Not by choice. Hunger didn't negotiate. It crept in with the patience of rot, persistent and merciless, gnawing at the edges of his will until even his thoughts felt brittle.
Tonight, though, the cold didn't have the strength to pierce him. He curled beneath a stolen scrap of fabric—a thing that barely qualified as a blanket, its coarse fibers stiff with grime, edges frayed like the unraveling of someone else's forgotten life. It smelled faintly of mold and ash, a scent that clung to him, indistinguishable from his own skin.
One month. That was all he had left.
In one month, the Academy gates would open, and for once—even the likes of him might slip through. Not because of privilege, not because of blood, but because the rules allowed for a sliver of chance. And chance was all he'd ever had.
Maybe there was power coiled beneath his ribs, waiting for the right moment to wake. Maybe his blood wasn't just cheap ink spilled into the dirt.
Maybe he wasn't meant to fade.
But hope was a quiet liar.
His family had been erased with the same carelessness one might swat a fly—victims of an experiment gone wrong, their lives reduced to nothing more than footnotes in someone else's pursuit of knowledge. No funerals. No names carved into stone. Just silence where voices used to be.
He'd carried that silence ever since, a weight stitched into the hollow spaces beneath his ribs.
But this town—this fractured place built on the bones of ambition—offered something the rest of the world didn't: a loophole. Here, near the edges of the Magic Forest, power didn't always ask for permission. Even kings had once been nobodies—men with dirt under their nails and magic in their veins.
If he passed the exam—if he clawed his way out of obscurity—maybe the world would finally have to look at him. Not as a name, not as a beggar, but as something that mattered.
Maybe that was enough.
With that fragile thread of defiance wrapped around his heart, he let sleep take him, unaware that the night was already sharpening its teeth, waiting to tear everything apart.
○●○
The first explosion snapped him awake.
Dust filled his throat. The ground trembled. Shouts rose in the distance—sharp, panicked. His heart kicked against his ribs, instinct faster than thought.
Then he saw the sky.
It wasn't right.
Streaks of fire cut through the dark, splitting clouds with flashes of raw, unnatural light. Magic. Heavy, volatile. The town below was unraveling—buildings collapsing, people running without direction, their cries lost beneath the roar of something larger than them all.
Above it, two figures clashed—blurs of motion wrapped in light and shadow.
One of them was Alister.
The protector. The man who'd ruled this town like nothing could touch him.
But he was bleeding.
The beggar froze, breath caught somewhere between disbelief and something darker. Blood darkened Alister's robes, stark against the glow of his magic. The untouchable wasn't untouchable anymore.
A laugh broke out—low, harsh, slipping past his guard before he could stop it.
It didn't feel like triumph. Just… release.
Because this was real. Alister was losing.
The other mage fought with none of Alister's arrogance—no wasted movements, no posturing. Just relentless, precise force. And it was working.
The beggar laughed again, the sound rough and brittle.
"You finally get to feel what we felt," he muttered under his breath.
His family—gone, like they'd never mattered. Burned away in the name of progress, another casualty in the shadow of a man who thought himself untouchable.
But now that man bled like anyone else.
The laughter faded, leaving something colder behind. A dull, empty ache that victory couldn't fill.
Would this change anything? Would it matter?
He didn't know. But for the first time in years, the weight in his chest felt just a little lighter.
And maybe—just maybe—that was enough.
○●○
The battle raged above him, raw power tearing through the sky.
Alister's staff snapped with a sharp crack. He staggered, blood darkening his robes, his breath shallow. Across from him, the other mage didn't gloat—just advanced, calm and precise, like he knew how this would end.
"This is where you fall," the mage said.
The beggar's grin twitched wider. Good. Let him fall.
But the world had other plans.
A deep groan echoed through the street—wood and stone giving way. He turned, just in time to see the shattered frame of a building collapsing.
He tried to move. Too slow.
A jagged beam crashed down, driving straight through his chest.
The impact stole everything—his breath, his voice, his strength. No dramatic pain, just crushing pressure and the shock of it, blood rising thick in his throat. His body pinned like an afterthought, insignificant under the weight.
His fingers twitched weakly, grasping at nothing.
I should've died a long time ago.
With his family. In the cold. Any of the times luck had kept him alive when it shouldn't have.
Of course, it wouldn't last.
Hope never did.
His lips curled, but no laughter came.
He'd wanted to see Alister fall.
But he wouldn't get to.
And just before the darkness took him, the world erupted in light.
○●○
Fire should have consumed everything.
The streets. The people. The sky itself—devoured by a surge of magic that didn't burn so much as erase, swallowing stone, flesh, and memory without hesitation, without mercy.
Buildings collapsed in on themselves, their skeletons turned brittle and blackened. The air hung thick with the scent of scorched metal and something sharper—something that wasn't meant to burn. Magic clung to the ruins like an aftertaste, lingering long after the destruction had passed.
Nothing should have survived.
And yet—
The world hesitated.
The roar faded, not into silence, but into something worse—a fragile quiet, stretched thin and trembling, as if reality itself wasn't sure what came next. Smoke drifted lazily, unfurling in slow spirals. Ash floated in the still air, weightless, indifferent, refusing to settle.
Time stretched—
Not empty, but waiting.
Then—
A breath.
Shallow. Ragged.
It slipped through the stillness, small and uneven, but real. A gasp followed, jagged, as if pulled from lungs that didn't remember how to work.
Fingers stirred beneath the dust, weak and trembling. A hand emerged, clawing at the debris, dragging against broken ground in search of something—anything—solid. Nails scraped stone, bloodless, the skin as pale as the ash it pushed aside.
Another breath. Sharper this time.
Eyes opened.
Blinking against the gray light filtering through the haze. The world was blurred, edges smeared by dust and shadow, but the cold weight of survival was clear—undeniable. No clarity. No understanding. Just the raw, impossible fact of being here when nothing else was.
Alive.
When nothing else should be.
[AN] Edited for flow and exposition.