Time in infancy doesn't flow. It accumulates.
He understood this around the second week of his new existence. Days piled upon one another without visible boundaries: sleep, food, wakefulness, sleep again. The body lived by its own schedule, never asking permission from the consciousness dwelling within it. And the only truly useful thing he could do under these conditions was observe.
He observed a lot. Perhaps more than ever in his past life, where observation had been a pragmatic tool for survival. Here, he had no other choice. No weapon. No power. No allies except two people he hadn't asked for and owed nothing to, though this new body, it seemed, thought otherwise.
The instincts were irritating.
Every time Alice held him, something warm and completely uncontrollable rose from within, regardless of what his consciousness thought. Every time she left the room longer than usual, his body began signaling its displeasure in ways his consciousness found humiliating. He didn't cry often. Significantly less than, apparently, was expected of a child his age, which was the first item on the list of things that began to worry his mother.
But sometimes the body took over. And then he cried, and hated it, and calmed down when Alice came, and again hated that he calmed down.
"This will take a long time," he thought in such moments, staring at the ceiling over her shoulder. "A very long time."
---
Galen Crawford was a middle-rank adventurer.
He understood this not from words, but from details. From how his father held himself in space. From how his hands moved habitually and precisely, without wasted gestures. From the old scars on his wrists, barely noticeable but readable if you knew where to look. From how he always sat with his back to the wall and facing the door whenever they were in a common room. From how his gaze automatically checked the windows upon entering an unfamiliar place.
Habits etched into muscle deeper than any conscious effort. He knew such habits. He himself was woven from them.
Galen left in the morning and returned in the evening, sometimes later. Sometimes not alone: he heard voices in the hallway, brief conversations with someone at the threshold. Once, something resembling an argument, muffled but sharp. Then the door closed, and the house grew quiet again.
In the evenings, Galen washed, changed clothes, and came into the room. He never came into the room to him in the state he returned from the street. This, too, was a detail he noticed and remembered.
Once, around the tenth day, Galen came earlier than usual. Sat on the chair by the bed where he lay, and for a while just looked. His face was calm, but behind that calm, something lurked that he couldn't yet precisely identify. Something requiring time.
«You look like your mother,» he said finally. Not to anyone in particular, more aloud. «That's good. Means you'll think.»
He looked at his father.
Galen noticed his gaze. For a few seconds, he looked back, and something in his expression changed: not much, not dramatically, but it changed.
«You're strange,» he uttered quietly. Not with anxiety. With something like the cautious curiosity of a person who has discovered an unfamiliar object and hasn't yet decided what to do with it.
Then he stood, adjusted the blanket, and left.
"Observant," he noted. "Both observant. This is bad and good simultaneously. Bad because hiding my condition will be harder. Good because, at the very least, people like this aren't boring."
---
Alice Crawford, née Alice Vane, was a second-rank support mage.
He learned this later, when a visitor came to them. A woman around forty, large, loud, with a booming laugh and a manner of speaking without pauses. She burst into the house early morning with a basket of something aromatic and immediately began hugging Alice, exclaiming something, then spotted him and instantly wanted to hold him.
«Oh, Alice, what a one!» she exclaimed, holding him before her and examining him with delight he did not share. «The spitting image of Galen, that same serious nose. How are you feeling, girl? Have you recovered?»
«Everything's fine, Martha,» Alice smiled. «Sit down, I'll make tea.»
«I'll make tea. You sit. A second-rank support mage needs rest after childbirth, I've always said so. Especially if she was investing power into the baby during…»
«Martha,» Alice interrupted gently.
«Quiet, quiet.»
He remembered that slip. "Investing power into the baby." What that meant concerning support magic, he didn't yet know enough about this world to draw conclusions. But it was something important. Something Alice didn't want discussed aloud.
"Interesting."
The guest, Martha, held him for a few more minutes, then returned him to Alice with the air of someone who had completed the mandatory part of the program, and switched to talking about city news. He lay and listened. The words were still primarily sounds, but rhythm and intonation were beginning to form a structure. Several words repeated often enough for him to start attaching meaning to them.
«Adventurer's Guild,» «royal patent,» «third quarter,» «alchemist's shop,» «monster season.» The last phrase Martha uttered with a particular intonation: not fear, but respectful seriousness. Alice nodded, and something in her face became slightly more guarded.
"Monster season," he repeated mentally. "So, monsters aren't rare here. So, this is a regular occurrence. So, the world is dangerous at a fundamental level, not just in theory."
This was useful. This was a piece of the map.
---
In the third week, Galen began doing something he hadn't expected.
Every morning, before leaving, he would enter the room and hold him for a few minutes. Held him as he had learned, confidently and carefully at once. Sometimes he spoke. Not much, not extensively, like the mother, but in short, concise phrases, as if giving instructions.
«It's cold today. Remember: cold isn't an enemy if you're prepared for it.»
Or:
«Yesterday was a good contract. Small, but clean. Clean work is more important than loud work.»
Or simply, looking out the window:
«Look how the sun rises. The best moment of the day, when everything is still possible.»
He didn't know if Galen did this consciously or if it was just a habit of speaking aloud whatever was on your mind. But he listened to every word. Listened and stored it away in memory, where the structure of a new language, a new world, a new existence was beginning to take shape.
"This man is used to preparing others," he thought, watching his father. "He thinks about what he says. He knows words leave traces."
This respect for words was something he understood on his own, former level. In his past life, he never gave promises he couldn't keep. Not because he was an honest man. But because words were tools, and dull tools are useless.
"An interesting man, Galen Crawford," he decided. "Let's see what you turn out to be further on."
---
The library became his obsession by around the end of the first month.
Alice carried him past that slightly open door almost every day, and each time he looked into it with the same sharp feeling of incompleteness. Knowledge was in there. In there was what, in this body and this state, he couldn't obtain any other way—neither through conversation nor through observation, but only through text. Through system. Through structure.
One day, Alice finally went inside. Not for long, just to take a book from one of the shelves, quickly, knowing exactly where everything was, and left. But for a second, he was inside, and managed to see enough.
Shelves ran from floor to ceiling. No fewer than twelve rows on each side, estimating roughly. The books were varied: thick volumes in leather bindings with copper clasps, thin pamphlets in paper covers, rolls of parchment tied with cord. There was no dust on the shelves. This meant the library was used regularly, that the books weren't just decoration but were working materials.
On the spines of some books, he managed to glimpse symbols. Letters of this language, not yet fully familiar, but no longer alien. Some words he could already partially read, piecing them together from the sounds he had memorized from conversations.
"Herbs and Their Applications." "Cartography of Eldrakar." "The Core System: Basic Course."
He remembered the last one especially. "The Core System." He had heard this phrase several times in Alice and Galen's conversations. It was always spoken in a certain way: seriously, but matter-of-factly, as something self-evident. The way people talk about the weather, or about laws that exist regardless of whether you like them or not.
"Cores," he repeated to himself. "This is important. This, apparently, is the foundation of how power works in this world."
He didn't know yet that he himself had a core. Didn't know it already existed inside him, dark and silent, like a seed in frozen ground waiting for its time. Didn't know this core would make him what he would become.
But he sometimes felt something. Especially in moments just before falling asleep. Something quiet and dark, living in the very center of his chest. Not pain. Not warmth. Something for which there was no precise word. Something that was him, but deeper than himself.
He didn't pay attention to it yet. He had too many other things requiring attention first.
---
The first month was ending. He understood this from how the light outside the window had changed: the leaves on the trees in the yard had grown thicker, greener, the days longer. Spring was transitioning into early summer. The sun in Valmir was real, alive, golden in the hours when it hung low over the roofs.
One such evening, Alice went out into the yard with him for the first time.
She wrapped him up for a long time, despite it being warm, and he endured it silently, having already learned that resistance was pointless here. Then she stepped onto the porch, and the air hit his face: real, outdoor air, smelling of earth and grass, with a hint of distant smoke from someone's chimney, with a light wind carrying something unfamiliar, sweetish.
He froze.
Not because he was scared. But because this was the first time in the entire month that the world had ceased to be confined by four walls. The sky over the yard was enormous. Real. Not a piece framed by a window, but a real sky stretching from edge to edge. Blue and cloudless, with several birds slowly drifting in the heights.
"Big world," he thought. Simply. Without further comment.
Alice walked slowly along the path of flat stones, holding him so he could look forward. She said nothing. Just walked, and her steps were quiet and steady, and he looked at the yard, at the trees, at the fence beyond which the street was visible.
On the street was the city.
Not just a city in the abstract sense, as he'd seen it from the window, but a living city right beyond this fence. Voices, the creak of wheels on pavement, someone's loud laughter, the smell of bread from a nearby shop, the clang of metal from somewhere further. All of it rushed in at once, dense, three-dimensional, completely different than through glass and walls.
Through gaps in the fence, he saw the legs of passersby. Boots, shoes, simple footwear, expensive footwear. Different people. Different fates. Different roles in this world about which he still knew almost nothing concrete.
Alice stopped by a large tree in the corner of the yard. Stood under it, letting the wind stir the branches. One of the leaves fell and landed right on the blanket he was wrapped in. She picked it up, twirled it in her fingers, then placed it in his hand, small and clumsy.
He felt the leaf. Thin, slightly rough, with veins. Warm from the sun.
"The first thing in this world I've truly held in my hands," he thought. Not equipment, not a weapon, not a map. A leaf from a tree in the yard of a small house in a small town.
"An interesting beginning."
Alice looked at him. Then smiled that same quiet smile as by the window weeks ago.
«You like it,» she said. Not asking.
He looked at her. At her face, lit by the evening sun. At the weariness, which had lessened slightly over the past month. At the calmness in her that came not from weakness, but from something else, from the inner stability of a person who has accepted everything they have and decided it is enough.
"Strange woman," he thought. "Strong. In her own way."
Galen came out of the house. He stood on the porch, looked at the two of them under the tree, and something in his face softened, quickly, almost imperceptibly, but he saw it anyway.
«Dinner's ready,» Galen said.
«One more minute,» Alice replied.
Galen didn't argue. Remained standing on the porch, arms crossed, looking at the sky over the roofs. Silent. Just being nearby.
He lay in his mother's arms, clutched a tree leaf in his fist, and looked at his father, at his mother, at the yard, at the sky. At this small, quiet little world that was now his. Not by choice. But his nonetheless.
"I don't know why this happened," he thought. "I don't know who or what decided to bring me back. I don't know what this world wants from me."
"But I will find out. I always found out."
"For now," he added, almost without irony, "for now, I have a home. I have a library behind that door. I have two people who, for some reason, want me to live."
"For a start," he decided finally, "this is enough."
Evening descended upon Valmir softly and unhurriedly. The first lights flickered on in the windows of neighboring houses. Somewhere in the distance, over the city's towers, the sky began to darken, transitioning from blue into deep navy, almost inky at the horizon.
Alexander Crawford looked at that sky and thought about what it would be like in a year. In five years. In ten.
The gods lie. The world is cruel. Power has a price.
He knew all this.
But he was alive. And that, strangely enough, was something to work with.