The first thing Kaius remembered was the weight of futility.
It was not a single memory so much as a bruised impression—years of fatigue folded into one final, narrow corridor of realization. He had miscounted the timing, misjudged the risk, let something small slip because he had been tired of being brilliant and lonely and afraid. The consequence had been merciless and immediate. He had watched the world refuse him the mercy of a second chance in that last instant, and his last thought had been a raw, childish apology to people he could not name.
Then there was light. Not the pleasant rinsing brightness of morning but a pressureless, clean radiance that unstitched the edges of thought like a seam undone. Memory sheared and poured forward: childhood lessons, bitter successes, half-loved faces—an entire life folding into a single, tidal breath. He did not expect to feel relief. Instead he felt absurdly, achingly small.
When the light ebbed, he woke to the smell of wet straw and woodsmoke, a crowd of muffled voices, and the sound of rain beginning to stitch itself against a thin roof. The world arrived in textures—grain of timber under his cheek, the chew of stale bread in his mouth, the damp press of wool across his chest. He blinked and realized he was lying on someone's lap.
He was a child.
The realization should have been disorienting. Instead, the old, familiar voice that had narrated twenty-five wasted years of introspection in his last life clicked into place with an irony that tasted like bile. He was inside a body that could not instantly contain all the knowledge he possessed. That mismatch—adult memory in child's limbs—came with a small, exquisite cruelty. It made him see everything fresh and fragile and unfair.
"By the Nine," said a woman's voice close by, warm with practised hush. "Strong lungs. He'll do."
Kaius turned his head. A face leaned over him, round with thirty winters and a mouth that had been made for soft commands. She smelled of lavender and stale tobacco. Her hands were quick; she tucked a shawl about his shoulders and lifted him toward the little window, letting the rain smear the world into watercolor.
"Name?" someone else asked, a younger man this time, his voice cracked from shouting or from crying. It had a practical edge to it—the kind that belonged to people who kept lists and debts and livestock alive.
Kaius tried to shape a sound and found instead a rasp and a queasy, infant uncertainty. He could think in sentences like a man but form them not at all. That mismatch stung in a way words could not fix: he could not speak, only watch the world negotiate his fate for him.
The woman frowned. "Well, what shall we call him, then? This one's got fire in him." She tapped his palm with a fingernail as if testing for heat. Her face twitched into a smile, something stitched to surviving. "Kaius," she said at last, as if the name belonged to the room already. "Kaius Holl. You heard it, little one."
Kaius—this Kaius—did not think the name fit him. Names were promises people made to you, and promises had a way of hardening into expectations. Still, the syllable settled in his mind like a gauntlet, and he kept it.
Someone shifted him up. His legs were spindly but surprisingly responsive. He tested them like a mechanic testing a borrowed device: flexed the toes, rolled an ankle, put weight on the soles. They worked. The world cared to keep him moving.
"Warm him," the younger man said. "We'll get a bowl of broth. Someone fetch the lantern—no, the priest—no, the cloth. We need names for the register, the innkeeper—"
"Stop," the older woman murmured, a hand on the younger man's sleeve. For the first time Kaius noticed how the other man's shoulders were pulled forward, as if carrying some invisible timber. He had the look of someone who had been forced to mature earlier than the weather allowed. "Let him be. If the child is healthy, we find him a bed. If he's not, we do what we can. But we do not make lists over a newborn's eyes."
They moved around him like a current. Names were offered—distant relatives, a midwife's ward, the parish. Each name was a potential fate and a small tangle of obligations Kaius had spent his prior life avoiding. He watched them choose him with a dispassion he would later recognize as the surgeon's calm: necessary cruelty, an economy of choices. For now, exhaustion claimed them all. For now, he was only a wet, noisy bundle someone had handed off into a world that did not owe him anything.
He closed his eyes and let his other life pour over him like rain: the library that smelled of dust and failure, the hands he had held with tentative courage and the words he had never spoken, the moment he had miscounted and the small, sharp light of consequence. The memory was a ledger; it gave no solace. Instead, a new ledger opened beneath it—here, in this child's chest, possibilities unspent.
With a kind of clinical curiosity, he found his mind could still parse things it should not. He knew the cadence of steel when someone dragged it across stone. He understood, half-remembered and half-intuited, the way runes were carved to bind force. Those were not things a newborn should know. For a long, dizzying second he suspected fever. Then he turned his hand and found the mark.
It was nothing more than a pale, irregular crescent at first, a birthmark beneath the skin. The old woman bent, squinted, and hummed. "Huh." She frowned again, and the younger man—whom Kaius realized was the one who had called the register—leaned closer. "Looks like a printing," he said, the wrong word. He had not the language to explain whatever his mind tried to make of it. "Like a brand."
Kaius lifted his palm. The crescent was on the lifeline, buried in the ridges. He remembered seeing something like that once—a glyph in a book, a page he had turned in the half-life before this awakening. The memory pulsed like an unrehearsed muscle: glyphs did not appear on mortal flesh unless someone, somewhere, had touched fate to skin. The thought made his mouth go dry, but he could not make a sound to match it.
"Not uncommon for those born near the Iron Road," the woman said placidly. "They mark the children whose mothers pass along goods and don't have coin to spare. It helps the parish find the nearest kin." Her eyes held a practiced lack of surprise. "We'll list it as a mark. Easier for the registry."
Kaius almost laughed inwardly. Of course: a practical explanation for the impossible. He had learned, in his other life, that people made lists to keep chaos from smelling like fear. Here it was again—rationality leaning over something that smelled like destiny and saying, politely, You will fit in a box.
The lantern flashed. A shape stood at the door—tall, narrow, a silhouette carved in rain. The man bowed his head as if to keep his hair dry. He did not come in. He did not need to. The voices lowered, words folding into things unsaid. There were responsibilities to be apportioned and an infant's future to place like a coin into a bank.
Something stirred under Kaius's skin then: a faint pressure, the smallest heat, like a muscle preparing for work. It was not magic the way storybooks told it—no bright, theatrical sparkling or divine voice. It was instead a quiet, insistent hum, a tenderness like a tightened string. When he focused, the crescent on his palm warmed as if at a hearth. His fingers twitched; the shawl on his shoulders fluttered with the movement.
The old woman's eyes widened in the way of someone who had not yet made peace with wonder. "Did you feel that?" she asked aloud to the room rather than to him.
Kaius could not answer with words. He felt instead: the slight tightening in his fingers, the echo of the warmth along his palm, the map of knowledge folding and folding until it fit more snugly within his ribs. He thought the word yes in the old man's quiet vocabulary of resigned certainties and kept the sound behind his teeth.
They exchanged looks, an economy of decisions in microseconds. The young man, who had been sharpening his tongue and his plans, felt something like fear touch the edges of his practicality. The woman—midwife, perhaps priest's assistant, maybe both—smiled with the practiced gentleness of those who had seen death and wanted to keep such things polite. "Keep him warm, boy," she said to the younger man. "And watch for fever. If he wakes too often, fetch me."
She leaned down and touched the crescent on his palm as if testing a violin string. The hum answered like a note struck too loud in a cathedral. For a blink Kaius considered the absurdity of being afraid of what he had not yet become. The old life's cynicism whispered that powers were a prettier name for trouble. But even cynicism can be tired, and tiredness bends even bitter philosophies toward curiosity.
Outside, thunder rolled like a distant drum. The rain took on an appetite, as though it was trying to scrub the world clean of older mistakes. Kaius listened to it and felt, somewhere behind his ribs, the small ache of someone who had been allowed to wake when he deserved to sleep. The ache was not complaint; it was a raw, honest pressure that tasted like a promise he had not yet learned the words for.
He slept in little pulls—dreaming of corridors and libraries and the sound of a voice telling him to be careful—then woke to the murmur of the woman telling someone how small his hands were. Names were exchanged: a ledger, a ward, a good family who might take him in or not. Kaius kept his mouth shut. He had been a man who spoke too much in the other life; this opening hour felt like a test of patience and humility.
When the rain thinned to steady drizzle, the man at the door returned. Up close, Kaius could see the bruise under his eye and a fold of worry at the corners of his mouth. He looked as if he had been pulled across a distance by duty. "They'll take him," Kaius heard the man say to the woman. "There's a widow on Hollow Lane—keeps lodgings, won't ask questions. Little ones are harder to keep in spring." The man's voice was businesslike. Not unkind. Not cruel. Businesslike enough to carry a child across a world of possibilities and leave it there like an unwritten letter.
Kaius watched them move and felt the strange distance one feels when watching actors on a stage one has loved and learned to mistrust. He had kept people at a distance before because he had been afraid of being loved and then losing it. He had not known that losing someone because of your own failures hurt differently than losing someone because the world itself chose to be cruel. He had not known which hurt worse.
The old woman hummed again as she smoothed the shawl. "We'll mark him at the register," she promised. "And if anyone asks—if anyone asks, we say the widow took him. Young Kaius Holl. It's a good enough start."
Kaius turned his hand to look at the crescent once more. Whatever this world called it—a mark, a brand, a birthmark—something had pressed truth into his palm. He thought of all the small, stubborn things that had kept him alive in his other life: careful calculations, stubborn curiosity, the small courage of showing up. He allowed himself a single, private vow, half-childish boast and half-broken oath.
I will not waste this life, he thought. Not now.
It was a thought heavy enough to be dangerous. In the chest of the cottage, that thought became the first quiet gear of a machine that might, someday, change the course of a world. For now, it was only a boy with too-old eyes and a crescent in his palm, born into a rain that seemed determined to wash the map clear. He did not pray; he had, at the edge of his new memory, an old man's resignation about prayers—how they often wanted nothing more than an audience.
He closed his fist once, then relaxed it.
The runes did not glow. The world did not tilt. The man at the door folded his coat and left coins on the table. The old woman tied a strip of cloth gently around the boy's wrist and called for the widow on Hollow Lane. Kaius Holl—new name, new ledger, new beginning—felt the small, enormous weight of being unmoored and free.
Outside, the rain softened to a drizzle, and the road ahead lay blank as an unrolled scroll.