Year 0, Crown Prince of Lucium
The night sky ignited when I was born.
It wasn't a storm—not in the usual sense. The stars pulsed to the rhythm of something older, deeper. Blue spirals danced across the clouds like celestial veins. Red fire cracked between them. The wind howled, not in chaos, but like it was singing a forgotten verse. The twin moons of Aveum hung still, as if the world itself were holding its breath.
At the heart of Tor Lucere—the royal capital of Lucium—in the opal-glass sanctum of the birthing hall, the arcane surged like a tidal wave as my mother screamed. Not just in pain. In awe. In reverence. In the instinctive terror of something greater arriving.
Magic responded before I did.
The instant I took my first breath, a sphere of red burst from my chest, pulsing with raw defiance. Blue lightning followed, coiling around the beams before shattering the chandelier in a thunderclap of will. Then came green—soft, luminous, primal—as vines erupted from the marbled floor, curling around the birthing table like guardians.
The magi fled. The midwives dropped to their knees. Even the Royal Councilor of Arcane Law staggered back, whispering the word that would shape my life:
"Triarch."
Born of three magics. Not into power—but as power.
I came into the world beneath silk banners and names older than language, with a crown already waiting. They named me Aelius Calen Thorne—He who brings the light—a name spoken only once before in the Royal Archive, reserved for the hour when Lucium would need its greatest champion.
I did not cry for long. Once the storm inside me calmed, I stared into the sanctum's vaulted ceiling with wide, silent eyes—watchful. The attending seer later claimed I looked straight into her soul.
From that moment, I was never treated as a child. I was regarded as something else entirely.
My father, King Varren Thorne—a former general of fire and hammer—looked down at me with no joy, only calculation. My mother, Queen Serel, held me to her chest and wept. Not out of fear—but because she understood what the world would demand.
"The Weave has answered," she whispered. "And she gave us a blade."
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Years 1–2
I was too young to speak, but Aveum was already speaking through me.
In the years that followed my birth, the kingdom of Lucium shifted—not politically, not publicly, but beneath the surface, in the quiet ways that matter most. Royal guards patrolled in pairs instead of threes when near my chamber. The Queen dismissed two of her most trusted advisors without public reason. Magni rotated through the palace at an unprecedented rate. All of it was done in whispers and subtle gestures, but I heard the strain in their footsteps, saw the hesitation in their glances. It wasn't fear of me—not exactly. It was fear of the unknown. Fear of what I might become.
I had not yet uttered my first full sentence when I first bent the Weave to my will.
The stories passed down by those who witnessed it claimed that I was reaching toward a toy—something as simple and innocent as a carved dragon made of arc-stone—and when it slid across the floor into my hand without a touch, time itself seemed to hesitate. The air rippled, thin filaments of color visible only to the most sensitive of mages. Red pulsed with kinetic urgency. Blue tightened around me like armor. And green, ever the quietest, began blooming in cracks across the palace floor.
They say no incantation passed my lips.
The magic responded not to words or rituals—but to desire.
By two, I could see magic. Not just feel it, as all gifted children do, but see the colors—the architecture of the Weave itself. My eyes would follow trails of ambient mana across the palace walls, dancing like auroras in hidden dimensions. My nursemaid once reached for a burning lamp too close to my cradle and found it snuffed out in an instant—silenced by a ripple of blue that surged from my blanket without command.
That night, the Queen herself came and dismissed all attendants.
She didn't speak to me as a mother would to a child. She looked into my eyes and whispered as if to an oracle.
"I see you, little one. You are more than us. More than me. More than even our kingdom knows how to hold. But I will teach you love before the world teaches you war."
She rocked me until dawn. I didn't cry once.
Others came. Observers. Scholars. Politicians masked as priests. All wanted to glimpse the boy who bent tri-color arcana from the crib. Some smiled. Others paled. The Council of Arcana eventually decreed I be placed under a "watchful tutelage"—a phrase that meant nothing and everything. They feared that which came too easily.
But the Immortals did not fear me.
When I was nearing two, the Immortals of Lucium—the elite arcane guardians, warriors who each commanded their own color—paid a ceremonial visit. It was a formality, they claimed, a traditional welcome for a royal heir. But the truth was simpler: they came to see if the rumors were true.
Among them stood Sandrakk.
Younger then, his armor less jagged, his presence less heavy. But his eyes were the same. Burning with calculation, purpose, and a pride that was always edged in something colder. He watched as I stood—barefoot, wordless—before them, and conjured a tri-weave pulse that made the chamber tremble. Red flared around my fingers. Blue laced my chest in runic bands. Green spiraled around my feet like mist-wrought ivy.
None of them spoke.
Not even Sandrakk.
But he smiled. Not with warmth, not with admiration. With understanding.
When the audience ended, and the others left in silence, he knelt beside me and placed one gauntlet to my small shoulder.
"We are not so different, you and I," he said. "You were born with it. I bled for mine. Let us see which story ends louder."
I did not yet understand the weight of those words.
But I remembered them.
Even then, I remembered everything.
The following weeks blurred into a mixture of supervised exercises and hidden evaluations. My nursery became a sanctum of shimmering wards and silent enchantments, watched day and night by palace seers. My meals were monitored. My sleep was tracked. I was a child—but never allowed to be one. The court didn't know whether to worship me or confine me.
And so I learned. Not because I was taught. But because I could.
Words came late—not because I couldn't speak, but because I chose silence over simplicity. When I did speak, it was in full phrases. When I asked questions, they were precise, demanding, relentless. The first time I spoke, I looked at my father and asked, "Why does the Crown protect with walls when it could shield with trust?"
He said nothing. But he looked away.
That night, for the first time, the Immortal guard was doubled.
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Years 3–5,
I began to understand the difference between having power and being allowed to use it.
By the time I was three, my days were carved into rituals of control. Every moment was documented, analyzed, weighed for arcane irregularities. The chambers I walked through were quietly reinforced with layer upon layer of shielding—more for the sake of containment than protection. I noticed the wards early. No one told me about them, of course. But magic leaves a scent when you know how to smell it. Red stank of iron and ozone. Blue was sterile, bitter on the air. Green lingered like crushed pine and moss. My world was soaked in all three.
They thought I wouldn't notice. But even then, I knew how to read silence.
It wasn't a lack of love that caged me. My parents tried in their way. My mother would visit often, bringing rare scrolls or old lullabies strung in ancient Lucian tongue. She never treated me like a monster. She treated me like a child. A gift she had been entrusted with ,by the Weave itself.
My father saw me as a weapon. He never said it outright—but he visited rarely, and when he did, it was to test me. A pulse of red energy hurled across the room to see how I'd react. A riddle, cold and precise, designed not to teach but to provoke. "A soldier learns by failing," he said. "A king learns by not failing." I was to be both. I was to be better.
I learned that loneliness could come wrapped in silk.
The other children of the court kept their distance. Their parents made sure of it. "The Crownborn is too delicate," they said. "Too important. Too dangerous." The few who defied them never came back for a second visit. One boy tried to sneak into the palace gardens where I played under guard. He touched my shoulder—and was flung backward by a pulse of protective magic I hadn't even meant to cast. He was fine. Shaken, but whole. Still, he looked at me like I was a ghost.
I stopped playing after that.
Instead, I read.
And the more I read, the more the world unfurled beneath me. There were truths about the Everwar, about Lucium's past, about the politics of the Immortals. I began to learn how to speak between the lines.
Sandrakk returned to the palace during this time. Not as a visitor, but as a presence.
He became, unofficially, a tutor of sorts. Not in spellcraft but in influence. In subtlety. In the art of perception.
"Power is only ever half of what you hold," he told me, crouched beside the practice stones beneath the palace tower. "The other half is what they think you'll do with it."
He never said as much, but it lingered in his posture, in the way he looked at the horizon. Sandrakk believed in change. Not the gentle, hopeful kind. The inevitable kind.
He watched as I began to experiment.
No longer content to cast spells I was taught, I started weaving my own. Spells that merged colors in new sequences. Spells that bent intent as much as effect. My first successful fusion was small—barely more than a flicker—but it was mine. A thread of red shaped like a blade, infused with blue resonance to hold its form longer, wrapped in green to heal its user as it cut. It vanished moments after forming, but the feeling remained.
Creation. Not imitation. Not obedience. Creation.
The Council of Arcana grew more alarmed with each report. I could see it in their meetings—when I was allowed to attend, cloaked in ceremonial robes and expectations too heavy for a child's shoulders. They debated not what I could do, but how long they could control it. Some wanted to slow my education. Others wanted to accelerate it to burn me out. A few suggested exile cloaked in diplomatic language.
It was Sandrakk who shut them down.
"If the boy were a weapon," he said before the assembled Magni, "you should pray he's loyal. And if he is more than that, then you'd best hope he loves Lucium more than he loves truth."
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Years 6–8
My sixth birthday came without fanfare, at my request.
The court had planned a spectacle, of course—parades of magi casting dazzling light into the skies, dancers from the coastal provinces, gifts enchanted with minor spells meant to entertain rather than empower. I refused them all. Not from arrogance, but fatigue. I had grown tired of the reverence, the way they bowed before me without ever seeing me. The palace walls were beginning to close in—not physically, not magically, but emotionally. A golden prison, still a prison.
It was my mother who noticed first.
Queen Serel had always been different from the others. Where my father taught me how to command and Sandrakk taught me how to maneuver, she taught me how to feel. She never feared me. Never looked at me as a tool or a future crowned icon. She saw through it all. Understood that beneath the tri-colored talent and arcane legacy, I was still a boy. A boy at risk of forgetting what it meant to be one.
And so, without a word to the council, she summoned me at dawn.
We wore no royal garments that day. No gold thread, no etched arcane silk. She dressed in a traveling cloak and handed me one too—simple, gray, unremarkable. I obeyed without question. I trusted her in a way I trusted no other. And when we left through a hidden passage below the palace walls, I knew better than to ask where we were going.
It wasn't until we stood on the edge of the city—the real city, far from the gleaming marble towers and gemstone gardens of the upper districts—that I understood.
I had never seen the Commoners .
We walked the cobblestone streets of Lucent Hollow in silence. Here, the air did not shimmer with magic. It hung with the scent of sweat, fire, and iron. Vendors hawked spices and stitched goods, their carts patched and worn. Children chased one another barefoot through narrow alleys, and old men carved wooden runes with tools dulled by time. I saw a boy my age laughing as he leapt into a puddle, drenching his sister. She didn't scold him—she laughed too, and shoved him back.
And not a drop of magic passed between them.
It was disorienting. More than that—it was humbling.
I turned to my mother, confused. "Why are we here?"
She looked at me, eyes soft. "Because you must understand who you are before you understand what you are. Power can blind you, Aelius. It can make you think you are above those who walk without it. But they are Lucium, too."
We passed an old woman sitting by a broken well, muttering softly to herself as she wove thread into cloth. My mother approached her, handed her a coin, and whispered a blessing in the old tongue. The woman touched her hand, smiled, and resumed her work. No guards. No fanfare. Just one soul recognizing another.
"Not all strength is arcane," my mother said. "And not all weakness is shameful."
That day changed something in me.
We spent the entire day among them. I saw a man work three jobs just to feed his children. A woman missing her hand teach others how to spin cloth with her feet. A blind boy who listened to the wind and could tell when storms were coming—accurately. Not magic. Just instinct. Just experience. Just life.
I asked her, "Why don't they hate us?"
She sighed. "Some do. Quietly. Some dream of magic. Others resent it. But most? Most just want to live. They don't need a prince who bends light. They need a prince who understands why they bend under burden."
I began to see my kingdom differently.
In the palace, I was a weapon. A future. A phenomenon. But here, I was just a boy. No one bowed. No one whispered. No one stared at me with fear or awe. They just moved around me. Laughed near me. Argued in front of me. They existed without pretense. And in their simplicity, they taught me more about leadership than all the polished lectures in the marble halls ever could.
Later, in the shade of an old root-crowned arch, I sat beside a shoemaker. He showed me how to shape leather, how to bind thread by hand. I tried. I failed. He laughed gently and corrected me, not knowing who I was. He called me "young master" only out of politeness. Not reverence.
I smiled.
That evening, as we returned to the secret path beneath Tor Lucere, I looked over my shoulder at the streets fading into dusk.
"Can I go again?" I asked.
My mother looked proud. And sad.
"You will need to," she said. "More than you know."
The next morning, when I returned to my training, I found myself hesitating before every cast. Why? I began to ask. For what purpose? For whom?
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Years 9–10
There are lessons the court cannot teach. Lessons that can't be etched into scrolls or conjured in crystalline chambers. Some truths must be witnessed—must be carried, like weight on the soul. My mother knew this. And so, on the eve of my ninth birthday, she made the choice that would mark the true end of my childhood.
She took me to the front.
The Everwar, they called it. An endless tide of arcane bloodshed, ebbing and surging across the continent like a wound that refused to close. I had studied the maps. Heard the histories. I knew the kingdoms by name—Lucium, Rasharn, Oremen, K'ley, and Kalthus. But until that day, they had only existed as lines and markers, terrain pieces on a polished board. I understood strategy, troop movement, magical attrition. But I had never felt what war did to a place.
Not until I stood on the scorched soil of Thessen Ridge.
The air stank of sulfur and singed bone. The sky was a palette of perpetual storm—thick with the residue of spent red and broken blue. Green magic clung to the trees like rot, corrupted by the sheer volume of pain that had soaked into the land. My mother's transport ship had dropped us miles behind the frontline, but even here, war screamed.
We traveled light—no banners, no retinue. Only two Immortal guards and my mother's will. She did not take me to see victory. She took me to see reality.
And reality, I learned, was agony in motion.
We reached the outer medical tents first—white canvas streaked with dried blood and soot, sagging under the weight of too many bodies. Healers moved like ghosts between rows of the wounded. Some worked spells. Others simply whispered prayers, hands stained red and trembling. I saw a young girl missing her legs, humming to herself as green vines wrapped around what remained of her thighs. She didn't scream. She had no energy left.
I watched a man begging for death as his magic flared uncontrollably from a shattered arm, the arcana eating him alive from the inside. A blue mage knelt and pressed his hand to the man's chest, murmuring a severing chant. The body stilled. The room did not.
And yet—it was not the magic that haunted me.
It was the silence between sobs.
The old woman who cradled a bundle of cloth as if it still breathed. The farmer who stared blankly at the remnants of his home, reduced to glass from a stray spellstrike. The little boy who clutched his father's severed hand like a keepsake.
I felt my stomach twist. I felt my throat close. For the first time in my life, I wanted to look away.
But my mother would not let me.
"You must see, Aelius," she said, voice soft but unyielding. "Not read. Not hear. See."
She walked me through the camp, hand in mine, eyes forward. Not once did she shield me from it. Not once did she apologize. She had fought here once. I knew that now. I saw it in the way the soldiers saluted her, not with protocol, but with haunted gratitude. She was no stranger to this place.
But I was. And that would change.
When we reached the cliffs overlooking the shattered valley below, I saw what remained of a once-lush forest—now a blackened scar across the land. Magic had ripped through it like a living tempest. The ground was still pulsing in places, alive with unstable arcane fallout. Red blazes flickered where soil had become cinder. Green tendrils twisted into shapes that once resembled trees, but now writhed like wounded beasts. Blue lightning arced silently between broken rocks, casting ghostly light over fallen siege wrecks.
I fell to my knees.
It was too much. Too large. Too wrong.
"I thought we were winning," I whispered.
My mother knelt beside me. "There are no victories in war, my son. Only survivals. And costs."
I turned to her, voice hollow. "Then why do we fight?"
She closed her eyes. "Because the alternative is worse. Because some forces—Rasharn, and those like them—would burn the world if we let them. But never forget, Aelius: we choose this path each day. And we pay for it."
That night, I did not sleep.
I sat by the tent's edge, staring at my hands. I conjured a flicker of red—then quenched it. A thread of green—then let it wither. I had never hated my magic before. But now… I questioned it. Questioned what it meant to wield power in a world where power destroyed everything it touched.
But amid the darkness, a new resolve formed.
Not one born of ambition. Not of pride. But of duty.
I did not want to rule from above the world. I wanted to change it from within. I wanted to be the flame that warmed, not the one that burned.