Chapter 3: The World Tree

The girl in pale-silver gauze couldn't resist blinking in surprise, her mouth popping into a round, pouty little "O." "You mean he was originally human? And just had a bloodline awakening?"

Granny Rowan nodded, casual as could be: "I've lived six thousand years, and this is still the first bloodline awakening this powerful I've ever laid eyes on. And the bloodline he woke up happens to be our very own species, dear. Young Quinn! This is a golden opportunity for you! The others will have noticed the boy too—dawdle, and your share might be gone..."

The girl in pale-silver went crimson, spat a little "hmph," and grumbled, "Granny Rowan! You're teasing me now too!"

She sulked for a moment, then suddenly her brow furrowed. A good while later she gave a small shake of her head, murmuring to herself, "Come to think of it... I feel like I've seen him somewhere. Who was he, again?"

...

Another corner of the city!

A young guy, handsome in a scruffy smart-aleck way, strolled down the deserted street with a cigarette in his fingers, humming a tune, in a visibly great mood.

A swirl of emerald light dropped onto his head—a little emerald bird.

The young guy immediately grimaced. "Kestrel! What is it this time? What does the boss lady need from me now?"

The little green bird chirped and chattered a few times, scrabbled around in his hair—turning his do into the trendiest mashup of a bargain-salon blowout and a bird's nest—then flapped off his head and transformed into a strikingly glamorous woman in a light-colored dress, mature and magnetic, landing feather-light on the ground, her face all smiles.

"Lucan! Everyone knows you're well-traveled and well-read, and those six eyes of yours are the sharpest in the business. Tell me straight: what bloodline did that little guy tonight actually awaken? His Starfall Dew devouring power is nearly up there with Granny Rowan, Marshal Nephele, and me."

Lucan's face shifted slightly. It took him a good moment before he sighed softly. "Kestrel! This could be some serious trouble. You really have to know?"

The glamorous woman's expression changed, the smiles gone, and she snapped in an ice-cold voice, "Lucan! If you're trying to pull some mystical mumbo-jumbo act on me, I wouldn't mind ripping you apart either!"

Lucan didn't dare stall another second and blurted at top speed: "Yggdrasil Line!"

The glamorous woman's face changed drastically, and by the time she came back to her senses, Lucan was long gone without a trace. She ground her teeth: "Of all the troublesome things to be. That kid is definitely already on the Concord's radar, and a few of the Legions too. I can't afford to mess with trouble that size."

At that same moment, in certain hidden corners of the city, a minor buzz of discussion was sweeping through every nonhuman being in town—all of them fascinated by Nathan's sudden appearance. Everyone except the man of the hour himself, who hadn't a clue!

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Nathan could never in a million years have guessed that this day would come—the day he'd become the center of conversation among beings that were a very big deal.

...

Bright and early the next morning, Nathan woke up without Mom having to drag him out of bed. He felt overflowing with energy, bright and crisp, in unbelievable form. Normally nothing short of an air horn could wake him—high school is just that brutal, and every boy and girl that age is chronically sleep-deprived.

If the memory of last night weren't burned into him so vividly—playing back frame by frame, impossible to mistake—Nathan would've been sure it was all a dream.

He'd crashed the second he got home last night—what with being run through the wringer all night with no real rest—and hadn't given the evening's events much thought. Only now, waking up, did yesterday's questions come flooding back. "What the heck was last night? What were those freaky meteors? And those guys hoovering up the meteors—if they weren't bloodborn, they were bloodborn freaks, but either way, definitely not human... Where did they even come from?"

Nathan pressed both hands just below his navel. He could distinctly feel a "something" down there beating slowly, like a second heart. Every beat of this miraculous "organ" sucked in a wisp of the icy "meteor" essence that had fused into his body the night before, then pumped out a stream of deep, heavy energy. The icy essence from the two, three hundred blobs of meteor light he'd taken in last night had already been pretty much digested; at this point, better than ninety percent of what filled his body was the newly converted, deep-humming energy.

When Nathan gave this newly born power a little push, a mass of black light instantly rose out of his palm. The stuff obeyed his every whim—one thought and it shifted through endless forms, reshaping itself in his palm however he liked. Handling it was infinitely easier than steering the meteors' icy essence.

He had no clue what the black light was actually good for. On a whim, he shoved his palm toward a soda can a few feet off and barked, "Rise!" The black light shot out all right—but sailed straight through the can, through the wall behind it, everything. Not a whiff of telekinesis.

Nathan sheepishly reeled the black light back in, smeared it over his eyes, and commanded, "Grant me true sight!" He waited a solid half minute. Apart from his eyes going pitch black under the light, not one thing changed.

Nathan burned through every last scrap of imagination he had, testing out all the superpowers and martial arts spells from every novel, comic, movie, web series... every kind of thing he'd ever consumed. The results were pretty soul-crushing: aside from passing through any material and changing shape, this black light had nothing special about it at all.

The coolest use he could come up with was copying a picture off his computer, wrapping himself in black light shaped into a full suit of armor, and cosplaying Darth Vader from Star Wars—he could even conjure a pitch-black lightsaber, looking even more evil than a Sith Lord.

Nathan cracked a wry little smile and muttered, "Well, it's not totally useless. Next time I run with Isolde's crowd, I'll finally have a character of my own—and it'll look way more legit than their prop costumes. No post-production needed, either. I can pull off all kinds of special effects on the spot."

Nathan was in front of the mirror fine-tuning the details of his Darth Vader look when there came a knock at his door, and a gentle voice called, "Nathan! You up yet? Come get breakfast and get moving, school time!" Mom had knocked a few times to get him up.

Nathan called back, "Got it, Mom!" and headed out.

He was so lost in thought he forgot to open the door—just walked ramrod straight "through" it and out into the living room.

His mom had already turned away and missed this jaw-dropping sight entirely. It took a beat of sluggishness for Nathan himself to realize he'd just passed clean through his bedroom door and walked right out of the room...