Morgana opened her eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling.
Wood. Dark timber beams, polished but simple. A bedroom, every detail of it wrong.
She sat up.
Her body responded, but slowly, the way a limb responds after hours of numbness. Her ribs ached with the memory of fractures that had already been healed. Her mana channels felt scraped raw, as if someone had emptied them a few hours before without her knowledge.
Her muscles were whole, her bones were set, her skin was clean, but beneath all of it sat a wrongness she couldn't name. The feeling of a body that had been broken down to its foundations and rebuilt.
She reached for her mana.
Nothing.
Morgana's fingers twitched. She reached again, deeper, pulling at the familiar reservoirs that had answered her since childhood. The channels were there. The mana was there. She could feel it sitting in her core like water behind a dam.
But the dam wouldn't open.
