It was rare, in the Rainbow Nations, for magic to manifest in a child later than the age of seven, though infant magic was hardly worth attention. Children who would eventually be pyromancers grew hot to the touch or emitted sparks at random, fledgling shadows would disappear for brief moments or be found in unexpected places, beyond normal means of travel. It was always a point of pride for the parents, knowing that their child had taken their first steps towards being an accepted member of society. Even though most parents outsourced their child’s rearing to the Familiar pact, the manifestation was the first meaningful sign of growth, the first moment of joy in the process of parenting, much the way the Mundanes celebrated things like first steps and developing speech.

That was why, when Heinrich turned fourteen without any sign of his magic, his father disowned him.

It was without precedent. Not the disowning. Bloodlines and family ties and honor were so ingrained in the Rainbow Nations that regularly excising corrupting influences was commonplace. But anyone born to wizards had magic flowing through their veins. It was in the beat of their heart, in the air that they breathed. So, when it became apparent that Heinrich had no magic, it became equally apparent to everyone who knew the situation that Heinrich, therefore, could not be Hansen Sommer’s true-born son. The whispers of illegitimacy followed Heinrich like a ghost, rumors that his mother had dalliances with a Mundane. It was a shame of a caliber that had few rivals. To make matters worse, Petra Sommer had died giving birth to him, and so there was no one to defend her, none save Heinrich to hold back the rumors that threatened to craft an unassailable narrative against his very existence.

The morning of his fifteenth birthday, a group of orphans cornered him in the courtyard where he spent his time alone, reading tales of the heroes that had fought back the White City in the first Blood War.

“I told you,” said the smallest of them to the rest, a weaselly Asgardian boy with barely more magic than Heinrich. He was hydrokinetic, but could hardly produce enough to fill a thimble, only enough control over it to create a gentle, impotent spray. One day, a master would come for him, seeking a budget Familiar more than for his specific talents, and that experienced wizard would help him grow. For now, he was no different than Heinrich, save for the way society believed he would, one day at least, become worth something.

“We think you have magic, Heinrich,” said the ringleader, a nasty smile on his face. “We just think no one’s brought it out of you in the right ways. We’ve made a list, you see.”

Heinrich knew that rolling his eyes would see the nastiness starting sooner, rather than later, but his exasperation with this sort of bullying was growing too heavy to bear. What his father hadn’t desperately tried, in the years before the man had given up on him, Heinrich had since tried on his own.

“We’re gonna throw you off the roof, to see if you can fly…”

Tried it.

“...light you on fire, to see if you’re resistant…”

Dad did it twice, convinced the first time just hadn’t taken.

“...throw books at you, to awaken your telekinesis…”

Heinrich couldn’t hold in his laugh. He’d tried that one too, exactly a year ago. The day his father had left him at the orphanage, Heinrich had walked out into the low-flying transport track, his arms held out in front of him to stop the first flying ship on approach. It had been foolishness born of desperation, but the darker part of him knew that he had wanted the all or nothing result. Success or death.

In the end, a passing Peacekeeper had tackled him out of the way, giving him a slap to the side of the head and a lengthy lecture before calling the orphanage to come pick him up.

Books aren’t enough, Heinrich thought. Certain death isn’t enough. Whatever sleeps within me, there’s nothing I can do to awaken it.

“...and if all that doesn’t work, we figured we’d try checking for inherited habits.”

Heinrich’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. Sometimes, magic could be awakened by putting the child into positions similar to positions their parents had been in. Events from their past, traumas or struggles they’d overcome. More often than not, this would awaken similar magics, like the inheriting of genes, but the process seemed to resist attempts to reproduce it intentionally.

The ringleader’s smile turned even nastier as he continued. “We thought we could move your bunk into the sty. We heard your mother had a thing for sleeping with anim-”

That was as far as he got, before Heinrich was on him. He’d flattened the bully’s nose with three punches before his target had the presence of mind to use his magic. A tendril of shadow lifted up from the ground and wound itself around Heinrich’s foot, attempting to haul him away. Heinrich wasn’t going anywhere. He grabbed a fistful of the boy’s shirt, holding onto him even as the tendril lifted the lower half of his body off the ground. Heinrich just kept on hitting. The pain and fury he’d bottled up, the inadequacy and the resentment, he let it all run through him as he kept hitting, hitting, hitting. Blood splattered across his own face as teeth flew from the boy’s mouth. He was practically horizontal now, with the other bullies grabbing him by the shoulders and legs, trying in vain to get him away. In the end, it had taken all the combined efforts of the eight other boys present and the two adult wizards who had been attracted by the crowd’s terrified cries to stop the savage beating.

Heinrich knew that his successful vengeance wasn’t a result of magic. The boy’s panicking flunkies had all made the same mistake his victim had, seeking to drag him away without providing any opposing force. As long as Heinrich had maintained his grip on the boy’s shirt, pulling him away hadn’t done anything meaningful, only given him more time to pummel the foul-mouthed bully.

Still, the whispers started that very same day, as he was locked in his room by the orphanage staff. Whispers that it had taken ten men to subdue him, rumors that he’d knocked all the teeth from Byron Avent’s mouth with a single blow. He reveled in it, even knowing it wasn’t true. It was a glimpse of the respect that actual wizards commanded, and it was intoxicating.

The next morning, he’d crushed the steel doorknob of his bedroom when he went to leave.

**************************************************

“It’s not super strength.”

Heinrich snorted, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed. If it wasn’t super strength, what was it? He was getting stronger every day, faster too. They’d brought him in this time for sneaking onto the Avalon supply launchpad and holding one of the vessels on the ground as it tried to take off. He’d done it one-handed.

It hadn’t taken the Peacekeepers long to figure out he was there, but it had taken them the better part of two hours to herd him into a corner long enough for one of them to land a Compulsion strong enough for the others to get a binding chain around his wrists. Now, he was sitting in an interrogation chamber in the Cabal of Peace, across the table from a messy-haired girl that couldn’t be more than a year older than him and a sour-faced red-head. Were he unbound, Heinrich knew by looking that it would be a light effort to pick the two of them up and hit them against each other until they broke.

The girl and the red-haired man started laughing at the same time.

"What’s so funny?” Heinrich asked, aggression and anger setting his heart beating faster. This was always the way it started, before someone got hurt. Before he got stronger.

It was the girl who had spoken before, and she was the one who continued the conversation. “I’d probably need at least one of my knives to take you on, no doubt about that, but Casper here would have you dead in thirty seconds, unarmed and one-handed. Either way, we’re not here to pick a fight. We’re here because I believe you to be special, and my companion believes you to be wasting your gifts.” She leaned in, and a wide grin stretched her face. It showed too many teeth, and the humor didn’t reach her eyes, leaving Heinrich with a vaguely unsettled feeling. “We are seldom wrong.”

“What’s so special about enhanced strength?” Heinrich asked. It was the most common type of Sovereignty magic, and one of the least valuable besides. If these two had come expecting to find something fantastic, they would leave disappointed.

“Nothing, in and of itself,” the girl answered. “But that is not your magic.”

“Then what-” Heinrich began, but cut off as a loud alarm began to blare throughout the room. The small circular light in the center of the ceiling shone with a pale blue light, and Heinrich felt the temperature drop considerably.

“Uh oh,” the girl deadpanned, “looks like something tripped the pyromancer suppression measures.”

Heinrich didn’t even have time to curse his interrogators before ice magic began to pour from a wrought-iron pipe that was set into the ceiling above his chair. Judging by what the girl had said, it was intended to incapacitate captive pyromancers, should they somehow override their binding chains, but it gave him no insight into why they were doing it to him.

A cold deeper than any he’d ever experienced began to seep into him, and Heinrich felt himself begin to drift away. Darkness creeped into the corners of his vision, his heartbeat slowed, even his breathing ground to a halt.

Then, without warning, it was over.

The magic that had been freezing Heinrich dissipated as rapidly as it had begun, and Heinrich shuddered as warmth flooded back into him. The girl’s lupine grin was back on her face, and her red-haired companion looked thoughtful.

“Why…” Heinrich began, panting for breath, “...did you do that?”

His interrogators exchanged glances. This time, it was the red-haired man who spoke, his voice dry and quiet, like a man unused to talking at length.

“The pyromancer suppression measures,” he said, “are rather reliable. Sakamoto Akari, the Shangri-Lan warrior priestess that our people still call “The Undying Sun,” could not use her pyromancy under the effect of that steady stream of ice. Most pyromancers are completely restrained within the first couple of seconds, with those on the more powerful end of the spectrum lasting closer to ten. This is with them struggling, drawing on magical heat to sustain themselves.”

Heinrich opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything. It was hard to tell, given the unpleasant nature of the experience, but he felt like he’d been exposed for something closer to twenty seconds. Without pyromancy?

“What does it mean?” Heinrich asked. “I’m strong and resistant to magic?”

“Lady Violet has been observing you for some time,” the red-haired man said. “After she came up with her current theory, of which I admit to being skeptical prior to this experiment, she requisitioned a group of prisoners to undergo...a Compulsion.”

As the man paused, Heinrich seriously hoping he wasn’t expected to chirp, “What Compulsion?” like a performing monkey, the girl produced a vid screen.

“I had some of our illusionists craft this beauty,” she said, holding the screen up so that its holographic display was at an angle that he could see. On it, there was an image of him, fighting his way through a veritable army of cryomancers. A crowd of ice-wielding wizards that would have been nearly impossible to gather, much less defeat, and the Heinrich on the screen shrugged off their magic with little to no effort, the ice sloughing off of him like he was oiled. After around five minutes, the clip ended with him standing triumphant on a mound of broken wizards.

“So you...got a bunch of people together,” Heinrich said, still trying to wrap his mind around whatever was happening, “and made them watch this?”

“No, Heinrich,” the girl said, leaning forward with an excited gleam in her eye. “I made them believe it. That’s your magic. You are what they believe.”

Heinrich clasped his bound hands on the table in front of him, and the room seemed to fall away. He could still hear the girl talking, but it sounded like it was coming from far away, filtered through the years of memories he was reliving. How young had he actually been, when his magic first manifested? Had the scorn of his father, of his father’s friends and co-workers, actually suppressed a magic that had been around since his youth? From the moment they began to see him as a Mundane, he had actually become Mundane.

Where would he be now, if they’d believed in him?

“So what happens now?” Heinrich said, interrupting the girl in the middle of a sentence as he exited his reverie. “Who are you people, why do you care enough to figure this out? What do you want from me?”

The girl shrugged. “I’m Lily, but they’ve recently started calling me Lady Violet. I like helping the people that get stepped on. As for Casper…”

The red-haired man, Casper then, stood and removed the chains that bound Heinrich’s wrists.

“I am the Mage of the Path,” he said, “and if you believe in me, I will believe in you.”

**************************************************

It had been a long time since something had truly hurt him.

Lord Blue had offered Heinrich a cell of condemned prisoners and a team of illusionists that were at his discretion to use. The criminals were kept in a near vegetative state, so that any new functionality or quality he sought could be introduced to them, granting him the foundation for getting that power out into the public eye. A pair of fellow Shepherds were permanently tasked with recording, editing, and broadcasting his exploits, so that the belief-siphon that was his power would feed off the public. They saw him performing feats of strength, of blinding speed, and he became faster and stronger with every person who saw. He hadn’t been injured in over a year of service, and it had begun to be whispered that he couldn’t be harmed. As the whispers hardened his body, he began seeking even more danger, to add exposure to this ability. Anything too subtle to be affected naturally through the public eye was applied to his prisoner cell, or set up through fake confrontations with actors posing as defeated villains. A mesmer who “found” Heinrich immune to his compulsions, and now Heinrich was all but impossible to affect. A binder who shattered his magical chains at just the right moment saw him able to shrug off even the most complex restraints.

But this girl, this waif, had launched him off his feet with a one-handed swing, from the air. Even if he ignored the level of durability and strength he’d developed over the years, physical strength fell off sharply when attacking from ungrounded positions. You needed proper stance to correctly leverage strength of any kind.

Which meant she was several times stronger on the ground.

Once he’d verified that Julia wasn’t dead, which would be a lot more trouble than even her egomania had already caused, Heinrich rose to his feet. In the time it had taken him to extricate himself from the Karalis girl, his attacker had teleported over to the youth with the broken wrist and...Heinrich’s eyes widened.

The girl was healing him. The bones knit themselves back together, the limp, misshapen appendage returning to its normal state in mere moments. Teleportation, strength, and now healing? And if he wasn’t mistaken, the girl had overwritten Julia’s compulsion with one of her own. She was talking quietly to Emily Browman, though she kept an eye on Heinrich as he observed them from a distance.

“Heinrich,” Emily called out, her voice hard. She bore the expression of someone who had recently come to the realization that her situation no longer allowed for soft choices. When faced against the might of the Rainbow Nations, those who could not harden their resolve were fated for defeat. “Do you know what a dead man’s switch is?”

Heinrich felt begrudgingly impressed. He’d been wondering what their plan was.

“What is the trigger?” he asked.

“A cell phone message, sent to an offsite location, every ten minutes,” Emily answered. “If they don’t receive a message from Jay, Marika, and me in the next forty-five seconds or so, then the manifesto is spread across the Mundane world.”

That would be disastrous. Not only would it irreparably harm the integration effort, but it would give the enemy the push that they needed to infect the Mundane world with their hideous corruption.

“Send your message,” Heinrich said. “I will not stop you.”

This was a blessing in disguise. After he dispatched the newcomer, he would torture whatever code the messages required out of Browman, then the location of their off-site collaborator, and he could put this matter neatly to rest before informing Avalon of the breach. According to the report he’d gotten from his fellow Shepherds, the Haden exchange was far ahead of schedule, and going from the most exemplary performance to the first cell to have a manifesto leak was a shame beyond his ability to endure.

Browman spoke a few words to the newly uninjured youth, who went inside, assumedly to find the girl he’d hurled through the door earlier. She’d caught him off guard, and he would be putting his prisoners on reinforcing his softer areas. Apparently the wide-spread acceptance of his invulnerability didn’t extend to the areas that people didn’t usually associate with it. The stone-faced leader of his newest adversaries produced a phone, rapidly tapping the surface for a brief moment before she put it away. She gestured for Jefferies to do the same.

After Browman put her phone away, the youth reappeared, supporting the Eastern girl as she limped towards the rest of the group. Her phone was already in her hand, and she sent her message as the mystery girl tended to her wounds. Judging from her appearance, Heinrich’s throw hadn’t hurt her much outside a few cuts and an injury to her leg that was making her limp.

As soon as Jefferies and the Eastern girl- Marika, was it?- put their phones away, Heinrich moved. If what Browman said was true, he had ten minutes from this point to bring the incident to an end. He opened at his top speed, the force of his movement tearing a chunk of the packed dirt up behind him. He would strike the mystery wizard from behind, while she was healing her friend, and then-

A blow to the chin halted his forward momentum, setting stars exploding in his vision. He leapt back, creating distance to assess what had happened, and what he saw had his blood boiling in his veins.

A pillar of stone had risen from the ground, six inches across at the tip, thicker at the base. It was clearly what struck him, but it shouldn’t have been possible. Not only had the girl not even turned around when he began his attack, there was no way she could have predicted his attack so far in advance as to be able to strike him with an element as slow as stone. Unless…

Heinrich dropped his combat stance as the girl turned to face him. Her enhanced strength was Sovereignty, her manipulation of stone Control. Her ability to tell when he was going to attack, and where, was Knowledge. She’d teleported and compelled as well. Heinrich would bet a year’s pay that the girl could sense his emotions, as well as alter magic in its raw form.

“You wield all seven of the Roads,” Heinrich said, and he could see the girl stiffen at the words. “I’ve known only two people in all my life who could boast the same, though one was not quite what I would call a...person.”

“Shut your mouth,” the girl said, her pretty face twisting with something not unlike pain. 

“I did not know she had a daughter,” he continued, though that was, in fact, something he had come to learn in recent days. A report from his Master told him to keep an eye out for bloodmage activity, which came as a surprise. Apparently a Vengeant had been taken captive by a bloodmage cell, interrupting a manhunt. The Vengeant’s target, according to the report, had committed no crime, but her capture was a top priority, second only to protecting the interests of the exchange. The trueborn daughter of Glory Vinaldi, the strongest wizard in the world.

He had not been told she was this powerful, though he should have expected as much.

The girl started for him, her teeth bared, but Heinrich held both of his hands up.

“I surrender,” he said simply. “I am bested.”

Surprise flitted across the girl’s face, but suspicion replaced it in short order.

“Read my mind, if you must,” he said. “I know that you can. I hereby vow that neither I nor any member of the exchange shall hound you further, and I shall make no report of the theft of the manifesto, provided that you return the original copy to me. They will be able to tell something is wrong, should it be removed from the domicile for too long.”

“Can we trust him?” Emily asked the girl.

The wizard frowned at him, then nodded slowly. “Everything he’s said has been true. I sense something deeper at work, but he’s serious about promising to leave us alone.”

“If you need,” Heinrich offered, “make a copy of the manifesto, just in case. Keep your dead man’s switch. I only need the original returned.”

Emily was silent for a moment, then nodded slowly. “As I told you, it’s not here. I won’t tell you where it is, but I’ll meet you at your domicile with it in an hour.”

Judging by his working memory of the layout of the city, the only places close enough that had any relevance to the group would be either the Browman’s or Jefferies’ residence. He wasn’t planning to go back on his word, but it was worth putting a pin into.

He cast a gaze around the clearing. Xalaster had taken off at some point after his initial arrival. As demonic as his appearance was, post-change, the boy had little appetite for the kind of cruelty he knew Heinrich was willing and capable of carrying out. He had no doubt that he would find Xander back at the domicile, watching the Mundane television he had gotten so attached to. It would warrant a reprimand, but considering that the young shapeshifter was the only other member of the exchange that seemed even slightly interested in seeing it to its intended conclusion, Heinrich doubted any disciplinary action would be in order. If he wasn’t incorrect about the girl’s identity, they’d come away winners in this engagement anyway.

He crossed the clearing to where Augustus still lay, smiling wryly as the assembled Mundanes rotated around his approach, clearly uncomfortable with his proximity. The girl merely watched him. With hardly any effort, Heinrich hefted Augustus’ unconscious body and shouldered it before returning to do the same with Julia. The girl was almost conscious, made of sterner stuff than her brother, but Heinrich weighed almost three hundred pounds, and hardly any of it was fat. Being under him when he fell was not conducive to the health of a girl who weighed one hundred and thirty, soaking wet.

He turned and nodded to Emily, who did not return the gesture. More’s the pity. He meant what he said, earlier. Were the girl not Mundane, she would have quite the future ahead of her.

Heinrich took it slow on the way back to the domicile. He was thinking through his actions carefully, as he had been trained to do. It was unlikely that the girl would remain where she was, now that she knew that he knew her identity, or at least had a vague approximation of it. Still, knowing where she’d last been was the best lead they’d had in the hunt in almost a month. It would take some doing, to convince Julia and Augustus to not go back on the warpath, and probably even more for them to forgive the theft of the manifesto. Julia had the characteristic paranoia of a mesmer, and the forgiveness Heinrich had offered the Mundanes was uncomfortable even for him. But he would honor it, as he honored all words he spoke.

He smiled as he picked up the pace.

There was still a report to make.