The voice belonged to a child. A mortal, human, skinny-to-the-bone, wimpy child. Still, as wimpy as the child appeared, the timbre of his voice exuded an uncanny authority. Uncanny for it accomplished a feat not possible for many—conjuring the attention of Heaven Realm's unruliest.
But more surprising was the predicament this child was in. He spoke the language of gods with such fluidity, too fluent yet appeared nowhere near being ethereal, or for the least, nowhere respectable. The child was on his knees, and bruises had already peppered its caps. In his arms, he balanced books that weighed more than his limbs.
He was being punished.
What a coincidence. Riven thought.
So were they.
After that momentary pause of astonishment, the three wisps reached a silent consensus. There were no signs of Flaura, nor any signs from above. They might as well examine this mortal closely, and satiate their need to scratch the itch of curiosity.
Caelum, the wisp better quipped to holding conversations with mortals, flew in a beeline movement. He spun around the young boy, checking, scrutinizing, putting his centuries of mortal studies into better use. "You can see us?" The boy's pallid eyes traced Caelum's path. Though curiosity lingered in its depths, exhaustion peered out as well. "Of all the young maidens... the prettiest of flowers, the handsomest of men... only a scrawny child can see us?"
The tone of Caelum's voice failed to mask his displeasure, though he made no attempts at concealing it. He was genuinely upset. Having roamed the land of mortals for centuries, he lucked out being noticed by a scrawny kid.
The kid's eyes became half-lidded. Hints of disdain swirled in its depths, regretful of the words he had spoken. Kneeling was hard enough, why did he look up and call out to some balls of light, getting himself into more trouble? An exasperated sigh escaped his parched lips. His breathing become more labored, his limbs had gone stiff from the weight of three leather-bound books. He lacked the energy to accommodate more trouble so he averted his gaze. Hammering them into the cobblestone ground to deny the balls of light more attention.
"It's too late to pretend you can't see us now, kid." A colder, heavier voice rang in the boy's ears.
Unlike the first ball of light that flew around the kid as soft as a spring breeze, barely letting its presence known, the second one was a knife to his neck—a tendril of icy gust. It brushed past the kid's hair, the inky locks that curtained his sunburnt face shoved to the side, his sunken cheeks and flaky skin revealing early signs of dehydration
Riven drew closer. Now there were three balls of light circling the boy like frenzied sharks.
The heavenly doctor's proficiency in medicine was immediately unearthed upon laying sight on this boy—three thousand years of dormancy proved his knowledge no less brilliant. He knew a patient when he saw one. "Another hour and you're a goner." Riven told the boy who looked up once again, drawn to his commanding voice. "You need water, kid."
The kid remained silent. Hesitant to speak. After deliberating to himself, he spoke. "I only get water when I finish these book."
The leatherbound, several hundred-paged books bore its weight on a pair of bony arms. Faintly, the wisps noticed an iota of spiritual essence beneath its pages. These books were ancient—not the type to serve its purpose as weights for punishments.
"The hell are these?" Caelum leered at the topmost book, scrutinizing the inked characters written in human script. "Dual Cultivation for Infants? Interesting!"
His remark besought the other wisps' attention. Both appalled by what they heard, they rushed to surmise the books themselves.
Lucius displayed irritation upon surmising the words embedded on the aged leather. If he had hands, they'd be rubbing his temples. Not only was Caelum wrong, he was downright demented. "You idiot!" He hissed. "It's just Cultivation for Infants. What do you mean Dual Cultivation? How your filthy mind would even register that—"
"Shameless!"
"Whoops, my bad. Could've sworn I saw those extra characters earlier."
Riven observed the boy. If this boy were to die in an hour, might as well get their hands on useful information. It was out of his hands if this boy succumbs to dehydration. He was a doctor but this situation was out of his hands—he didn't even have hands.
"Cultivation for infants," Riven repeated the words to himself, incredulous. How dumb must this kid be to fail a book for infants? He snorted. "You're real dumb, aren't you? I see why you're being punished."
The boy let out a sigh, not for his labored physique, but out of exasperation. As if he'd exhausted not just the people around him but also himself for being stupid. "Cultivation for infants? Is that what it says?"
"And you can't even read?"
"Worse," the boy replied almost instantly. "I can't understand a single word they all say."
As funny as it should have sounded, the wisps did not laugh. They couldn't. Not with the cold shudder that enveloped them—a bad premonition.
Immortals; gods or demons, grasp the human language like the back of their minds. It came to them naturally, like a second language already imprinted to their bones. Only one in several hundreds of thousands failed to comprehend this second language. The three wisps themselves, have only ever met one immortal with such condition. To make things more complicatedly thought-provoking, this condition was already uncommon among immortals. For it to manifest on a mortal was even more uncanny.
Surreptitious glances were exchanged.
"What's your name, kid?" Riven asked, his flame darkened to a dangerous hue.
"I don't know. I hear a lot I don't know which one it is."
"Alright, we'll choose which one to call you then," Lucius said. "Go on."
The boy obliged. "Bastardsson?"
This answer shattered the tensed air immediately upon its utterance. A boisterous laugh erupted from Lucius, and Caelum began to snicker.
"Well, I'd gladly call you that--"
Riven interrupted Caelum's nonsense. "What else?"
It didn't take long to realize the tragedy this boy's life had been. Bastardsson, Gnat, Disgusting bug—those were only a few of what he'd believed his name was. No one called him by his real name.
"The woman who birthed me..." the boy began in labored breaths. With the sun directly overhead, the punishment had become torturous. An ironic combination of ghostly pale and sunburnt red washed his complexion. "Before she passed... she called me Aiden."