The moon over Thornwall was three-quarters full and slightly lopsided, which gave it the appearance of a coin that had been sat on — an observation Levin had made once before and which the moon had done nothing to correct in the intervening days, because moons, like most celestial bodies, do not accept feedback.

  It hung above the eastern hills in a sky that was clear and cold. Populated by more stars than Levin had ever seen in his previous life, which he could not remember, or in this life, which he was still in the process of understanding, and which was providing new information at a rate that significantly exceeded his willingness to process it.

  The tavern was quiet.

  Marda had gone to bed at the tenth bell with a grunt that served as approximately forty percent of her total daily vocabulary. The grunt had been followed by the sound of her bedroom door closing, which was followed by the sound of her boots being removed, which was followed by silence, which was followed by a snoring so profound and so architectural that it vibrated the floorboards of the common room below and caused the glasses on the shelf behind the bar to produce a faint, sympathetic hum, like a choir of very small and very trapped monks.

  Ria's room beneath the attic stairs was dark. The humming had stopped an hour ago and the thin line of candlelight that usually leaked from beneath her door had been extinguished.

  Levin descended the xylophone staircase.

  He hit the silent notes along the way to make sure he did not wake them up.

  He crossed the common room in the dark.

  His staff was in his hand. His boots were in his other hand, because boots on a wooden floor at midnight produce a sound-per-step ratio that is incompatible with stealth, and Levin had learned — through many weeks of pre-dawn water-fetching and post-midnight forest excursions — that the Leaky Sovereign's floorboards were informants.

  They reported every footfall to the building's acoustic network, which transmitted the information upward through the joists and beams and into the rooms above with the efficiency of a surveillance system designed by someone who believed that privacy was a luxury and creaking was a public service.

  He reached the back door and opened it. The hinges protested — a single, thin squeal that lasted approximately one-third of a second and that Levin absorbed with the resigned acceptance of a man who had oiled these hinges twice and had concluded that the hinges enjoyed squealing and would continue to do so regardless of lubrication, maintenance, or direct verbal requests to stop.

  The night air hit him.

  It was cool and carried the smell of grass, earth, and the distant, fading trace of woodsmoke from chimneys that had banked their fires for the night. The moon painted the village in silver and shadow — the rooftops bright, the alleys dark, the bell reflecting the little moonlight that there was, and the goat pasture on the eastern slope a pale grey quilt draped over the hillside.

  Levin sat on the back step and put his boots on.

  He stood once done and walked past the well, the woodpile, past the spot where the cat usually sat during the day, and where the cat was not sitting now because the cat had its own schedule and its own priorities and neither of these aligned with Levin's midnight excursion.

  He walked south.

  Past the last houses and the fence that was not a gate. Past the point where the village ended and the countryside began, which was a transition marked by no sign, boundary stone, line, and no perceptible change in the quality of the packed earth beneath his feet, but which was nonetheless real, in the way that all transitions between one thing and another thing are real even when the things themselves are indistinguishable.

  The clearing he was making his way to was half a mile south of the village, set back from the road in a natural depression between two low hills. It was roughly circular, perhaps sixty feet across. Carpeted in grass that was silver in the moonlight and surrounded by a ring of birch trees whose white bark glowed like bones.

  Levin had found it during his second week.

  He had been walking — walking was what he did when the tavern felt too small, the ceiling's stare felt too pointed, ow when the warmth behind his sternum felt too loud — and the clearing had presented itself with the quiet availability of a room that had been waiting for someone to use it.

  He had used it since. For practice, testing, personal studying, and for the private, solitary work of understanding what he was becoming, conducted away from windows and witnesses and the particular quality of attention that people directed at him when he did things that his level said he should not be able to do.

  He stepped into the clearing.

  The grass was damp. His boots left dark prints in the silver.

  He walked to the centre. He set his staff against a birch at the clearing's edge — the staff slid two inches to the left before catching on a root, which was the staff's way of acknowledging the birch tree's hospitality while maintaining its philosophical commitment to not staying where it was put.

  He stood in the centre of the clearing and breathed.

  The air went in. The air came out. The moon watched. The birch trees watched. A fox, somewhere in the undergrowth beyond the clearing's edge, paused in whatever foxes do at midnight (which is, broadly speaking, the same thing foxes do at every other hour: being a fox, with commitment) and directed one ear toward the clearing before deciding that the human standing in the moonlight was not food, not a threat, and not interesting, and resuming its fox activities.

  Levin raised his left hand.

  Palm up. Fingers slightly spread. The gesture that had become, over seven weeks, as natural as breathing and considerably more destructive.

  He concentrated.

  The mana responded.

  It had always responded. From the first day, the first tentative Arcane Bolt that had been a faintly luminous sneeze, the mana had come when called — rising from the reservoir behind his sternum, flowing through channels that he could feel but not see, arriving at his palm as light and heat and force.

  Tonight, the mana did not rise.

  It surged.

  The difference was immediate and visceral, the difference between turning on a tap and opening a floodgate. The reservoir — the warm, humming, patient thing that had been growing for seven weeks, one point at a time, kill by kill, flicker by flicker — released its contents into his channels with a pressure that made his arm shake.

  Blue-white light erupted from his palm.

  The light was bright. Brighter than the moon, brighter than the light orb he had made for Ria's spider cave, brighter than the Arcane Bolt that had turned the mill clearing's floor to glass. It was a pillar of luminescence that rose from his hand and hit the night sky and kept going, a vertical beam that punched through the darkness above the clearing and illuminated the undersides of clouds that Levin hadn't known were there.

  The birch trees cast shadows that stretched to the clearing's edge and beyond.

  The grass around his feet turned from silver to white.

  His forearms blazed — the lattice of luminous lines that traced his veins and tendons visible now as a continuous, crawling web of blue-white fire that extended from his wrists to his elbows and was climbing toward his shoulders.

  Levin closed his hand.

  The pillar cut off.

  The darkness rushed back in, filling the space the light had occupied with the eager haste of a substance reclaiming territory it considered rightfully its own.

  Levin stood in the clearing, breathing hard, his closed fist still raised, the afterimage of the pillar burned into his retinas in a vertical line of green and purple that bisected the moon.

  His hand was trembling.

  He opened it. He looked at his palm. The skin was unmarked — no burn, no residue, no bruise, no physical evidence that his hand had just channelled enough mana to light up a clearing, a hillside, and the underside of a cloud formation that was, by his estimate, several thousand feet above him.

  The reservoir hummed.

  The hum was different.

  He had been noticing the difference all afternoon — during the parade, during the tea, during the sweeping, the sleeve management, and studying his thin wrists — but he had been ignoring it, because ignoring things was his most developed skill and because the parade had provided an excellent excuse to direct his attention elsewhere.

  There was no parade now. There was no tea. There was no broom, no bar, no ceiling with water stains, no Marda, no Ria, no crowd chanting his name.

  There was a clearing, a moon, and a man standing alone with his hand raised and his arm glowing and a reservoir inside him that had changed.

  The hum was deeper. The primary frequency — the one he had been hearing since the first wolf kill in the first week — was still there, steady and familiar. The secondary harmonic — the one that had appeared after the wasps, after the five-hundred-and-fifty threshold — was still there too, pulsing beneath the primary like a heartbeat beneath a breath.

  A third frequency had joined them.

  It had arrived sometime during the goblin cave. During the sustained burst of kills — the fifty, sixty, however many goblins had been clumped in that cavern listening to a speech about chicken smell — the third frequency had emerged from the cascade of golden flickers and had settled into the harmonic structure of the reservoir like a new instrument joining an orchestra mid-performance.

  The third frequency was low. Subsonic, almost.

  Levin felt it in his bones more than he heard it in his ears. It vibrated in his sternum, his spine, his jaw. It was the frequency of something large — something that had mass and depth and weight — and it changed the character of the hum the way a bass note changes the character of a chord.

  The reservoir was no longer a lake.

  Lakes have surfaces. Lakes have shores. Lakes have boundaries that you can see, test, measure, and walk around. It might take time, a lot of time generally, but it was still possible.

  The reservoir had none of these things.

  It extended in every direction that Levin's internal perception could reach, and when his perception reached what should have been an edge, it found more. And beyond the more, it found more still. The reservoir had become, at some point during the day's events, something that the word "reservoir" could no longer contain, in the same way that the word "thimble" had stopped being adequate weeks ago, and the word "bucket" had stopped being adequate after that, and the word "lake" had stopped being adequate after the troll.

  He needed a new word.

  Levin did not have one.

  He lowered his hand and flexed his fingers. The blue-white glow along his forearms dimmed from blazing to bright to visible to faint, settling back into the background hum of a system at rest.

  He raised his right hand.

  He cast Chain Lightning.

  The spell left his fingers as a single arc — a jagged, branching line of blue-white energy that leapt from his hand and struck the nearest birch tree. The arc hit the trunk, crackled across the bark, jumped to the next tree, jumped again, jumped again, each link a fraction of a second, each connection a bridge of light that illuminated the clearing in staccato flashes.

  The chain reached the seventh tree and kept going.

  It kept increasing its links without stopping.

  Levin's eyes widened.

  Chain Lightning, as he had been casting it for weeks, linked four targets. Five, on a good day, when his concentration was sharp and his mana was full. The spell's notification — Arc Chain, the system had called it — had specified that maximum links scaled with his mana pool.

  The chain was on its twelfth link.

  Thirteenth.

  Fourteenth.

  It completed a full circuit of the clearing, linking every birch tree in the ring — twenty-three trees, twenty-three arcs of crackling energy — and then it returned to his hand, the final arc leaping from the last tree back to his outstretched fingers with a snap that tingled in his wrist and left a taste of copper on his tongue.

  Twenty-three links.

  He had cast a Chain Lightning that linked twenty-three targets.

  The birch trees smoked gently. The bark at each impact point was scorched — small, dark circles, each the size of a thumbprint, arranged in a ring around the clearing like the marks on a clock face. The air smelled of ozone and singed wood and the particular sharp, clean scent that lightning leaves behind, the scent of atmosphere that has been briefly and violently rearranged.

  Levin looked at his hand.

  He looked at the ring of scorched trees.

  He looked at his hand again.

  "Hm," he said.

  The sound was small. The sound of a man who had expected a result and received a different result and was now standing in the gap between expectation and reality, which was a gap that had been widening steadily for multiple weeks and that was now wide enough to contain a twenty-three-link Chain Lightning and a pillar of light visible from several thousand feet and a reservoir that had no edges and a third harmonic frequency that vibrated in his bones.

  He cast again.

  Barrier Ward. The notification's name for the spell he had been calling "barrier" since the troll fight.

  The wall of force materialised in front of him — translucent and humming. He had cast barriers before. They had been six feet wide, eight feet tall, lasting perhaps ten seconds before the mana sustaining them dissipated.

  This barrier was twelve feet wide.

  Fifteen feet tall.

  It stood in the clearing like a window into a room made of light, its surface rippling with patterns that moved too fast to track, and it showed no signs of dissipating. Levin held it for as long as he could. A minute or more. The mana cost registered as a faint, distant tug on the reservoir — a cup of water removed from something that was no longer a lake and that the word "ocean" was beginning to eye with nervous interest.

  He dismissed the barrier. It winked out.

  He raised both hands.

  He cast Mana Bolt — the spell that the notification system had named, the concentrated arcane projectile that scaled with his mana pool. He aimed it at the sky, because aiming it at the ground would produce a crater and aiming it at the trees would produce firewood and aiming it at anything within a mile of Thornwall would produce questions that he was not prepared to answer.

  The bolt left his hands and rocketed into the sky..

  It rose fast — a blue-white streak that climbed the night sky like a reverse comet, shrinking with distance, dimming with altitude, until it was a point of light among the stars, indistinguishable from them except that it was moving and they were not.

  It detonated in the sky.

  The detonation was silent from the ground — too far away for the sound to arrive as anything more than a faint, delayed pop, like a cork being pulled from a bottle in another room. The light, however, was not silent. The light was a sphere of blue-white radiance that expanded against the night sky, illuminating the clouds from below, casting the clearing and the hills and the village beyond in a momentary, shadowless noon that lasted perhaps two seconds before fading.

  Two seconds of artificial daylight.

  From a single bolt.

  Cast with a fraction of his available mana.

  Levin lowered his hands.

  He stood in the clearing and looked at the sky, where the afterglow of the detonation was fading from white to blue to the deep, indifferent black of a universe that had witnessed the display and had filed it under "noted" alongside supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and the other various energetic events that the cosmos produced and then forgot about with the administrative efficiency of a filing system that processed trillions of entries per second and had no favourites.

  His arms ached. A pleasant ache — the ache of muscles that had been used, not the ache of muscles that had been damaged. The mana channels along his forearms tingled with residual charge, the way skin tingles after holding something very cold.

  The reservoir hummed its three-part harmony. Primary. Secondary. Tertiary. Three frequencies, layered and producing a sound that was felt rather than heard and that occupied a space in his chest that was larger than his chest, which was a paradox that he had stopped trying to resolve and had instead filed under "probably fine" alongside every other inexplicable aspect of his existence in this world.

  He sat down in the grass.

  The grass was wet. His trousers absorbed the moisture with the resigned acceptance of fabric that had been through worse.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  He looked at his hands. He turned them over — palms up, palms down. The skin was unmarked. The fingers were steady. The wrists were, as Harwick had noted and as the bandit had noted and as the notification system had not yet noted (though Levin suspected it was only a matter of time before [Wrist Thickness: Level 1] appeared in his peripheral vision), thin.

  Thin wrists. Steady hands. A reservoir with no edges.

  The math did not add up.

  He had been doing the math wrong. He had known this since the troll fight. Since the Empower notification had appeared in his vision and told him what the warmth behind his sternum actually was, but he had been avoiding the recalculation in the way that a person avoids opening a letter from the tax office — with the knowledge that the contents would require attention and the hope that postponing the attention would somehow change the contents.

  The contents had not changed.

  Empower: Passive — Gain +1% max mana from target's mana stores permanently into your max mana capacity. Per kill.

  From the target's mana stores.

  He had been counting kills. Four hundred kills, five hundred kills, each one a tick mark on an invisible tally, each one adding what he had assumed was a flat, uniform increment to his pool. One percent. One percent. One percent. One percent. Simple and linear. A graph with a steady upward slope, predictable and clean.

  The graph was wrong.

  The graph had never been a straight line. It had been a curve — shallow at the bottom, where the kills were goblins and wolves and rats and creatures whose mana stores were small, whose one percent was one percent of almost nothing. A goblin's mana pool was, by any reasonable estimate, tiny. One percent of tiny was tinier. The increments had been real but minuscule, accumulating slowly, building the reservoir drip by drip over hundreds of kills.

  The troll had not been a drip.

  The troll had been Level 14. The troll had possessed a mana store — a regeneration engine, a biological system that consumed and produced magical energy at a rate sufficient to rebuild its own body from catastrophic damage in seconds. One percent of that store was not one percent of a goblin. One percent of that store was a quantity that made the goblin increments look like rounding errors.

  The troll had been a bucket dumped into a bathtub.

  And the goblin army — forty, fifty, sixty goblins, each one a small increment, but delivered simultaneously, in a cascade that had overwhelmed his system's ability to process them individually — the army had been a river.

  A river of small streams, converging.

  Each stream insignificant on its own. Together, a flood.

  And the goblin king. Level — he hadn't checked. Higher than the others. Armoured. Commanding. A creature whose mana stores were, by goblin standards, substantial, and whose one percent had been the largest single goblin increment Levin had ever received.

  The reservoir's growth was not linear.

  It was exponential.

  Not in the mathematical sense — not doubling with each kill or following a clean progression system. Exponential in the practical sense: the stronger the enemy, the larger the increment. The larger the increment, the more powerful the spells. The more powerful the spells, the stronger the enemies he could defeat. The stronger the enemies he could defeat, the larger the next increment.

  A cycle and endless loop.

  A wheel that turned faster the longer it spun.

  And the wheel had been spinning for seven weeks. The speed was increasing, and the reservoir was growing. The growth was accelerating, and the acceleration was accelerating, and somewhere in the mathematics of this progression there was a point — a threshold, a horizon — where the numbers stopped being numbers and started being something else.

  He did not know what the something else was.

  He suspected the universe didn't either.

  Levin pulled a blade of grass from the ground. He held it between his thumb and forefinger. He looked at it. The blade was silver in the moonlight, thin and fragile, bending under its own weight.

  He channelled the smallest amount of mana he could manage into the blade.

  The grass glowed.

  A faint, blue-white luminescence that started at the base, where his fingers held it, and climbed to the tip, turning the blade into a tiny, delicate wand of light. The glow was steady and controlled. The magical equivalent of a whisper.

  It was also, he noted, brighter than his first Arcane Bolt had been.

  His minimum output — the floor of his capability, the smallest amount of mana he could push through his channels — was now greater than his maximum output had been seven weeks ago.

  He released the blade.

  It drifted to the ground, the glow fading as it fell, and landed in the grass, where it lay among its fellows, indistinguishable, ordinary, a blade of grass that had briefly been something more and was now something less and that would, by morning, have forgotten the entire experience, because grass does not form memories and this is, on balance, probably for the best.

  "That was pretty."

  Levin's head turned.

  Ria was standing at the edge of the clearing.

  She was wearing her nightclothes — a long shirt that belonged to Marda and that hung past her knees, giving her the appearance of a very small person wearing a very large tent. Her feet were bare. Her braid was undone, her hair loose around her shoulders, dark against the white of the borrowed shirt. She had her arms crossed against the night air, and her breath made small clouds that drifted and dissolved.

  Her eyes were on his hands.

  "How long have you been there?" Levin asked.

  "Since the pillar."

  "The pillar."

  "The beam of light that went straight up and lit up the clouds. That pillar. I was at my window and then I saw it and when I saw it I followed it."

  "You followed a pillar of light. In your nightclothes. Barefoot. In the dark. Across half a mile of countryside."

  "The pillar made it easy to find you. It was very bright, possibly the brightest thing that has ever happened in Thornwall, which is admittedly a low bar, but still very bright."

  She stepped into the clearing.

  The wet grass pressed between her toes and she winced — a small contraction of the face, quickly suppressed — and crossed to where Levin sat.

  She sat down beside him.

  The grass soaked through Marda's shirt immediately. Ria's shoulders hunched. Her jaw tightened. She said nothing about the cold or the wet, because saying something about the cold or the wet would have been an admission that following a pillar of light across half a mile of countryside in bare feet and a borrowed shirt had been, perhaps, not the most thoroughly planned expedition of her career, and Ria did not make admissions of this kind.

  She made soup instead, but there was no kitchen here, so she sat in the wet grass and pretended the wet grass was fine.

  "You're testing," she said.

  "I am.."

  "The new mana from the goblins?"

  "From the goblins. And the troll. And everything before them."

  "How is it?"

  Levin looked at the ring of scorched birch trees. He looked at the sky, where the afterglow of the Mana Bolt had faded to nothing. He looked at the blade of grass at his feet, ordinary again, dark, one among millions.

  "More," he said.

  "More?"

  "More than yesterday. More than the day before. More than last week. More than—" He paused. He picked up another blade of grass. He did not channel mana into it. He held it and looked at it and turned it between his fingers. "When I arrived here, my mana pool was a cup. A small cup. The kind you drink espresso from, if espresso existed in this world, which it doesn't, and which is, incidentally, one of the more significant losses I've sustained since arriving."

  "What's espresso?"

  "A drink. Small. Intense. The liquid equivalent of being shouted at by someone who cares about you," he paused… Espresso? He wasn't sure where that came from, much less how if felt so familiar and important to him. "Never mind. The point is: the cup was small. And every kill added to it. One percent of the target's mana. One percent. A drop. A trickle. Hundreds of drops, hundreds of trickles, over seven weeks, and the cup became a bowl, and the bowl became a bucket, and the bucket became a well, and the well became—"

  He gestured at the clearing. At the scorched trees and then at the sky.

  "This."

  Ria pulled her knees to her chest. She wrapped her arms around them. Her hair fell across her face and she pushed it back — the same gesture she made with her braid, automatic performed every forty-five seconds regardless of hairstyle.

  "The Chain Lightning," she said. "I counted the flashes. Twenty-three."

  "Twenty-three links. Last week, I could manage five."

  "And the barrier. How long did you hold it?"

  "A minute. Maybe longer. I stopped counting."

  "And the bolt. The one that went up."

  "That was—" He stopped. He looked at the sky. The stars looked back, offering their usual combination of beauty and indifference. "That was a fraction. A small fraction. Of what I have."

  Ria's arms tightened around her knees. Her chin pressed against her kneecaps. Her eyes, dark in the moonlight, were fixed on his face.

  "How much do you have?"

  Levin was quiet for a long time.

  The clearing held its breath. The fox in the undergrowth had moved on. The birch trees stood in their ring, scorched and patient. The moon continued its slow arc across the sky, tracking the hours with the reliable indifference of an object that had been doing this for four and a half billion years and was not about to start taking a personal interest in the mana capacity of one Level 1 Mage sitting in wet grass.

  "I don't know," Levin said. "I can feel the edges of most things. The edges of a spell — where it starts, where it ends, how much it costs. The edges of a barrier — how wide, how tall, how long it holds. The edges of a bolt — how far, how fast, how hard. I can feel all of those edges. They're clear and defined. Like the walls of a room."

  He paused.

  "I can't feel the edges of the reservoir."

  Ria's breathing changed. A slight quickening and fractional increase in rate that she controlled almost immediately, pressing her lips together, steadying herself.

  "You can't feel—"

  "I reach for the edge and there's more. I reach further and there's more. I reach as far as I can and there's still more, and the more keeps going, and I don't know where it stops, and I'm not certain it does."

  The words hung in the air between them.

  They hung there the way words hang when they've been said for the first time — heavy with the weight of having been carried silently for too long, lighter for having been released, and changed by the act of being heard by someone other than the person who said them.

  Ria looked at the scorched birch trees. She looked at the sky. She looked at Levin's hands, resting on his knees, steady and unmarked and thin-wristed and capable of things that the level system said they should not be capable of and that the universe had decided to track with teal notifications and cheerful chimes and a filing system that catalogued everything and explained nothing.

  "The troll," she said. "At Cairn Bridge. That was the big one that made the big jump."

  "One percent of a Level 14 troll's mana stores. The troll regenerated — it rebuilt its own body from damage that should have killed it, multiple times, in seconds. The energy required to do that — the mana required — was enormous. One percent of enormous is still—"

  "Enormous."

  "Significant. One percent of significant."

  "And the goblins today. The cave. Fifty, sixty of them."

  "Each one small. Each one a drop. But fifty drops at once is a glass, and the glass arrived all at once, and the reservoir absorbed it all at once, and the absorption produced—" He gestured at his forearms. The blue-white glow was gone now, settled back into dormancy, but the memory of it was there — the crawling web of light that had climbed past his elbows toward his shoulders, brighter and more extensive than it had ever been. "That."

  "The glow was different today after the cave. When you walked back to the perimeter. Your arms were brighter. I saw it. Everyone saw it, I think, but nobody said anything because nobody knew what to say, and also because you had just eliminated a cave full of goblins and people tend not to critique the lighting choices of someone who has recently done that."

  "The glow is mana… err.. Excess mana. When the reservoir is full — or when it's been recently expanded — the excess bleeds through the channels and becomes visible. The brighter the glow, the more excess. The more excess, the more the reservoir has grown."

  "And it's still growing."

  Ria rested her chin on her knees. She was quiet for perhaps thirty seconds, which was, for Ria, an extraordinary duration of silence — a personal record that she had previously achieved only while asleep and that she was now achieving while awake and sitting in wet grass, which suggested that the information she was processing required her full cognitive resources and that her vocal cords had been temporarily reassigned to support duties.

  "The system," she said. "The Empower skill. It showed up after the troll."

  "After the troll. At the five-hundred-and-fifty threshold. Along with the combat skill notifications. Mana Bolt. Barrier Ward. Arc Chain. Beam of Annihilation."

  "But you'd been using those spells for weeks."

  "The system was cataloguing. Watching and recording. It saw me cast Arcane Bolts and filed them as Mana Bolts. It saw me cast Chain Lightning and filed it as Arc Chain. It saw me throw barriers and filed them as Barrier Wards. It saw me punch a hole through a troll and filed it as—"

  "Beam of Annihilation."

  "Beam of Annihilation. Which is a name I did not choose and would not have chosen and which sounds like something a twelve-year-old would name a spell in a game, and which is, unfortunately, accurate."

  "And the Empower skill. The one percent per kill that was already happening, before the notification."

  "Since the beginning and the first kill. The notification didn't create the skill. The notification acknowledged it. The universe had been running the programme for seven weeks and only bothered to send the documentation after I crossed a threshold that triggered the paperwork."

  "The universe has paperwork?"

  "The universe has extensive paperwork. The universe is, at its core, a bureaucracy. It tracks everything. It measures everything. It files everything in teal boxes with rounded corners and cheerful chimes. And it does all of this with the serene confidence of a system that believes its record-keeping is more important than the events being recorded, which is a belief shared by every bureaucracy that has ever existed, in this world or any other."

  Ria's mouth twitched. The twitch became a grin. The grin was smaller than her usual grin — quieter, more contained, shaped by the moonlight and the cold and the particular intimacy of a conversation conducted in wet grass at midnight about things that neither of them fully understood.

  "So," she said. "What now?"

  Levin looked at the clearing. The scorched trees. The sky. The moon, still lopsided, still watching, still offering no guidance.

  "Now. I find out what this can do."

  He stood up. The grass released his trousers with a wet, reluctant sound. He extended a hand to Ria. She took it. Her fingers were cold — the cold of bare skin in night air, the cold of someone who had followed a pillar of light across half a mile of countryside without pausing to consider footwear — and he pulled her to her feet.

  She did not release his hand immediately.

  She held it for perhaps two seconds longer than the act of standing required, and in those two seconds her fingers tightened once — a brief, firm pressure that communicated something that words would have made smaller.

  She released his hand.

  She pushed her hair behind her ear.

  "Show me something," she said.

  Levin looked at her. Her face was silver in the moonlight. Her eyes were bright. Her borrowed shirt hung past her knees and her bare feet were muddy and her hair was loose and she was shivering — a fine, continuous tremor that she was suppressing through jaw tension and willpower and the absolute refusal to acknowledge that she was cold, because acknowledging cold would have been an admission of poor planning, and Ria did not make admissions.

  He raised his right hand.

  He cast a spell.

  The spell had no name. It was not in the Principia Arcana. It was not in the notification queue. It was not Mana Bolt or Arc Chain or Barrier Ward or Beam of Annihilation or any of the catalogued, categorised, neatly labelled entries in the universe's filing system.

  It was warmth.

  A sphere of gentle, golden warmth that formed in his palm and expanded outward — slowly and without force or flash or the dramatic visual effects that accompanied his combat spells. It grew to the size of a basketball (another oddity he couldn't quite explain how he knew what it was now that he thought about it), hovering above his hand, radiating heat the way a hearth radiates heat — aimed at the person standing in front of him who was shivering in a borrowed shirt and pretending she wasn't.

  The warmth reached Ria.

  Her shivering stopped.

  Her shoulders dropped. Her jaw unclenched. Her eyes, which had been narrowed against the cold, widened — not with fear or awe or the recalibrating stare that people directed at him when he did impossible things, but with something simpler.

  Surprise.

  The surprise of a person who had expected lightning and received a hearth fire.

  "Oh," she said.

  The sphere of warmth hung between them, golden and steady, casting a light that was softer than the moon's and warmer than the stars' and that turned the clearing, for a radius of perhaps ten feet, into a small pocket of summer in the middle of a cold night.

  "That's new," Ria said.

  "Everything's new," Levin said. "That's rather the problem."

  Ria stepped closer to the sphere. She held her hands out to it, palms forward, the way a person holds their hands out to a fire. The golden light played across her fingers, her wrists, the cuffs of Marda's oversized shirt.

  "It's beautiful," she said.

  Levin looked at the sphere. He looked at Ria's hands in its light and then looked at the clearing — the scorched trees, the wet grass, the moon, the stars, the fox that had returned and was sitting at the clearing's edge, watching the golden light with the cautious interest of an animal that had encountered something outside its experience and was deciding whether to investigate or flee.

  The fox investigated.

  It took three steps into the clearing, nose twitching, ears forward, and then sat down at the edge of the warmth's radius and curled its tail around its feet, because foxes are, when it comes to free heat sources, pragmatists.

  "We should go back," Levin said. "Before Marda wakes up and finds both of us gone and draws conclusions that will make breakfast uncomfortable."

  "Marda's conclusions are always uncomfortable. That's her gift."

  "Her gift is soup that tastes like hot water. Your gift is soup that tastes like soup. I prefer your gift. I would like to continue receiving your gift. This requires surviving breakfast."

  Ria grinned. The grin was the wide one, the bright one, restored to full power by the warmth of the sphere and the absurdity of the conversation and the particular quality of a midnight that had contained lightning and revelation and a fox sitting in magical warmth and a man who could reshape the night sky with a gesture and who was now worried about breakfast.

  Levin dismissed the sphere and the golden light faded. The cold returned. The fox, deprived of its heat source, stood up, regarded Levin with an expression that communicated, in fox terms, "rude," and trotted back into the undergrowth.

  Levin retrieved his staff from the birch tree.

  The staff had slid another three inches to the left during his absence, continuing its lifelong migration toward whatever destination it believed lay in that direction.

  They walked back to Thornwall.

  The road was silver under the moon. Their footsteps — his booted, hers bare — made different sounds on the packed earth, producing a rhythm that was uneven and syncopated and that sounded, if you were listening from a distance and feeling generous, like a very simple and very quiet piece of music being played by two instruments that had never rehearsed together but that were, through repetition and proximity and the particular chemistry of walking side by side in the dark, beginning to find a shared tempo.

  Ria's arms were crossed against the cold. Her teeth chattered once — a single, involuntary click — and then stopped, because she clenched her jaw and forbade them from chattering again, and her teeth, recognising the authority of the jaw, complied.

  Levin raised his hand. A small orb of golden warmth — smaller than the sphere, the size of an apple — formed above his palm. He held it out to her.

  Ria took it.

  The orb sat in her cupped hands, glowing and warm, and she held it against her chest as they walked, and the golden light leaked between her fingers and lit her face from below, and her expression in that light was one that Levin had not seen before and that he filed, carefully and without examination, in the same place where he filed the shrug on the south road and the sound of a shield breaking and coming back and the line in the notebook that said watch this one.

  They reached the tavern.

  They entered through the back door and the hinges squealed. Marda's snoring continued uninterrupted, which was either a testament to the depth of her sleep or a testament to the volume of her snoring, which was sufficient to mask any sound short of a direct magical bombardment and possibly some indirect ones as well.

  Ria set the orb on the kitchen counter.

  It sat there, glowing, casting golden light across the cutting board and the knife rack and the pan that she had seasoned with four coats of lard and that gleamed in the warmth like a small, iron sun.

  "Goodnight, Levin," she said.

  "Goodnight, Ria."

  She paused at the door to her room. She looked back at him. The golden orb lit one side of her face. The other side was shadow.

  "The reservoir," she said. "The one with no edges."

  "Hm?"

  "You said you can't feel where it stops."

  "I can't."

  "Maybe it doesn't stop."

  She said it simply. Flatly. The way she had said "huh" on the south road when he'd told her his level. The way she said things that other people would have said with emphasis or alarm or the particular vocal inflation that accompanies statements intended to be dramatic.

  Ria did not do dramatic. Ria did factual. And the fact, delivered in the doorway of a small room beneath an attic staircase in a tavern in a village between two hills that had tried to become mountains and thought better of it, was this:

  Maybe it doesn't stop.

  She went into her room. The door closed. The thin line of candlelight appeared beneath it, burned for approximately thirty seconds, and went out.

  Levin stood in the kitchen.

  The golden orb on the counter faded. The warmth retreated. The kitchen returned to its usual state of darkness and the faint smell of rosemary and the residual memory of soup.

  He climbed the xylophone staircase. Silent notes. Long stride over the twelfth. The attic. The cot. The ceiling with its three water stains, which had, in the moonlight filtering through the small window, developed an expression that was less "mild surprise" and more "quiet concern," as though the ceiling had been paying attention to the evening's events and had opinions about reservoirs with no edges that it was keeping to itself.

  Levin lay down. The cot groaned.

  He stared at the ceiling. The ceiling stared back.

  The warmth behind his sternum hummed its three-part harmony. Primary. Secondary. Tertiary. Three frequencies, layered, interlocking, vast and patient and growing and showing no signs whatsoever of stopping.

  Maybe it doesn't stop.

  He closed his eyes.

  He did not think about clouds.

  He thought about a blade of grass that had glowed brighter than his first spell. He thought about twenty-three birch trees linked by lightning. He thought about a pillar of light that had reached the clouds. He thought about a fox sitting in magical warmth with its tail curled around its feet. He thought about cold fingers holding a golden orb against a borrowed shirt, and the light leaking between them, and the face above the light.

  He thought about the troll. A bucket dumped into a bathtub.

  He thought about the goblins. Fifty kills. A river.

  He thought about what came next. The things that were larger than trolls. The things that were deeper in the world. The things that the Principia Arcana described in its later chapters, the chapters he had read once and set aside because the creatures in those chapters had been theoretical, distant, powerful, and irrelevant to a man whose primary concerns were tea, sweeping, and the leftward tendencies of a broom.

  The creatures were less theoretical now.

  The creatures were, in fact, exactly the kind of creatures whose mana stores would make a troll's look like a goblin's, and whose one percent would make the troll's one percent look like a blade of grass glowing in the dark.

  The wheel turned faster the longer it spun.

  And the wheel was spinning.

  He fell asleep.

  The cot groaned once more, settling under his weight, and then the attic was quiet, and the tavern was quiet, and Thornwall was quiet, and the only sound in the world was the hum — three frequencies, layered, interlocking, vast, and patient, and growing — and the distant, barely audible sound of a reservoir that had started as a thimble and had become something that language could not contain and that mathematics could not predict and that a sixteen-year-old girl in a borrowed shirt had described, simply and accurately and without drama, in five words that sat in Levin's mind as he slept and that would still be there when he woke:

  Maybe it doesn't stop.

  The ceiling watched over him.

  The three water stains had arranged themselves, in the moonlight, into an expression that was almost fond.

  Almost worried.

  The moon moved. The stars turned. The fox, somewhere in the countryside, found a rabbit hole and settled in for the night, warmer than it had any right to be, carrying in its fur the faint, fading trace of golden light that smelled, if foxes could identify such things, like magic.

  The night passed.

  Dawn would come. The bell-ringer would ring. The tea would be made. The broom would pull left.

  And the reservoir would hum.