Masozi was pretty sure, by the time he was seven years old, that he would outlive his parents, and probably all of his siblings as well.
Because they weren't clever enough, and they weren't careful enough, and he, on his own, wasn't strong enough to be that for all of them.
He was born - he assumes - on the shores of Lake Malawi, and his earliest memory are peaceful ones, of swimming in the deep blue waters and watching the fish below, and distantly feeling their sleepy slow minds.
He knows there are monsters, he doesn't remember ever not knowing this, but in the beginning he's not afraid of them, because his mother and father don't seem to be. They complain, sometimes, but the same way they complain about the rain or about ants getting into their food-stores.
When Masozi is seven, the monsters get his eldest sister. She's eleven. His mother weeps and moves on. She's already pregnant with her ninth – though two of his would-be younger siblings didn't survive their infancy, and for all he knows she lost half a dozen others before him. It's not like his parents ever talk about the past.
This is when he knows that he needs to learn to be more clever and careful and ruthless, if he wants to survive. His hopes of bringing at least his younger siblings along with him are slim, but at that point he hasn't, yet, given up.
They move around more, after that, and end up spending a while in the slums of the big city, Lilongwe. It's not beautiful like the lakeshore. It's crowded and dirty and by the time Masozi is ten he can feel the crush of minds all around him, always. But this is when he learns that the monsters don't come for everyone. When he learns that most people don't have magic at all, not even a little, but that they're safe anyway in the cocoon of not-believing.
Not perfectly safe; there are enough local superstitions to leave cracks, and the dark things slip through. Still, enough that he lives to see thirteen, though by then he's outlived his remaining older brother and two of his little sisters.
He meets other magic users. Their minds feel different, at least once they're old enough. His parents keep to themselves, and move around often, but Masozi finds snatches of time to talk to them. Enough to find out that languages are important, English in particular, and that there's a study of magic - of spells, ones you can learn from other people, not like the way his parents do it where their muttered or sung incantations never work for him and he's always had to do his own.
He learns that there's a school, even, but it's very far away, and no one knows anyone who's ever been to it. You have to be important and rich and have parents who know the right people, and they don't, not here. But Masozi takes in everything he can, anyway.
Mostly on his own, he teaches himself to read and write in English.
Masozi's mother's final pregnancy is a hard one, and she's older now, not as resilient, and the dangerous world has taken its toll on her. And meanwhile, the monsters are more interested in Masozi, as he grows older and bigger and stronger, and his mother is too sick from the pregnancy to defend herself let alone him.
By now, Masozi can do more than just feel minds. He can...push them. The few times he mentions this to anyone except his parents - who respond to everything with the same quiet, stoic resignation - the responses are alarm and fear. So he stops.
He teaches himself to feel the monsters. It takes six months before he can do it at all reliably, even for the big smart ones, and it's not nearly as useful as the sense he already had, for people and animals; he has to be trying, to be looking in the right way on purpose. Pushing them is even harder. He can do it, at all, but it costs him something.
Normally, it doesn't feel like pushing on minds costs him the light of magic that lives inside him, but now that he's thirteen and knows a little more of how magic works, he can notice that it does - but that if he's pushing on a mind at all, then that means he's touching it, and he can pull energy from there. If someone notices him doing this then they try to grab it back, and it hurts, but non-magic people mostly don't notice, anymore, if he's careful. He can pull energy from the air around him, too, or from other living things; by now it's not just their hut that's completely free of insect vermin. And so even when his mother is sick and his father retreats into guarding her, the slum lords and the gangs and the street thieves leave their family alone, and some people can even be nudged into bringing gifts of food.
Not enough food, though. Masozi's father dies trying to guard his mother from a particularly big and powerful monster, when Masozi is out stealing food from the market; he doesn't like doing this, but the stallholder won't starve this month if he takes some fruit, and if he doesn't then his family will starve, and a tiny nudge so they're looking the other way is all it takes. Masozi is home in time to save his mother and his youngest sister, who's four, but it takes everything he has; he's nowhere near strong enough to kill a monster, even now, and he's barely able to convince it to seek easier prey elsewhere.
...Which means one of the other wizard children in the city, probably, but at least they might have better protection.
Masozi doesn't leave their makeshift hut and his mother's bedside for the rest of the pregnancy. His nine-year-old brother dies on a food run; he's getting old enough to be interesting to the monsters, now, which pop up in alleys if no one else is around to be looking.
And then his mother dies anyway, screaming, bleeding out her life onto the filthy mattress, and she tells him to GO but he can't. Not until the very end, when it's clear the baby was born dead and what was the point of any of it, anyway.
She tells him to get out. To survive, however he can, whatever it takes. She doesn't mention his baby sister; she knows he can't protect another person, not on his own. And then she gives him her life-force - her mana - all of it, which is a lot more than he expected given her physical state. And she dies quickly and peacefully, and that's that.
He finds a mundane family who he knows has enough money to feed another mouth - who sent food, sometimes, during his mother's pregnancy - and he pushes and pushes until they agree to take his little sister.
And then he finds one of the wizard children who's not old enough to fight back, and pushes them as well, and they talk to their father and come back to tell him where the nearest wizard enclave is. Those are the places that can send children to the school, where you learn to use magic with real skill. He's pretty sure, at this point, that he has literally no other path to survival.
The journey takes him months, and is hellish in a fascinating variety of ways. He has to learn to yank the life out of rats, not just insects; this comes less naturally, it hurts and feels wrong, but he figures out with enough trial and error that if he nudges their tiny minds first, in the right way, then they come to his hand willingly, and he feeds them morsels of food, and then kills them and they don't resist. And so he has enough mana, usually, to get his magic into the twisted wrong-stained minds of the monsters that come after him - mals, he hears they're called, in English, by the wizards who have the school - and to convince them that he's actually not easy prey at all.
He reaches Johannesburg, somehow. There is, in fact, an enclave there, but they don't want him and they don't have any extra spots for the school, not this year.
...This is only part of why he doesn't try to hold off the particularly disturbing mal that goes after some of the local children, even though it likely followed him on his way to try talking to them again, and so it's arguably his fault. Mostly, he's just much less prepared to defend a group instead of just himself. But - also - it's definitely in the back of his mind that if one of the fourteen-year-olds dies, their spot might go to him instead.
If he does get a spot in the school for magic - the Scholomance, he's learned it's called - then he will survive, and learn, and be stronger, and someday save a hundred times as many children. But this doesn't make it feel any better, not now, not yet.
He does rescue some younger children, though; they're less delicious to mals, and don't attract the really big difficult ones yet. And Johannesburg apparently doesn't have a strong candidate for the spot. Masozi can read and write and speak English, fluently albeit with a strong accent, and he speaks three other languages at this point - Chichewa, Zulu, some Africaans - and can read and write a little in all of them. He is also, apparently, scary, and apparently in this particular situation, that counts as a positive.
Masozi gets a spot, and on the morning of induction he's ready. He doesn't have much on him, and he's tall for his age but very underfed, so they told him he had weight to spare. He spends all of it on bringing a plastic jar of dung beetles, because apparently there aren't any bugs, in the school, somehow, and the dung beetles can eat human dung just fine so they won't be hard to feed. It'll make his room stink, to keep them there, but that's hardly the worst indignity he's suffered.
None of the other children speak to him as they wait.
And then a hook of magic grabs him, and everything goes away.