The storm did not become a legend.
Not immediately.
By morning, the sky over the West Blue had cleared. Ships that had anchored in panic returned to their routes. Fishermen cursed lost nets and blamed bad luck. Sailors argued whether the wind had truly felt angry or if fear had simply made it seem so.
People forgot quickly.
Lowtide Village returned to its routine.
Inside the small house near the shore, the crying finally stopped.
The infant slept, chest rising and falling steadily. His grip was surprisingly strong, fingers curled tightly around nothing at all. Someone wrapped him in cloth and placed him in a wooden cradle that creaked with every gust of wind that slipped through the walls.
No one noticed anything strange.
No one felt pressure.
No one sensed danger.
He was just a child.
They wrote his name in the village record and moved on.
Axiom.
Days passed.
Then weeks.
Axiom grew quietly.
He did not cry often. He watched more than infants usually did, dark eyes following movement, light, shadows on the wall. When the wind howled outside, he slept deeper instead of waking.
The women of the village found that odd.
"Storm-born," one of them muttered once, half-joking.
No one laughed.
Lowtide Village raised him the way it raised all children—with shared meals, shared labor, and unspoken rules about survival. He learned to walk on uneven docks before smooth floors. He learned early that falling into the sea was dangerous and that storms were not something you argued with.
By the time he could speak, he already knew when weather was about to change.
Not because he remembered a plot.
But because his body listened.
Far inland, beyond the paths villagers used, Galeheart Wilds waited.
The forest did not care about names or records.
Wind bent trees into strange shapes. Animals with dense muscle and sharp eyes hunted and were hunted in turn. Bones fed the soil. The soil fed stronger beasts.
And sometimes, when the wind blew just right, the Wilds seemed to lean toward the village—
—as if watching something grow.
That was all.
No conclusions.
No powers.
No destiny spoken aloud.
Just a world turning, and a child breathing inside it.