The task of removing the wrap while not damaging the big painting that his sister had made with her trusty crayons, in a kind of black that was slightly metallic in its tone, something that she seemed to really like, perhaps due to her silver hair, that does sometimes do that after all, it was kind of a common occurrence to like things that fit with ones own body.
Either way, after using a knife and taking some rather experienced and well-thought-out cuts to the thing that resembled a big box wrapped in the white paper, something simple but understandable, after all not everything had to be of some crazy colour, and perhaps his sister had already exclaimed that she wanted to do something like this.
Cades however couldn't stop smiling, despite him hearing a weird sound in his head, and having some kind of stabbing pain in his left hand and now, for some reason, also his right lower back half of the right leg.. quite specific, but that's how it was..for some reason.
It took Cades about seven minutes until he finally got rid of the entire thing while cutting out the painting, that as previously mentioned seemed to depict him and her, sister and brother together, ending up with putting it aside for now, intending to later put it into a frame, something he had quite an obsession with back then.
Finally, the entire wrap was gone, and as he saw what was underneath his eyes began to glow even brighter than they had before as he thought about the painting and saw the proud smile an childish laughter of his sister.
It was indeed a big wooden box, one that hge recognized easily, after all he had wished for this thing since many months now, it was decorated with a beautiful measuring tool engraved atop the still elegantly sealed box, one of those that resembled triangles but didn't have a bottom, it consisted of two beautifully intertwined parts and it was undoubtably very expensive and high grade to get for his birthday, for a child's birthday.
And as he took it and smiled brightly he could see how, just for a moment, the bright and happy look on his mom's face vanished and she looked towards his dad, who now wore the very same look as she did, a look of great worry and concern, the very same look that he received the first few days after he tried to cut off one of his own limbs and had to go to the doctor for it.
The doctor, however, determined that he was simply obsessed with knowledge to an unnatural degree, something that Cades himself hadn't quite understood, resulting in him trying to figure it out at any cost, something that only further proved the doctors diagnosis.
He didn't know this either, but this resulted in his father and his mother thinking a lot about what to gift him, their first thoughts consisted of just some magical books, math guides, or even interplanetary atlas's, or even just encyclopedias with knowledge about all kinds of monsters and where one could find them, but in the end they had decided to get him an artificing kit so they might lead his obsession to go into a direction where he didn't, for example, have to control fire and experiment how fast stuff would burn down and at what kind of temperatures.
And indeed, it was destined to work for him, seeing that he had changed his past dream which he didn't even remember anymore into becoming an artificer, something that had lasted until the incident in which he lost everything, and turned into an obsession that still lasted well beyond that, an obsession that did save his life multiple times, same as the bit of swordsmanship his father had taught him, though he had also studied a bit about the techniques as soon as he got him some books about that stuff, so that was perhaps an even bigger help for the theories.
But either way, Cades simply looked at the box and released a high-pitched scream of excitement as was to be expected from a rather small child, as he was, and soon after he had already climbed up his chair a bit so his tiny body would get a really good luck from above, reaching a similar height to his mom who was about half a foot smaller than his dad at 6'4, though he was still not able to see his dad's bald head from above, or even entirely.
Inside the elegant box there was an assortment of metal tools of a silvery colour, some smaller, some bigger, and many of them sharp which caused his parents to have a slightly panicked look on their face and remind him of his promise to not hurt himself, but he didn't really listen to them, he was just thinking about the usage of all the tools he already knew, which was most of them, and trying to think of the usage of some of the other tools, such as a big rope and some kind of assortment of pens which he later figured out to be a scaffold for artificing of bigger creations, or even just for the holding of smaller ones that had to be in the air or drying on the underside at the same time as he had to work on the upper side.
However, just as he was about to grab into the beautifully made box and take out the first tool of his choice, a kind of metallic robe that seemed to be really intriguing but was really just a kind of safety device during artificing, one that held back bigger thins and had a kind of protection sequence engraved, his hand suddenly began to badly bleed.
It was his left hand, his second favourite, but he still quite liked it, and now it was suddenly looking as if it was flattened by a thousand pound weight falling atop it, and the next second it looked more like an accordion, but either way, the faces of his parents had already vanished, his sister being the only one remaining and suddenly staring at him with a cold but caring face, until she suddenly vanished as well.
And then Cades woke up from his dream.