The garden at night was a place forgotten by footsteps.
Kael padded silently through the cold marble corridor, small hands clutching the edge of his cloak. He pushed open the aged door leading out into the east wing garden—the one no noble children visited anymore. Its path was cracked with roots, and the moonlight sliced silver across the moss-laced flagstones.
Here, the air smelled different. Not like the perfumed courtyards near the central palace, but damp and alive, with soil, bark, and the scent of something ancient. Something breathing.
He stepped into it like a diver entering water.
The silence was comforting—until it wasn't.
A sharp rustle broke the stillness. Then a weak, pitiful chirp.
Kael froze.
He turned slowly toward the sound. Beneath the gnarled roots of an old glimmerpine tree, something shivered. A shape—a bird, black-feathered and trembling, its wing twisted at an unnatural angle. One eye fluttered open as he approached, dull and unfocused. The other remained crusted shut with dried blood.
Kael crouched. "You're hurt."
The bird flinched but didn't flee.
He examined it carefully, suppressing the instinct to touch. Pressure could worsen the fracture. His gaze drifted toward the wing—the joint had been crushed. Bone structure displaced. Soft tissue bruised, possibly torn.
He exhaled through his nose.
In his old life, he would've called for help. But here? The castle's servants didn't care. He was the disgrace, the cursed prince. No one answered his voice unless forced to.
He looked around. The garden was empty. Only the moon listened.
Kael opened his palm over the bird and closed his eyes.
He didn't need to speak. Gravity didn't answer to words—it answered to force.
Force equals mass times acceleration. The formula had etched itself into his brain long before he ever breathed in this world. F = ma. The core of motion. The invisible hand shaping everything from apple falls to celestial orbits.
He'd bent that principle last week with Gravipoint—anchoring objects to the floor. And then again with Feather Drop—reversing weight to soften descent.
Now, he imagined the bird—fragile, barely clinging to life. Gravity was crushing it against the ground even now. Even at rest, it bore the invisible pressure of mass multiplied by acceleration. An unkind constant.
He focused.
"Lessen," he whispered. Not a command. A thought, a plea.
He shaped a field around the bird's body—a localized bubble, where downward acceleration was slowed. Where the pull of the earth became a gentle touch instead of a demand.
The bird lifted.
Only slightly. Just enough to float two inches above the moss, like a marionette cut free from string and supported by intention alone.
It made no noise. Its eye blinked again, this time clearer.
Kael let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
His core ached. Manipulating gravity on living things was harder—maybe because they resisted in ways stone didn't. Maybe because something inside him recoiled at the idea of altering a creature's natural state.
But he didn't stop.
With a quiet grunt, Kael stood and moved toward the low branch of the glimmerpine. The bird drifted after him, weightless, suspended in the pull of a small, invisible orbit.
He reached the hollow near the tree's base, where old nests still rested.
With delicate focus, Kael lowered the bird into one—just enough for it to settle without pressure. His spell flickered, then released.
Gravity reclaimed the bird, but gently this time. It nestled into the straw, still dazed, but alive.
Kael stared at it.
He didn't feel triumphant.
He felt… real.
Not like the disappointment hiding in Dust Tower, or the embarrassment mocked in court. Not even like the scientist trapped in a child's frame. Just a boy. A boy who had done something good.
The bird chirped again. This time, stronger.
Kael smiled faintly.
"Inertia," he said. "That's what I'll call you."
It was stupid. Probably no one else in the world would think it fit. But to him, the name meant everything.
Inertia was the resistance to change.
An object in motion stayed in motion unless acted upon. An object at rest stayed at rest. It was the stubborn law of existence, immutable and quiet. Just like the bird. Just like him.
Kael turned back toward the garden's shadows.
The moonlight had shifted, climbing higher, casting faint shapes across the broken stones. He followed them back toward the tower—toward his attic lab and the silent books waiting to be filled.
And yet, something inside him had changed.
Gravity wasn't just a force to weaponize. It wasn't only numbers and formulas and experimental fields.
It was connection. Invisible strands binding all things. It crushed, yes—but it also held.
That night, Kael didn't sleep.
He opened his notebook and scrawled a new heading beneath Project Graviton:
Field Theory: Organic Stabilization via Localized Mass Dampening
(Codename: Feather Drop II)
Beneath it, he wrote one sentence in smaller script:
It's not just about winning. It's about lifting what the world would let fall.
To be continued…