The keep of Walderose groaned under the assault of the autumn gale. The winds pouring down from the northern crags bit, tearing at the slate roof and rattling the thick leaded glass of the nursery window like starved hounds desperate for marrow. Within the chamber, the hearth fire was a sickly thing, choking on green wood and spitting bitter grey smoke into the draughty air.
To be born is to be bound, but being reborn with near half-century worth of intellect trapped within an infant body has to be torment devised by a cruel god. Seiyuu Ashitoge, who had once dictated the rise and fall of nations, now found himself a prisoner of soft cartilage and useless limbs.
He suffered the indignities of the flesh with a silent endurance. He did not rage, for rage consumes its wielder. Instead, he observed. He learned to act this farce of a role. When the ache of hunger twisted his unformed gut, he did not cry from instinct; he calculated the precise volume and pitch required to summon the wet nurse. A sharp, rhythmic wail commanded the breast; a low, fitful keening brought dry, rough-spun wool to replace his soiled clouts. To his mother, Elara—a woman whose beauty was rapidly fading beneath the grinding millstone of anxiety—he offered empty, toothless smiles, buying her fragile loyalty and sanity with the illusion of innocence.
If this world was a game of chess, he had been spawned onto the board as a battered pawn. He could read the rot of House Walderose in the very stones of the manor. He saw it in the water-stained tapestries depicting faded boars and silver stags, their threads unspooling like the family's honor. He smelled it in the sour, thin broth the servants consumed.
His father, Lord Aldous, was a man hollowed out by a siege without swords. The House of Castellan, their prosperous neighbors to the sunlit east, had choked the mountain passes, levied crippling tolls on Walderose timber, and starved their silver mines of laborers. It was a merchant's war, bloodless but lethal, designed to leave Walderose freezing in the dark until they surrendered their ancestral lands. Aldous lacked the cruelty to fight back. He was a man of honor, which, in Seiyuu's estimation, meant he was a man waiting to die.
It was during his second moon in this bleak realm that the nature of Aethelgard walked through the heavy oaken doors of the nursery.
Aldous ushered the stranger in, the lord's usually defeated posture rigid with a tense deference. The man who entered brought the smell of dried blood and bitter root with him. He was draped in robes of heavy, ash-grey wool, leaning heavily upon a gnarled staff of black ironwood. But it was the man's face that captured Seiyuu's terrifyingly lucid attention. Half of the stranger's visage was a ruin of melted, puckered flesh, resembling candle wax that had been left too close to a flame. Where his left eye should have been, a milky quartz sat nestled in the scarred socket.
"The roads will be dead to us within the fortnight, Lord Aldous," the ancient man rasped. His voice sounded like a rusted blade scraping against a whetstone. "The Dread-Frost creeps south earlier than the almanacs predicted. The Abyssal spawn in the Howling Crags grow bold in the cold. They have already taken three of Castellan's outriders."
"Then let the beasts feast on Castellan's men," Aldous replied bitterly, though his hands wrung together. "I thank you for braving the storm, Scribe Vance. I had feared the Veridian Spire would ignore our summons."
"The Spire ignores nothing, my lord. But it cares for very little," Vance countered, his single pale yellow eye sweeping the room before settling on the wooden crib. "The Crown in Veridia rots on its golden throne while the Arch-Dukes hoard the High Aether. They will not send the King's Swords to protect your borders. If Castellan starves you out, the Crown will simply accept their copper as tithe and strike the name Walderose from the great ledger."
Vance hobbled toward the crib, his ironwood staff thumping heavily against the stone floor. Seiyuu felt the hairs on his infant arms rise. The air around the Scribe was heavy, charged with an invisible, suffocating pressure.
Magic, Seiyuu concluded, the cold machinery of his mind whirring to life. Not the parlor tricks of illusionists, but a raw, volatile physics native to this realm.
"He is small," Vance murmured, leaning over the crib. The milky quartz eye seemed to glow with a faint, sickly luminescence in the gloom.
"He has a strong heart," Elara defended weakly from the shadows near the hearth, her arms wrapped around herself.
"A strong heart is food for worms if the soul is brittle," Vance stated without an ounce of pity. He raised his right hand. Seiyuu noted with clinical detachment that the Scribe was missing the top two joints of his index and middle fingers, the stumps sealed with smooth, silvery scar tissue. "By your leave, Lord Aldous. I shall read the boy's resonance."
Aldous nodded, his jaw clenched so tightly Seiyuu could hear the grinding of his teeth. "Do it."
Vance hovered his maimed hand a span above Seiyuu's chest. Instantly, the oppressive charge in the air snapped into focus. A pale, viridian light bled from the old man's palm, washing over Seiyuu's small body.
It felt like cold iron hooks sliding beneath his skin, dragging through his veins, and probing the very marrow of his bones. A normal infant would have shrieked in mortal terror from this sensation. Seiyuu, exercising a willpower forged in the fires of corporate slaughter, forced his pupils to dilate and let out a soft, confused gurgle, batting a pudgy fist at the glowing light as if it were a firefly.
"By the Old Gods..." Vance breathed, the green light abruptly winking out. The Scribe took a stumbling step back, his ironwood staff clattering against the stone as he leaned his weight upon it. His pale yellow eye was wide with shock.
"What is it?" Aldous demanded, stepping forward, a sudden, desperate hunger in his voice. "Is he cursed? Has Castellan's poison reached him in the womb?"
"Cursed?" Vance let out a raspy, breathless bark of laughter. He stared at Seiyuu as if the infant were a slumbering dragon. "Lord Aldous, the boy's mana channels are dormant, as they should be for a babe. But the architecture of his soul... I have walked the halls of the Veridian Spire for sixty years. I have seen the souls of Arch-Dukes and High Inquisitors. I have never seen a vessel so dense. It is like looking into a collapsed star."
Elara gasped, bringing a hand to her mouth. "What does that mean, Scribe?"
Vance turned his ruined face toward the mother. "It means, Lady Elara, that Aether—the raw magic of our world—is a poison to the weak. It burns the flesh and shatters the mind of those who try to wield it without the necessary spiritual fortitude." He gestured vaguely to his melted cheek and missing fingers. "But your son... if he survives to his tenth name-day, when the dormant channels violently tear themselves open in the Awakening... he will possess a well of power that could swallow this entire valley."
Silence descended upon the nursery, heavier than the storm outside.
Aldous fell to his knees beside the crib, his trembling hands gripping the wooden slats. The hollow, defeated look in his eyes was instantly replaced by a blazing, fanatical fire. It was the dangerous, intoxicating fire of a drowning man who had just been thrown a rope.
"A mage," Aldous whispered, his voice cracking. "A High Mage of Walderose. Castellan wouldn't dare strike us. The Spire would grant us immediate wardship. We just need to keep him alive. We just need to endure for ten years."
"Do not mistake potential for destiny, my lord," Vance warned, his tone grave. "A dense soul is a heavy burden. The Awakening kills one in three children. And if Castellan's spies catch wind of this reading, they will not wait ten years."
The Scribe gathered his robes, casting one last, unreadable look at Seiyuu. "Guard him well, Aldous. The winter that comes for Veridia will not spare the innocent."
When the heavy door clicked shut, leaving only the crackle of the hearth and the howling wind, Seiyuu closed his eyes.
His father was weeping silently by the crib, whispering prayers of salvation to a god Seiyuu knew did not care. Aldous believed his son was a shield, a savior handed down by providence to rescue their failing house.
He is a fool.
Seiyuu retreated deep into the fortress of his own mind. He reached out to the strange, ethereal anomaly that bound him to this world. In his mind's eye, a tapestry of starlight unfurled, etching ancient runes across the darkness of his consciousness.
The runes shimmered, cold and uncompromising.
Magic, Seiyuu realized, was just another currency. Capital and leverage. The Scribe had spoken of Aether as a dangerous radiation that mutated and destroyed the weak. But to a man who had forged everything out of his own suffering, danger was just the price of power.
His father hoped to use him as a deterrent to survive in the shadows of the Ironfall Valley. But Seiyuu had not been reborn to survive.
He would endure the indignities of this mewling flesh. He would play the sweet, babbling heir. He would wait while the snows buried the keep and Castellan tightened the noose. He would wait for his tenth name-day, when the Aether would flood his veins.
And when he finally possessed the power to reach out and mold this brutal, dying world, he would not be a shield for House Walderose, but the blade that would cut the throat of kingdoms.