Chronicles of the Untalented

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Silas sat beneath a cracked skylight in the quiet upper floor of the library, sunlight long forgotten, the light replaced with flickering magical lanterns. The air was dry, pages of old tomes rustling as he turned them with delicate, careful fingers. Velira had gone downstairs to return a few scrolls, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

And the silence.

He liked the silence.

It reminded him of that old library back home. Before this world. Before magic. When the only power he had was thought.

Light.

He tapped a blank page of his notebook slowly, thoughtfully. His mind wasn't on spells—not directly. Not yet. He was thinking through concepts. Of what made magic tick.

If the dark path, his path, was entropy—rot, chaos, dissolution of matter—then the light path must be its inversion.

He scribbled in the margin of his notes:

> "Dark = entropy → increase of disorder

Light = order? But not just order. Preservation. Stabilization of systems."

He kept writing.

> "Dark corroded the hound's body—

Light could preserve it.

Is light the path of resistance to decay? Inversion of entropy? A closed, self-repairing system?"

He stopped, blinked. Then laughed.

Not loudly. Just a brief chuckle through his nose.

It was always like this—he understood the world best when he flipped it upside down.

The dark made more sense to him than light. But through dark, he could start to see the shape of light—how this world's magic might truly balance itself.

"They don't teach this," he thought, lips curling. "They cast light spells like torches, think they've mastered it just because they can illuminate a room. But they're playing with the outer skin. I want the bones."

He stood and wandered past the shelves, running a hand along the aged wood. A priest might call this heresy—learning the light path through study of decay, death, disintegration. But to Silas, it was beautiful. Clean. Logical.

The world ran on symmetry. Push and pull. Erosion and resistance.

Destruction and preservation.

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Later that night, back in his room, Silas sat cross-legged on the floor.

His effigy stood behind him, silent. Watchful. It no longer unnerved him. If anything, it was like having a shadow that understood him better than anyone else.

He looked down at a small crystal of low-grade magical light he'd borrowed from the cathedral's library. It glowed gently in his palm. Warm. Soft.

"Not heat," he murmured. "Stability."

He passed a tiny thread of mana from his fingertip into it. The light fluctuated—then dimmed.

Too chaotic, he thought.mana disrupts it. Of course it does.

He laughed again.

Every test was a lesson. Every failure meant he'd touched something real. That was how he learned back then, and how he'd learn here too. Trial. Observation. Control.

He didn't need a teacher. He needed time.

And he was dangerously good at being patient.

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