The cries of hunger were the first song I heard in this frail body.
No golden halls, no obsidian throne – only a wooden hut groaning under the wind, and the smoke of a dying fire choking the air.
I was born to peasants.
My mother's hands were rough from labor and cracked by frost, yet she held me with tenderness, as if the whole world lay in her arms. She smiled down at me as if I were a gift. A gift? No. I am a curse in a cradle.
She believed she could give me a new life. She did not know that within me dwelled something far older, far more dreadful than all her village prayers.
My father returned from the fields with his back bent under the weight of wood and soil, with eyes in which there was nothing but exhaustion. Their world was gray, pitiful, full of hunger and fear. And yet in their eyes burned hope – hope that their child would grow and have more than they ever did.
Oh, how bitter laughter pressed against my lips, though from the mouth of a child came only cries.
---
I grew slowly, yet with memories a child should not possess. When I crawled upon the packed earth, I already saw maps of kingdoms I once conquered. When I stammered over my first broken syllables, in my mind I recited incantations that shattered souls.
At night, when the hut grew silent and my parents slept, I scratched into the dust and dirt beside the cradle. Symbols. Runes. Marks that do not belong to this world.
My mother thought it play. My father thought it childish curiosity.
But those lines in the earth burned in my eyes as a reminder of who I was – and who I would be again.
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The first time I felt the spark, I was barely three years old.
I sat alone while my mother stirred thin soup and my father split wood. I raised my hand – small, weak, trembling – and whispered words I once thundered across temple spires.
The air in the hut froze.
The flame in the hearth died for an instant… and then flared again, darker, violet, unnatural.
My mother recoiled, crossing herself and whispering that it was a bad dream.
But I knew.
The darkness had never left me.
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I am not their son. I am no gift.
I am the ruler who was slain, the shadow that returned.
And in this cradle of ashes, my claim upon the world begins anew