The seasons turned, a slow wheel of sun and rain.
Leo's world expanded from the confines of rug and crib
to the wider geography of castle halls and guarded courtyards.
His body,once a traitorous prison, began to obey,
becoming a vessel he could,with effort, steer.
He learned to crawl,a frantic, undignified scramble
across vast deserts of polished stone,fleeing the approach of doting servants.
He learned to stand,clinging to table legs like a shipwrecked sailor to driftwood,
his legs trembling with the effort of defying a world that seemed to pull him down.
And through it all, the performance continued.
He was a court jester in a kingdom of one,
playing the fool for an audience of two beloved,bewildered monarchs.
He babbled nonsense,carefully filtering the words that tried to form—
the historical terms,the philosophical concepts, the echoes of another life.
He hid his observations behind a mask of wide-eyed vacancy.
But the mind, the restless, ancient mind, was a separate thing.
It watched,it cataloged, it analyzed. It saw the patterns in the castle guard's rotations.
It understood the subtle social hierarchy in the way the servants addressed each other.
It noted the way the light from the Mana Veil cast different,more vibrant shadows
than the light of a long-dead star called the sun.
His mother, Kaelia, remained his sanctuary. In her arms, the performance could soften.
He could rest his head against her shoulder and simply breathe in her scent,
a temporary amnesty from the war within his own soul.
She was the one who took him on daily walks through the castle,
naming things for him in her gentle voice.
"That is a tapestry,my love. It tells a story."
"These are roses.They smell sweet, do they not?"
He played his part, pointing with a chubby, uncoordinated hand, mimicking her sounds.
"Ta…ta…," he would say, for tapestry.
"Wose,"for rose.
It was during one of these walks that the performance finally, irrevocably, cracked.
They were in the Long Gallery, a hall reserved for portraits of stern-faced ancestors
and artifacts of Eldoria's history.Kaelia was showing him a display of ceremonial armor,
her voice a soothing melody against the cold,metallic silence of the exhibits.
At the end of the gallery, in a place of honor atop a marble pedestal,
rested a single object.It was not a sword or a shield.
It was a circlet,twisted from a metal that seemed neither silver nor gold,
but something in between,something older. It was tarnished and dented,
one of its points broken off entirely.It looked like a piece of scrap,
deemed too historically significant to throw away.
"And this," Kaelia said, her tone shifting to one of reverence, "is the Crown of Aethel.
Or what remains of it.A piece of the lost age. They say it was worn by the last king…"
She did not finish. She did not need to.
Altherion.
The name was a thunderclap inside Leo's skull, so loud he was surprised it didn't echo in the hall.
He knew this circlet.Not from a book. Not from a dream.
He knew the weight of it on his own brow.He knew the feel of the cool metal
against his skin on a warm day.He knew the exact spot where the gem—a star-sapphire
that pulsed with the heartbeat of the city—had been pried from its setting by desperate,greedy hands
as the world fell apart around them.
The nostalgia was not a gentle, scholarly longing. It was a physical pain,
a visceral,gut-wrenching homesickness for a home that was dust.
It was the memory of watching that crown,his crown, tumble from his head
as he poured his soul into a final,desperate spell.
The memory rose like a tide,drowning the careful walls he had built.
Kaelia, seeing his fixed stare, misinterpreted its nature.
"It is not very pretty,is it, my darling?" she said softly.
"It is just a broken,old thing."
No.
The denial was a fire in his veins. It was not a broken, old thing.
It was the symbol of a civilization.It was the weight of a million lives.
It was the last fragment of a world he had failed to save.
He looked from the circlet to his mother's gentle, misunderstanding face,
and a profound,desperate need to be seen, to be understood, overwhelmed him.
The actor dropped his mask.The ghost stepped into the light.
He pointed a steady, un-trembling finger at the crown.
His eyes,usually carefully vacant, now held a depth of sorrow
that no infant's face should ever be able to convey.
And he spoke. Not a babble. Not a mimicry.
But a clear,phonetically perfect, devastatingly accurate line.
His voice was high, a child's voice, but the cadence was ancient, the pronunciation flawless.
It was a line from the Lament of the Fallen,a epic poem sung by the survivors of Aethel,
a poem that had been lost for two thousand years.
"The crown lies heavy on a brow of dust," the child recited,
"And sings a silent song of what is lost."
The words hung in the air of the Long Gallery, crystalline and sharp.
For a moment,there was no sound. The very dust motes seemed to freeze in their sunlit dance.
Kaelia's hand, which had been resting on his shoulder, went rigid.
Her breath caught in her throat.The color drained from her face,
leaving her as pale as the marble pedestal.She looked down at her son,
not with confusion or worry,but with pure, unadulterated shock.
The performance was over. The secret was out.
Leo, his small body trembling with the aftershock of his confession,
met her gaze.He saw the love there, still, but it was now fractured,
shattered by a truth too immense to comprehend.
He had not mimicked a sound. He had quoted lost poetry.
He had not seen a toy.He had seen a kingdom.
The first spark of his true self had flared into the open,
and in its brief,brilliant light, he saw the terrifying new landscape of his life.
He was no longer just a strange child.He was a mystery.
And mysteries,in a world of power and politics, are dangerous things.
To be continued...