The air was still.
No screaming winds, no shrieking beasts of chaos, no discordant trembling in the soil. The realm he once stepped into with caution now greeted him with a strained stillness. Dawn stood at its edge, beneath the silver arch that marked the boundary between the academy's ordered halls and this forgotten pocket of untamed possibility.
The Forbidden Realm.
It was no longer as wild as before. He had tamed it, not with power, but with patience. Once, this place was a void where gravity warred with mass, where seas rose skyward and trees bled mist. Now, it held the faint outlines of worldliness—the semblance of a realm remembering how to exist.
Dawn stepped forward.
The sky above rippled in slow hues, not a painted dome, but something more coherent. The sea, to the east, now swelled with predictable rhythm. The soil did not squirm beneath his boots. It held. It acknowledged weight. It yielded.
He inhaled deeply, and the air did not resist his lungs. This, too, was a victory.
"You're remembering," he whispered, not to himself, but to the world around him. "Let us continue."
He walked a winding path he himself had shaped—a trail where he had first formed the foundational Trinity: sky, sea, and soil. But today was different. Today, he brought with him understanding, not of himself, but of the natural laws that governed the Land of Prime. Dozens of books had filled his days since returning from the exploration event. Dozens more lived in his mind, etched into memory. He wasn't here to impose his laws.
He was here to reenact the world's laws.
---
The first lesson he chose to replicate was the law of resistance—specifically, the behavior of water when struck by opposing force. He knelt by the shoreline and summoned his Primal Origin Light. It flickered around him, not in radiant bursts like a battle aura, but like a tuning fork searching for harmony.
He drew a circle in the sand, carefully. Then, with his Will, he drew water from the sea into the air above it.
It hovered.
Now came the trial.
He struck it with a palm, softly at first.
Nothing.
Again, harder.
The water hissed. Twisted. Began to spiral backward into the sea, shrieking like a beast that had learned to scream.
Wrong.
Dawn grimaced. The realm still remembered wrongly. Here, force was not met with resistance—it was met with collapse.
But he did not flinch.
He forced the water into suspension again. His Will flared, silent but insistent. He struck again.
It screamed.
Again.
Again.
Until finally, the water recoiled outward from the strike. Just slightly. But it did.
The world resisted.
A shiver ran through the land. The sea churned. The air rumbled. Something ancient within the realm stirred.
The truth had been reenacted.
---
Dawn spent days this way. He did not eat. He drank sparingly from the rivers he had once willed into direction. He reenacted principles: heat rises, echoes fade, heavier stones fall faster, energy disperses evenly.
Each time, the realm resisted.
Each time, he bore it.
His Will was not like others. Others forged it in flames, in duels, in moments of crisis.
He forged his by bearing falsehood until only truth remained.
At one point, he sat beneath a solitary tree that had sprouted from a place he once sank into mire. It offered shade now. That was new. That was real.
He opened a worn book he had brought with him, one not of spells, but of physics and philosophical metaphysics. Pages flicked slowly as he traced a diagram of pressure gradients. He nodded once and stood.
He chose a nearby cliff face and began his next task: wind pressure across a plane.
Again, the realm bucked against it.
Again, his Will bore it down.
---
One night, as he lay watching the stars—no longer erratic, but holding vague orbits—he smiled faintly.
"This looks more like a true realm," he said to the realm. "This is good. Very good!"
He closed his eyes.
And the sky responded.
It began to rain.
Gentle. Measured. True.
His Lattice pulsed, not in brightness, but in depth. As if it sank into the land and sky itself. He wasn't floating above the world like a transcendent observer. He was becoming its anchor.
A pillar.
The realm, once forbidden, now pulsed with slow, rhythmic breath. The breath of something stabilizing. Becoming.
Dawn opened his eyes and whispered, "I am not the law. I am the echo that endures it."
Somewhere far away, the Academy waited. Friends practiced their marks. The Hall of Choice had etched divine blueprints into their Origins.
But here, in a place without a blueprint, Dawn forged something rarer.
A Will that mirrored the world.
And as he stood, the stars did not shimmer wildly. They bowed, just a little, to the horizon.
To him.
The Pillar of the Forgotten Realm.