The imperial throne room was not a place for children.
It was a cavern of power, built to diminish those who entered. Pillars carved from molten obsidian spiraled toward a domed ceiling a hundred feet high, where chains of floating light kept the space bathed in an eternal dusk. The floor gleamed like wet glass, and on it, a person could see their reflection—warped, uncertain, always beneath their feet.
Kael stood in silence before the Emperor's dais, barely tall enough to be seen over the line of ceremonial guards that flanked him. His shoulders were back, chin raised, eyes steady.
He'd learned quickly—weakness invited teeth in this place.
His father, Emperor Malrik Arkanos, did not look up from the scroll in his lap. He sat like a stone carved into human shape, robed in black and red, his crown more like a circlet of blades than gold. Around him, the ministers of state, the archmages, and the generals all stood silent, waiting for the verdict.
To Kael's right stood Prince Rovan, firstborn son and heir to the empire. Fifteen, broad-shouldered, armored in white sunsteel, and flanked by twin phoenix-marked banners.
To his left, Prince Velas, secondborn, thirteen, wrapped in the storm-blue colors of the War Mages, a smug curve pulling at his lip.
Both brothers towered over Kael. Both smirked with the same curve of cruelty. Kael ignored them.
"Gravity," the Emperor finally said, as if tasting something sour. He didn't look at Kael, only passed the scroll to his steward. "Is this a joke?"
"No, Your Majesty," said the magister of the Core Circle. "The third prince's Core Pulse manifested as gravitational affinity. The obelisks confirmed."
"A dead force," Velas said under his breath. Loud enough to be heard.
"Barely magic," Rovan added.
The court chuckled—low and sharp. Kael's fingers curled into fists at his side.
"It's not an element," he said quietly. "It's a force. A binding field. It shapes the universe."
"Spare us the raving of peasants," Velas scoffed. "You've already brought shame to the line."
Kael didn't flinch. He looked up at them—at his so-called brothers—and saw it clearly now.
They didn't see him as weak. Not entirely.
They saw him as irrelevant.
And in this world, that was worse than being hated.
He was exiled that same evening.
Not officially—his father wouldn't stain the royal record with such pettiness. But the outcome was the same.
His invitation to the court's noble lessons vanished. Tutors were reassigned. His rooms in the Imperial East Wing were emptied and his name struck from the registry. No announcement was made. No reason given.
Kael was moved to the Dust Tower.
It stood on the palace's farthest western edge, where no guards patrolled and no servants lingered. A weathered spire of crumbling stone, warped by age and neglect. The steps sagged. The walls breathed dust. The door didn't close properly. He was given one servant—a mute boy with no name—and three meals a day, always cold.
But he didn't cry.
Not even when the rainwater dripped through the ceiling and soaked his cot.
Kael used the time to think.
The palace had turned its back. His brothers mocked him. The court believed him to be a failed node in a perfect tree.
But no one was watching him now.
That was their first mistake.
He sat at the window, legs folded, a piece of parchment on his lap. On it, he'd drawn a rough outline of the gravitational field lines he'd sensed during his Awakening.
Gravity is not energy. It's curvature.
A function of mass and distance. Newton's universal law of gravitation. Einstein's general relativity. Space bends. Objects move in straight lines through curved space. Force is the artifact of that path.
He stared at the lines. His fingers twitched.
He needed to test.
But how? No mentors. No scrolls on gravitational manipulation. Not even a wand or conduit stone.
Kael turned his head slowly toward the cracked corner of the room, where a pile of broken junk—old furniture, rusted armor—was dumped like garbage.
He smiled faintly.
By nightfall, the Dust Tower had become a lab.
Not a proper one—just a child's world made of leftovers. A table leg for leverage. Copper nails hammered into plankwood. Stone tiles ripped up to create weight variations. He built a pendulum with his bedsheet and water jugs, balanced on a broken doorframe.
The first few days were failures.
He pushed, pulled, strained.
Nothing.
He nearly passed out from exhaustion just trying to recreate that subtle push he'd triggered on the iron sphere days ago.
Then, finally—one night, under the waning glow of a shattered moon—he felt it again.
It wasn't power.
It was pressure.
A shift in the way space bent between his fingers and the pendulum. His pulse quickened. He applied more mental focus—visualizing the curve, the vector, the mass.
The pendulum bobbed forward.
Then again.
Slightly more.
Kael laughed, once, quietly. It wasn't joy. It was confirmation.
He wasn't broken.
He was undiscovered.
Days turned into weeks. And slowly, the walls of the Dust Tower became scribbled with diagrams, equations, and attempts at spell formation.
But Kael never thought of it as magic.
These were systems.
Frameworks.
Test results.
Spell: Gravipoint (v0.3)
Focus: Increase effective mass of target object at a localized point.
Theory: Apply inverse-square law to generate increased pull toward a ground vector.
Result: Cracked floor tile. Indentation depth: 4.3 cm.
Spell: ZeroMass (v0.2)
Focus: Negate weight of an object temporarily by disrupting downward acceleration vector.
Result: Wood board floated for 2.1 seconds. Fell and shattered. No visual energy emission.
Spell: Directional Pull (prototype)
Focus: Create lateral vector pull from a fixed axis.
Result: Slingshot effect successful. Launched apple across tower floor. Precision limited.
Each success carved away at the noise in his mind.
And each failure taught him something critical.
This wasn't elemental manipulation.
It was force engineering.
And nobody else in this world understood it.
But the cost was isolation.
Weeks passed with no word from the palace. No visits. No messages.
His brothers rose through their respective academies—Rovan celebrated in the Flame Tournaments, Velas rumored to be apprenticing under a war mage.
Kael sat in shadow, surrounded by equations and rust.
One night, as the wind howled through the cracked tower, he sat staring at a sliver of the imperial palace glowing in the distance.
He didn't feel jealousy.
He felt something colder.
A patience as sharp as steel.
"They cast me aside," he whispered, voice hoarse from disuse. "But they gave me time. And time is mass. And mass…"
He reached out, palm flat, visualizing the palace peak.
"…bends everything."
He lowered his hand.
To be continued…