Childhood on the Origin was short. Parents were often busy with assignments, so they passed their children off to care providers. The children with fewer prospects found themselves in more crowded, smaller classrooms, with lower quality air and a lack of good activities. It was a necessary evil - there wasn't enough space to go around, so although most such children would have been malleable enough to learn more, preliminary testing left them deprioritized in favour of more immediately talented ones.

Maso's early assessments had been moderately positive; not nearly good enough to be tracked into a research or engineering field, but sufficient for a decent picking of career paths. Still, the first decade or so of his life had been stuffy and isolated, the bleakness of their surroundings and education stifling his cohort's desire for camaraderie or play. Immersives were the foundation of his (and most of his peers') childhood, allowing an escape from one's surroundings into a more pleasant environment.

There had been no avoiding the fact, though, that those environments were purely educational. That led to its own unique feeling of blandness over time. Resplendent vistas were only so interesting when one was frantically searching for a way to start a fire to cauterize their wound; dark caves lost their charm when it was necessary to light them up in order to recognize an arbitrary set of minerals.

As such, despite the admittedly fantastical nature of the exercises, there was never any true escape.

The exact concept of magic was foreign to Maso, but he could remember dreaming of similar things. Early on, he'd daydreamed of shocking his tutors with feats of logic and cunning, rising above his classmates and achieving impossible scholarships. Later, as he started preliminary training on his final career path, he'd sometimes imagined himself being absurdly skilled in spatial combat, defeating bizarre aliens with fantastical weaponry.

Now, something like that old desire had started to bubble up in him. He had to find a way to contact the Origin, to find a way to escape this planet and fulfill his mission objectives. For that, he needed to understand the strange systems by which this world worked, so magic was a prerequisite regardless.

Seeing what was possible with magic had started to add on to that. He wanted to summon lightning with a phrase, to freeze enemies in their tracks. It was practical, it would further his objectives, but most importantly - right now, at least - it was just cool.

"The first thing you need to know," Rèmsciore said, ducking under a tree branch, "is that most magic is very slow to use."

"How slow?" Maso was barely keeping up, finding himself wading through deep shrubs and low branches that Rèmsciore seemed to glide past. He assumed it was a skill that one would naturally pick up from spending a long time in the forest. Useful, but not worth the time investment. Maso hoped he'd never become that good.

"That depends," Rèmsciore said, glancing back at Maso. "For me, not too slow." He grinned, hopping over a log without looking. "For you, well, it might be wise to get used to a sword."

"It can't be that bad," Maso said. "At least I can say the words while fighting."

"Ah." Rèmsciore stopped, and Maso stumbled slightly to avoid running into him. "No, I'm afraid not. It's not possible to use spells without accessing your crann, you see."

"What?"

The other Aspen turned around to look at him. For the first time, he seemed somewhat serious - not upset, but deep in thought. "How about I show you something?"

"Sure."

Rèmsciore turned on the spot, looking at the surrounding forest. This wasn't an area Maso had been in before, but it was no different than what he'd started to become used to: dense tree covering, thick shrubs layered on top of each other, branches barring every possible path.

"There," Rèmsciore said, pointing at a rather large rock that jutted out of the surrounding shrubs, maybe a stone's throw away. "Do you think you could hit that - say, with a bow?"

Maso had never used a bow - he was only remotely familiar with the concept from a single ancient weapons course he'd taken out of interest - but he imagined he could hit the rock with any weapon, considering it wasn't moving... and bigger than two people. "Yes."

"All right." He took in a deep breath, pointed with one hand - not his sword hand, Maso noticed - and spoke: "Bisect."

Several things happened at once.

Firstly, the rock did not move. This was the standard behaviour of a rock, at least within Maso's past experiences with them. However, in this case, he had to admit that he'd expected something... else.

Well. He did get something else, at least. An ear-splitting crack rang through the air, almost causing him to flinch. Where? He'd been focused on the rock, so it took him a moment to realize.

Behind him and Rèmsciore, a massive tree truck had just split in two, and was falling towards him-

Instinct kicked in. Maso lunged forward, wrapping one arm around Rèmsciore's body, and pulled them both forward as hard as he could. The other man had still been turning his head, and must have been surprised when Maso hit him, because he let out a strange whuff at the contact.

They toppled over together after a moment, amidst the sounds of cracking wood and crashing branches, landing in some foliage only a step or two away from where the tree itself had fallen.

"Ah," Rèmsciore said, lying on the ground face up. "Thanks! I didn't expect the angle to have changed so much in the last year or two."

Maso brought himself to his knees, panting. His neural augment had kicked in within a millisecond of him noticing the tree, and had started to pump regulated amounts of adrenaline; he gave a silent command for it to stop, and felt a pressure in his brain release.

"What was that?" he said, after a moment.

"Bisect," Rèmsciore answered. "It's an old spell-"

"No. I mean, why did you just do that?"

He shrugged. "It's a good demonstration. I don't suppose you're still wondering why we cast spells through the crann, now, are you?"

"A good demonstration." Maso drew his mouth into a line. "I prefer my demonstrations with more explaining and less getting crushed by falling trees."

"Again," Rèmsciore said, standing up and brushing himself off. "It's not a big deal. Just a little bit of a surprise, that's all. Nothing bad came of it, eh? The best lesson is the one you don't forget!"

"Right." Maso watched the other man finish brushing himself off, then start walking again. Begrudgingly, he followed. Everyone here is insane.

"Anyhow, the point is, we used to be able to use magic with just words and the right thought patterns. It was a tad difficult to pick up - don't ask me how I know - but not altogether dissimilar to the way humans use magic, or the Avalla, for that matter."

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Rèmsciore paused for a moment, and hopped over a stream. Maso followed suit a moment later. He thought he recognized this area from the wayfinder, but he couldn't be sure without stopping to check.

"Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. Not long ago, we were at war with the Lilieth, fighting for the... fighting to keep the Thadh sacred. Not long before the end of the war, they did something to the Thadh. Nobody really knows what, but in the span of a week, our magic stopped working properly. The target, the strength of the spell, subtleties to how it manifested... The changes have been slowly reverting, but two years ago, that bisect would have targeted an area that was more directly behind me, and a year before that, it would have been twice as strong."

"If you knew how it was modified," Maso said, "then why not account for that? Just target an area in the wrong direction. If the enemy is in front of you, just turn around?"

Rèmsciore laughed. "Clever enough, I suppose, but magic doesn't really work that way. You can't be indirect with it - if you let your mind get caught up in technicalities and abstractions, you'll never hit the mark anyhow. Besides, even if it worked, we would've needed months or years to retrain our fighters."

"From what I read of the Lilieth, you would have been fine."

He laughed again, harder this time. "Things would have been much easier if you were right. No, they launched a new offensive at the same time, an order of magnitude stronger and more vicious than they'd been before. We had no choice but to use magic through the crann instead."

Maso considered the idea of engaging in combat while having his access to weaponry gated behind a user interface that was slower than the computers he'd been able to use as a child. "How did that go?"

Rèmsciore glanced back at him. "Well, everyone died."

Maso stared.

"It was quite the surprise, actually," he continued, barely dodging a tree as he turned away from Maso. "None of our leadership had predicted they'd take action like that. We miscalculated, I suppose. Some people blamed the seers, but personally, I think the root of it was worse than a lack of information."

For the first time, Maso took a moment to consider what would lead to a man secluding himself in a forest for multiple years. The culture and people here were similar to that of the Origin, but different enough that he'd passed off the hermit as being just another oddity from a planet of sprawling forests and sun-loving villagers. If magic was real and a species called Aspen used it to fight off tree-beings for control of an apparently deific tree - why wouldn't there just be people who spent years in a forest, meditating?

Suddenly, his perspective had shifted. Had this man lived through something terrible? Had he come out here to get away from it, to escape - his own failure, whatever it may have been?

Something in Rèmsciore's gaze had seemed darker than he'd expected, deeper and foreign in a way that villagers' hadn't. Was this why?

Rèmsciore hadn't seemed that bothered by the discussion, though. Maybe Maso was overthinking it.

He frowned, and kept walking.

"Anyhow, that's all besides the point. You wanted to know how to use magic. Fortunately for you, it's quite easy with the crann. Tedious, but easy."

"Okay. I suppose I have to use it through the menu?"

"Fantastic! A quick learner. Don't worry, things will slow down soon enough," Rèmsciore said. "What was the magic you were trying to use on the spider?"

"It was a chant." Maso pushed through a cluster of branches that Rèmsciore had somehow avoided entirely. "Apparently if you say it four times, it should summon a bolt of lightning."

"Ah! Fascinating. That sounds like human magic. Where'd you learn about that?"

"I must have heard it somewhere," Maso said, trying to sidestep mentioning that he'd read about it while in the void. He still had yet to hear anyone else mention being tutored by an omniscient being while in a state of undeath - Lanoch had seemed to think it normal that he just appeared on her roof, but he'd intuited (quite quickly) that the villagers did not think Lanoch was normal.

Not that Maso particularly disagreed.

He attempted a stronger explanation: "A villager, maybe? I've talked to so many people recently, I've lost track."

"I see, I see," Rèmsciore said. He looked over his shoulder at Maso, grinned, and winked.

What was that supposed to mean? Did he know about the void?

"Not a big deal, regardless," he carried on. "Now you know. Human magic doesn't work for Aspen, just like how Aspen magic doesn't work for humans or Avalla or dwarves - although they'd probably figure out a way to make it work if we told them too much about it."

"Right."

"Anyhow. Off track again! Perhaps I've become scatterbrained from spending too much time in this forest, eh?" Rèmsciore chuckled, slowing down and stopping as they walked into a somewhat less dense area. "We'll do your first lesson here. Children can manage this one - well, if they tried, at least - so you should be good."

Maso nodded.

"You'll do the same thing I did, earlier. Bisect. Don't worry," he said, at the look on Maso's face, "it's not that dangerous. Usually. I mean, it'll be fine. You'll just use it on that stone over there." He pointed.

"What do I have to do?"

"Do you see the spells menu in your crann?"

Maso hadn't opened it yet, but he remembered well enough. "It's empty."

"Ah. I suppose you haven't been allocating any of your reputation points, then." Rèmsciore tsked. "Not very optimal of you."

"Not very what?"

"Yes, yes, don't worry about it," he said. "It's fine. I doubt you'd be able to figure out a good build anyhow. Just tell the system to set everything up for you."

Maso blinked. "I'm going to need a bit more to go on than that. I thought you couldn't speak with the Thadh until you had a high enough level."

"Oh, well." He shrugged. "This is different, I guess? It's nothing too difficult. Just open up your crann, and imagine it setting things up for you. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes."

"A few minutes of... thinking it'll set 'things' up for me?"

"Yeah, exactly."

Sighing, Maso activated the routine that was almost becoming second nature. "Thadh."

A sprawl of menus appeared, somehow more than before. The quests section had doubled since he'd fought the spider, now featuring quests titled Learn about Magic (1) and Cast your first spell!, among other more obvious ones (Walk back to the coast would have seemed like a free win if the reward wasn't just "Not being in the forest anymore!").

The spells section was awkwardly located near the top-left of Maso's peripheral vision, although he'd found he could shift the layout towards a more convenient location if he glanced back and forth quickly. He'd noticed a variety of other menus that had seemed interesting over the past few days, but he'd been too busy completing minor quests to actually play around with them. Now, he found himself drawn to the Stats menu, which he'd opened once before out of curiosity.

He opened it, and was greeted with another confusing layout of numbers and acronyms. Str, int, wis... somehow the crann's tendency towards sprawling, multiple-page explanations of basic wording didn't stretch to these acronyms. Regardless, at the bottom he could see the same thing he'd seen the one other time he'd checked this menu: Points available through reputation gain: Several!!

Actually, the first time he'd checked, there had only been one exclamation mark. This had to be an improvement, he supposed, although not one he had any way of measuring.

Not particularly useful overall.

"What... stat should I use for magic?" he asked. As usual, the menus had almost entirely covered his vision, so he couldn't be sure he was talking in Rèmsciore's direction.

The reponse came from his left: "Oh, stats! I take back what I said. You're much more interested in this than a child. The ones I've met, at least. Are you sure you don't want to become a merchant? I promise you, nobody here knows how to play the economy. You'd be rich in no time."

Maso said nothing.

"Fine, fine. Wisdom is the stat that translates into magic, although it's not exactly a one to one. A few points in there should be enough to get you access to lower level magic like bisect or refuel."

Wis, then, Maso supposed. He concentrated on the letters, trying to move a 'few' of his 'several' points into the stat. Why not just call it statistic? he wondered. It wasn't like there was a lack of space in the menu's title area. It had enough white space to give him a headache.

Suddenly, a buzzing feeling filled his head. Like he'd eaten the wrong thing, or ran for too long.

> Congratulations! By allocating your first points in WIS, you've gained access to the prelude spell set. You are also now ~1% wiser, putting you in the top ninety-three percent of Aspen!

He navigated back a menu. The Spells section was still there, but it was no longer empty.

Bisect (I): Your relationship with the Thadh cannot be broken! Use its power to break other things in half! (Please note that the first sentence is not binding and may be rescinded at any time.)

Forest Runner (I): The forest is your home, just often enough for you to understand how to get out of it.

Refuel (I): Your stomach is full. After you use this spell, that is. Warning: Low nutritional value!

The text seemed to almost have a draw to it, pulling Maso in. He stared at the first spell, and focused.

Two seconds passed.

Ten feet away from the rock, and disturbingly close to Maso and Rèmsciore, a tree branch exploded.

"Ah, well. You'll get it next time," Rèmsciore said, even as the branch hit the ground in front of him.

Maybe I should just get a sword, Maso thought.