The despair was a physical presence, a leaden weight in his tiny chest that made even the act of breathing feel like a chore. Lysander moved through the routines of infant existence as an automaton. The coos and coddling of his mother, the playful jostling from his father, they were events that happened to him from a great distance. He was an observer behind a pane of thick, cloudy glass, watching a play he had already seen, whose ending he knew was a return to the same agonizing beginning.
His parents' initial joy began to be tinged with a low, thrumming worry. Clara would hold him for hours, her songs becoming less lullabies and more whispered pleas. "What is it, my heart? What has dimmed your light?" she would ask, her face a mask of maternal concern. Edmund, less poetic but no less concerned, would try to rouse him with loud, cheerful noises or by lifting him high in the air, but Lysander would only stare back with eyes that were old and empty, windows to a soul that had seen too much.
The world outside his cocoon of misery continued its turn. The brutal grip of the Great Frost began to loosen, inch by grudging inch. Icy drips from the eaves replaced the permanent icicles, and a pale, tentative sun sometimes broke through the grey wool of the sky. The change in season did nothing to thaw the winter in his heart.
It was during one of these slightly warmer afternoons, as he lay listlessly on a blanket by the hearth, that a conversation pierced the fog of his apathy. His father was speaking with a fellow tradesman, a man whose voice was as rough as the hides they worked with.
"...aye, it's a queer business, and no mistake," the neighbor was saying. "That fellow, Finch. Alistair Finch, down on Elm Street."
The name was a spark struck on the tinder of his memory. Finch. It was there, buried deep, associated with a time of shadow and desperation in his original life, a period before the stability of the publishing house, before the clarity of Elara's love. A time of frantic, searching grief.
"He's been buying up materials from the apothecaries," Edmund grunted, his voice accompanied by the sound of him mending a strap. "But not the usual remedies. Quicksilver, antimony, strange salts I've never heard of. And glassware, retorts, alembics, all of it. Claims he's an apothecary, but I've yet to hear of him tending a single soul."
The neighbor let out a short, derisive laugh. "An apothecary without patients is a man with a different master. Alchemy, I'll wager. Chasing phantoms and fool's gold."
Alchemy.
The word detonated in Lysander's mind. It was a key, turning a lock he hadn't known existed. A flood of fragmented, sensory memories burst forth: a room so cluttered with books and instruments that the walls seemed to bow inwards. The air thick with the acrid stink of sulfur and the metallic tang of ozone. The feel of a cold, smooth beaker in his hand. And a man, a man with eyes that burned with an unnatural, feverish intensity, set in a gaunt, pale face. Alistair Finch.
His own voice, younger, raw with a pain he had long suppressed, echoed in his memory. "They say you study the Prima Materia, that you can manipulate the fundamental essences, even time itself. I have... a problem. A sickness of a temporal nature. My sister..."
The memory was like a lightning flash, illuminating a dark landscape for a single, brilliant second before vanishing, leaving only the afterimage seared onto his consciousness. But it was enough. It was everything.
The leaden despair shattered, replaced by a white-hot wire of pure, undiluted purpose. This was not a random act of God or a twist of fate. This was not a cosmic punishment. This was the result of a man's actions. His death, his rebirth, this entire monstrous loop, it was tied to Alistair Finch and his damned experiments. The alchemist was the architect of this prison.
And if a man had built it, a man could tear it down.
The change in him was instantaneous and profound. The listlessness fell away like a discarded cloak. His eyes, which had been dull and vacant, now snapped with a sharp, focused intelligence. He began to pay acute attention to every conversation, every scrap of information that floated through the small house. He was no longer a passive prisoner; he was a spy in the enemy's camp, and the enemy was Time itself, with Finch as its chief lieutenant.
He began his campaign of conditioning with a new, ruthless patience. He allowed the "child prodigy" to emerge, but in carefully measured doses. He would mimic a word with perfect clarity days after hearing it, just once, enough to startle but not to terrify. He developed a habit of intense, unnerving silence when adults spoke, his gaze fixed on their faces as if he were absorbing not just their words, but their very thoughts. He stopped fighting the limitations of his body and began a determined, grueling regimen of mastering it. He would practice holding his head up for longer periods, strengthening his neck muscles. He focused all his will on the act of rolling over, of pushing himself up, of crawling. It was a war of attrition against his own flesh, and he was a general who would not accept defeat.
His parents watched this transformation with a mixture of relief and deepening awe. The strange, somber child was gone, replaced by a fiercely determined one. The story of his earlier, inexplicable knowledge of the peddler's red ribbon was now joined by other small marvels. He would stare at a specific toy minutes before it was given to him. He would become agitated when a certain visitor was due, as if he knew their presence was unwelcome before they even arrived.
"It's as if he knows things, Clara," Edmund said one night, his voice hushed as they watched their son sleep, his small face finally peaceful. "Not just bright. He knows."
Clara, her hand resting gently on the crib, could only nod. "He is a special soul, Edmund. I have felt it from the beginning. He has been here before." She meant it as a mother's poetic fancy, but her words landed on Lysander's conscious mind with the weight of absolute truth.
He had passed his first test. He had moved from the why to the who. The despair was gone, burned away by the fire of a new objective. Find Alistair Finch. Understand what he had done. And make him undo it. The path was long, and he was still a child in a crib. But for the first time since he had opened his eyes to the blurred light of 1701, Lysander had a destination.