First Among Equals Chapter 1: It Happens Today

Clarity sees; he sees.

Spirits stir in young children between the ages of eight and twelve. Talented children from the Ereshta'al line have spirits that sotis stir as early as six years of age.

Caen Ereshta’al was only two years old when his spirit first stirred.

It happened late one night on Ser-gwu Island, during the biennial celebrations held by the Ereshta'al head-family.

That night, Caen lay cuddled beside his father, Ergen, who read him a bedti story about magical adventures.

As was the manner of the Ereshta'al, Ergen had fondly wrapped a tendril of his own spirit around Caen's. One mont, the little boy's unawakened spirit had been still as stone. The next, it writhed and squird chaotically.

There was a patch of milky, crystallized mana on Caen's face that had already begun fading into wisps. This was expected in newly awakened children. Pain, however, was not.

Caen's agonized screams tore through the quiet of night, jarring his mother, Sh'leinu, from sleep.

Ergen worked fitfully to suppress their child's spirit, while Sh'leinu rushed out to get her mother-in-law, who was an older and more practiced Spirit-healer. Their joint efforts did not stop Caen's pain, however.

At the Ser-gwu celebration, several powerful mages were in attendance, most of them specialists in Dynamism: affairs of the spirit. Elder Gev was one of such. When they sought his aid, he brought temporary respite to their son, and, upon examining the boy's spirit, was shocked to find it truly awakened.

Soon, the island was abuzz with news of this. A two-year-old child of Edict and Ereshta'al heritage had awoken their spirit.

They subjected him to extensive probes and examinations while coming up with strategies to manage his pain. Preliminary tests showed that Caen indeed possessed the bloodline of the Ereshta'al family, and the speculon on his forehead implied that he possessed his mother's as well. Yet curiously enough, he exhibited no affinity for magic whatsoever.

He was young, they said. His spirit would heal, mature, and manifest its attributes properly. He only needed ti. Most of his peers wouldn't awaken their spirits for years to co, anyway.

In the anwhile, Caen's anomalous spirit was in constant, excruciating turmoil, tearing itself apart with each chaotic movent. Newly awakened spirits were fragile, but Caen's was much more so than usual. His entire nuclear family worked hard to help manage his affliction. Gaining control of his spirit would help, so elders assured.

The ti it took to attain the magical stage of Attuner ranged from just a few months to three years, depending on when the child's spirit awakened. Twelve-year-olds tended to spend much less ti gaining control of their spirits than eight-year-olds or earlier.

By the age of four, Caen learned to control the movents of his own spirit, making him one of the youngest Attuners in living history. To his parents' relief, Caen’s fragile spirit had begun healing, and the pain had mostly subsided, but he was still sickly. After a routine inspection, Elder Gev insisted that they wait a while longer before getting Caen's affinities tested.

Caen was in love with magic. As a precocious child, he quickly tired of sitting at the feet of older relatives to hear tales. He took to reading stories for himself. He wanted to know, longed to understand. And his parents humored him. They answered what questions they could, and eventually resorted to buying him books on rudintary magical theory. Fascinated with his own spirit, he learned to use his spirit tendrils deftly in spite of his magical deficiency. He sat with older children and listened as tutors explained the fundantals. These, Caen grasped quickly, even without a passive augntation to his mind.

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His tutors were intrigued by him. They spoke excitedly about his future potential. So young and already at the second stage of magic, they'd exclaim. An impossible feat. Surely the next stage would co just as easily as the first had.

By the ti so of his peers' spirits were awakening, Caen was eager to get tested again.

The results were the sa. Abjection, they called it: no true affinity for magic. This was a rare sickness, and the elders found it mysterious. Bloodlines were a well-established defense against abjection. He must have been too young, still.

He tested once more at age seven. No affinities.

Every year till he turned ten, Caen's test results did not change. His ratings on the Peilker Scale were near zero in every known discipline of magic.

All this ti, his knowledge of magical theory continued to grow. His peers, however, soon outpaced him. Passive augntations to their minds gave them an advantage that Caen could not bridge by re talent alone. He had to work several tis harder than the children in his commune to understand magical concepts that they intuitively grasped.

For all his effort, Caen's spirit struggled to cast even the simplest of spells. When his peers were manipulating their spirits in complicated patterns, he was still laboring under the weight of his abjection, barely able to shape his mana into basic spell constructs. No one else was struggling with this.

So of his tutors looked at him with pity, others still with disappointnt. Children his age and older made jokes. They called him ‘zero child’ openly or ‘special cripple’, and though it stung, Caen knew it to be the truth. He lacked every known augntation that affinities granted. He could not even play gas with his age-mates lest they wound him grievously. He was weaker, sicklier, frailer, slower of body, mind and spirit, less receptive to the elents and to magic as a whole than anyone else he knew; than anyone else that existed, perhaps.

Sotis, he overheard the adults talking, and they would say that he had used up all his good luck by starting so early, or that he wasn't trying hard enough.

Traveling with his family to Ser-gwu Island for the biennial celebrations now brought him great anxiety. He had long since lost the luster of being exceptional.

Understandably, several elders who had previously shown interest in Caen's condition were now too busy to et with him. Before retreating into secluded ditation, however, Elder Gev had t with Caen and his parents one last ti. He had a theory: Caen possessed a third bloodline. An exceedingly rare phenonon. The Ereshta'al spirit tendrils, the Edict speculon, and a hidden third, which was sohow responsible for suppressing Caen's magical potential. The elder believed that this reliably explained Caen's abjection.

If Caen could locate this third bloodline, then Elder Gev would be better equipped to inspect him when next he resurfaced. It wasn't the promise of a solution, but Caen clung to it like a lifeline.

He searched his own spirit desperately, becoming more intimately acquainted with it than ever before. He found nothing. This did not deter him.

He was not gifted. He had just been a precocious child. His head start was inconsequential. But if Caen had loved magic when he thought he was special, he loved it all the more when he understood he was not.

He needed magic. Caen needed it. He thought about it, dread about it. He studied and trained daily, scanning his spirit for that ever-elusive third bloodline.

In so ways, it disheartened Caen to know that he would never gain even passable proficiency at this thing his heart burned for, unless he located that hidden bloodline. The supposed cause of his abjection. He clung to the hope that he would find it, but that hope died with every passing day, with every passing biennial celebration at Ser-gwu island.

There was a fundantal problem, and Caen did not know it. He was blind and could not see.

Until today.