Nothing was clear. Not in his head, his heart, or his brain. Every thought was encroached by another that bit on the past's revelation. Every answer leading to another question, another curiosity-laced thorn that needed to be plucked out. And with it, another shallow conviction lost that each was a small piece of himself.   Only a single question remained.  Should he remain watching? Or take control of himself? ____  "Something has changed." The first to speak it were the holed up Arcanologists that otherwise would not leave their pens and papers to warn their king even if they believed the world itself had been coming to an end. The royal mages came soon after. The mana-sensitive children otherwise oblivious to the world began to speak of cryptic messages and prophecies to their parents' horror.  Leading Arcanologists from all the world's nations joined hand to delve deeper into this phenomenon under the impatient and overzealous funding of their kings and councils in power. Corroborating together these genius' of their own respective fields created impossibly complex machines capable of measuring all changes in the property of their surrounding mana. Acoustic mages joined hands with Geosculpters to measure the frequency changes while Aerologists and leading Arcanologists corroborated to measure the density of mana in the atmosphere around them until finally the fruits of their labor began to show itself. The answer? ...Mana was slowly fleeting away from this world. In every atmosphere regardless of terrain, race, or creed, all mana slowly escaped outwards to the edges of the universe where man knew they could not yet reach. In light of this discovery the great minds of each nation were quickly called back to their homelands, forced to develop mana reservoirs of inane sizes through promises of untold riches, status, or if neither worked, the promise of death to them and all their kin worked quite well to get them going. In the midst of this emerging cold war, a single soul travels through purgatory reaching the listless land on the other side. *Author Note* - I am using AI to create cover images for the series along with some of the images placed throughout the novel but I am not using AI to write any of the actual content. It seems to take a lot away from the realism and sort of subtext of dialogue and story so I think I'll refrain on it unless it gets considerably better!