Waking up slowly, his body groaned in complaint and refused to move as well as he was politely asking it to. It was the worst he had felt in his entire life, which makes sense as he was getting on in years and those days tend to happen more frequently as time goes on. There’s always a new record to set. Even so, today was a new kind of experience. Getting stampeded over by a family of buffalo could perhaps explain the soreness. If those buffalo had stabbed him repeatedly, that could explain the apparent anemia. Looking at his hand was difficult, since his eyesight was so blurry and unfocused, but even he could see how pale white his skin had become.

So startling was his skin tone, he hadn’t even noticed that he didn’t recognize his surroundings or the fact that his hand was that of a twelve-year old. It took an aggressively shrill and panicked girl’s screaming about a young master waking up for him to try a little harder to focus on the environment he found himself in. Was he in a hospital? No hospital he’d ever seen gave you silk sheets in a four-poster bed. How could the doctors and nurses easily get to you when you laid in the center of an emperor sized bed? He was on the edge near the door, but he could have rolled! Furthermore, how did he get here when he was pretty sure he was perfectly hail and healthy when he last retired to bed in his own home? Finally, where were his pants? He could feel he was wearing some sort of oversized shirt or dress… also why was he so painfully thin?

Pawing around his body, his skin felt smooth and hairless over the bumpy protrusions he eventually recognized as his long-lost rib cage. How long had it been since he was thin enough to feel his ribs… fifteen years? Sure, even at his unhealthiest he could still press in to feel his ribs through the… ahem… fluff, but this was a little different. This was a little less intentional. Apparently he was in some sort of long-term hospice, since he felt skinny enough to have lost over half his body weight. Had he been in a coma? They apparently even shaved his entire body. Though… even shaved, his skin felt a little too… supple?

A few moments later, he saw people-shaped blurs crowding around the edge of his bed on the side he was laying. Voices of several excited sounding women crashed into his suddenly headache addled brain. “Did he truly awaken?!” “The Young Master is awake!” “Someone call Lady Forrester!”

Eh? Were they not here for him? They are crowding around him though…

He could feel the moment she entered the room, like the clouds were clearing on a stormy day. Like waves cascading from her presence, his vision began to clear in sudden and obvious stages. His pain and fatigue just washed away before her. If he wasn’t certain they didn’t exist, he would swear this woman was an angel descended. She strode towards him, her gait unnervingly and unnaturally level, and gathered him into a tight embrace. He couldn’t help but notice how much larger than him she was. She was like a giant before a man, or an adult in front of a child…

He began to panic. Frantically pulling himself from her grasp, she released him with no small amount of hurt apparent on her face. He struggled to pull the covers from his body and looked down at himself. He wasn’t just emaciated; he was also tiny as though he had shrunk a foot in height. Fearfully, he gazed upon the women around him, rolling himself further onto the humongous bed.

“Who are you people!?” He called out to their worried astonishment. For several seconds, Rowan Keep was completely still.

For the remainder of the day the women either physically examined him or taught him everything they could about who they thought he was. Honestly, they were a little too accepting of the fact that he was pretending to have amnesia. Nothing they said sounded even vaguely familiar. Not even the name of the continent that this hitherto unheard of kingdom resided on had rung a bell. It had been a while since grade school, but he was pretty sure he could at least remember the names of the continents. The idea that this whole situation could be one crazy realistic dream did pass through his head, though he quickly gave up on that line of thought. The only conclusion that the man could come up with that explained his new body and world that didn’t seem to be Earth was both simple, and impossible. Syron, or the ‘Young Master’ as the women kept calling him, was his new life. Perhaps he died and this was what came next. If so, the after-life was different than people assumed.

The woman known as ‘Lady Forrester’ turned out to be his mother, so he apologized for recoiling at her touch. It’s not like he meant to hurt her feelings or anything, he just panicked a little. She just smiled like the sun and sat beside him silently staring at him while he interacted with the various maids that attempted to help him with eating or using the toilet. While a little embarrassing, it’s not like he physically had a choice but to accept their help. He apparently hadn’t moved in a good long while. They brought him a pretty amazing tasting porridge to eat though, which is not a sentence he had ever thought would be uttered.

The next day, he insisted he tried walking around a bit, but it wasn’t possible. Whatever musculature he had before had long atrophied. He required a maid to push him around in a wheeled cart just so he could explore ‘his’ home a little. The cart was basically a four-wheeled wheelbarrow with a bunch of green blankets and fluffy black pillows inside to prop him up. Since it was all so new and exciting, the maid in question started to get into her role as a tour guide, explaining every little thing he wanted to know about. Which was quite a lot, as it turned out.

For starters, the Foresters are filthy rich. To an extreme degree. Their choice in décor, however, utilized only two main colors and one design choice. The design choice in question was fantasy monsters. They were depicted everywhere. The carvings of his four-poster bed frame, stone statues lining the halls on little pillars with even more monsters climbing up them. Along the walls were paintings of various battlefields full of monsters facing armies led by chestnut haired men and women; some were wielding long spears or swords, others blasted fireballs or lightning from their hands. One of them, a particularly small woman, held a comically large axe that there is no way she possessed enough mass to actually use. Even if she were also comically strong to go with her axe, if she weighed as much as she looked, she would get swung around by her weapon long before she could swing it back.

Whoever designed this place definitely likes that fantasy niche. It’s pretty excessive, to be honest.

The maid didn’t think it was all that strange however. In fact, she seemed to get into the narrative pretty strong.

“But of course the Foresters would fill their home with monsters. If there is any House that does not fear monsters, it is this one. The Foresters have been the greatest monster hunters in the whole of the Kingdom for a dozen generations!” The maid exclaimed with pride. Unfortunately, at that moment she seemed to remember who she was speaking to and went quiet. Syron had learned yesterday that he was an only child… also he was completely infirm. Naturally no one would expect him to fight monsters with his body.

Especially since… monsters aren’t real, right? People seem to be talking like they are pretty real, but that’s just the story set up by this crazy rich person, right? Even yesterday the maids were talking about how this House protects the eastern border of the Kingdom from the monster tides. That just seemed like a metaphor for, like, anti-immigration or racism or something. It might be wrong, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t prevalent.

Since he didn’t feel comfortable forcing the poor maids to carry him up and down the steps, he kept his exploration to the second floor of the household. Fortunately, on the second floor was the main entrance to the keep’s library. The library was a huge circular room that started on the second floor and went up three stories before peaking as an enormous glass dome without any metal holding it together. Unfortunately, even with the amazing library, it turns out Syron couldn’t read the letters. Despite everyone seemingly speaking English in this foreign, magical country, they don’t use the Phoenician alphabet. They only have 23 letters, but the words didn’t seem to make sense until he said them out loud and a filter in his head translates.

It might sound like ‘marklar’ if I sound out each syllable individually, but when I say it all out loud at once I hear ‘building’. On a slightly happier note, it seems to be a pretty easy conversion since it’s just English without a c, q, or x. I spent the rest of the afternoon ‘reading’ about the world.

Which made him come to a conclusion. Either this crazy rich person wanted to sell their ‘fantasy setting’ so hard they had thousands of hand written ‘history books’ talking all about wars with mythical creatures, magical conclaves solving natural disasters only to cause other worse ones a few years later, and a few other magic related topics… or Syron was legitimately in a world that believed in magic and monsters.

He finally found a treatise on magic proper, but sadly his weakened body gave out and decided to read it the next day. Rather embarrassingly, he fell asleep in his cart on my way back to his room and woke up the next morning in a different night shirt. The maid that was in the room when he woke up seemed rather put out by the questions he had come up with after sleeping off some more of the culture shock. She still answered them… but he could tell this Marigold was getting frustrated with him. He called for his cart and headed off for breakfast, but had woken too late so he asked a lady knight to carry him down the steps. Smiling, she lifted as though he weighed nothing more than a bunch of grapes, and carried him daintily down the steps. After apologizing for intruding on the kitchen staff, since they seemed so shocked by his intrusion, he ate some more porridge and went back to the library. The lady knight hefted him easily up the steps, forcing him to wonder if she was super muscular under her metal reinforced leather armor.

Returning to the library, he got back to ‘reading’.

“To begin your magical studies, first you must feel the magic within you. Each person has magic within them, though differences in amounts can vary wildly. The more you possess, the easier it is to initially locate your magic to start. Start with the basic breathing exercise labeled on the next page to calm your body. Now introspectively examine yourself. Look for a clump of warmth and focus all of your mind on that clump. Force that clump to move. It doesn’t matter how you push it at first, the clump can only travel around your body in a fixed pattern. Just keep trying to force it around your body until you can figure out your entire body’s path. This cycle is used to both strengthen your body, as well as your magical foundation, enabling you to use more magic in the future.

Once you’ve mastered cycling your magic around your body, you can attempt a basic spell. The basic spell you’ll be able to complete is based entirely upon your aptitudes, which are fixed at birth. Each person has only one aptitude, as their magical pathways within their bodies are unique to their spell’s effect. Due to this, each person is only able to produce two magical effects their entire life. If they rotate the magic one direction along their pathways, they produce one effect, and if they rotate the magic the opposite direction, they produce a different effect.

If you are unaware of what your aptitudes are, do not attempt your first spell. The effects may be advantageous or dangerous depending on which direction you rotate your magic around your body in a cycle. If you are aware of your aptitudes, and you are prepared to deliver your spell’s effect in a safe manner, imagine your spell’s effect and force it to happen with intent.”

Syron stopped reading at this point. Each word took time to translate, though the process was getting faster as he started to memorize the letters. He decided that even though he didn’t know what his aptitude was, he didn’t have to cast a spell to determine if magic was real. All he had to do was find his clump of warmth and push it around his body. He closed his eyes and focused on his body. He never read the breathing technique, so he didn’t know what to do, but he relaxed as best he could and started pushing his focus onto various parts of his body searching for his magic. He felt exceedingly stupid trying to do this if it was all a hoax.

But the magic clump was found quickly. He could feel it resting dormant in his throat, and once he focused on it properly, it felt intense. There was a sun resting in his throat that burned with such immense intensity he could barely stand to focus on it, though it didn’t hurt him. It just applied pressure.

Syron started pushing it, and it moved just like book said it would. Though, he had little control of its cycling once it started, he just pushed a little and it started moving through an intricate pattern around his body. He could feel… power? Not much, given his horribly weak body, but it was definitely power he felt.

“Magic is real…” he said aloud, with no small amount of wonder.