The room smelled faintly of dust and something mineral, the stone chunk sitting on the floor where he had left it, wrapped in his coat like something that needed protecting.
Magnar did not announce his return.
He had entered the café through the back, moving quietly despite the weight in his arms.
The stone was heavier than it had any right to be, dense in a way that felt deliberate rather than geological. He had kept it tucked close to his body on the way up the stairs, mindful of every step.
He stood over it now for a long moment, watching. Waiting.
Nothing happened.
No pulse. No movement. The crystal remained dark, cracked through the center like a wound that had already healed wrong.
He knelt and pressed his palm against the surface. Closed his eyes. Reached inward the way he always did, then outward toward the crystal specifically, following the thread of whatever had stirred in that underground chamber.
Nothing answered.
The silence was worse this time, not the broad empty quiet of the world itself, but something narrower. Almost intentional. As if whatever had responded before had simply turned its face away and was waiting to see what he would do about it.
His jaw tightened.
A knock came at the door.
Magnar straightened and stepped back from the stone.
The door opened before he could respond.
Eliza leaned in, silver hair tied back loosely, eyes sharp despite the late hour. Her gaze moved across the room and dropped immediately to the wrapped bundle by his feet.
"Well," she said lightly. "That doesn't look like laundry."
Magnar said nothing.
She stepped fully into the room, tilting her head at the stone with open curiosity, genuine and direct rather than polite.
"Found something interesting?"
"Possibly."
She smiled at that.
"You have a habit of understating."
She crouched, resting her hands on her knees, studying the wrapped bundle without touching it.
"Is it valuable?"
"I do not know yet."
"Looks like a rock," she said.
"It is."
"That's usually how valuable things start."
She rose, brushing her hands against her sides.
"Adrian used to bring home pockets full of important stones when he was a boy. I still have a jar of them somewhere."
She said it without mockery, the memory sitting warmly in the room for a moment.
"I won't touch it. Whatever it is, you look like you'd rather it stay yours."
She left.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Magnar locked it.
He tested the crystal again.
Then again.
He varied pressure and contact and distance, altered his breathing and his focus and the angle of his internal alignment.
He tried approaching it the way he had approached resistant materials in his original world, with force, then with patience, then with the focused stillness that had once been enough to draw a response from almost anything.
He tried anger.
He tried calm.
Nothing.
By morning, frustration had settled into his chest and made itself at home there.
The day passed in pieces.
The café work came easily now, his hands moving through the familiar rhythms without requiring attention.
Outside the window the city continued its ordinary business, people moving efficiently through lives that had never required anything more of them.
They worked and compensated and adapted, and when something failed they did not look for deeper forces behind it.
They simply adjusted and moved on.
Magnar watched them between tasks and thought: they would have loved to fly.
After his shift he walked to the library.
The building was old stone reinforced with newer material, its shelves carrying the accumulated weight of everything this civilization had chosen to remember.
He moved through the relevant sections methodically, pulling records and setting them aside, building a picture from pieces.
Magic had existed. That was not disputed by anyone serious.
It had shaped architecture, agriculture, warfare, infrastructure.
Then, roughly five thousand years ago, the references began thinning.
Spells became rituals.
Rituals became myths.
Myths became footnotes in texts primarily concerned with other things.
The theories for why were numerous and contradictory, cataclysm, gradual exhaustion, deliberate suppression, simple exaggeration by later historians who could not imagine it had ever been real.
None of them agreed on cause.
None of them claimed it could return.
Magnar closed the last record and sat with the absence of answers for a moment.
Then he returned the texts to their shelves and walked back to the café as the evening settled over the city.
That night he sat with the stone between his knees and worked at the surrounding rock, removing fragments he had chipped away earlier to expose more of the crystal's fractured surface.
It caught the lamp light faintly, violet glinting beneath black in a way that suggested depth rather than reflection.
He reached for it.
Nothing.
He pushed intent rather than force, the way complex techniques had always required, presence and direction rather than raw energy.
In his original world this quality of attention had been enough to draw a response from almost anything.
Here it met stillness so complete it felt like the crystal had forgotten what it was.
Hours passed without result.
When dawn crept through the narrow window his body made the decision his mind had been refusing to.
Sleep took him without warning, sudden and complete, and he was gone before he had time to object.
He woke standing.
Not in the room above the café.
Beneath a towering canopy of green, light filtering through leaves thick with life.
The air was warm and humid and heavy with the smell of earth and sap and something older beneath both.
He breathed it in and felt it before he understood what it was.
Mana.
It saturated everything, pressing against him from every direction, not aggressive but present in the way that sunlight is present, simply there, waiting to be used.
Magnar stood very still and let the sensation move through him.
It was so familiar it was almost painful, the recognition of something he had not realized he was grieving until it returned.
A dream, he told himself.
It must be a dream.
He lifted his hand and willed heat.
Fire bloomed above his palm.
Small.
Unrefined.
Real.
He let it gutter out and laughed under his breath, a short quiet sound that surprised him slightly, the way genuine reactions sometimes did.
He moved deeper into the trees, testing as he went.
Gravity, balance, perception, the responsiveness of the air to his intent.
Everything answered.
The world bent the way it always had.
He moved through the forest with the ease of someone returned to a language they had spoken their whole life, and for a stretch of time that he could not have measured he simply allowed himself to be in it.
Then pain lanced through his ankle.
He stumbled, swearing, and swatted at the insect clinging there.
Blood welled from the bite.
He stared at it, breath going shallow.
No dream had ever drawn blood.
"Magnar."
The voice reached him from somewhere outside the forest, clear and insistent, and the forest dissolved.
The ceiling above him was low and familiar.
His body lay twisted in the position he had collapsed into.
Adrian stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, expression flat.
"You're gonna be late," Adrian said. "Again."
Magnar pushed himself upright, and pain flared at his ankle sharp enough to make him stop.
He went very still.
Then, slowly and deliberately, he reached down and pulled up his pant leg.
The bite mark looked back at him.
Red and swollen and entirely, undeniably real.
Adrian frowned from the doorway.
"You good?"
Magnar did not answer.
He was looking at the mark and thinking about blood welling from a wound in a forest that had not existed, in a world where he had been standing upright and asleep at the same time.
That dream had not let him go unmarked.
And that changed everything.