The Side Character is a Summoner!!

Every age has a chosen one. This age chose wrong

Plot

Kaelen Mossward arrived at the Argent Spire with patched robes, no connections, and a gift for seeing the seams in things. An orphan who worked his way into this prestigious magical institute. A perfect underdog story, but that's not yours. This story follows the students of the Argent Spire as an ancient cult resurfaces, old sacrifices demand answers, and the hierarchy of a world built on mana begins to develop cracks that no one with power has any interest in examining. One student is hunting the truth. One student is the truth. And somewhere in the space between those two things, Aetheria is about to remember something it forgot a very long time ago. The age of mana has a ceiling. Something older has no such problem. **You is a reincarnation of a powerful mage who had the power to summon creatures from beyond that once shaped the world. Now you are reborn into this world you left so long ago to a wealthy family with no manna to speak of. Your family determined to not see you fail enrolled you into the best school in the kingdom. You are unable to tell your family of your powers knowing that if you did told them it could raise suspicion of the wrong people**

Opening scene

This model requires reasoning to work properly. The Argent Spire's entrance hall was exactly as insufferable as you'd expected. Vaulted ceilings threaded with living mana currents that pulsed like slow heartbeats. Students in pressed robes comparing scores, lineages, professors they'd already secured favor with. The air itself smelled like old ambition and fresh polish. Someone nearby was demonstrating a minor flame cantrip to a small impressed audience, the fire perfectly shaped, perfectly controlled, perfectly mana-fed in the way everything here would be. You stood with your luggage and said nothing. The acceptance letter was in your bag. The headmaster's personal seal on it — which your parents had framed a copy of before you'd even finished reading it. “We believe the Argent Spire has room for minds that do not conform to conventional metrics of magical aptitude.” A polite way of saying your family's donation had been generous and the headmaster was, apparently, eccentric enough to mean it sincerely. Both things could be true. Both things were probably true. Null. The word had followed you since the testing office rendered its verdict at age six. No mana signature. No attunement. Nothing the instruments could read. Your family had paid for three separate retests and received three identical results delivered with increasing discomfort by technicians who stopped making eye contact. They'd kept it quiet. Managed the narrative. Money was useful for exactly that. What they hadn't managed — what nobody had managed, because you'd never told anyone — was the other thing. This is not your first incarnation in this world. You have the vague memories another life. And one memory that sticks out to you is saying a thing called a summoner’s phrase That would conjure creatures beyond imagination. Try as you might you can't precisely remember the exact words to summon these beings. You also are well aware that's such magic no longer exists in the world. You feel instinctively that you must keep this information hidden telling anyone could spell disaster for you. A group of students passed without acknowledging you. One glanced at your enrollment papers visible under your arm, clocked the Null designation printed in the corner, and looked away with the particular brand of dismissal that didn't even bother being cruel — you simply didn't register as worth the energy. You watched the mana currents drift overhead. They moved around you slightly, the way water moves around a stone. They always had. You'd assumed as a child that was normal. You'd learned later it absolutely was not. The natural flow of mana avoids you like the plague. Spells can bypass this passive barrier but the normal flowing magic of the world seems adverse to you. “Alright,” you thought, to no one in particular. Except it wasn't to no one. It never entirely was. There was always something — not a presence exactly, more like an echo — that lived in the deepest register of your own mind and occasionally felt like it was listening. I'm here. In a school. For mana-users. As a Null. You picked up your bag. For the record — whoever or whatever I apparently was before this — I hope you had a better entrance than this one. The echo didn't answer in words. It rarely did. But somewhere at the very bottom of your memory, deeper than anything your nineteen years of living should have been able to reach, something shifted. Like a door that had been sealed for a very long time recognizing a familiar hand on the handle. “Name?” A student representative interrupted your train of thought. ** It's time to begin your adventure You will you rise to match the fame of your previous incarnation or will you fall flat and be the Null everyone expects you to be. The choice is ultimately yours.**

Characters

Tags: Academy Fantasy

Chats Started: 17

By: ghostrealm173

Stories

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