Janus is flabbergasted. It took him years to admit to his friends that he could manipulate mana, and he thought there were no secrets left between them. Yet here is Lyza, navigating the lightless arteries of the city sewers with the expertise of a professional scout. The knowledge is impressive, but it infuriates him. She had a hidden life beneath the streets while he was busy apologizing for his blue hair in the light of day.

  "You’ve done this before," Janus mutters, his voice echoing off the damp, mossy stone. "Many times."

  "Don't start," Lyza whispers, not looking back. Her eyes are fixed on the path ahead. "Just keep moving. Every second we spend down here is a second the Empire isn't scanning your bracelet."

  They wander in a heavy silence, broken only by the distant, muffled screams of the city above and the skittering of unseen vermin. By the time they emerge into the grey, soot-choked air of Sector 12, Janus is just happy to breathe. Even the smog feels like mountain air after an hour in the sewers.

  Strangely, his mana is returning faster than usual. The bone-deep cold of his depletion is fading, though he still feels like a hollow shell. He spots the sign: People’s Hardware. Lyza’s family has never been rich, mostly because they are too altruistic for their own good. They sell hardware at prices that barely cover the electricity, living as if profit is an insult.

  "That's why they'll never leave the slums," Janus thinks, though a part of him envies their simplicity.

  As they enter, the scent of heavy oil and solder smoke assaults his senses. Silas, Lyza’s father, leaps over the counter with a speed that doesn't match his middle-aged frame.

  "My little girl! You’re hurt," Silas cries, his hands hovering over Lyza’s scratched face. He looks at Janus. "And you, Janus? Are you okay?"

  "I'm okay, sir," Janus says, feeling a pang of jealousy. Back in Sector 2, Janus has a massive bedroom and sometimes mana-enriched steaks, but his mother’s touch is always a calculation of status. Silas looks at his daughter with a raw, unshielded care that Janus has only felt sometimes when he visits his father.

  "Dad," Lyza says, her voice hard. "We’re both F-Rankers. We fought and survived against an Abomination thanks to Janus. I think it’s time to show him. We need to talk about what happened at the Plaza."

  Silas hesitates, looking at Janus as if weighing his soul. "Lyz, are you sure? There’s no going back from this."

  "He’s already past the point of no return, Dad. I swear to you, he’s dependable."

  Silas nods, and suddenly, the air snaps. He disappears in a blur of motion, moving so fast he leaves a visual trail behind him. In less than ten seconds, the store is locked, the security shutters are slammed down, and the curtains are drawn. Janus stands wide-eyed. Silas is as fast as his mother. Why is he hiding this in a hardware store?

  Silas presses a hidden compartment on the wall. Suddenly, the mana in the room is sucked into a vacuum. Janus’s core flares in response. He falls to his knees, a grunt of agony escaping his throat as his mana turns to liquid fire. He sees grey, flickering energy leak from his fingertips, corroding the floorboards where they touch.

  A heavy hand lands on his back. A flood of calm, green mana pours into him, stabilizing the eruption.

  "Sorry, kid," Silas says as Janus gasps for air. "That's a mana-damper. It cuts the signal to your bracelets. Those 'low-rank' shackles are actually listening devices. If they hear the wrong words, you become a 'person of interest' before you can blink. We had to go dark."

  Janus stands up, shaking, and turns to thank him. He stops mid-sentence. Silas’s ears are no longer human. They are long, elegant, and swept back into sharp points.

  "Sir, I think I'm seeing things," Janus stammers. "Your ears..."

  Silas smiles, a sad, knowing expression. "This is the real me. Lyza asked me to be truthful. We have to show you who we are."

  His skin, which Janus always thought was just well-maintained, now looked impossibly smooth, as if the years of working in a hardware store had failed to leave a single mark on him.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Janus turns to Lyza. Her ears have shifted, too. "What? You're all elves!? But that’s..."

  "Against the law?" Lyza finishes with a smirk. "For starters, yeah. Highly illegal. But what about using Abomination magic?" She fires back, trying to regain her footing. "Should we ask Rick’s new master what he thinks about that?"

  Lyza and Janus laugh, the tension breaking for a moment. "I don’t know. I think I could convince the Empire my magic is good for destroying trash, at least."

  "Nah," Lyza teases. "They’d prefer you as a lab rat. At least you’d get free cheese."

  "Enough, you two," Silas interrupts, though his eyes hold a glimmer of nostalgia. Janus can see his lips betraying him; he found them amusing. "You're bleeding, and we have much to unpack."

  Silas reaches out. Without a sigil, without an incantation, he conjures a stream of vibrant green mana. Janus is just stunned by the way he used magic. It flows toward Lyza, surrounding her like a living vine. Her wounds don't just heal; the blood literally flows back into her skin as the gashes seal perfectly.

  "That's elven magic," Lyza says softly. "We couldn't show you before. If people found out about our condition..."

  "Do not call it a condition, Lyza," Silas chides.

  "Well, Dad, it's certainly a problem. If they found us, we’d be property. Slaves. Or worse."

  Janus looks at Lyza, hurt crossing his face. "Why didn't you tell me? I told you everything! I told you my father was secretly training me!"

  "It wasn't my secret to tell, Janus," she says gently. "If I told you I was an elf, I was outing my whole family. I couldn't risk their lives, even for you."

  "And what changed?"

  "Are you kidding? You talked to a Rift-God!”

  “It was a Rift-Entity, we don’t know if it was a Rift-God,” Janus corrected

  Lyza ignores him, continuing. “You created a Mana ball that doesn't exist in human Magic, and you deleted a D-Rank monster's head.”

  “Heavily injured D-Rank monster’s head,” Janus downplays.

  “You aren't human, Janus. At least, not a hundred percent. I always thought the blue hair meant you were half-elf, but this..."

  Silas steps forward, pushing a tall, thin object covered by a sheet. He pulls the cloth away to reveal a beautifully adorned mirror.

  "I have mirrors at home. I hope you are not insinuating I’m ugly, Mr. Silas." Janus says, still deflecting them.

  "Not like this one, this is an Elven Artefact," Silas says seriously. He activates the scrying glass.

  Janus stares. In the reflection, his hair isn't just blue; it's glowing like a bundle of fiber-optic cables, pulsing with a frequency so high it almost makes his head ache.

  “This is the Aetheric Pigmentation. It is very different from what happens sometimes with humans when their hair becomes white because of a Mana Spike, the Aetheric Calcification,” Silas says. Through the glass, Janus sees the mana surrounding Lyza like a soft mist, but Silas is a blinding bonfire of power.

  "The Codex is a human tool," Silas explains. "Its first function is to develop the user’s Cores. It is difficult to quantify, but it is between 5 and 10 years of progress in mere seconds. That is why you are already stronger than you were this morning. The Empire uses it on every citizen so their soldiers are already stronger than those from other kingdoms. If they have to draft people to war, the base is already prepared.”

  “But The Codex was built essentially to find human soldiers. Elven mana vibrates at a frequency the Stone is literally programmed to ignore. To the Empire, we are 'failures' because their machines are blind to our light."

  "And your hair," Silas continues, "is a conduit. Humans keep mana in their Core. Elves use their skin, their eyes, and their hair to hold the excess. Our cores are smaller, but our bodies are aetheric sponges."

  Janus lifts his hand. He tries to manifest a globe of mana and watches on the mirror as part of the energy flows directly from his skin and hair. As the globe of Mana starts to condense, the light begins to stutter. The Static returns, a jagged, mini-rift forming in the center of the ball. His mana drains instantly, the cold returning to his veins. His first thought is to release it so the feeling of wrongfulness stops.

  "Do not release it," Silas commands, grabbing his shoulder. "Absorb it back. I shall guide you."

  With Silas’s help, Janus pulls the glitch back into his body. It hurts, a sharp, stinging sensation like swallowing glass, but the energy returns to his core.

  "I suspect your father, Theron, is more than just a scholar," Silas says, his voice grave. "To have a core this reactive... he might be Elven Nobility. I have tried to investigate him before, but his history is a fortress. I stayed away to protect my people."

  "Nobility?" Janus laughs weakly. "Me? I’m just a guy with weird hair."

  Silas interrupts Janus. "Janus, my family is nobility. And even as a half-elf with a broken core, you are already more powerful than Lyza. You just have to learn to control the Taint. If you don't, it will eat you from the inside out."

  "He talked to the thing in the sky, Dad," Lyza adds. "The Abomination."

  Janus recounts the vision: the eyes, the vacuum of the void, and the 'gift.'

  "Intriguing," Silas muses. "We need to talk to Theron. He has the answers we do not. But for now, the trams are down and the city is in chaos. You stay here tonight. Send a message to your mother, Madame Kaelen; tell her you are safe at a friend's house. I shall get you some clean clothes."

  Janus nods, exhausted. For the first time in his life, he looks in the mirror and doesn't see a failure. He sees a mystery.