The dream opened with quiet thunder. A hum in the air. Not the hum of Hector's childhood melody, but something older—more structured. A rhythm not sung, but built.
He stood in a library that spanned miles, the shelves etched directly into the mountainside. Every stone radiated with glyphs, every scroll hummed with latent energy. It wasn't raw power. It was ordered power. Controlled, shaped, taught.
At the center of it all stood a man.
Hunched, narrow-shouldered, dressed in scholar's robes that looked scorched at the edges. His face was lined with age, eyes distant but not dull. This was no warlock or tyrant king. This was a sage.
One of the first.
The man placed his hand to the stone wall and whispered.
"Before, there was chaos. We drank from the river of magic like beasts. No measure. No understanding. Only fire and death."
He stepped back. The stone shimmered.
"So we built buckets. Not to cage it, but to carry it. To give form to the formless."
A mural bloomed behind him, stone transforming into a sequence of images:
A human meditating beneath stars, pulling magic from the world.
A glowing sphere forming in their chest—the first mana core.
"The mana core," the sage said, "a vessel within, where magic can live without burning its bearer."
He turned to Hector, as if he knew he was being watched through time.
"You will need to build your own."
---
Hector awoke.
The dream was still with him. Not as pain, for once, but as knowledge. His body tingled, awareness rushing through his limbs like dawn through a forest.
He sat up and pressed a hand to his chest.
He could feel it now—a space inside him, hollow but warm. Something waiting to be filled.
He remembered the sage's words.
"A vessel within..."
He understood what had been missing all these years. Why human spellwork felt off, like shoes that didn't fit. Why no incantation ever sounded right. He wasn't broken.
He was different.
Human mages built cores through meditation, through years of mana gathering and controlled practice. The elven ways were even more subtle, relying on a resonance with nature and emotion.
But Hector was neither.
He was angelborn.
His body, though close in form, did not follow mortal blueprints. His soul, shaped by shapeless gods and carved by dream after dream, required something other.
He stood beneath the Tree of Life later that morning, focusing inward.
He did not gather mana.
He invited it.
He hummed the song again.
And the world listened.
From the leaves above to the stones below, mana answered. Not in torrents, but in threads. Gentle. Respectful. Familiar.
He drew them inward, and for the first time, they stayed.
His core began to form.
Not in the way the human sage had envisioned, but uniquely. It spiraled like a galaxy, soft at the edges, warm and silver-blue. A place where his dreams and his pain and his endless remembering could live and feed the light within.
He knew there were ranks to the cores of mages.
Initiate. Adept. Ascendant. Master. Sage.
Some measured them by color. Others by density or purity. Elves measured them by harmony. Humans by volume. Dwarves by pressure.
But none of that would apply to him.
His path was not written.
The sage from his dream—the one who had invented the very structure of magic as the world now knew it—had been forgotten because he was not the greatest.
Just the first.
A stepping stone others built upon.
Two thousand years had passed since his era, and Hector could not recall hearing his name in any text, any tale, any temple.
Forgotten.
And yet, Hector remembered him. His dream gave the man weight. Legacy. A place in the thread of fate.
"You were not nothing," Hector whispered into the grove. "You were the beginning."
The Tree rustled in approval.
That night, Hector lit a candle beneath the roots and etched a new name into his secret book.
The name of the man who gave the world structure.
Even if no one else would speak it.
---
He spent the next weeks in quiet observation, not trying to force his development but instead watching how his body adapted to this new process. Every time he hummed, something changed. His heartbeat aligned with the vibration. His breath moved in harmony with the world. His mana no longer resisted his will. It danced.
Where other children cast clumsy firebolts or struggled with levitation, Hector began weaving the sensation of remembrance into his spells. He could manifest memories—flickers of moments. Not illusions, but truth.
He called it Soulweaving.
In the morning, he would meditate beneath the Tree. By noon, he would spar with elven warriors, learning how to fight not just with a blade, but with intention. Every movement, a word. Every parry, a question. By night, he wrote names in his book. Names of the forgotten.
And always, he carried the dream.
One night, he asked the Tree, "Why was the sage forgotten?"
The pixie replied, "Because greatness isn't always loud."
"But others came after him. Stronger. Louder."
"Yes," she said. "But they stood on his shoulders."
Hector thought of that. He remembered how the sage never demanded reverence. He simply taught. Built the foundation. Gave shape to the future.
"Is that enough?" he asked. "To know you were first, even if no one remembers you?"
The Tree pulsed once.
"It is everything."
Hector closed his eyes, and deep within him, the core shimmered once more.
A spiral of light. A melody of memory. A container for what would come next.
He was ready to find his magic.
Not borrowed.
Not imitated.
But born from within.
And the world, sensing it, whispered in return.