“This is a waste of time,” I grumbled at the parchment from hell in front of me. “I’d rather be fighting Isidro, or beating metal into shape. Speaking of metal, don’t those dashing looking soldiers have plenty of equipment in need of maintenance? What’ll they do once dad can’t keep up? It’s a crime of conscience to withhold a smith from our imperial troops!”

  A hand smacked me upside the head, getting a squawk to escape my mouth. “You’re as much a smith as you are literate,” Asna huffed. “Which is a deficiency I told you we’d remedy. Now come, we haven’t even gotten to words!”

  “If it was such a deficiency, you would’ve cared before I became a mage,” I scoffed.

  “Elves live long lives, given enough time and anyone can learn the written word on their own,” Asna shrugged. “But now we’re on a timetable! It’ll be a few years before your grandfather will be willing to take you as his apprentice, and in that time we need to get you to an acceptable level of literacy.”

  “How do you even know he’ll want to take on an apprentice? What if he just ignores your letter for the hermit life you say he adores?”

  Asna did something I’d only seen as a response to a dumb as fuck question. She rolled her eyes. “Erd loves family, he’d come if I simply ask, let alone to see a granddaughter he had no knowledge of.”

  “You didn’t tell him about me?!”

  “Elves live long lives,” Asna intoned once more.

  “That explains nothing,” I said.

  Asna held eye contact for an uncomfortably long time, before letting out a snicker. “You’ve accustomed yourself to human culture, buttercup.” Asna chuckled. “We don’t tend to introduce our children to the wider family until they are of age.”

  “What about Rio? He’s probably bandied around the fact that I exist,” I pointed out.

  “Perhaps, perhaps not.” Asna shrugged. “Rio’s an eccentric, but he respects our traditions just the same as any other member of the family. Besides, he knows I’d give him hell for ruining the surprise.”

  “Isn’t he like, ten times stronger than you?” I raised a brow.

  “That boy would never hurt his mother.” Asna puffed out her chest in supreme confidence. “It’d take centuries of change before he could even think of such a thing!”

  I huffed. “Good thing we don’t have that long then.”

  Asna paused, giving me a calculating gaze. She’d been taking my warnings of doom more seriously since I unlocked my mana, which was both gratifying and annoying. I’d been warning of this shit since I learned words, and Asna could read the world. She could tell when I was lying.

  Shouldn’t such urgent warnings from a literal toddler be enough to convince her that maybe my prophecy had some merit?

  But no, it was the fucking magic that convinced the mystical elf, how utterly predictable.

  “By your own admission you don’t know when that could be,” Asna finally said. “Perhaps this ‘End’ begins a century from now? Perhaps tomorrow? Basing your actions on an unknown is foolish. All mages have a thorough education, and there must be a reason for that. Besides, your grandfather is miles ahead of anywhere you could hope to be, he’ll protect his family if such a thing comes to pass.”

  “Ah yes, the grandfather I’ve never met.” I rolled my eyes, which earned me another smack upside the head. “Hey!”

  “Less talking, more studying.” Asna smirked.

  I grumbled, but did as I was told, going over the alphabet once more, connecting shapes with letters and having it corrected by my mother. We hadn’t even gotten to the writing portion yet. Entirely because ink and paper was fucking expensive. We had a few books that my mother liked to cycle through, trading them for new ones when the merchants came by, but those were all much too advanced for me apparently, which wasn’t insulting at all. So instead she actually used a scroll to write down the Uomin alphabet, and the rest was reserved for when Asna was confident enough in my recitations.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Didn't stop me from messing around with mana though. Look, my mother didn’t get it, there wasn’t any possibility that it took a century for the End to come. Auriel Caesar was a major component of the game, and he was here now. That alongside the rumours of a coming war cemented to me that it’d at the very least be soon.

  Asna was living under the polite fiction that I couldn’t possibly recognize which Caesar ruled during Armageddon, completely dismissing that portion of my doom-speak. I was convinced that was some kind of coping mechanism to ignore the need to address a very imminent cataclysm.

  Sure, I didn’t know how old the female lead was, but I could put together a clear enough picture with the pieces I had, and that picture wasn’t a pretty one. So I needed strength, and mana was my greatest asset to train. So even if it hedged some of my focus, I practised with my mana.

  Gathering a few motes and threading them around one of the bones of my fingers. So far I’d just been infusing mana into my body, either to mend or without any intent at all. Mending…mended, fatigue or body depending on the flavour. But purposeless infusion? It just made whatever it was enhancing better at what it does, albeit not by much.

  Which, I could already tell, was going to be a massive problem.

  The body was a thing of balance, every portion designed within its specifications. Fuck around with that and you’d quickly find that things start breaking down. If I enhanced my muscles too far, I could break bones and tear tendons, add bones and tendons? Well then I had to think of ligaments. Enhance far enough and I'd need to include organs.

  I wasn’t anywhere near that point, but I could feel the strain on the rest of my muscles when I enhanced my arm to strike.

  So I’d need to enhance every single part of myself all at once to keep everything nice and functional, which wasn’t fucking possible, even if my body could handle the entirety of my reserves.

  So how could I fix this problem? Through experimentation of course! Before I’d straight infuse something with mana to make it better, as a kind of mystical fuel. Now I was trying to use them as support beams, hoping that it’d be more efficient than enhancing my bones dead on. Which made sense right? Bones were essentially the support structure of the body, so why wouldn’t it work? The metaphor matched at least.

  I didn’t know if that was enough to convince my magic, hells, I knew nothing about magic in the first place. Stumbling around blind like a fool when real dangers I couldn’t comprehend lied in wait to pounce. So I just had to stumble harder until I got an actual teacher.

  Wrapping mana around my finger required more concentration, but I was finding that multitasking with the ethereal was a lot easier than with the physical. Maybe it was the constraints of my brain? My brain technically wasn’t the one controlling any of the magical aspects, from what I could understand.

  I didn’t know what was but assumed it was my soul, as that made the most sense, and apparently souls were much more flexible than brains. Who could’ve guessed that tidbit? I didn’t know how the missing piece of my soul fits into that equation, it sat there like a void, empty and hungry and—

  It sat there, and I didn't know what to do with it.

  Something I’d have to figure out for later, I refused to believe the demon would cripple me, if only because that would cripple it just as well.

  Once the bone was adequately wrapped in mana, I pushed my soul with intent, commanding the mana to support the carpal bone and—

  My finger snapped in half.

  I stared at the exposed bone of my finger, shock more than enough to mask the pain. I looked over to my mother. Asna was giving her the kind of smile you’d give a gnat before crushing it under your heel.

  The imp was positively cackling.

  “Sweetheart~” Asna said, as sweet as could be. “Were you practicing magic when you were supposed to be focused on studying?”

  I blinked, looked at the bleeding thing of exposed bone, then turned back to my mother with a sheepish smile. “No?”

  The World was quiet in that place.

  A rat scampered across a patch of forest that was so very quiet. Wind refusing to sing the song of rustling trees, birds hushed in the flap of their wings, and so many things of mammalian origin acted with silent prejudice. All held their breath in this place, all except for the rat of slick black fur. It chittered and sniffed the ground, following a path that was impossible until—

  It reached the centre of the silence, a small clearing, unassuming in its menace.

  The rat smiled, and the thing behind the rat smiled wider.