London.
Fog.
Heavy fog.
The last of the rain had finally fallen away, and pale mist rolled across the ground like soft, shifting waves, spilling through the cobbled lanes, winding itself around the eaves, swallowing trees and rooftops and every trace of ordinary noise, until the whole world looked like a blurred watercolor.
Tiny beads of moisture slid slowly down the window frame. After spending a deeply meaningful seventy-seven minutes in his dream, Iain gradually woke in that familiar haze that came when the world seemed to tilt, break apart, and knit itself back together.
"So it's true. A little over an hour in the dream is a little over an hour in real life too."
On the narrow, crowded bed in his orphanage room, Iain slowly opened his eyes and looked at the clock hanging on the wall.
The hands pointed to midnight.
Most people were asleep by then.
Animals too.
The old cat and the three-legged sheepdog were already snoring in the corner, while several energetic kittens and puppies were still roughhousing inside their cages. The fire in the grate was still crackling away.
Iain lay there staring blankly.
He never got tired of looking at the cracks in the ceiling. At some point the rain outside had stopped, leaving only the drip of water from the eaves, one drop at a time.
Like some ancient clock.
Inside Iain's mind, the runes were still there.
Not "still there" in the sense of simply remembering them clearly. Normally, the things he stored in his head with his so-called 4K Blu-ray visual memory were more like photographs. He could retrieve them whenever he wanted, but they were still only pictures. He had to deliberately think of them in order to see them again in his mind.
But these runes were different.
They felt as though they had been branded into the deepest layer of his consciousness. He did not need to make any effort, did not need to consciously recall them. They simply remained there, quietly, as if they had always been there, as if they were part of his brain itself, pieces of machinery essential to his very existence.
"They feel close enough to touch."
Iain closed his eyes and tried to "touch" one of the sets of runes.
And on some mysterious level of awareness, he felt his thoughts stretch out like a hand, gently pressing against the outline of that rune.
Then something moved.
Like a dark current suddenly stirring in a pool of stagnant water, something rose from the deepest corner of his body and began to flow through channels Iain had never even known existed.
Slowly, it surged toward the rune he had touched.
And then the rune lit up.
In the darkness of his thoughts, it gave off the faintest flicker.
"Hm? So this is magic?"
Iain's heart skipped.
He opened his eyes and looked down at his hands.
They were still the same hands. There were still little bits of fur caught under his nails from trimming cat claws that afternoon. The lines in his palms were just as chaotic as they had been yesterday.
No fire effect. No ice effect.
Frankly, Iain found that disappointing.
He closed his eyes again and returned to the rune.
This time he felt that "dark current" even more clearly.
It welled up from somewhere inside him. Iain could not quite say where. It was not his heart, and definitely not some randomly inserted fantasy energy center.
Nor was it any organ he knew.
It felt more like... a blank space inside his body. A place he had never realized existed until now, and which had suddenly become perfectly clear.
The current poured into the rune.
The rune began to turn slowly, like a gear newly wound with a key, rotating one stiff notch at a time.
"What happened to innate magic? What happened to wandless casting?"
Iain waited.
Unfortunately,
nothing happened.
The cages. The cats. The dog. The radiator. The wardrobe.
Nothing changed.
There was no flash of fire, no explosion, no flowers or birds appearing out of nowhere. None of the dramatic special effects from the films ever showed up.
It only felt as though a faint breeze had passed through the room and the air had become a little fresher.
"Don't tell me my innate magic is making air?"
Iain frowned in frustration and thought hard. He carefully observed the runes in the depths of his mind, and only then noticed that just a small section of them was actually glowing.
The others were rotating too, but only with obvious strain, stiff and awkward.
"What's going on? Why is only one section being activated? It can't be because I'm too weak to trigger the full set, can it?"
"Is that why the magic won't work?"
Iain could tell that the glowing section of the runes was the part he had memorized most deeply.
If different runes represented different kinds of magic, then perhaps how smoothly they turned also had something to do with talent.
But then why was the glowing section not actually producing any magic?
"A prodigy like me cannot possibly have a magical talent that amounts to being an oxygen generator! Fiendfyre! Fiendfyre! My wish is clear! Enhanced Fiendfyre, where are you already?"
"I thought wizards were supposed to run on willpower!"
Still unwilling to give up, Iain started searching for differences, his eyes sweeping across every corner of the room.
He was trying to find even the tiniest change, any sign at all that the magic had taken effect.
But the stools and chairs had not moved. The old cat was still snoring by the fire. The ginger kittens in the cage were still piled together, not even in a different pose.
Where was the magic?
Where was the effect?
Iain was more serious and bewildered than ever.
Then suddenly,
rustle, rustle, rustle...
A faint, unexpected sound came from outside the window.
It was very quiet.
Mixed in with the drip of water from the eaves, he would never have noticed it at all if he had not been in such a heightened state of awareness.
It sounded like something crawling through grass.
Or footsteps.
But not quite.
There was something oddly... sticky about the sound.
"Is it an automatic gold-digging spell? Has my deepest desire become magic?"
Iain jumped out of bed and padded barefoot to the window, pushing it open.
The night wind rushed in carrying the damp chill left behind by the rain. He leaned out and looked into the orphanage yard.
The lamp in the back courtyard had been broken for quite a while, and no one had come to fix it.
At that moment, the whole yard was swallowed in blurred darkness. Only a faint trace of light from the street beyond barely outlined the crooked old plane tree at the far end.
And beside that tree, two small figures were creeping about on tiptoe.
Iain recognized them immediately.
Keisha and Catherine, the two most incorrigible little troublemakers in the orphanage, one nine years old and the other eight. They specialized in sneaking out after lights-out. Rumor said they went to feed a stray cat behind the bins at the corner. Mrs. Hawke had caught them several times already, and every time she made them scrub floors as punishment.
Clearly, they had learned nothing.
"Angel Queen! Sheriff!"
Iain called out to the two girls using his own private nicknames for them. He was not trying to scare them. He only wanted to ask whether they had seen anything strange outside so late at night.
But before the words had fully left his mouth, the two children reacted like startled birds.
"A ghost!"
It was as though they had seen something horrible.
In the dim light, with his messy hair and pale face leaning out of the window, the girls had evidently seen something, and whatever it was scared them badly enough that they stumbled and scrambled toward the side entrance of the orphanage as fast as they could.
"AAAAAAAH!"
"The zombie apocalypse Iain used to tell us about in his bedtime stories when we were little has started! We really are living in Raccoon City!"
"I knew it the moment those raccoons showed up in the yard a few years ago!"
Their shrill screams echoed through the courtyard.
Like the wail of some banshee from a game.
"What the hell???"
Iain still had one hand braced on the windowsill, his whole body frozen. He wanted to ask what they were talking about, but the two little terrors had already run too far away to hear him.
Fortunately, Iain possessed night vision not much worse than an owl's.
So he saw it for himself.
The ground beside the plane tree...
was moving.
The soil was heaving, as though something underneath were pushing upward. The turf bulged and split, exposing the wet black-brown earth below.
Then one hand appeared.
Then another.
Then many hands, reaching up out of the ground.
"Good lord... Aunt Mary, Granny Clara, Old Mr. Lewis, even Mrs. Hawke's mother's turned into one of the undead... this is bad! This is really bad!"
"Go to the church and get a priest. No, priests are scarier than ghosts, get a nun instead. The sky is falling! All the dead ancestors of our orphanage are climbing out of the grave together!"
Iain's mind went completely blank.
At that moment,
he felt he finally understood where his "missing magic" had gone after leaving home.