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❄️ Chapter 1: The Cry of a Newborn
The wind howled like a starving beast.
Snow fell thick from a gray sky, blanketing the camp of hide tents and smoking fires until even the footprints of hunters vanished within moments. Beyond the Wall, this was life—short, cruel, and bitter.
Inside one such tent, a woman screamed. Her voice cracked against the storm, muffled by furs and the low chants of a midwife. Men gathered outside, weapons in hand, as though steel could fend off death itself. Beyond the warmth of the fire, the forest watched with eyes of ice.
The child came with blood and pain, born in the heart of winter. His first breath was a cry that cut through the howling storm, and the wind stilled for just a moment, as though the world itself was listening.
The midwife gasped.
The babe's eyes were open—wide, sharp, impossibly aware. They glimmered not with the dull gray of most Free Folk, but with an intensity that made the hairs on her arms rise.
"He looks at me," she whispered, almost dropping him. "Like a grown man, not a babe."
His mother, pale and trembling, reached for him. "He is mine. My son. The gods have given him."
The babe's tiny fingers grasped at the air. He did not understand the words, but his soul remembered. He had died once. Another world, another life, flickered at the edges of his newborn mind. Vast oceans, islands in the sky, beasts that could swallow ships whole, and men who split seas with their fists.
And books. Endless books. Knowledge that did not belong to this frozen wasteland.
This is not a dream… his infant mind whispered. I have been given another chance.
The clan chief pushed into the tent, his beard rimed with frost. He looked upon the child with a hunter's eyes, weighing worth against weakness. "A boy?"
"Aye," the midwife said, voice trembling. "And strong. His cry stopped the wind."
The chief grunted. "Then he will live."
That was no small thing. Beyond the Wall, half the children born in winter died before they saw a second moon. But this boy's wail had made even the storm pause, if only for a heartbeat.
The babe, cradled against his mother's chest, drifted into sleep. Yet in that fragile slumber, visions stirred.
An endless sea beneath twin suns.
A compass needle that spun wildly before settling north.
And a voice, neither male nor female, echoing in his mind:
"Two gifts per moon. Draw from the Sea of Worlds. Choose well, little king."
The child did not yet know what it meant. But in that moment, in a smoky tent beyond the Wall, with storm and shadow pressing in, his destiny began.