Chapter 4: My Son, A Stranger
Armored Dragon Calendar Year 410 – Roland POV
[Roland POV]
My son was not the boy I raised.
The thought had been growing in me for months, lodged in my chest like a splinter I couldn't reach. I watched Claude shape metal at the smaller anvil, his small hands moving with a precision that made no sense for a child who had only been working the forge for a few months.
The hammer fell in a rhythm I knew well, too well.
It was the rhythm of a master craftsman, not a boy of six. The way he turned the metal, anticipated the heat, knew exactly when to quench and when to let it cool, these were skills that took years to develop.
I had spent two decades at this forge, learning the secrets of metal and fire through countless mistakes and hard-won victories. The knowledge in my hands had cost me burns, ruined projects, wasted materials, and endless frustration before it finally became instinct.
Claude had none of that history, none of those failures.
Yet he worked the metal like he had been doing it his entire life, like the knowledge had been poured into him fully formed.
But Claude had never shown this ability before the water incident. Before he woke screaming one morning with tears streaming down his face, babbling about deaths and monsters and places he had never seen.
I still remembered that morning with terrible clarity. The sound of his screams had torn through the house, raw and primal, the sound of someone experiencing something no child should ever experience.
When we reached his bed, he was thrashing, his small hands clawing at the sheets as though trying to escape something that wasn't there.
"The fire," he had gasped, his eyes wild and unseeing. "They're all burning. I can hear them screaming. I can—"
And then he had stopped. Gone silent.
His eyes had cleared and he had looked at us with an expression I didn't recognize. Ancient, heavy.
Whatever looked back at me through those eyes had never belonged to my son.
"Father?"
I blinked, realizing I had been staring. Claude was looking at me with those strange eyes of his.
They weren't the eyes of my son anymore. They were older.
Heavier. Filled with knowledge that no child should possess.
"Good work," I said gruffly, turning back to my own anvil. "Your form is improving."
The lie tasted bitter on my tongue. His form wasn't improving.
It had simply appeared one day, fully formed, as though transplanted from someone else entirely.
That night, I couldn't sleep.
My wife breathed softly beside me, lost in the peaceful rest that came from a clean conscience. I envied her peace.
She spoke of Claude's changes as a gift from the gods, a blessing that had transformed our troublemaking son into a diligent worker and a dedicated student.
"He's growing up," she had said just last week, her voice warm with maternal pride. "Boys do that, Roland. They mature. They find purpose."
I had wanted to believe her. Wanted to accept that explanation and set my worries aside.
But I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching something else entirely. Not growth.
Replacement.
She didn't notice what troubled me.
The way Claude's eyes would go distant sometimes as though he was looking at something far beyond our humble village. The way his body would move with skills he hadn't learned, then stumble as though he had forgotten how to walk.
The way he muttered to himself in the dark, having conversations with voices only he could hear.
I had caught fragments of those conversations when I passed his room at night. Strange words that made no sense.
References to places and people I had never heard of. Once, I had heard him say "three hundred and forty-seven," the number heavy with meaning I couldn't parse.
What did that number mean? Who was he talking to?
I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake my wife, and pulled on my boots. The floorboards creaked beneath my weight despite my caution, but she didn't stir.
She could sleep through anything, my wife. It was one of the things I loved about her.
The night air was cool, carrying wood smoke and autumn leaves. I had been following Claude for three nights now.
I watched from the shadows as he left the house in the hours before dawn. I told myself it was concern, that I was simply being a protective father.
But part of me was afraid of what I might find.
Claude emerged from the cottage with the silent grace of someone who didn't want to be heard. He moved differently in the darkness, I noticed.
More fluid. More deliberate.
Like a predator rather than prey.
The transformation was subtle but unmistakable. During the day, he moved like a child, sometimes clumsy, sometimes uncertain, always recognizable as my son.
But in these dark hours, when he thought no one was watching, someone else took over. A stranger who moved with confidence that had nothing to do with youth.
I followed at a distance, keeping to the shadows and moving with skills I hadn't used since my younger days. Before the smithy, before the village, before I settled down to raise a family in peace.
Those days were behind me now. I had chosen this life, this quiet existence of honest work and simple pleasures, and I had never regretted that choice.
But the skills remained, buried beneath years of civilian routine, waiting for moments when they might be needed again.
Claude made his way to the forest edge, following paths that I knew led to the training grounds he had established. But tonight he didn't stop there.
He kept going deeper into the trees, until I could barely make out his small form in the filtered moonlight.
The forest was different at night, darker and more dangerous. Sounds carried strangely between the trees and shadows seemed to move with intentions of their own.
I had warned Claude about the forest many times, told him about the dangers that lurked beyond the village boundaries.
But he moved through the darkness like he belonged there. Like the shadows were old friends rather than potential threats.
Then I saw what he was doing.
A crude training dummy had been set up in a clearing, fashioned from bound sticks and old cloth. Claude faced it with a wooden sword in hand, his posture shifting into something I didn't recognize.
The stance was wrong, wrong for Paul's teachings at least.
It was lower, more aggressive, weight distributed in patterns I had never seen. His grip on the sword was different too, not the two-handed style Paul favored but something one-handed and fluid.
He moved.
The sword was a blur, striking the dummy with a speed and precision that belonged to a seasoned warrior. Each blow landed exactly where it should have, targeting joints and vital points with surgical accuracy.
His footwork was flawless, carrying him through patterns that Paul Greyrat himself would have struggled to match.
I watched in horrified fascination as my six-year-old son dismantled an imaginary opponent with the efficiency of a trained killer. The strikes weren't flashy but functional.
Designed to end fights quickly and decisively. There was no wasted motion, no unnecessary flourishes.
Just cold, efficient lethality wrapped in a child's body.
But the strange part wasn't the skill itself. It was his face.
When he fought, whatever haunted him disappeared. Just cold focus remained.
This wasn't my son. This was something else, someone else entirely.
Then, mid-strike, he stumbled.
His sword went wide, his footwork faltered, and suddenly he was just a boy again. Confused.
Lost. He caught himself against a tree, breathing hard, one hand pressed to his temple as though fighting off a headache.
"What the hell," he muttered, and his voice was young again. My son's voice, not the stranger's.
"Come back. Come back. I need..."
He trailed off, shaking his head. After a long moment, he straightened and resumed his stance.
The strikes that followed were clumsy by comparison, the movements of a child trying to remember something he had briefly glimpsed.
I watched until he finally stopped, chest heaving with exhaustion, and made his way back toward the village. Only then did I step out of my hiding spot.
The training dummy bore the marks of the stranger's assault. Deep gouges in the wood.
Cloth torn where a blade would have found flesh. Damage that a boy of six should not have been able to inflict.
I touched one of the marks, feeling the splinters beneath my fingertips. The wood had splintered from the force of impacts that should have been impossible for such a small body to generate.
My son is a stranger.
The thought wouldn't leave. Lodged in my chest like a splinter I couldn't reach.
What kind of stranger? And what happened to the real Claude?
I returned home before he did, slipping back into bed beside my sleeping wife. But sleep wouldn't come.
I lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the house settling around me.
When Claude came home, I heard his footsteps pause outside our bedroom door. Heard him stand there for a long moment, as though debating whether to enter.
Then the footsteps continued, soft and careful, and I heard his door close quietly down the hall.
My wife stirred beside me, mumbling something unintelligible before settling back into sleep. I envied her peace.
I envied how she saw our son as a boy growing into his potential.
What would I tell her? That our son moved like an assassin in the darkness?
That he trained with skills he had never learned? That sometimes, when he looked at me, I saw the eyes of a stranger looking back?
She would think I had gone mad. And perhaps I had.
But I knew what I had seen. Knew that something had changed in my son, something fundamental and irreversible.
The question was what I should do about it.
Part of me wanted to confront him immediately. To demand answers, and force the truth out of him, no matter the pain.
But another part, the part that remembered my own youth, my own secrets, counseled patience.
Everyone carried hidden depths. I had learned that lesson long ago, in a life I had left behind.
Just because Claude had secrets didn't mean he was dangerous.
But those strikes. That cold focus.
The efficiency of a killer.
I turned onto my side, facing away from my wife, and tried to quiet the fear that whispered in my chest.
The next morning, I confronted him.
"I saw you training last night," I said without preamble, watching his face for any reaction.
Claude went still. For a heartbeat, his eyes changed.
Not fear. Not guilt.
Calculation, weighing options and outcomes with a speed that made my skin prickle.
The transformation was brief, there and gone in the space of a breath, but I saw it. The stranger, assessing me.
As if deciding whether I was a threat.
"How much did you see?" he asked.
"Enough."
Silence stretched between us. My wife was at the market, giving us privacy that suddenly felt oppressive.
The smithy fire crackled behind me, its light flickering across my son's strange face.
I watched him wrestle with the question, watched the decision form behind his eyes. Part of me hoped he would lie.
Would give me some innocent explanation that I could pretend to believe, allowing us both to maintain the fiction of normalcy.
But I had raised Claude to be honest. Even if he was different now, surely some of that had survived.
"I can't explain it," Claude said finally. "Not in a way you'd believe."
"Try me."
He laughed without humor. The laugh was too old for his face, carrying years of exhaustion.
"I don't even understand it myself, Father. I wake up with memories of things I've never done. Skills I've never learned. Deaths I've never experienced."
His hands clenched at his sides. "Sometimes I'm me. Sometimes I'm... someone else. And I can't control which one I'll be from moment to moment."
The confession was raw, honest in a way that hurt to hear. This wasn't the calculated response of a deceiver.
This was a boy, my boy, struggling with something beyond his comprehension.
"Are you possessed?" The question came out harsher than I intended, tinged with a fear I couldn't quite suppress.
"No." He met my eyes, and there was nothing in them but exhausted honesty.
"I'm still Claude. I'm still your son. But there are things inside me now that weren't there before. Knowledge. Memories. Instincts. They're part of me, but they also came from somewhere else."
"From where?"
"I don't know."
I wanted to push harder. To demand answers that made sense, explanations that fit within the boundaries of the world I understood.
But looking at my son's face, seeing the weight that pressed down on his small shoulders, I found that I couldn't.
Whatever had happened to Claude, he was suffering from it. That much was clear.
And pressing him wouldn't ease that suffering.
"The skills," I said slowly, choosing my words with care. "The ones I saw last night. Where did they come from?"
Claude's jaw tightened. "I told you. I don't know. They just... appear sometimes. Like I'm borrowing someone else's body. Someone who knew how to fight. Someone who spent their whole life training for battles I can't remember."
"And the knowledge at the forge?"
"Same thing." He held up his hands, small and calloused from work that should have been beyond his years.
"Sometimes my hands know things my mind doesn't. Sometimes I start working metal and I'm not... I'm not really there. Something else takes over. Something that knows what I don't."
"Is it dangerous?"
The question seemed to surprise him. He considered it for a long moment, his brow furrowing in thought.
"To you? To Mother? To the village?" He shook his head slowly.
"No. I don't think so. Whatever this is, it doesn't want to hurt people. It wants to protect them."
"Protect them from what?"
His jaw tightened again. For a long moment, I thought he wouldn't answer.
Then he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper.
"From what's coming."
The words hung in the air between us. I wanted to ask more.
Needed to ask more. But Claude's expression stopped me.
He looked old. Like a man who had seen too much and carried it alone.
"Some things you're better off not knowing, Father," Claude said quietly, echoing my own thoughts with eerie precision. "Just... trust me. Please. I'm trying to protect this village. Protect our family. That's all I want."
I studied my son's face, searching for any trace of deception. Any hint that he was manipulating me, using my love against me.
But all I saw was desperate sincerity. A boy asking his father to trust him with something too large to explain.
"Alright," I heard myself say. "I won't ask again."
Relief flooded his features, making him look young again. Making him look like my son.
"Thank you, Father."
I turned back to the forge, picking up my hammer with hands that trembled slightly. The familiar rhythm of work steadied me, anchored me to a reality that made sense.
Behind me, I heard Claude take up position at his own anvil. Heard the smaller hammer begin its pattern.
The rhythm was too perfect. Too practiced.
But I didn't turn around. I didn't ask.
I simply worked beside my son, the stranger who wore his face, and trusted that whatever burden he carried, he had his reasons for bearing it alone.
It was the hardest thing I had ever done.
But he was still my son. Whatever else he might be, that hadn't changed.
And I would stand beside him, even if I couldn't understand him.
Even if he frightened me.
Because that's what fathers did. They stood by their children, no matter what.
Even when those children became strangers.
◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ AUTHOR'S NOTE ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆
Want to read ahead? We have 10+ advance chapters available at eternal-lib com!
◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆