I was a curious child, always drawn to the edges of things—questions without answers, areas others dared not go. It was during one of those aimless meanderings that I stumbled upon something strange, something ancient. Today, they would call it magic, although even that word sounds too little, too neat.
We didn't know how to name it then. My friends were afraid of it. They spoke of it as if it were something—something alive and aware, something not of our reality that didn't belong in our world. They avoided it, whispered about it, thought it was cursed. But I couldn't look away. Where they saw danger, I saw awe. Where they saw threat, I saw question that hung unanswered.
To me, it wasn't some living thing to be feared. It was a subject—raw and untouched, waiting to be studied, to be understood, maybe even mastered. Nobody from that time was born with a taste for such things. Magic, if that's what it really was, didn't choose people. It had no heroes, no inheritors. But I chose it. Or perhaps, in some quiet, impossible way, it chose me.