There is a Fourth City, in that city a Fourth Street. On the fourth floor, of the building number 4, an appartment with crooked number four hanging on the door. Through a dark corridor inside the apartment, you can find a trash filled kitchen, two dusty rooms and a bathroom that needs some serious scrubbing.

In the smaller room, found to the right of the entrance, a man just woke up to the sound of children hurrying to school. He slowly stretched his arms above his head, this would be the day. He would get up, exercise, take a shower, and over breakfast, read up on some publicly accesible magic training. He's been promising that to himself for the past four years, two or three times he even managed to stay productive for a few days. Once, once he managed to work for entire two months. Today would be the first day of the training montage that would beat that record, and in three months he will light a cigarette with his right pointing finger, while sitting in a fancy bar. First though, he would just put on some music on his laptop and browse few websites.

The man looked to the side of his bed, where his laptop should lie on top of some take-out boxes, and saw that when he was stretching he knocked over some open bottles of unfinished carbonated drinks. Thinking nothing of it, he picked up the wet and now sticky laptop, dried it with a dirty t-shirt, and opened it to turn it on. Leaving the laptop on the edge of the bed, the man crawled over to a small chair he kept his cigarettes on, lit one with his old Zippo, sipped some water from a bottle with a red label of a popular carbonated drink and looked over to the laptop to type in the password. Instead of the usual login menu, he just saw a rainbow coloured glitchy mess on the screen. His silver little window into the world, broke. His first instinct was to grab the device, and somehow will it to work, but with his hand stretched over the keyboard he just exhaled, "I suppose.. now I'm free from this little addiction". The voice came out of his throat high and soft, subdued from years of rare use.

Mathew put away the cigarette, poured the rest of the water on the laptop and got up. Immediately he had to catch his balance, as he almost tripped on one of the bottles littering the ground. Sighing at his knees that disagreed with the sudden movement, and leened on the scratched up leather armchair next to him. From this position, he looked around his little haven, prison, the foor walls keeping him away from his own criticism. The four by six meters room, looked much smaller and darker than it should. Few empty canvas hanged on the walls, an old leather sofa stood between the bed matress and the door, behind Mathew was a long, white table. Almost everything in the room was covered in trash, old dirty clothes, and untouched for years painting supplies.

The man walked over to the window opposite the door, on one of the shorter walls, to fix the sheet-turned-curtain, so that office workers from the high rise on the other side of the street didn't hurt their eyes on the sight of his growing belly and sides hanging over his boxers. He's been told he didn't look as terrible as he saw himself, but some modesty wouldn't hurt anyone either way.

Avoiding trash on the ground, he slowly walked out of his bedroom, grabbed a ladder propped against a painting that had it's glass cover shattered, and dragged the thing over to the bathroom. From the storage space hanging under the ceiling by the bathroom door he took an old, offensively orange sleeping mat, and rolled it out on the dusty corridor floor. Already out of breath from the exercise, he got down on his stomach and began doing push ups. On the third one, his arms began to shake and on the fifth he couldn't push himself back up. "After one month, you will see the difference. After two, others will and after the third one you will wink at yourself in the mirror", with such thought he stood up and managed twenty squats. Flopping down on the mat, he took a few breathes and fighting against his shaking stomach muscles began doing sit ups. He was spent after ten. Not wanting to give up just yet, Mathew rolled off the mat, but only managed two more push ups. Face down, on the cold, wooden and dusty floor, he closed his eyes.

A handsome, short teenager was skipping class with a group of friends. The tallest girl in the group held his hand and chatted with two of their female friends, while the other two guys walked behind talking to each other. While the group talked about sweet nothings, the boy imagined wings of fire carrying him above the world. The small blue flame with which he lit everyones cigarettes filled him with confidence that he could do anything. While everyone struggled to cast a single spell a day, he could waste his mana on party tricks. Sure, he couldn't perform a single ritual, and didn't bother comitting magic circles to memory, but he wouldn't need to. After all, free form magic was stronger and with focused enough will could achieve anything.

The chubby, short man scoffed, and got up from the floor. On still shaky legs, he walked out of the dark corridor, he didn't change the light bulb since it broke three years earlier, to look for some clean clothes in the larger, eastern room. Except for a large mirror on the floor, a single large painting of a man with a dog on the southern wall, a gift from the family he cut contact with a couple years ago, and by the northern wall a red bookcase with only bottom shelves filled, the six by six meters room was empty. An old, bent all over clothes dryer stood by the wide window, only two pairs of boxers, some mismatched socks and a single torn up shirt on it. Mathew sneezed, his nose only now catching up on all the dust that got into it. He shook his head, grabbed the one shirt, and the closest underwear and shuffled towards bathroom. When he reached the door to the corridor, he slapped the light switch and had to close his eyes due to the sudden brightness. He quickly turned off the light in the room, "Eh, when did I stop turning on the lights".

After the shower, made slightly unpleasant by the water gathering up to Mathews ankles, the man first promised himself to cut his hair, and then came into the kitchen squeezed between the smaller room and the bathroom. He spent few minutes browsing through the pile of old shopping bags, empty boxes, and dirty dishes, he found an almost full box of green tea, for which he turned on a yellow electric kettle. From the fridge he took some almost fresh cheese, a bread roll he left inside the day before, and after carelessly slicing them up, put them on a frying pan. Breakfast ready, Mathew looked over the few small art pieces that hanged over the old beige office table, lit a cigarette from a stove burner and squeezed his ass onto the only empty chair. The man pulled out the black smartphone with a cracked screen out the pocket of his black jeans, the thing luckily still had some battery. It was time to figure out how to move on with magic.

First Mathew delated all bookmarks on fire magic, and psionics. His personality no longer fit fire, and in his current state psionics at best would do nothing, and at worst open a path to some relatively weak and desperate creature from the other side of the veil, even the most inferior of the denizes of that dimension capable of breaking and taking over his weakened mind. With that out of the way, he found most of the websites he used in the past went down, and the ones left required passes he no longer had the qualifications for. Not defeated yet, the fallen mage tried finding new websites, but the open forums were filled with posts from trolls and delusional apprentices. The rest he found, seemed like scams that would just try to drain his pockets. Mathew put away the phone, turned on the small kitchen radio, set to a station playing experimental somethings he didn't understand, but made him feel sophisticated. He decided he would try to find some old books, and notes, hoping he stored them somewhere rather than threw them all out. Only after he finished his tea that is, since anything hotter than room temperature burned his mouth, it would be another ten or fifteen minutes.

While leaving the kitchen, Mathew noticed the keys to the basement hanging on the door, and figured he would check down there first, and browse the books in the apartment later. He slipped his feet into old, comfortable, but filled with holes sports shoes, there was no need to put on something pretty for the short trip. He wondered if he should put on a jacket, but he wouldn't be going outside, so there wasn't a need for it.

The light on the staircase hurt Mathews eyes slightly, so he hurried down while keeping them squinted. His legs still felt a little weak after the light workout, but he made it down without tripping. The door to the basements was polished steel, with a black plastic handle, the man fumbled a bit with his keys and after opening the door, walked down to the end of the corridor. There the metallic door with the number 42, opened easily enough, revealing a dusty, about one and half by three meters space. Filling it was an empty alluminium shelf, and four carton boxes. One box was filled with christmas decorations, another with some old computer games and cables, the last two contained old sketches, notebooks and books. Most of the books were old, school textbooks or fiction, but after moving most things onto the floor Mathew found the Grimoire he attempted to write during highschool, a textbook he borrowed from an apprentice earth mage from one of the other dimensions, during a night of celebratory drinking after he moved into his own apartment, and finally a book on basics of psionics, he recieved for his twelfth birthday. He either left the other books upstairs, or back with his family. Maybe he threw them out. The three books in hand, Mathew made to leave the basement, but stopped at the door, put them down and went back in to clean up the mess. If he wanted to get his life back together, he might as well try to be less of a slob.

On the way back up, Mathew was already more used to the light and found himself surprised at the walls recently repainted white and the entirely new, simple black metal handrails. He remembered some loud noises that came from the staircase few months earlier, and wondered if there was a fight that damaged the place. It was a relatively new building, so there was no need for renovations. The stairs looked the same gray concrete, at least.

As the chubby man reached his door at the top floor, he was a little out of breath, but his legs recovered already. Inside the apartment he kicked off the shoes and went into the larger room, where he sat down in front of the bookcase and set down his books aside. The two filled shelves had mostly fiction or art books on them, but squeezed at the bottom one was a Skillbook for an elementary System. Everybody with at least adequate magical ability recieved one at the end of high school, and Mathew feeling too proud to use it, kept it in hopes of giving it away to a child if he ever had one.

The mage looked down on the large black sketchbook he called a Fire Grimoir, back in High School he found it absolutely hilarious to use such a mundane object to write a Magic Book. Next to it was a leatherbound notebook on earth magic, and last but not least there was his Psionic for Beginners. None of them fit him. His personality no longer having the spark to fuel the Fire, old memories paining him too much to touch Psionics and while Earth would potentially fit his body type, was still something he wasn't excited about. Mathew gave the Skillbook a look, got up with a sigh and looked around. He decided that he should welcome this change in a clean apartment. "How you live reflects your soul, or some such."

The adult man felt deeply ashamed, carrying out tens of trashbags to the canisters, while his body and clothes became more and more dirty from all the dust that accumulated in his apartment. When he finally sat down to admire the job well done, he heard children coming back from school. Afte a satisfying shower, after he cleaned the drain of his hair the water no longer accumulated, the last pair of clean underwear on his ass, the last shirt in the washing machine and the dirty pants on, he sat down in the middle of the larger room. He looked at the mirror, now propped against the wall, his stomach was spilling onto his pants, on his arms and chest no signs of the muscles he used to have, the tattoo of a smile on his right arm no longer seeming like a worm he saw it as for the past decade. The mage grabbed the Skillbook, and set it on his crossed legs, his hands lightly set on the cover. "No reason to hold on to pride anymore, I can allow it once more when.. if I will reach power that warrants it."

"I...", came out a weak voice. Mathew coughed a few times, straightened his back and tried again. "I accept to Learn", he said in a deeper voice he forgot he had.

In front of him appeared a grey window, titled No longer passes qualifications.

Fire Mage, Psion, Blazing Psion Apprentice, Void Apprentice, Electric Apprentice, Air Apprentice, Elemental Apprentice, Elemental Spellblade Apprentice, Healing Apprentice.

He dismissed the window and a new one appeared, Aviable Courses.

Fire Apprentice, Earth Apprentice, Ice Apprentice, Spellblade Apprentice, Decaying Apprentice, Psion Apprentice.

"The options are as constricting as I expected," Mathew muttered to himself and chuckled. "I have no intention of touching psionics, fire and earth are out... Decaying? Did I really fuck myself up that badly? Spellblade is out unless I find someone to train me in some martial arts. That would leave ice. Huh... I am a winter child from the north of Europe, always preffered the cold and well... even my surname would fit. Fire seemed so much cooler when I was younger, but why not?" With these thoughts, Mathew spoke once more. "I desire to Learn to be an Ice Apprentice."

After a few hours of adjusting to the method of meditation the System provided, Mathew got up feeling his legs crawling all over, as they seemed to have fallen asleep from sitting for so long. He came up to and sat on the windowsill. The stary sky over the settlements on the dark side of the Moon had never looked so beautiful, and he didn't feel so free in a long time.