Chapter 1 | Cat-astrophes

Chapter 1

The last thing Archmage Calid Asigoth remembered with any clarity was the number seven.

Specifically, the seventh recursive fold in a translocation matrix he had been refining for the better part of three decades, a matrix that, in his professional opinion, was going to revolutionise interplanar communication, win him the Aldermaine Prize for Applied Thaumaturgic Innovation, and finally shut up Professor Hendricks at faculty dinners. 

The seventh fold had always been the tricky one. 

It sat at the junction between spatial compression and temporal bleed, a point where the mathematics and mana stopped being polite and started making threats. He had accounted for this. He had triple-checked the resonance dampeners, calibrated the mana siphons to within a quarter-thaum of tolerance, and eaten a sensible lunch.

What he had not accounted for was the cat.

The Academy’s mouser, a fat, entitled creature named Lord Pemberton who had survived four deans, two fires, and an incident with a summoning circle that nobody talked about, had chosen the precise moment of seventh-fold activation to walk across the primary inscription plate.

The matrix hiccupped.

Then it screamed.

Calid had exactly enough time to think oh, that’s new before the laboratory turned inside out, his soul was ripped from his body with all the gentleness of a cork leaving a bottle, and he was flung through something that was emphatically not an interplanar communication channel.

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He woke up face-down in dirt.

This was, in the grand taxonomy of post-experimental outcomes, not the worst result he’d ever experienced. That honour still belonged to the time he’d accidentally turned his own skeleton fluorescent for a week… 

But it was certainly in the top five.

The dirt tasted of pine needles and copper. His mouth was full of it. 

His body, and he was increasingly suspicious about whose body this actually was, felt like it had been used as a practice dummy by someone who took their practice very seriously and their dummies very personally. Everything hurt. His joints hurt. spine hurt, neck hurt, teeth hurt, which was a new and unwelcome addition to the general symphony of discomfort, because Calid Asigoth had maintained excellent dental health for five hundred and seventy-four years and was rather proud of it.

He spat out dirt and tried to move his fingers.

They moved. Ten of them. 

That was promising.

He tried to reach for his mana reserves, the deep, slow-spinning well of arcane energy that had sat at the centre of his being since he was nineteen years old and had first touched the Weave in a cramped tutorial room that smelled of chalk and ambition.

There was nothing there.

He reached again, deeper. Past the surface layers, the autonomic channels, and the emergency reserves he kept for situations exactly like waking up face-down in unfamiliar dirt.

Nothing. Nothing was there. 

The absence was so total, so absolute, that for a moment he simply lay there and considered the possibility that he had died and this was whatever came after. If so, the afterlife had really skimped on the welcome committee.

A sound reached him, it was distant, enormous, like thunder had gotten into an argument with an earthquake and both had decided to settle it by hitting a mountain. 

The ground shuddered beneath his chest. 

Pine needles rained down from somewhere above.

Calid, or whoever he was now, opened his eyes.

He found himself in a dark forest. The kind of dark that suggested either very late evening or very early morning, with the additional caveat that something was on fire in the distance, painting the undersides of the canopy in shades of furious orange. The trees were enormous, ancient things with bark like cracked leather, and they were swaying in a wind that had no business existing on a night this still.

Another explosion that was closer this time, or bigger, or both. 

The orange light flared white for a heartbeat, and in that heartbeat the shadows of the forest snapped into knife-edge relief and then vanished.

He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.

Calid looked down at his fingers.

They were thinner than his own and looked older. The knuckles were swollen, the skin papery and liver-spotted, and the nails were cracked and dark with dried blood. He turned them over. The palms were calloused in patterns he didn’t recognise, not the smooth, ink-stained hands of a man who’d spent five centuries holding quills and tracing glyphs, but the rough, ridged palms of someone who had gripped a sword, or a staff, or possibly a very aggressive broom.

He looked down at himself and at the white robes he wore now, or they had been white once, before someone had apparently dragged them through a hedge, a ditch, a small war, and then a second hedge for good measure. They were torn across the chest, and beneath the tear he could see bruised skin and– 

He pressed his fingers to the centre of his chest, just below the sternum, where the damage felt worst. 

Where something felt broken. 

Shattered, actually. 

As though it were a glass sphere that had been struck with a hammer and then ground under a heel for good measure. The fragments of whatever had been there were still present, sharp little edges pressing against tissue that was swollen and hot, and the pain when he touched them was exquisite in the way that only truly catastrophic internal injuries could be.

His breathing went shallow and fast. He made it stop. 

Five hundred and seventy-four years of academic discipline were good for exactly one thing in a crisis, and that was telling your lungs to shut up and let you think.

Assessment, he told himself, in the calm, measured internal voice he used during laboratory emergencies. You are in an unfamiliar body and have no mana. Something in your chest is destroyed. There are explosions. You are in a forest. The explosions are getting closer. Prioritise better.

Another detonation split the sky. This one was different because it carried a resonance that bypassed his ears entirely and hit something deeper. His bones vibrated and the trees groaned. A flock of birds erupted from the canopy in a black, shrieking cloud, and in the light of the blast he saw them twist and scatter like leaves in a gale.

He got to his feet.

It took two attempts. 

Calid’s legs were shaking and balance was wrong. This body was taller than his, thinner, and the centre of gravity was off in ways that made standing feel closer to a negotiation. But he got there and he stood in the dark forest with his borrowed hands and his borrowed pain and his complete absence of mana, and he listened.

The explosions were coming from the north. 

Or what he was choosing to call north, on the grounds that directions needed names and he needed something to orient toward that wasn’t ‘the place where everything is on fire.’ Between the detonations, he could hear other sounds: crashing, splintering, the distant ring of metal on metal, and once, just once, a scream that started human and ended as something else entirely.

Right, he thought. So that’s where the fighting is. Which means that’s where I should not be.

He turned south.

He made it four steps before the air changed.

It was subtle. 

A thickening, like humidity, denser, more intentional, carrying a taste that sat on his chest. The hairs on his arms rose and the hairs on the back of his neck followed. Every instinct he’d developed over half a millennium of working with dangerous energies fired at once, and they all said the same thing: something is here and that something is looking at you.

He stopped walking.

The forest had gone quiet. 

The insects, the wind, the distant creak of branches, all of it had simply ceased, as if the woods had collectively decided to hold their breath and see what happened next.

What happened next was that a few figures stepped out of the darkness between the trees.

They moved strange. 

That was the first thing Calid noticed. 

Their gait was too smooth and too fluid. They wore dark robes, actual dark, not just dirty, and their eyes caught the distant firelight and reflected it back in colours that eyes had no business reflecting. Red, deep, arterial red.

The one in front smiled with too many teeth and not enough reasons.

“Elder Shao Wen,” the smiling one said. “Still breathing? The Hall Commander will be disappointed, he was quite certain the core strike had finished you.”

Calid, Shao Wen, whoever he was, said nothing. 

Partly because he had no idea what the man was talking about also because the broken thing in his chest pulsed with a pain so sharp it stole the air from his lungs. But most importantly, because he was very rapidly trying to figure out what to do next without access to mana.

Not the comfortable, theoretical thinking and application of translocation matrices and recursive folds, but rather the ugly, practical ones of survival. 

Three opponents with unknown capabilities. 

No mana within him. 

Unfamiliar body that was apparently damaged, critically, by the feel of it. 

Dark forest, uneven terrain, limited visibility. 

No weapons visible on his person, though the robes were voluminous enough to hide a modest armoury.

The situation was not encouraging.

The smiling one tilted his head. “Nothing to say? The great Elder Wen, silenced at last. The Hunting Hall will want to hear about this. They do enjoy their trophies.”

The two behind him shifted. One produced a blade, short, curved, and with a dark sheen that suggested the metal had been treated with something unpleasant. The other simply raised a hand, and the air around his fingers darkened and coiled with smoke given malicious intent.

Calid’s mind, operating now at the particular velocity it achieved when death was both imminent and personal, did something it had been doing for five hundred and seventy-four years: it reached for the ambient energy around it.

Not mana. There was no mana. 

He’d established that. 

The well was dry, the channels were empty. The entire framework he’d built his life around was simply absent.

But there was something.

It was everywhere. In the air, the soil, the trees, and even in the bodies of the three killers standing in front of him. 

A pervasive, flowing energy that moved through the world like water through cloth, present in every fibre, saturating everything, following currents and eddies that had nothing to do with wind or gravity. It was denser near the explosions to the north, thinner here in the quiet dark, but it was there. 

He had noticed it because it was leaking out of him in waves now. 

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But, it was not mana.

It behaved differently. The resonance was different in a slower, more organic pattern. Where mana was a river you could dam and channel, this was more like… a breath. 

The world’s breath. 

It expanded and contracted in rhythms he could almost feel if he stopped trying to grab it and simply listened.

So he did exactly that.

The smiling man was still talking. Something about honour and the glory of the Crimson Fang and how Elder Wen’s head would make a fine addition to someone’s collection. 

Calid let the words wash over him.

He couldn’t pull the new energy inside himself. The broken thing in his chest, the core or dantian to others, some fragment of borrowed memory supplied, the word arriving with a flash of context that was filled with someone else’s memories, experiences, strengths, and life, was shattered beyond function. 

It couldn’t gather, store, use, manipulate, or circulate. 

But Calid Asigoth had not spent five centuries studying mana manipulation to be defeated by a change of medium.

He didn’t need to pull energy inside himself. 

He had never needed to. 

That was what spell matrices were for, external structures that shaped energy outside the caster’s body. A frameworks that took raw power and gave it form, direction, and purpose. You didn’t store the mana in yourself; you built the container in the air and let the mana flow through it. 

It was the difference between being a bucket and being an aqueduct.

The smiling man raised his hand. Dark energy, the same coiling, smoke-like substance, gathered at his palm. “Last words, Elder?”

Calid’s fingers creaked as he raise his arms and hooked said fingers at his foes.

This was not a spell, nothing more than a test. 

The barest sketch of a matrix, a simple compression lattice, the kind of thing he’d taught to first-year students as a warm-up exercise. 

Three nodes, six connections, one focal point. 

Calid traced it in the air with his mind, the way he’d done ten thousand times before, and instead of feeding it mana, he offered it the breath of the world.

The energy resisted. 

It didn’t want to be shaped because it wanted to flow and cycle. Follow its own ancient patterns. 

Mana was obedient; this was wilful. 

He adjusted by widened the nodes and softened the connections. He made the lattice less of a cage and more of a suggestion, a polite invitation rather than a command.

The energy hesitated for a moment before it finally responded.