-"This will be harder than I initially thought."
After 8 months of scouting (reading books and eavesdropping) all Jake could do was sigh. It wouldn be that hard for him to escape from the Heilunghaus but getting out of the city was just impossible. He had only just turned four, so people didn really pay his snooping any mind, writing everything off as child curiosity, but in a couple of years getting info would become more difficult as adults inevitably notice his unusual eagerness to leave.
He wasn able to come up with a plan but he knew the general direction: get help and get stronger. The latter was quite easy - by continuously focusing his full attention at the palms of his hands (as he had read in a book) he could already feel magic within them. Every time he did that, his hands would feel lighter. Jake also started exercising by running laps in the garden and doing pushups and squats in the room at night.
-"Ah, who the ** am I kidding! This is pathetic..."
Although it was indeed a pathetic attempt at powering up, he had no other ideas on how to train, so stopping would be counter-productive.
As for the former? Who would even help him? Adults around didn even consider his fate to be that bad. Their thought process went something like this:
"Poor people exist, right? So many of them live to be elders, that must mean living in poverty isn that hard! They should honestly be thankful to us for not burning their little stinky rat-holes down... Why would anyone ever want to live outside as opposed to the slums? We are saving you from your own immaturity and bad judgement, silly boy!"
So, Jake opted to seek help from fellow children, but it went even worse. Cases like his, when a child with no background or backing ended up in the esteemed Heilunghaus, were vary rare. In fact, out of almost four thousand kids living there, there was only one other with a similar situation, but he lived in the north wing and was an actual small child. Everyone else was either a noble or a regular citizen. Naturally, both positions were eligible for adoption during the stay at the facility and gained complete freedom after reaching 14. Even if they were still small and weren that proud, they couldn sympathize with Jakes problem. No one would want to help him leave. And even if someone would be willing, what can they do? They are just small children. Reading and training were his only hope, at least until something horrible happened in the Heilunghaus next year...
***
It was the first night of summer, exactly five years after Jake was found by a nurse on the streets of northwest Numark. A five year old boy was sitting cross-legged in his room, training his telekinesis on a 2 pound granite rock he had found the day before in the garden. In human society, such a feat was simply unheard of. However, no one in the building would care even if they knew, since the kid practicing was doomed to be abandoned by society at 14. It was not Jake. The boys name was Godrick with no last name. He was practicing magic by himself every night since turning four as instructed by a tattered journal currently lying next to him on the bed. This journal was the only thing he had when Godricks previous caretaker abandoned him at the front doors of the Heilunghaus, about five and a half years ago. How does a five year old gain the mental capacity to realize that he needs to become stronger in order to survive when the biggest threat to his lifestyle is maybe another kid taking his toys on the playground? Weirdly enough, Godrick asked himself that question every day. He was a lot smarter than every other child he knew up until now for no apparent reason. Even stranger was the fact that the journal he was zealously using to study magic was seemingly written with the assumption that Godrick will understand its contents at 4 or 5.
After a while he stopped practicing and prepared to toss the training rock out of the window with a sour expression.
-How tragic. It seems my growth has come to a halt. Besides regular cleaning magic and lifting small rocks with some insignificant telekinesis I can do a thing. The journal states that I should learn just that and obediently accept my fate as a slum dweller but I simply cannot! - his chubby kid face was gloomy in thought. He opened the window and his silly looking long blond hair that a child his age shouldn be able to grow and equally silly looking golden eyes looked like they darkened by a few tones. He looked outside feeling the cool night wind on his nightwear, his cheeks, his nose, his chin... Then he heard a quiet shuffle in the grass below and felt a sharp pain in his lower jaw.
-"AW-ch What in the blazes? Who are you?!" - Godrick was almost knocked out by the sudden uppercut but he could still make out what hit him: it was a slim but slightly muscular ginger boy similar to him in age with dark green eyes wearing the same clothes as him who was now sitting on the windowsill holding his head like it was in pain. The boy let go of his head when he heard Godrick talk, and whispered with a panicking tone:
-"SHH don wake anyone up, Im looking for a... Godrick, can you tell me which one that is?"
Godrick was smarter than any child in this wing but he was still a child. No matter how suspicious the unknown boy was, the blonde could not help but give in to his attention starved kid instinct and blurted out:
-"Godrick, thats me..." - then he quickly realized his mistake and added - "Whos asking?"
The unknown boy looked surprised when he heard the last part. He thought about something for a solid minute, then looked determined and told Godrick:
-"Not here. Lets get down into the garden. I can lower your weight with my magic so we can jump down from here."
Godrick didn want to listen to a stranger but then he remembered that he overheard two nurses talking about a child with a similar situation he was in, only that child lived in the wing opposite to his.
-"Fine, lets go." - he said with determination.
After the two got down, the ginger introduced himself:
-"My name is Jake. No last name. I don know what the adults told you but if you stay here until you are fourteen..."
-"You want to escape." - Godrick cut him off. Jakes expression instantly changed to confusion and then a frown but his worries were quickly interrupted by the blonde:
- "I get it. I have inquired about the slums as well and the thought of ending up there is preposterous for me! You came here because there isn a soul in this forsaken place who can be of help. I was thinking about going to the south wing and finding you myself but dismissed it as a potential waste of time as others my age are usually quite lacking. I have to say, I sure am glad that my judgement was wrong. Do you have a plan?"
The confident but somewhat inexperienced tone of Godrick threw Jake off as he expected to deal with a whiny five year old but the surprise was pleasant and he started:
-"Well, **. I didn expect... This. Ok, so I need you to..." - his voice was interrupted by a bone-chilling feral howl coming from the window they just jumped from.
Novel Bin 