My first memories were soaked in cold.
Not the gentle chill of a morning breeze, nor the crisp coolness of rain-washed air. No—this was the kind of cold that sank into the bones, that gnawed at skin until it felt raw, that whispered you were small, helpless, and unworthy of warmth.
There were no soft blankets to swaddle infants here, no lullabies, no motherly cooing. Warmth was weakness, tenderness a disease. They hardened their children from the first breath, as if kindness itself was an enemy to survival.
The crib they placed me in was no cradle at all. It was little more than a box of rough-hewn wood, unpolished and splintered. The boards pressed into my back, biting whenever I shifted. When I cried—as babies do, from hunger or pain or simple longing—I was not comforted. My sobs were met with silence. Sometimes with disdain.
I was not coddled. I was not rocked to sleep. I was left to exhaust myself into slumber. And in that silence, in those endless hours of neglect, I learned my first truth in this new world: weakness was punished. Emotion was scorned.
The woman I called mother—I hesitate to use the word, even now—rarely spoke to me. She had eyes like polished glass, a pale sheen to her skin as though carved from moonlight, and hands roughened by callus and scar. When she looked at me, there was no softness, no recognition of me as her child. Her gaze was practical, her tone clipped, her movements efficient. If she fed me, it was because hunger killed infants who wailed too long. If she touched me, it was only to move me from one place to another.
The man who lived with her spoke even less. His presence filled the small house like thunderclouds before a storm. I remember his eyes most—ice-cold, unyielding, a predator's gaze weighing whether prey was worth the strike. His strength was impossible to ignore. Even before I understood this world, I felt it pressing down on me, like a mountain looming overhead. He rarely raised his voice, but the air shifted when he entered a room, as though the walls themselves feared to displease him.
He was no father to me. No one dared call him that. Not even my mother.
By the time I was three, I was walking on unsteady legs. By four, I was working—because children here did not simply play. Childhood was not a sanctuary. It was training for survival.
They set me to tasks I had no business attempting at such an age. Carrying buckets of water half my size. Hauling bundles of firewood that left my small hands raw and blistered. Scrubbing wooden floors until my knees ached. Cleaning stalls that stank of sweat and dung.
If I cried, I was struck. If I stumbled, I was ignored. If I faltered long enough, the work would be done without me—and I would go without food.
I learned quickly. Not because I wanted to, but because the alternative was worse. Tears bought me nothing. Complaints earned me pain. Silence and endurance became my shield.
The village around me was no gentler. It was small, yes, but harsh as the land that cradled it. The cottages were stone, their walls chipped and scarred by endless storms. Roads were little more than packed mud, torn by wagon wheels and hardened by frost. The fields bore crops twisted by relentless winds, their gray-green stalks hunched like beaten men.
And the people… they were carved from hardship. Their bodies were forged into strength by necessity, not vanity. Even the women bore muscles roped tight like steel cables, their skin marked by scars and burns. Children younger than ten already carried the weight of survival in their stance. None were soft. None were weak. If weakness appeared, it was buried.
Every morning, the village stirred before dawn. Training began at sunrise, not just for warriors but for all. Children sparred with wooden weapons, their shouts ringing out in the pale light. Others ran drills—lifting stones, balancing logs, tumbling through dirt. Even those too small to fight sat cross-legged in meditation circles, their breaths timed with the rhythm of chants.
It was then I learned a word whispered with reverence, with awe, and sometimes with fear: Aetherka.
They called it Life Energy. The invisible current that wove through air and earth, through water and fire, through every living being. The villagers spoke of it the way priests once spoke of gods in my old life—sacred, untouchable, divine. Some feared it. Others worshipped it. All relied on it.
Only one in five were born attuned. Those few could feel the flow of Aetherka in their veins, like a second heartbeat. They were the chosen, the blessed.
The villagers called them Weavers and Bearers.
Weavers shaped Aetherka into the raw elements—fire conjured from bare palms, ice drawn from thin air, stone coaxed from earth. Bearers, in contrast, pulled it inward. They strengthened their bodies beyond mortal limits, making flesh and bone into weapons sharper than any blade. Speed, strength, and reflexes—magnified until they surpassed the possible.
The man in my house was both.
I never heard him admit it. He was no braggart. He wore his power like a cloak of silence, but I saw it all the same.
I saw him ignite the forge with a mere flick of his hand, no flint or spark required. I saw him lift stones that would have broken a team of men, carrying them as if they were bundles of straw. I saw him strike an ox into silence with nothing but a glare, his body radiating menace as though the very air bent to his will.
And the villagers knew. They bowed their heads when he passed, their eyes lowered, their voices hushed. Even those who carried scars from battle, even those with arms thick as tree trunks, treated him with a respect tinged by fear.
He never sought acknowledgment. He never demanded it. He simply existed, and the world bent around him.
To me, he was a storm made flesh. A storm I was forced to live beneath, with no shelter and no reprieve.
But never, in all those years, did anyone call him "father."
Not my mother. Not the villagers. Not even me.