On the day that was supposed to mark her awakening, Lumina stood alone at the center of a cold stone altar. All around her were murmurs hidden beneath long robes and faces of a family that seemed holy—but her heart knew—they were waiting for her to fail. And they would silently rejoice when it happened.
The wind did not dance around her body. No flame flickered in her palm. There was no rumble of the earth, no flash of lightning—no element answered the call of her blood.
Silence.
And in that silence, Lumina heard her heart crack.
> "No response."
"An anomaly."
"Perhaps… a curse."
One by one, the voices emerged, cutting deeper than any spell ever could. Her mother lowered her head, her father turned away faster than light, and the elders… sealed her fate with a single, icy sentence:
> "Lumina is not one of us. Dispose of her."
---
That night, with no farewell ceremony, no embrace, and not a single tear from those who had raised her, Lumina was sent to the edge of the world—a place haunted by cursed spirits, where the air reeked of blood and despair. A land even the bravest mages rarely dared to tread.
A crumbling shack became her new home. The cracks in the roof couldn't keep out the wind, and the sounds outside the window were not forest birds—but the screams of starving spirits bound to a dimension long forsaken by light.
Day after day, she survived. With crusts of bread tossed in a filthy sack, rainwater, and a body slowly adapting to suffering.
But suffering was never something one could grow used to. Only buried deeper.
And there, on the darkest night, when her body trembled with hunger and fever crept through her veins—something happened.
Her hand, long incapable of summoning magic, began to glow softly. A pale light—not fire, not lightning—but warm… alive. She touched the festering wound on her leg, and the skin healed. Not through healing magic, but as if time itself had moved backward by a few seconds.
---
The next day, the spirits came.
Not to kill her. But they stopped at the threshold. They did not groan, did not scratch, did not touch.
They… bowed.
Lumina stared at her small hand. The light appeared again. Like a whisper, like the breath of a world that refused to die.
> "You are not magic," whispered one of the spirits in an astral tongue no human should understand.
"You… are life."
---
The next night, Lumina dreamed. Of a child bound by a magic circle. Of a seal planted deep within her body. And of one face from her past—an uncle who always stroked her head with a smile far too wide.
He was the one who sealed my power.
He knew what I was.
And they all… feared me not because I was weak.
But because I was something they could never control.
---
Lumina opened her eyes. The shack was still cold, the wind still carried screams, but something had changed.
She was no longer the abandoned child.
She was the beginning of something they could not stop.
But this world is not a place that loves those it has rejected.
In the land of the ancient spirits, every trace of humanity is a threat—even those who only want to go home.
> "No one is allowed to leave this place. Not you. Not anyone," muttered an old voice, rising from the mist, faint like the breath of death.
The borders of that land were guarded by creatures that had long forgotten the meaning of mercy. They devoured footsteps before hope could ever touch the ground.
Lumina knew...
Even if she endured the hunger, the silence, and the despair that slithered through every corner of the night—
the world would never let her go.
Because in this place, humans are only allowed to arrive… to disappear.