"You're bleeding," Adrian said.
"I know."
It was early. The café smelled of coffee and something frying in the back, and Magnar was sitting at the prep counter with his pant leg up, examining the bite with the focused attention of someone cataloguing evidence. Red. Swollen. Slightly warm to the touch. Real in every way that a bite mark could be real.
Adrian leaned against the doorframe and looked at it and then at Magnar and then back at it with the expression of someone who had questions and was trying to decide which one to lead with. He settled on: "You gonna tell me what happened?"
"No."
"Right." He pushed off the frame. "Shift's in ten minutes."
The morning ran smoothly. Magnar worked and let his hands manage it while the rest of him worked through the night's data. The forest had been real — or real enough to leave a mark on his body, which amounted to the same thing for practical purposes. The mana had been real. He'd produced fire with a thought, had felt the ambient field pressing in from every direction, had run half a dozen tests before the insect had interrupted him.
The output had been uneven. Ambient draw was different from internal draw — more available, less precise, requiring a different kind of control. Like trying to pour from a river after a lifetime of pouring from a well. He would need to account for that.
He would need to go back.
He was very much looking forward to going back.
Near midday a young woman dropped into the counter seat, ordered without looking at the board, struck up a brief conversation with Magnar about absolutely nothing in particular, and left a generous tip on her way out. The door swung shut behind her. The café settled back into its usual register.
Magnar stood there for a moment.
"She was just being nice," Adrian said, appearing at his shoulder to collect the empty cup. He glanced sideways. "That expression you're wearing right now is slightly alarming."
"What expression?"
"The one where you look like you've just been handed data you don't have a category for."
Magnar picked up a cloth and said nothing, which Adrian had apparently learned to interpret as something because he moved on without pressing it.
Someone being kind to him for no reason, without agenda, without expectation of return. He'd spent so long in rooms where everything had a cost that he'd forgotten some things didn't. That was worth noting.
Later, while the afternoon trade was thin, Adrian drifted alongside him. "Still running calculations?"
"Always."
"Anything I should know about?"
"Not yet."
"Reassuring," Adrian said dryly, and found a surface that was already clean and wiped it anyway. "One day you're going to tell me something unprompted."
"One day," Magnar agreed. Genuinely. It surprised him slightly.
That evening he sat on the floor of his room with the crystal between his knees and a small flat tool borrowed from the kitchen and worked at the surrounding stone with patient, methodical care. The crystal beneath came clear in increments — palm-sized, tapered, the crack running through its center with that old, softened quality. He refined the shape carefully, found a natural groove near the tapered end, and threaded a cord through it.
He held it up and looked at it.
Functional. Portable. Better.
He put it around his neck, lay down on the bed, and instead of waiting for sleep he closed his eyes and went looking for it.
Arrival was quieter this time. Calmer. The forest came in through the senses in the right order — smell first, then sound, then the weight of the mana pressing against him from every direction, patient and thick as summer air.
He stood in the same forest. Same light, same textures, same ambient density. Whatever the crystal was doing, it was doing it consistently.
Good.
He started with fire. A small flame above his palm, controlled and deliberate, too large on the first attempt and deliberately reduced on the second. He spent several minutes there, mapping the gap between intent and output, getting a feel for how the ambient draw worked in practice.
Less tension than internal reserves. More available, more forgiving. But imprecise in the way that abundance was always imprecise — when there was too much to work with, the natural tendency was to draw too broadly. He narrowed his focus deliberately, working against the current instead of with it, and the flame stabilized.
Air next. A controlled current between his hands, steady but wanting to broaden — he kept it contained through the same method, precise intent rather than generous draw. Earth after that. A section of root beside his foot shifted and compacted and held.
He was recalibrating. Not recovering. The distinction mattered because recovery implied he'd lost something, and he hadn't. His own reserves were intact. He was simply learning a new instrument.
He was enjoying it considerably.
A sound reached him from the left. Unhurried movement through dense undergrowth — something large, he could tell from the sound pattern, something that moved without the quick adjustment of a predator navigating cover but with the slow, deliberate pace of something that had never needed to be in a hurry.
He turned without stepping back.
The creature that came through the trees was massive. Low and broad, the color of old bark, moving with the specific patience of something that understood it was the most significant physical object in its immediate environment and had no need to prove it. Across its back and flanks grew protrusions of dense, layered stone — not attached, not armoring — grown, fused into the skin over what must have been decades of accumulated mana saturation. They caught the filtered light like cliff faces. Its head was wide and blunt, carried low, the single horn above its snout worn smooth with age.
It stopped when it noticed him.
The eyes that settled on Magnar were dark and thorough and entirely unalarmed. They moved across him with the patient weight of something old enough to have developed a genuinely accurate threat assessment system, held for a moment, and arrived at a conclusion. The creature lowered its head and moved on. The stone protrusions along its spine shifted faintly as it walked, settling like boulders after a tremor, and it disappeared back into the green without any opinion about the encounter.
Magnar watched the space where it had been and thought: this world's mana has been here long enough to become geological.
The stone growth wasn't armor. It wasn't a defense mechanism, exactly. The creature had simply been alive in a saturated mana environment for long enough that the environment had become part of it. Slow, patient, from the outside in, across a lifetime. The creature carried the world in its bones.
He returned to the work.
He tested combinations — elemental pairings, transitions between affinities, the timing required to shift without losing cohesion mid-sequence. The mana responded readily to everything, sometimes too readily. He kept his outputs small and mapped the gaps. When he felt like he had a reasonable baseline he allowed himself slightly more and directed a focused burst of air and fire at the base of a dead tree twenty feet ahead.
The tree came apart with a sound like a struck bell scaled up to something unreasonable. The detonation rolled outward through the forest. The canopy erupted in birds. Splinters scattered across more ground than he'd intended to clear and the surrounding trees shuddered with the displaced air.
He stood very still.
The output gap between intent and result was larger than he'd estimated. He added that to the calibration list.
Where the trunk had been, a space had opened in the forest wall. And through it, visible for the first time, a narrow trail ran between the older trees — pressed into the earth by what looked like regular but infrequent use. Worn enough to be deliberate. Recent enough to be current.
Something in him moved immediately. The specific pull of a thing that wanted following.
He took two steps toward it before he stopped.
He didn't know this world. He didn't know who used that trail or why or what lived in this forest consistently enough to press a path into the ground over time. He had no map, no contacts, no understanding of the social landscape, and he had arrived here via an unconscious crystal and a nap, which was not ideal preparation for first contact with an unknown civilization.
He stood there for a moment, looking at the trail, having a disagreement with himself.
The trail was not going anywhere.
He turned away from it. It was one of the harder decisions he'd made recently, which was saying something given the last few weeks.
Next time, he'd know more. He'd prepare properly. He'd be ready.
He woke up planning.