Chapter 2: First Breath, First Kill (71 AC, Age 2-3)
Another year in the cage of flesh had passed. It was a year measured not in feasts or namedays, but in the slow, agonizing crawl of physical development and the deepening cracks in his family's fragile existence. The Galt incident had left a permanent scar. Borin, his father, had never fully recovered. His jaw had healed crookedly, giving him a perpetual sneer, but the deeper wound was in his spirit. He moved with the shuffling gait of a defeated man, the spark in his eyes extinguished and replaced by a dull, aching fear. He worked, he drank the cheap, watery ale that was Flea Bottom's only solace, and his nighttime cough grew deeper, a rattling premonition of an early grave. He was a compromised asset, his long-term viability plummeting.
Lara, his mother, had aged a decade in a year. Her weariness was now laced with a frantic, bird-like anxiety. She started at shadows, her hands constantly checking on Maric or his now five-year-old sister, Elara, a frail, quiet child who seemed to have been born with her father's resignation. Lara's affection for Maric was a fierce, desperate thing, the love of a woman clinging to a small point of light in an encroaching darkness. He was her baby, her sweet, quiet boy. She had no inkling of the ancient, calculating mind that watched her through his dark, observant eyes.
His greatest source of information, and his greatest point of frustration, was his brother. Kael was five, but the streets had already molded him into something older, harder. He was a ghost in training, learning the secret paths and hidden economies of the slum. He would vanish for hours and return with a bruised cheek and a stolen loaf of bread, or a handful of clams filched from a fishmonger's barrel. He never spoke of where he went, but Maric watched him with the focused intensity of a spymaster studying his most valuable field agent. He saw the way Kael's eyes darted, constantly assessing threats and opportunities. He saw the calluses forming on his small hands. He heard the new, coarser words Kael began to use, words learned in the gutters from other feral children. Kael was becoming a creature of this place, a living textbook on survival that Maric studied relentlessly.
For Maric himself, this year marked the transition from helplessness to a new, more infuriating form of imprisonment. He could walk. His legs, once useless appendages, were now functional, but they were the clumsy, unreliable limbs of a toddler. He would stand, take a few determined, wobbly steps, and then pitch over with a humiliating lack of grace. Each fall was a fresh insult, a reminder of the chasm between his mind's intent and his body's capability. But Marco Bellini had not built his empire on pride; he had built it on relentless, grinding discipline.
So he practiced. While other children his age took their first steps to the cooing encouragement of their parents, Maric's first steps were a calculated exercise. He treated his own body like a recalcitrant underling that needed to be broken and trained. He focused on balance, on the placement of his feet, on the subtle shift of weight. He fell, he rose, he fell again, his face a mask of infant placidity that hid a core of diamond-hard resolve. To Lara, his quiet determination was a sign of a placid temperament. To him, it was basic training.
Speech was the next bastion to conquer. He listened, cataloging words, sentence structures, and inflections. The raw data filled his mind. But his tongue was thick, his mouth unaccustomed to forming the shapes of complex thought. He could manage single syllables, the frustratingly primitive building blocks of language. "Ma," for Lara. "Kae," for his brother. They were tools, nothing more.
His first true, intentional word was chosen with the care of a king issuing a decree. One afternoon, Kael brought home half a meat pie, a treasure of unimaginable value. He had likely risked a severe beating for it. Lara divided it into five meager portions. As she handed Maric his tiny piece, his hand shot out, clumsy but firm, and he fixed his gaze on Kael's slightly larger portion.
"Mine," he said. The word was thick, poorly formed, but the intent was unmistakable.
A shocked silence fell over the hovel. Borin looked up from his stupor. Lara's tired face broke into a radiant smile. "He spoke! Borin, did you hear? His first word!"
Kael just stared, his suspicious eyes narrowing. He saw not a baby's first word, but a challenge. A territorial claim. He was the only one who came close to seeing the truth.
Maric held his brother's gaze for a second before letting his face dissolve back into a vacant, childish expression. The test was a success. He had communicated a complex, possessive concept. He had asserted his will. It was a small victory, but it was a start.
The true turning point, the event that would forever alter the course of his new life, came during the bleak heart of winter. A cold, biting wind howled through the gaps in the hovel's walls, and a perpetual, dreary rain turned the alleys of Flea Bottom into a quagmire of mud and human waste. Sickness, the ever-present predator, was stalking the Gut. The coughing sickness, they called it. It had already taken two children from the hovel next door. Elara was feverish, her small body shivering under a thin blanket, and even Kael's street-honed toughness was failing, his nose running constantly.
The cold made the other inhabitants of their home bolder. The rats.
They were a constant, scuttling presence in the walls and under the floorboards, a greasy, chittering tide of filth. But with the cold came hunger, and they grew brazen. They were no longer content with crumbs; they were after the family's hoard of food—a small sack of oats and a few dried fish—which was all that stood between them and starvation.
Maric, now nearing his third nameday, watched them with cold fury. They were thieves. Pests that threatened his primary assets. They were a microcosm of the world outside: vermin that preyed on the weak. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the damp wall, watching one particularly large specimen. It was a grizzled old male with a notched ear and a coat of mangy grey fur. It crept from a hole near the fire pit, its nose twitching, its beady black eyes gleaming with malevolent intelligence. Its target was a small piece of hard, stale bread that had fallen from Lara's lap.
It was their food for the next morning.
A primal, possessive anger, something deeper and hotter than his usual cold calculation, surged through Maric. Mine. The word echoed in his skull.
He moved without thinking. It was an instinctual, clumsy act. He pushed himself up, his chubby legs unsteady, and lunged toward the rat. He wasn't trying to kill it, merely to scare it away from his property. But his coordination was still that of a toddler. His foot caught on an uneven patch of the floor, and he pitched forward, his hands thrown out to break his fall.
In his right hand, he was clutching a small, sharp-edged piece of slate he'd been scraping against the floor, fascinated by the lines it made. It was a toy. An instrument of idle curiosity.
His falling weight drove the hand holding the slate downward. The rat, startled by his sudden movement, had frozen for a fatal instant. The sharp edge of the rock connected with its skull.
There was a sickeningly soft, brittle crunch.
The rat convulsed once, a horrid, electric jolt, and then lay still. A tiny smear of blood, shockingly red, blossomed on the dirt floor.
The hovel was silent save for the whistling wind and Elara's faint, feverish breaths. Maric stared at the dead creature, his heart hammering in his chest. He had killed. It was a pathetic, accidental kill, a footnote in a life that had been defined by ordering the deaths of men. But it was the first life he had taken with his own hands in this new world.
And then it happened.
It was not a thought or a sound. It was a sensation, utterly alien and profoundly intimate. A warmth bloomed from the point of contact, from the dead rat, and flowed up his arm. It was like a thread of liquid gold, a warm, honey-like energy that surged through his veins. It was the antithesis of the hovel's damp chill. It was pure vitality.
The gnawing, perpetual hunger in his belly, a sensation so constant he had accepted it as a part of his existence, vanished. The weariness in his small, developing muscles evaporated. The slight fogginess of his mind, a product of malnutrition and the oppressive squalor, cleared as if a dirty window had been wiped clean. He felt… strong. Not strong in the sense of a grown man, but whole. Complete. The low-level physical misery that was the baseline of his life was simply gone.
With the warmth came a fleeting, ephemeral wisp of something else. It was not a memory, not a skill. It was a phantom sensation, an echo of the rat's existence. For a breathtaking second, his senses sharpened. The smell of the damp earth, the stale smoke, the sickness on his sister's breath became incredibly vivid. He was suddenly, innately aware of every crack in the wall, every shadow in the corner, the precise location of the loose floorboard near his father's pallet. It was the primal, instinctual knowledge of a creature that lived and died by its familiarity with its territory. Then, as quickly as it came, the sensation faded, leaving only the warmth and the clarity behind.
He pushed himself back, his eyes wide, staring at the dead rat and then at his own small hand. He flexed his fingers. They felt more responsive, more his own.
What was that?
The mind of Marco Bellini, the Architect, went to work, sifting through the impossible experience with the cold logic that had been his greatest weapon. He broke it down, analyzed it.
Hypothesis: The act of causing death resulted in a transfer of… something. Essence. Life force.
Variables:
* The Cause: Was it the act of killing itself? Was it his intent? His intent was merely to chase, not to kill. The kill was an accident. This suggested intent was not a primary factor.
* The Source: A rat. A low-level creature. The transfer was minor, a brief surge of vitality and a phantom echo of instinct. What would the source be if it were something… more? A dog? A man? The thought was chilling and exhilarating.
* The Transfer: A tangible, physical sensation. A warmth. An energy. It was real. He was not imagining the absence of hunger or the newfound clarity in his head.
* The Byproduct: The absorption of non-physical traits. The momentary burst of spatial awareness. This was the most significant variable. If killing a rat gave him a flicker of its instinct, what would killing a swordsman give him? Or a scholar? Or a king?
The implications were staggering, a paradigm shift in his long-term planning. His foreknowledge of Westerosi history was a map to the gold mines. This… this was a tool to dig the gold. It was a power that could allow him to not just navigate the future, but to dominate it in a way he had never imagined. It was a path to strength, to longevity, to an accumulation of skills that could make him a polymath, a warrior, a sorcerer, all in one lifetime.
The name of his old organization, the Bellini family, meant 'the beautiful ones'. It was an ironic title for a group of thugs and killers. But this gift, this dark, beautiful, terrifying power… it could make him truly beautiful, in the purest, most predatory sense of the word. He could become the perfect survivor, the ultimate predator.
A small sound brought him back to reality. Lara was stirring. He needed to act. This secret, this incredible, world-altering discovery, was his alone. He could not share it. Love, he knew, was a vulnerability. Fear was a liability. His family, seeing such a power, would react with one or the other. They would not understand the cold calculus of it; they would see only a dark miracle, a curse. They would become unpredictable. And unpredictability was death.
He did what he had been training himself to do for three years. He became a toddler again.
His face crumpled. A high-pitched, frightened wail tore from his throat, a perfect imitation of a child terrified by the sight of death. He scrambled backward, away from the dead rat, and held his hands up to his mother, his eyes wide with expertly feigned horror.
Lara was instantly awake, rushing to his side. "Maric! What is it? Oh…" She saw the rat, the smear of blood. "Seven hells." She scooped him into her arms, rocking him, murmuring soothing words. "Shh, shh, it's all right. Just a filthy rat. It can't hurt you now."
She held him tight, feeling his small, solid body. "You feel warm," she murmured, her brow furrowed with concern. "Not feverish, just… warm. Healthy." She chalked it up to a mother's wishful thinking, a moment of respite from the encroaching sickness.
Over her shoulder, Maric looked at the dead rat. The body was already growing cold, its significance known only to him. He buried his face in his mother's neck, the picture of a frightened child, while his mind raced, cold and clear and sharper than it had ever been.
He kept the secret locked away, buried deep beneath a facade of childish innocence. In the days that followed, he observed the world with his new, heightened clarity. He watched as the sickness took Elara deeper into its grip, her breaths becoming shallow. He saw the desperation in his mother's eyes as she gave his sister the last of the broth. And he felt the lingering warmth inside him, the stolen vitality, a stark contrast to the decay around him.
The feeling of guilt was a foreign, phantom sensation, like a limb that had been amputated long ago. He acknowledged its theoretical existence and dismissed it. Guilt was useless. The rat's life force was not. It had made him stronger. It had made him sharper. And in this world, strength and sharpness were the only things that mattered. Weakness, like his sister's, was a death sentence.
A week later, while huddled by the fire, he saw another rat, smaller this time, darting out from the shadows. It was heading for the water bucket. His family was asleep, a collection of quiet, wheezing breaths in the darkness.
He looked at the rat. He looked at his hands, now his own to command with growing precision. The memory of that golden warmth, that surge of life, was a powerful lure. The experiment had to be replicated. A hypothesis was worthless without confirmation.
He quietly picked up another stone. This time, it would not be an accident.