Chapter 6 - Mana

The snow outside had finally begun to melt.
Water dripped steadily from the roof. Every now and then an icicle would snap off and crash onto the packed earth below, scattering shards of ice in every direction.
Mark sat in a circle with his siblings, listening to Terry describe the battle between two divine pantheons at the dawn of the world. Once Terry drifted into religion, familiar words quickly gave way to names, titles, and concepts Mark had never heard before.
In Terry’s stories, the pattern was always the same. The gods of the Luminous Pantheon were noble and just, while the Abyss and its servants existed only to destroy. Mark found it all a little too neat, but perhaps Terry simply didn’t know any other version.
On the other side of the room, half in shadow, Mari sat on a low stool beside one of the beds. She wasn’t listening to the story. Her back was to the rest of the family, and for some time only her hand had moved, reaching out every so often to press a wet rag against Alia’s forehead.
Alia had been feverish since yesterday morning. She lay beneath a blanket despite the warmth of the room, her skin pale except for the unnatural flush across her cheeks. Her breathing was shallow and a little too quick.
Dod laughed at something, and Sari shushed him without looking up while Terry continued his story. Mark barely listened anymore. His attention kept returning to Mari’s back and the small figure beneath the blanket beside her.
Eventually, Terry’s story ended, and the house settled slowly into silence. His brothers went first, then Terry, then his sisters, each of them sinking beneath blankets under the weight of the day’s work. Only Mari remained awake, the occasional scrape of her stool breaking the quiet.
Mark lay awake in his crib. He wasn’t even sure what he expected to accomplish. He was less than a year old, unable to speak and barely capable of controlling his own body.
Whatever was wrong with Alia was the sort of thing that happened in this world to children with thin limbs and too little food after a hard winter. He also knew there was almost nothing a child his age could do about it. The only thing he could think to try was that strange sensation he had been returning to since the System’s brief appearance.
Since the System’s brief appearance, Mark had returned to that strange sensation again and again. The System itself never answered, but sometimes, usually when exhaustion blurred the edges of his thoughts, he felt something else.

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Tonight, with Alia sick only a few paces away, trying again felt better than lying there helpless.
Mark closed his eyes and turned his attention inward. The sensation reminded him of warmth, though it had no temperature. Sometimes it felt almost like a current, despite having no sound, weight, or anything else he could properly name.
He had never managed to hold onto it for long, but tonight he kept returning to it whenever his attention slipped.
It took longer than he expected. His infant body kept dragging him toward sleep, and every time his thoughts began to loosen, Mark forced them back onto that half-familiar sensation. Mari shifted somewhere across the room. The fire cracked softly. Outside, melting snow slid from the roof in wet clumps, while farther away a branch snapped beneath its remaining weight.
Mark stopped paying attention to the sounds around him and focused entirely on the strange warmth. As he followed it, the sensation gradually sharpened.
With his eyes still closed, Mark became aware of something filling the room around him. This was nothing like the faint, distant echo of the System. It filled the room and passed through his body as though neither walls nor flesh mattered.
Mana.
He knew the word already, even if he had never known what mana felt like. This had to be it. Somehow, the recognition came immediately. It was everywhere.
Mana drifted through the dark room in slow currents and eddies. Some streams felt faintly different from others, though Mark lacked even the vocabulary to understand how. It passed through the sleeping bodies of his brothers, through the walls, through the straw beneath him, and through his own body. An uninterrupted flow had surrounded him every moment of this life without him ever truly noticing it.
He stayed very still, afraid that if he moved or let his emotions rise too sharply, the sensation would disappear again.
After some time, minutes perhaps, or much longer, Mark finally let his attention drift toward Alia. Mana surrounded her just as it surrounded everyone else, moving through and around her thin body in patterns he couldn’t begin to understand.
Mark searched anyway, looking for something wrong: a break in the flow, a darker patch, anything that might explain the fever, the rapid breathing, or the way Mari had barely left her side all evening.
Nothing stood out to him, but that meant little when he had no idea what any of the patterns meant.
He had finally discovered something real, something he could actually explore, and it still wasn’t enough to help Alia tonight.
Still, Mark had something real to work with. He didn’t know what mana could do, how to control it, or whether it had anything to do with the System. He didn’t even know whether this new sense would still be there when he woke.
Across the room, Mari adjusted the wet cloth on Alia’s forehead. Mark looked at the currents surrounding his sister one last time, still understanding almost nothing about what he was seeing.
Tomorrow, he would start changing that.