Time, for a being of 8,000 years, was a currency to be spent with miserly precision. For Elias, trapped in the frustratingly slow-moving vessel of a child's body, every second was a grain of sand in an hourglass he was desperate to shatter.
Two years had passed since his "miracle" with the eviction notice. Two years of playing the part, of smiling with a mouth that had once spoken words that unwove cosmic laws, of toddling on legs that had once strode across the bones of leviathans. The dissonance was a constant, low-grade agony, a itch he could not scratch for fear of revealing the monster beneath the skin.
His world was the cramped, two-room apartment and the grimy, concrete-choked playground below. It was a study in mundane despair. The air was thick with the smell of boiled cabbage, stale cigarette smoke, and the metallic tang of fear—fear of the next bill, the next illness, the next unexpected knock at the door. Lillian and Mark loved him with a ferocity that was both touching and, to Elias's analytical mind, profoundly useful. They were his first and most important shields. Their poverty was his camouflage.
His days followed a rigid, self-imposed structure. Mornings were for physical cultivation. While other children his age were learning to stack blocks, Elias was perfecting the circulation of his Qi—or as he more accurately termed it, his Animus, the raw stuff of existence itself. He would sit in a sunbeam, seemingly entranced by dust motes dancing in the air, while inside, he was a master conductor orchestrating a symphony of energy.
The ambient magic of this modern world was pathetic. It was like trying to drink from a damp cloth. The Pantheon Accord, he deduced, wasn't just a treaty; it was a massive, planet-wide damping field. It regulated the flow of arcane energy, preventing the kind of cataclysmic displays that had characterized the old days and, more importantly, keeping the human cattle ignorant and docile. But like any law, it had loopholes. It was designed to detect large outputs of power, not the subtle, internal refinement of the energy that was already present in every living thing.
So, Elias drew his power from within. From the food he ate, the air he breathed, the very emotions of those around him. He learned to siphon the dregs of potent energies: the sharp spike of his father's anger after a bad day, the sweet, cloying wave of his mother's love when she held him, even the faint, ambient fear that permeated the entire housing project. He refined it all in the crucible of his spirit, compressing it into a core of power so dense and pure it defied the Accord's sensors. It was a painstaking process, a diamond forming under immense pressure, one agonizing atom at a time.
Afternoons were for information gathering. This primarily meant television. Lillian, grateful for a quiet child who would sit for hours, often left the small, grainy screen on for background noise. To her, it was cartoons and daytime dramas. To Elias, it was a intelligence goldmine.
He cross-referenced news reports, weather anomalies, and local urban legends with his encyclopedic knowledge of fable behavior patterns. A series of bizarre animal mutilations in the next county? A low-tier werewolf, probably newly turned, struggling with control. A sudden, localized fog that caused people to forget entire hours? A lamia or a mist-weaver, likely marking its territory. A charismatic new cult leader drawing surprising crowds? A succubus or an incubus feeding on devotion.
He began to mentally map the city not by its streets, but by its hidden inhabitants. The warded building several blocks over was indeed a fable enclave—a low-to-mid-tier one, judging by the strength of the glamour. He sensed the canine sharpness of a were-kin pack operating out of a meat-packing plant. He felt the cold, parasitic emptiness of a vampire nest deep in the city's subway tunnels. They were all playing their parts, hiding in the shadows, careful not to break the Accord.
It was all so... small. So petty. Their little games of territory and feeding rights were like ants squabbling over crumbs while he, a titan, walked among them, biding his time.
His greatest challenge was language. His mind understood all the languages of man and god, but his vocal cords were undeveloped, his tongue clumsy. He had to consciously dumb himself down, to mispronounce words, to speak in the simple, fragmented sentences of a toddler. Every "mama" and "dada" was a calculated performance, a coin spent to purchase their unwavering trust and affection.
He was playing the long game, and he was a master of the craft. His patience was that of a continental plate, slow and inexorable.
One evening, the equilibrium of their fragile world shattered. Mark came home early, his face a mask of thunderous fury and shame. The smell of cheap whiskey clung to him, but it was undercut by the sharper scent of blood. He'd been laid off. And in the ensuing argument with his foreman, things had gotten physical. He hadn't started it, he insisted to a weeping Lillian, but he'd certainly finished it.
"He'll press charges, Lil," Mark said, his voice hollow, slumped at their rickety kitchen table. "He's connected. I'm done. They'll throw the book at me."
The fear in the room was palpable, a thick, suffocating soup. It was delicious. Elias, sitting on a ragged blanket on the floor, subtly deepened his breathing, drawing the potent emotional energy into his core. Crisis, he thought coldly. An opportunity.
Lillian cried, her hands shaking as she tried to clean the cut on Mark's knuckles. "What will we do? We can't… we can't lose you. How will we live?"
"I don't know," Mark whispered, the fight gone out of him, replaced by a despair so deep it was a well with no bottom.
Elias watched them. Their lives were so fragile, a house of cards in a hurricane. He could let it fall. It would be inconvenient—a scramble for new guardians, a potential move that might disrupt his careful observations. But it was manageable.
Or, a darker, more cunning part of him whispered, I can be the glue that holds it together. I can be their little miracle. Again.
The calculus was simple. Devoted, grateful parents were a more stable resource than the chaotic foster system. Their love for him was his most valuable asset. It was time for an investment.
The man his father had struck—a foreman named Jerry, with "connections." Elias didn't need to know more. The man was a bully, a small-time tyrant in a small-time kingdom. Such men were predictable. Their stories were always the same: pride, greed, a fear of being exposed.
Later that night, as his parents slept a fitful, terrified sleep, Elias went to work. He sat up in his crib, his eyes gleaming in the dark like chips of obsidian. His energy reserves were still low, but this required finesse, not force.
He focused on the concept of Jerry. He pulled the threads of the man's essence from the psychic impression left on his father's knuckles and the fear in his parents' hearts. It was a faint signature, but enough. Elias began to weave a narrative, not in the world around them, but in the world of dreams.
He couldn't reach Jerry directly from this distance with his current power. But he could target his father. He sent a subtle, insidious thought-form into Mark's sleeping mind. It wasn't a complex message. It was a feeling. A memory. The name of a rival company Jerry had been secretly negotiating with, a name Mark had overheard in drunken boasts but had forgotten. Elias pulled it from his father's subconscious and highlighted it, bathing it in a glow of sudden, crucial importance.
Simultaneously, he crafted a second narrative for Jerry himself, using the man's own avarice and paranoia as the foundation. He couldn't plant a full dream, but he could amplify what was already there. He took Jerry's latent fear of being caught double-dealing and turned it into a looming, shadowy dread. The feeling that he was being watched. That his secrets were about to be exposed. That the strange, quiet man he'd fired today might know more than he let on.
It was a delicate operation, a psychic house of cards. He fed it energy for hours, until he was trembling with exhaustion, his small body drenched in a cold sweat. Just before dawn, he felt a shift. A decision made in a dream. A fear crystallizing into a course of action.
He allowed himself to collapse back onto his mattress, spent. The die was cast.
Two days later, a nervous-looking Jerry appeared at their door. He didn't meet Mark's eyes. He mumbled something about a misunderstanding, about not wanting to cause trouble for a family man. He offered Mark his job back, with a small, almost apologetic raise. "Let's just forget the whole thing, huh?" he said, his voice strained.
Mark stood there, stunned, as Jerry practically fled down the hallway. Lillian burst into tears of relief, hugging a bewildered Mark.
"I don't understand," Mark muttered, holding her. "He was so sure he'd ruin me."
Lillian looked down at Elias, who was sitting on the floor, serenely stacking rings on a spindle. "It's another miracle," she whispered, her voice filled with awe. "Our little Eli. You're our good luck charm."
Elias looked up and gifted her a perfect, beatific smile. You have no idea, he thought.
The victory was minor, but its implications were vast. He had not only secured his stable environment but had successfully manipulated two adult minds across a distance, exploiting their own emotions to steer their actions. He'd used the Accord's own principles—the reliance on subtlety and story—against the mundane world. He was learning to compose music on the strings of cause and effect.
This success fueled him. His cultivation accelerated. By age three, his physical control was absolute. He could run with a silence that was unnatural, his balance perfect. He could manipulate small objects with a precision that made Lillian remark he'd be a surgeon one day. (He'd filed the idea away; a surgeon's access to blood, pain, and life force was indeed promising).
He began to venture further in his explorations, always under the guise of a curious child playing near his parents. The playground was his primary observatory. It was there he first saw her.
A little girl, maybe a year older than him, named Chloe. She was always pristine, her dresses too clean and too expensive for the neighborhood. She didn't play in the dirt. She would sit on a bench, her mother—a woman with cold, beautiful features and an air of immense boredom—watching nearby, and she would hold court. The other children, even the older, rougher ones, were drawn to her. They would bring her their best toys, vying for her attention, for her faint, condescending smile.
To any other observer, she was a privileged child from a better-off family slumming it for some unknown reason. To Elias, she was a beacon.
She radiated power. A specific, potent kind of magic. It was the magic of compulsion. Of narrative inevitability. The children weren't choosing to obey her; they were fulfilling their role in her story. They were the supporting cast to her princess.
She was a fable. A young one, her powers still nascent, but her archetype was unmistakable. She was some form of Charmer, a manipulator of wills. A nascent Snow White or a Sleeping Beauty, whose core myth wasn't purity or sleep, but the passive, enthralling power of their existence.
Elias watched her from the sandbox, his eyes narrowed to slits. Here was a true test. A being from the hidden world, living just next door, disguised in plain sight. His parents, like all the other oblivious adults, saw nothing.
He decided to engage. A controlled experiment. He needed to gauge the strength of her power, her awareness, and the rules of engagement that governed the fables in this modern era.
He waited for his moment. One day, Chloe was alone on the swings, her mother distracted by a phone call. Elias toddled over. He didn't look at her. He focused on the swing next to hers. It was old, its chain squeaking with a rhythmic, annoying pitch.
Elias placed his hand on the metal link. He didn't use his refined Animus. That would be like using a laser scalpel to cut butter. Instead, he used a sliver of power to manipulate friction and resonance, a simple kinetic adjustment any low-tier fable might use without triggering Accord alarms.
The squeaking stopped. Immediately.
Chloe's head snapped around. Her eyes, a startlingly vivid green, fixed on him. There was no curiosity in them, only a cold, assessing ownership. She was used to being the only source of unnatural events in her vicinity.
"You fixed it," she stated. It wasn't a question.
Elias looked at her, letting his eyes go wide and slightly vacant, the perfect picture of a confused three-year-old. "It was noisy," he mumbled.
"I know," she said, her voice laced with a superiority that was ancient. "I was going to fix it later. You don't have to. My daddy says people like you shouldn't touch things that aren't yours."
The insult was delivered with the casual cruelty of a child, but the intent behind it was pure fable arrogance. People like you. Mundane. Human. Inferior.
Elias felt a flicker of that old, familiar rage. The rage that had once toppled pantheons. He wanted to show her what he really was. To peel the innocence from his face and show her the abyss beneath. To make her understand that her entire bloodline was less than a speck of dust in the ledger of his sins.
Instead, he tapped into the deepest, most potent power he had mastered in this new life. He let his lower lip tremble. His eyes welled with perfect, convincing tears. He projected a wave of pure, hurt confusion. He didn't just fake cry; he made his emotional signature so pathetically, vulnerably human that it was a weapon.
"I… I'm sorry," he wailed, the sound grating on his own ears but serving its purpose perfectly.
The spell was broken. Chloe's compulsion relied on confidence, on perceived superiority. Faced with raw, messy, human emotion, her power faltered. She looked confused, even slightly disgusted, as if a toy had started bleeding. "Don't cry. You're a baby," she said, losing interest, and turned away.
Her mother looked over, annoyed. "Chloe, be nice." The woman's gaze swept over Elias, seeing only a crying toddler, and dismissed him entirely.
Mission accomplished. He had learned everything he needed to know. Her power was strong but brittle, reliant on a specific narrative. She had no true awareness; she was a child playing with a loaded gun she didn't understand. And most importantly, the Accord's laws were strict enough that even a minor fable wouldn't risk overt magic on a "human" child in public.
He allowed his mother to rush over and scoop him up, cooing comforts. He buried his face in her neck, hiding his expression.
The experiment was a resounding success. He had confronted a fable and remained perfectly hidden. He had used the mask of innocence like a master.
But the encounter left a bitter aftertaste. The arrogance of it. People like you. The sheer, unearned superiority of these creatures, hiding behind their glimmers and stories, thinking themselves above the very world that gave them form.
That night, as he lay in bed, he replayed the incident in his mind. Not the victory, but the insult. The dismissal. He focused on the feeling, honing it, sharpening it into a razor edge of pure, cold hatred.
They thought themselves the masters of story? They thought their narratives were sacred?
He would show them. He would take their precious stories and break them over his knee. He would rewrite their myths, corrupt their archetypes, and make them play roles in his story. The story of the Tethered Calamity. The story of The One Who Cries.
And it would begin with the little princess in the playground.
He wouldn't destroy her. That was too simple, too crude. He would corrupt her narrative. He would turn her compulsion into obsession, her pride into dependency. He would make her his first true pawn. His masterpiece of manipulation.
A slow, cruel smile spread across the face of the three-year-old boy in the dark.