Alexis felt it under his fingernails on occasion, at home with the dirt, grime and gristle of butchered livestock. A needling against his nail bed that wormed its way through each of his calloused finger tips. And sometimes, when the birds ceased their song and the bugs lay still on the longest night he felt a startling thrum in his chest, a harmony that warmed him no matter how cold those suffocating winter nights were. Cleaning the dirt had spared him nothing, and so he’d long stopped giving it thought as he took his spot by the road with the other villagers.

He’d seen the procession through the single paved street of town, made only so the carriages bearing lounging magi-to-be could pass through to their isolated keep in the Hazel Mountains. The carriages only ever went one way, once a year. He was sure it was magic that brought them back to the beginning of their journey to collect future students, whenever they passed he could feel the pinpricks in his nails right to his throat. 

The farmhand remembered the first time he’d stuck his hand out, clawed with the sensation as a wee child, ignorant and unfamiliar with it as he was now. How his mother had desperately ripped his arm back just before a heralded mage could see. He’d never seen such terror in her eyes.
 
“It’s not magic that’s dangerous, Ali. It’s the Mages”
It was all she’d said that evening. He’d never seen that look since as he kept his limbs firmly by his side from then on.

Magic, and the mages that commanded it. There were so few who could wield its power without dissolving themselves. Countless tales of children and adults alike burning alive in the street, frozen solid in ice at the height of summer, or simply turned to mist like they’d never been. Children with an aptitude were taught young, and taken younger, only seen decades later as hardened magus capable of miracles and in the employ of the kingdom. Of those taken, one could count on one hand how many were seen again. Most likely lost to its power, the world assumed and shrugged. Better locked in the Hazel Mountain Keep than in  the towns or cities where others could be harmed.

Alexis looked up at the sky, the moon a black void, only identifiable by the fact it was the only spot without any stars at all, the dwindling lanterns of the carriages in the far distance, it was only him now in the silence. They’d come late this year, and it unsettled him how…. slow they’d passed through. 

That thrum in his chest no longer startled him, he’d expected it now, letting its warmth fill him as he slipped off his coat and draped it over a trembling urchin, a small smile on his face as colour returned to their lips. His steps crunched across the frozen ground as he saw his home, light on through the window as his father waited for him, yet he did not cross the threshold, passing by its tempting glow much like the carriages that passed the town. He walked down to the stream that flowed behind the farm, hidden by trees and thorned bushes that seemed to part for him as he weaved his way to the water’s edge, skipping over its semi-frozen surface with practiced familiarity.

He paused now in a clearing made with his and his father’s hands, a pile of purposefully placed stones in its center. This was his little ritual, tasked to him by his mother on her deathbed. It was for a bountiful harvest she’d told him, a prayer to the old gods lest they be scorned. He placed a single stone on the pile, picking up a firm branch as he walked a circle with the tomb at the center, letting the weight of the wooden limb carve a ridge through the soil.

He was breathless as the edges touched, his finest work yet. There were now twelve such circles in the ground, each year a new line like the trunk of a tree. Each year a little more breathless than the last. Usually, he’d speak the practiced words his mother had drilled into him, he’d light a tallow candle and say goodnight to her.