Fourteen years. Fourteen years to learn the language, the customs, the history of this incredible world called Gaia. Fourteen years to understand that I, Leo-the-nobody, was now Kaelen, a ward of the Holy Church of Ain, living in the shadow of the great capital city.
And most importantly, fourteen years to learn about the Awakening.
It was everything. Your element defined your status, your career, your entire life. The other orphans I grew up with dreamed of Fire to become blacksmiths, Water to become healers, Earth to become builders. They revered the great families—the Malkuths, the Hods, the Keters—whose powerful bloodlines guaranteed them mighty Divine Elements.
I had no bloodline. I was a leaf on the wind. My only heritage was a death in another world.
The day of the communal Awakening ceremony arrived. It was for the parentless, the commoners, the nobodies. No grand cathedral for us, just the town square with a traveling priest from the capital. My friends were buzzing with nervous energy.
"Think I'll get Air? I'd love to be a messenger!" my friend Elara said, hopping from foot to foot.
"Anything but basic Earth," another groaned. "I don't want to be a ditch-digger."
I stayed quiet. A cold dread, entirely my own, sat in my stomach. This wasn't just about social pressure. This was about the core truth of my existence here. I was an imposter. A soul shoved into a world that didn't make me, activated by a miracle meant for its native children. What if Gaia looked at me and saw... nothing? What if the mechanism broke on contact with my foreign soul?
"Kaelen of the Parish Orphanage," the priest called, his voice bored from repetition.
I stepped forward. The priest, a man with a pinched face who clearly saw this as a duty, not an honor, placed his hand on my head. He began the rote prayer to Gaia and Goddess Eva.
I closed my eyes, not in prayer, but in fear. Please, I thought, not to Gaia, but to the universe itself. Just let it be something normal. Let me belong. Just this once.
I felt it then. Not a spark, but a void. A deep, cold emptiness that I recognized. It was the same absolute nothingness I had floated in after the car crash. It was the silence before my first cry in this world. It was my element. Not a gift from this world, but a piece of the between-place I had carried with me.
It erupted from me.
The priest yelped and jerked his hand back, clutching his fingers. The vibrant green grass at my feet turned brittle and grey, crumbling to ash in a perfect circle around me. The wooden podium next to me groaned as its vitality was siphoned away, the wood splintering and rotting before the crowd's eyes. The air grew cold and still, the cheerful noises of the square sucked into an eerie hush.
The bored priest was gone, replaced by a man staring with pure, unadulterated terror. He stumbled back, pointing a shaking finger at me.
"Decay!" he screamed, his voice cracking. "The touch of the Other! Heresy!"
The crowd, once jovial, recoiled as if I were a venomous snake. Elara's hands were clamped over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. The friend who didn't want to be a ditch-digger looked at me like I was a corpse.
I stood there, surrounded by the evidence of my own power. The power of ending. The power of death. In a world that celebrated life and elemental creation, I was anathema.
In that moment, any hope of belonging shattered. I wasn't just an orphan. I was a ghost. A heretic. A mistake.
The priest, finding his courage, gestured to two town guards. "Seize him! By the authority of the Council of Sephirah and the Holy Church!"
As the guards advanced, their hands glowing with the solid, honest light of basic Earth element, I finally understood.
My first life had ended in a crash. My second life had just ended on the Awakening altar.
And my third life? It was about to become a flight for survival. I had died in one world only to be born into another that wanted me dead all over again. The will to live, the same stubborn will that had carried me through two births, ignited in my chest.
I wouldn't go quietly.
I raised my hands, not knowing how to control it, only feeling that cold, familiar void swirling in my palms. The world called it Decay.
I called it my own.