Marissa was a child, yet I was the childish one. I was an obtuse, hard-headed ellari. Defeat did not make me waver, it motivated me once more.

I never had true doubt in myself, I needed a remainder. A remainder that I would unravel the mysteries of the arcana. That I would know more about this world. That I would know more about me.

I channel mana. Nothing. And then I channel mana again.

Unrewarded endeavor.

I spellcasted to remember the feeling of a completed spell.

Once more.

A lot of mana had been wasted. Dissipated, maybe reabsorbed, sometimes another spellcast to have a better image of the finished product. I had yet to cast.

Deep in the night, father and mother were already sleeping, and here I was still channeling more mana. I didn’t know how much mana pools I’d already gone through, but it didn’t matter. The pain in my head didn’t stop me.

I stopped on my tracks. I gazed at my pinkish palms, my violet hands. I recalled the promise I’d did to my father the day before.

How could I be so blind? So childish?

I was an idiot, but I had respect for my father and our promise. I couldn’t just keep doing these outbursts and tiring myself to death. I was a damned child, who knows how pulling these acts would affect my growth.

I sighed to myself in the dark room, only lighted by the midnight moon. I went to sleep on my cushion bed. It was almost instantaneous.

**

“Come on, catch me!” Marissa taunted as she ran away.

“That’s a fact, not a challenge. And I will do it!” While she had a head start, I was faster than the girl.

Daily strolls on the park for years built one’s stamina. Today was a day like any other, Marissa and I had come to the park accompanied by her own father. The man was nowhere to be seen at the moment though.

“I’m not so sure!” She sent a burst of wind my way.

I evaded it with ease, but it had an effect on my equilibrium. “That’s cheating!” I cried as she got farther and farther

“It’s no cheating if you are not caught!” Marissa looked behind for an instant.

“That’s not how it’s use—” Then it hit me. “I’ see what you did there.”

If she decided that fighting fairly wasn’t the drill, I wouldn’t follow. Mana flowed along my body, my reserves rapidly depleting. I wasn’t happy with a measly cantrip. As I finished my spellcasting, a third of the pool away, my body felt lighter than before.

Fast steps became wide strides and long jumps. My momentum growing by the second. Marissa took another look but stood silent, contemplating the impending doom that was about to catch her.

At the first opportunity I saw, I leapt more than five meters, seizing the skies and Marissa. I knocked her into the ground.

“That’s unfair.” Marissa protested in my claws. “I didn’t use complicated spells.”

“Yet you used one.” I looked at her with a smile carved in my face. “This is not an argument you will win, Marissa.”

“Will you get off me?”

“Oh, right sorry.” I lifted my body, liberating her. Then she promptly started to run away. What a shame that she is so predictable that I had her leg grabbed. She flopped to the ground, only to recover the next instant and look at me with a defying pout. “I mean, what did you expect to happen?”

“That I would run away?” Marissa pondered innocently.

“Yes, I can see that.” I responded. “The futility of that.”

This time she sat on the ground cross-legged, no intent of making a not-so-great escape.

“I could totally have run away if I casted Rush, you know?” Marissa tried to justify her defeat.

“I know that. But you didn’t!” I taunted her. I only felt like a child while I was with Marissa. “Why bother casting a cantrip instead of Rush if you were trying to cheat?”

To which she responded with a simple shrug. Sometimes, I couldn’t fathom what was her train of thought. It just seemed random. Illogical.

Cantrips were the most fundamental block of sorcery. Simple, almost unstructured magic that could be casted without the tedious first cast that this field of magic normally had.

“A cantrip isn’t equal to three-star spell, though.”

“And it wasn’t, you still cheated.” Marissa always wanted to be right.

The three-star classification she used referred to the Starry Tier. A simple system that evaluated the difficulty of spellcasting. Not mana consumption. Which opened the possibility of an unstructured spell able to level cities to the ground yet being called “cantrip”.

The three firsts’ stars were the more important. The first was an unstructured spell, the most basic form of magic.

The second star began the spellcasting part, it included basic spells like Mage Light or the movement cantrips Marissa had made use of. Every cantrip was considered a two-star spell, though not every two-star spell was considered a cantrip.

The third, where I was, was the start of true spellcasting, as my father said. Here was the spell that I just used, Slow Fall.

Fun fact, there were different spells with the same name. This indicated that they had the same function even if they were syntactically different. There was a Slow Fall spell from Air, Void, Time, Space, and Arcane element. I used the arcane one obviously.

By different syntaxis I meant the composition of the spell and their way they worked. Air Slow Fall made a cushion of air to slow one’s fall. Simple enough. Arcane was more complex. I manipulated in a mild manner how gravity affected me. Not changing gravity itself, but reducing its effects on me. I supposed Space also worked in a similar way, either manipulating gravity or space itself.

About time and void…

No idea. I supposedly had an above average affinity in the Time element, but father was wary of me messing with Time or Soul affinities. Which was totally logical, you wouldn’t want a child messing with the fabric of space-time. Time probably slowed time, therefore your falling speed.

But void? Zero clues.

Either way, three stars out of twelve wasn’t noteworthy. Especially when the last three tiers were orders of magnitude apart. Well, higher orders of magnitude apart.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The rest of the tiers, or at least the firsts ones, followed the rule of one being ten times more complicated than the previous one. I think there was a different measuring scale for sorcerers that measured mana consumption instead of difficulty, but I didn’t know the details as I hadn’t bothered asking father.

Marissa woke me from my trance, patting me on the shoulders. “Hurry up! We are going to miss your parent’s twentieth anniversary.” Unlike children’s birthdays, wedding anniversaries were celebrated every decade. Another show of ellari time perception distortion and prolonged life expectancy.

That’s true, today was the day my parents celebrated their marriage for the second time. About nine years since I came to this world.

***

Endless streams, a feeling of nothingness. Nothing to feel. Not a signal of touching, levitation induced by matterless water. Ripples in a torrent, nothing to transfer movement to, yet the world reacted against it.

Echoes, cacophony, pain. Misery without motive. Illogical eternity. An infinite train of infinite individuals. Somehow countable. Somehow incalculable.

Cold out of nothingness. Alas, sense to be made. The lack of energy equivalent to cold. Therefore, cold is nothingness.

Emotion. Momentum in the constant flow of entropy, an outsider to the closed system. How would you calculate something that wasn’t in the preestablished order? Not enough variables to determine.

Light. A black light. Paradoxically. No. Metaphorical. My own light.

Awaken.

Whose voice was that I cannot tell. But it was a superposition, a phonetic chimera. Like three different people called me at the same time. It felt… oddly nostalgic.

***

“Are you alright?” Mother patted my head.

I was in the balcony, mother and father were there. Alongside four more elves. No. Not elves, ellari. My head hurt a bit, as if my brain was screaming… Three adults, one child. The child was my friend, Marissa. The adults, unknown.

“Yes, sorry.” I apologized for something I did not know. “Who are they?” I pointed to the two men and the woman.

“You weren’t paying attention, were you?” Mother giggled. “These are your grandparents. Sheel, your grandma; and Sal’em and Filan, your grandpas.”

“Sheel and Filan are mom’s parents, Edrie.” Father explained with further detail. “And Sal’em, is my father.”

So they have parents. That was my first thought. I knew that they had to exist, but to my inner child it was like some divine revelation. A paradox, an impossibility. Parents having parents? Nonesense.

It didn’t escape me the lack of maternal figure of father, though. And I feared it would remain that way as asking such a thing in their anniversary would be summarly inappropriate.

Sal’em was blue like father. Sheel and Filan were purple and violet, respectively. My skin tone probably a recessive gene from a previous generation as neither of my parents shared it. The culprit was my mother’s father, Filan, it would seem.

I caressed my head, the river accompanied me, even if no one could see it or sense it. After nine years, I could still feel the emptiness.

My Light, the Lady of River of the Damned, a shinning savior in total darkness, lingered around. These attacks were random, usually they followed one of my remembrances, but not always. Sometimes I would just be assaulted by dark energies I couldn’t describe, out of the blue.

“Are you feeling well?” Grandmother Sheel asked, supporting me in her arms.

“Yes, sorry.” I apologized again. I knew I shouldn’t, yet it felt appropriate. “My head aches.”

“Oh, pour soul.” Sheel words struck true. “Do you have medicine, daughter?” She looked at mother.

“Of course.” She instantly directed to the kitchen.

“How weird.” Father commented. “This is the first time Edrie had a sickness.”

Oh, father. Only if you knew. I had hidden every headache I had suffered until now because I clearly knew this wasn’t a physical ailment you could just heal away. And at this point, I doubt I could remove the river from my being.

“Well, it was destined to happen at some point in his life.” Sheel said while patting my head. A good caring grandmother. Which made the situation weird now that I thought about it. I hadn’t seen these people in my life, almost a decade long.

Mother gave me a glass filled with a white diluted liquid. Knowing how this would go, I swallow it in one go before they told me. Unsurprisingly, it was bitter.

“What a bummer, the child gets sick when we were going to celebrate such an event.” Sal’em, father’s father (my inner child had a giggle) said. “I only have one day a decade to come here as an excuse.”

“You know you can come here every time you want, father.” Dad replied.

“No, I don’t think I will.” He sarcastically said.

Everyone except Marissa and I laughed. I believe I was an adult in my previous incarnation, but that wasn’t precisely funny. Maybe a bit sad, even. Perhaps ellari humor was lost in translation.

“It’s time for the cake, don’t you think.” Sheel commented mom. “The children are probably bored, better have their bellies filled up.”

“Of course.” Mother followed her to the kitchen.

I now got the idea of what type of person was Sheel. A manipulative person that wanted to be always in control. Almost every conversation at the moment was directed by her.

My parents didn’t acknowledge it, maybe they knew it and decided it wasn’t worth it to discuss it. She easily gave that aura of command and supremacy, yet it didn’t feel suppressing.

“Wow, that’s certainly big.” Sal’em spoke everyone’s thoughts aloud as the cake made their appearance.

As a matter of fact, the cake was monstrously big (for child standards). A three-tiered cake with layers taller than my torso’s width. The layers were covered in multi-colored fondant. Starting from below, a purple tier, then a blue, and ending with a violet. Totally discreet message.

“Obviously.” Sheel expressed proudly. “I wouldn’t have less for my daughter’s anniversary.”

“Honey, you told the same thing at the first anniversary.” Filan, her husband, added.

“Because it’s true.” She looked up to the sky, with a firm gaze.

Even though the people before me were my grandparents, they didn’t look old. Not a chance. I still had problems guessing ellari’s ages, but I knew my parents were around the early hundred-year-mark, so I would put my grandparents at their two-hundreds. This meant that easily five generations of a family could live at the same time.

“Can I have a bite?” Marissa, who had been silent all this time, finally talked. Drool came from her mouth.

“Of course, sweety.” Sheel replied. “Who wants to make the first cut?”

“Let me do it, mother-in-law.” Father offered himself to cut the cake.

Perhaps it was related to his job in the workshop, but his cuts were perfect. Not a single leftover left in the trail where the cake rested on. Forget spellcasting, this was the real magic.

Everyone’s portion was needlessly big, but the cake didn’t experience much of a change. Marissa wasn’t slowed by that fact as she almost put the whole cut in her mouth. She struggled to eat it, but in the end, she managed it.

The adults laughed once more, and now I joined them. This was the type of absurdity that was funny. Marissa looked at us perplexed, oblivious of what was happening. In the end, she joined us out of the effect of masses. Laughing was a speeding sickness.

I mostly ignored the conversations that popped around the table, having not much interest in them. Maybe a story when father and mom were younger, but that’s all. One did catch my attention, though.

“What will you do with Edrie’s education, daughter.” Sheel commented over some yellow wine. It looked sickening rather than appetizing. “Having high affinity at such young age is nothing to scoff at.”

While the education part interested me, the latter part had surprised me. My parents didn’t tell about my superb affinity to their own parents. Was it something so dangerous that it couldn’t be trusted to the family? It could be the case that they did know it but hide it before Marissa, but something told me that it wasn’t the case.

“Emm…” Mother hesitated for a second. “Tel’am and I are still talking about it. We believe a lot of institutions will accept him with a scholarship thanks to his affinity and the fact he can spellcast three-star spells at his age.”

“Wait.” Sheel was surprised, out of character. “Did you say three-star spellcasting? Is Edrie capable of doing such complex calculations?”

I knew I was better than my child peers thanks to my advanced mental age. Even Marissa, who had my continuous help, struggled with three-star spellcasting. Managing one out of five spellcasts after a full minute of conjuration for something I could do in a matter of seconds. A fully completed spellcast would never fail, unlike a common cast. But it was easy for a child of her age to lose concentration mid-spellcast.

Though calling it “complex calculations” for three-star spellcasting was a misnomer. I’m not saying it’s easy, but spellcasting doesn’t correlate well with common mathematics. As I had explained, spellcasting was founded in the field of manathics, and unlike their precise and scientific counterpart, manathics were based more in approximations than a definitive result.

TL:DR, there was a forgiving margin of error when spellcasting.

Sheel looked at me. Well, everyone looked at me following my grandmother’s question. I just simply nodded, putting another spoonful of cake in my mouth.

“Can we see it?” Sal’em was the one who talked first.

Truth be told, I wasn’t a real three-star spellcaster. I managed to spellcast a single three-star spell, which was a lot different. Yes, I only managed to cast Slow Fall at the moment with consistent results.

The expecting glances of my grandparents motioned me to do it. Following ellari extravaganza, I wanted it to be as spectacular as possible given my limited resources.

A wild idea occurred to me, but I didn’t want to cause no one heart attacks, so I settle with a mild one.

I stood on the table. And mouthed the phrase. “Slow Fall.” While chanting was a form of both casting and spellcasting, it wasn’t in my repertoire. It was purely aesthetics to show what I was spellcasting.

I jumped down the table with a backflip. I fought with the laws of physics, denying gravity as I slowly approached to the ground and I landed at my feet graciously.

“Ta-da~” I bowed to my audience.

Who started it may be an unanswered question, but in the end, they all clapped at me.