When he finally opened it, the brown paper gave way to a leather-bound book so old the cover had gone soft as cloth. A note, scrawled in handwriting that belonged unmistakably to the billionaire from the fundraiser, offered an apology that read less like remorse and more like a man covering himself after one too many drinks: sorry about tonight, got carried away, found this in storage, seemed like your kind of thing.
Kael almost threw the note away without reading past the first line. Then his eyes fell on the book itself, and every professional instinct he owned sat up at once.
He turned the first page with the exaggerated care of a man defusing something. The script inside was older than Sumerian, older than Akkadian, and those two languages alone represented some of the earliest writing humanity had ever bothered to scratch into clay. Civilizations that old usually preferred metal and stone. They did not, as a rule, leave books behind. A book implied a culture confident enough in its own permanence to trust something as fragile as bound pages, and that confidence was, historically speaking, extremely rare.
This book should not exist. And yet it sat on his desk, smelling of dust and tannin and something else he couldn't name, patient as a held breath.
He estimated its worth somewhere north of several hundred million dollars, and then stopped estimating, because the number had stopped meaning anything useful. He put on his reading glasses, pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves from his desk drawer, poured himself two fingers of the whiskey he kept for grading emergencies, and got to work translating a text that, by every rule he knew, should not have survived to be translated at all.
Hours disappeared. He didn't notice them going. There was a particular quality to real research, the kind Kael hadn't felt in longer than he wanted to admit, where the outside world simply stopped applying: no billionaire, no ex-girlfriend, no trash bags on a welcome mat, nothing but the shape of an unfamiliar grammar slowly resolving itself into sense under his hands. For the length of that translation, Kael Richards was not a punchline. He was exactly what he had always wanted to be. The pain of the evening didn't vanish so much as it got shoved, gently and gratefully, into a back room of his mind he could return to later.
What the book actually contained, once enough of it had yielded to his patience, was a story: the account of a legendary mage who had, at the very end of a long and storied life, worked out a spell to carry the essence of a dying mind into the body of an unborn child in another world entirely. Kael read the account twice, then a third time, hunting for the tell of a forgery, some anachronism, some slip in the grammar that would mark the whole thing as an elaborate joke played by a billionaire with too much money and too little judgment. He found nothing. The calligraphy was too consistent, too confidently strange, too far beyond what any forger would bother faking for a linguistics professor who'd already been publicly humiliated once that night.
Anger flared in him first, hot and irrational: the suspicion that this was simply a longer, crueler version of the parking lot joke, one that would end with him standing in front of a mirror reciting nonsense syllables like a fool. But suspicion is not proof, and Kael had spent his entire career refusing to draw conclusions ahead of his evidence.
So, flat-voiced with the indifference of a man who half expects nothing to happen, he read the incantation aloud.
The words left his mouth and the air around him answered. Colors he had no name for curled up from the pages like smoke that had learned to dance, and a light bloomed out of the book bright enough to swallow the whole office, and the last thing Kael Richards felt as Kael Richards was the strange, dizzying sensation of the entire room tilting sideways, twisting, folding in on itself like a page being turned by a hand the size of the world.
He opened his eyes to a ceiling he did not recognize, in a body that would not obey him.
Murmuring voices surrounded him, low with something between awe and alarm. Kael tried to sit up and discovered, with the horror of a mind fully intact trapped inside limbs that were not, that he could not so much as lift his own head. He was lying in a plain wooden cradle. Two faces hovered above him, lit by candlelight, speaking words that meant nothing to his ears and everything to the part of his brain that had spent a career learning to recognize when a language was, in fact, a language and not noise.
It worked, he thought, and the thought arrived in him with a strange, hollow calm, the way truth sometimes does right before the panic catches up to it. The wizard's spell actually worked. I'm a baby. I am, God help me, actually a baby.
"Did we really have to leave the main house and come all the way out here for this?" a voice said, somewhere off to the side, dripping with the specific irritation of someone inconvenienced by a birth they'd rather not have to acknowledge.
Kael, or whoever he now was, understood the words even though he had never heard the language spoken before in his life. That fact alone should have terrified him more than it did. Later he would come to understand that his gift for recognizing structure beneath surface noise had followed him across whatever boundary separated one world from the next, and that it worked on living speech exactly as it had always worked on dead scripts: given enough exposure, the grammar simply revealed itself.
A young woman held him against her chest. Candlelight flickered gold and orange across weathered stone walls, throwing long shadows that danced whenever the flame trembled. She smelled of woodsmoke and something faintly herbal that Kael, in this life or the last one, could not name. Her eyes, looking down at him, held none of the irritation of the voice from the doorway. They held wonder instead, unguarded and complete, the wonder of a mother meeting a child for the first time.