---
title: "Chapter 2: A New World"
slug: "ch-2"
novel: "the-beginning-after-the-end"
number: 2
views: 1850000
likes: 132000
wordCount: 3100
createdAt: "2017-04-06"
---

The city was unlike anything Arthur had ever imagined. Towering structures of white stone and crystalline metal stretched toward the sky, connected by bridges of pure light. Below, markets bustled with crowds of creatures—some humanoid, others utterly alien in their forms.

A hand grabbed his wrist. Arthur spun, ready to defend himself, but the woman holding him was elderly and wore robes decorated with symbols that made his mind ache to look at them. A low-rank mage, his new instincts whispered. Relatively harmless.

"You're a Descender," she said simply. Not a question. "From the lower realms."

"I don't—" Arthur began, but the woman was already dragging him away from the square.

"Beastkin slavers are everywhere these days," she muttered. "We need to get you off the streets before someone recognizes what you are."

She led him through winding passages to a small cottage nestled between two larger buildings. The interior was cramped but clean, filled with books and strange instruments Arthur didn't recognize. The woman released him and collapsed into a chair with a sigh.

"My name is Gideon," she said. "I'm a scholar of the lower realms—the Abyssal Worlds, as we call them. I've been studying the barriers for fifty years, waiting for them to fall, waiting for someone to come through."

"Come through?" Arthur echoed. "You mean people have done this before?"

"Not in recent memory," Gideon admitted. "But the legends speak of Descenders—people from the lower realms who cross over, bringing with them power that shouldn't be possible in our world. You have that look about you. Too much potential. Too much ancient power."

Arthur looked at his hands. The artifact was gone now, merged with him during that transformation. But he could feel its presence, like a second heartbeat thrumming through his veins. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Survive," Gideon said curtly. "Learn. Grow. In three months, there's a mage academy entrance exam in the capital. If you can place high enough, you'll be protected by the academy's status. Without that protection, you'll be hunted."

"Hunted?" Arthur's blood ran cold. "By whom?"

"Everyone with ambition and insufficient morals," came the reply. "Power attracts attention in Dicathen. Attention usually brings death."

Over the following weeks, Gideon trained Arthur in the basics of magic theory. The system here was different from anything he'd imagined—mages didn't cast spells so much as shape the ambient mana into forms that manifested their will. It required constant meditation and practice, but Arthur found the meditation easy. Too easy. It was as if some part of him already understood magic at a fundamental level.

By the third week, he was casting spells that should have taken months to learn. By the fourth, he'd surpassed most of Gideon's students. The power within him—the residue of the artifact, he assumed—was accelerating his learning exponentially.

"You're a prodigy," Gideon said one morning, watching him manipulate threads of mana into complex patterns. "But that's dangerous. Prodigies attract jealousy, and jealousy leads to assassination attempts."

"Then I'll have to be strong enough that assassination becomes impractical," Arthur replied, and meant it. Whatever had brought him to this world, he would not die cowering in ignorance.

As he practiced, Arthur began to have fragmented memories that weren't his own. An ancient kingdom, long dead. Battlefields. Dragons. Magic that made the spells he was learning look like children's games. These memories terrified him, but they also called to something deep within his soul—a sense that he had lived before, that he had been powerful once, and that his story was far from finished.

The artifact hadn't just transported him to a new world. It had awakened something within him. Something that had been sleeping for lifetimes.

And it was hungry to remember what power felt like.
