Golden Dawn Headquarter
Luna Gaea Solar System
Milky Way Galaxy, Charlie Quadrant
Neutral Free Zone
January 30th 2019
In the aftermath of the incident—the sudden displacement, the fracture of space that had torn Sam and Leon into somewhere unknown—training resumed with unsettling normalcy.
No debrief. No lingering alarm.
Just… continuation.
As if Golden Dawn had quietly decided that whatever had happened was either understood—or irrelevant.
Leon had vanished just as abruptly as the event itself, leaving behind nothing but the echo of his presence and Sam's simmering irritation. There were questions she wanted to ask, words she hadn't gotten to say—but he had denied her even that. The memory of it lingered like grit beneath her skin.
Emani, however, wasted no time.
She had seen something.
Sam's mana control—once erratic, reactive—had sharpened. It moved with intention now, with rhythm. Not perfect, but no longer fragile. And Emani responded the only way she knew how.
By escalating.
"Again," she would say, already moving.
From that point on, training shifted. Less theory. Less stillness. More impact.
Their sessions became a constant exchange of motion—footwork, balance, breath, timing. Emani stripped Sam of distance, forcing her into close quarters where instinct mattered more than thought. Every strike demanded response. Every mistake was corrected immediately—sometimes with words, more often with pressure.
By the end of each day, Sam's body ached in ways that felt… deliberate.
Constructive.
Like something inside her was being reforged.
—
When Emani allowed her rest, Sam found herself drawn elsewhere.
To the library.
Golden Dawn's archive did not feel like a room—it felt like a threshold. Endless rows of preserved knowledge stretched outward, blending the ancient with the modern. Stone-carved shelves housed relic texts sealed in protective wards, while suspended holographic arrays interfaced with the internal network—the Zod Network—streaming controlled data through layers of encryption.
Knowledge, here, was curated.
Guarded.
Alive.
Sam moved through it quietly, fingers grazing the spines of texts that hummed faintly with residual mana. She already knew what she was looking for.
The pagan gods of Terra.
More specifically—
Asha.
Even as someone still finding her footing in the Hidden World, Sam understood this much: the old gods were not myths here. They were history. Power. Foundations of entire belief systems that still influenced factions, bloodlines, and cultivation paths.
She had met people who worshipped them.
Worked beside them.
Whatever Asha was—whoever she had been—it wasn't something trivial.
Sam pulled a set of sealed documents from an indexed archive, their bindings etched with restriction sigils that loosened only after recognizing her credentials. Some of the data cross-referenced into the Zod Network, but she could tell immediately which records mattered.
The important ones were never left exposed.
They had weight.
Presence.
She turned down another aisle, eyes scanning titles, when one particular tome caught her attention—its cover worn, its script unfamiliar, almost resisting recognition.
She reached for it—
—and paused.
Another hand reached at the same time.
Their fingers brushed.
For a single, fleeting moment—
Everything went quiet.
Not silence.
Absence.
The world didn't dim—it vanished. Sound, color, sensation… all of it stripped away, leaving behind something hollow and vast that swallowed her perception whole.
Sam inhaled sharply and pulled back.
When she turned, she already knew who she would see.
Emily Legens.
"Oh. It's you," Emily said, her tone casual, as if nothing had happened.
She took the tome fully into her grasp.
Emily had been a constant presence in the library lately, buried in her own research. Sam had overheard enough to piece together fragments—runes discovered beneath Lakefront City, symbols that resembled intergalactic script yet deviated in subtle, unsettling ways. Something old. Something… misaligned.
"Hi," Sam replied, her voice slower than intended.
"What are you doing here?" Emily asked, glancing briefly at the book before looking back at her. "This isn't exactly light reading." She tilted the tome slightly. "Arcane discipline theory. You into Magic?"
"Uh…"
Sam hesitated.
It wasn't the question.
It was her.
There was something about Emily that refused to settle in Sam's senses. Not threatening. Not overwhelming.
Just… wrong.
"Hello?" Emily said, raising an eyebrow. "You good?"
"Oh—yeah. Sorry," Sam said quickly, clearing her throat. "I just… yeah. Kind of."
She forced herself to focus, but her perception kept drifting.
Emily stood out—and not because of her appearance.
If anything, her clothes were loud. Bright pinks, layered textures, expressive choices that should have flooded Sam's senses with emotional color.
But they didn't.
Sam's perception of emotion had always manifested as color and tone—a spectrum that wrapped around people like an aura. Even Ascendants, guarded as they were, still leaked something. A faint hue. A whisper of presence.
Emily had none.
No color.
No sound.
She wasn't muted.
She was absent.
Like a figure sketched in black and white and placed into a world that refused to acknowledge her existence.
Sam stared for a fraction too long before catching herself.
And in that moment, a quiet, unsettling thought took root.
What kind of person doesn't have a color?
"Leon tells me you're still learning the ropes of mana application," Emily said, her voice light, almost conversational. She extended the tome toward Sam without hesitation.
"The Arcane Arts aren't the same as Mystic Arts. Magecraft is… stricter. Harder to grasp. Mana Arts, by comparison, are almost instinctive."
Sam accepted the book, the weight of it settling into her palms. "What's the actual difference?"
Emily didn't answer immediately. Instead, she turned, already walking, expecting Sam to follow. The quiet of the archive seemed to bend around her as they moved between towering shelves and suspended data arrays.
"Mystic Arts," Emily began, "treat mana as something you become aligned with. You circulate it through your body, shape it with will, refine it through control. It's internal—fluid. Like learning how to breathe differently."
They reached a long table carved from pale stone, its surface etched with faint, dormant sigils. Emily slid into a seat, setting her own texts aside.
"Magecraft," she continued, tapping lightly against the tome Sam held, "treats mana as something you construct with. Every spell is a framework—layers of logic, formula, and intent stacked together. If Mystic Arts are instinct…"
Her gaze flicked up, steady.
"…then Magecraft is architecture."
She leaned back slightly, folding her arms. "It requires calculation. Precision. You don't just feel your way through it—you build it, piece by piece. And if you build it wrong…" A small pause. "It collapses."
Sam sat across from her, absorbing the explanation.
"It's not something everyone can handle," Emily added, almost offhandedly.
There was no arrogance in her tone.
Just fact.
"You seem really knowledgeable about it," Sam said.
Emily gave a small shrug. "I should be. I'm a Mage."
Her attention drifted briefly to the materials spread across the table. One brow arched, almost imperceptibly.
"…Interesting."
Sam followed her gaze.
They had been reading the same thing.
Ancient texts on the development of pagan runic alphabets—variations across civilizations, the evolution of symbolic frameworks, the convergence of meaning and power through written form.
Emily tapped the edge of the tome lightly. "Coincidence?"
"Oh—uh…" Sam shifted slightly. "I'm just trying to learn more about runes."
"Runes aren't universal," Emily said. "They're contextual. Every planet, every civilization develops its own system—its own syntax for interacting with mana. Different logic. Different rules."
Her fingers brushed across a page, eyes scanning quickly.
"Which means," she added, quieter now, "when two systems resemble each other… It's usually not accidental."
For a brief moment, her expression sharpened—thoughtful, almost distant.
Then it was gone.
Sam caught a glimpse of the other documents Emily had been studying—cross-referenced notes, fragments tied to the runes discovered beneath Lakefront City… and something broader. Something reaching beyond Terra itself.
Emily noticed Sam's glance.
And chose not to comment.
Instead, she stood.
"I should get back to my work."
There was no hesitation in the motion—no lingering attachment to the conversation, as if she had already taken what she needed from it.
"It was nice talking to you," she said.
She turned—
—then paused.
For just a second.
Emily glanced back over her shoulder, her expression unreadable.
"Leon might come off like an asshole," she said, matter-of-factly. "But don't worry. He's… decent. Once you understand him."
Sam blinked. "Uh—"
But Emily was already gone.
No footsteps.
No presence.
Just absence, slipping back into the silence of the archive.
Sam exhaled, shaking her head slightly as she looked down at the collection of texts in front of her.
The pages felt heavier now.
Like they were holding onto something she hadn't quite grasped yet.
****
After her reading in the library, Sam was in her room, meditating, reaching deep into herself, accessing a place that seemed to belong to anyone who had awakened their soul core. Her mindscape.
She did this through her Internal senses. Sam had learned in her training with Emani that her internal senses were what made her able to read the emotions of others. A part of her consciousness that could perceive things on a hyper level. Now that she had awakened, her internal senses had gotten stronger and more stable, especially her sight and hearing.
So Sam decided to focus her internal sense inward. She decided to listen to how her blood was pumping through her body, how her heart was pumping the blood, how her muscles moved and stretched, and the sturdiness of her bones. Her sight also focused on the flow of electric impulses through her nerves, and how her cells vibrated with an intense motion. Sam noticed that all this was just surface-level.
She needed to go deeper than just her physical body. If she could extend part of her mind as an Internal sense, then what about the rest of her Internal body? Wasn't her internal sense just a part of her consciousness that she was projecting? And as Sam thought that, she felt her mind being pulled deep into the void of her subconsciousness. And beyond the darkness, what she saw was an Image of….
It was hard to describe it. Sam felt like she had been dropped in the vastness of an ocean, only it looked like outer space with the piercing darkness that stretched for miles, with bright numbing dots of lights that looked like nebulas. The luminescent cosmic dust flowed through everywhere, and in the middle of it all was a bright burning pattern that looked like a chladni plate.
The cymatic pattern vibrated, and visible waves of vibration and sound flowed through the image. And in the center of the sequence, there was a light so bright that for a moment Sam felt like she had been devoured by a real star. There was heat, an intense heat that felt like her cells were being fried, and then a coldness washed over her. In the middle of the light was Sam. It was her, dressed in a white robe with an octagram pin on the cloak, which covered the face with a hood. But Sam could see her face. There was rage, raw anger, and bitterness that drew her further in.
As Sam focused on herself, she felt themselves mixing, drowning in a sea of darkness, their fused body descending towards the pit of darkness below. And when Sam reached it, her fingers moved to touch it, and then there was a bang, like an explosion, and her body felt like it had been dragged to somewhere else that was neither in her room nor the moon itself.
Sam was somewhere else, floating under a purple night sky, though it was empty of stars. She was alone in a field of nothing but an endless space of darkness. It felt like she was floating above the darkness. Her finger moved, and a ripple spread around. She was floating on the surface of a sea of darkness.
This was her mindscape, her soul realm, and it was then Sam truly understood one of the lessons Emani had given her.
"The living body is a triune that consists of the body, mind, and soul. The body cannot function without the mind or soul. The mind cannot function without the body and soul, and the soul cannot function without the body and mind." Interesting. Sam thought to herself.
Sam was caught off by the shimmering of runes that appeared in front of her. She turned to her soul which had brightened. The song from within it got louder, and she felt her leg pulled towards it. Sam sighed. She realized what she had to do. Sam sat on the surface of the sea, crossed her legs, and then opened her mouth. She inhaled and then exhaled before long words and lyrics began pouring out. At first, it was a whisper, a whisper in the darkness that surrounded her soul. And then the song began to resonate with her soul, the vibration from it increasing as the song filled the entire surface of the Soul realm.
Gathering in the sky was a mass of energy that seemed to have come from within her soul core, the energy gathering in the sky of the mindscape. And then she felt a vibration from the core of her being, and the Gaea spell system interface popped off once again.
Enlightened has begun the path of Magehood. Does Enlightened want to begin Star core construction?
"Another skill to unlock, huh?" Sam said. "Why not?"