#Aiden
Taylor slid the pepper-sauce jar toward me, and I nodded like nothing unusual was happening inside my skull. I scooped a little onto my porridge, stirred slowly, kept my hands steady. If anyone at the table noticed the way my eyes drifted—how they unfocused for just a breath too long—they would think I was tired.
Truth was, I was digging through Rin's memories again.
Trying to understand this place.
Mergehold.
To an outsider, it's a charming little city tucked beside the mountain spine—colorful stalls, prayer bells singing in the wind, families coming to pay tithe and worship the Supreme Deities. A holy retreat for troubled children. A sanctuary.
I passed Matthew the salt.
Sanctuary.
Right.
In reality, Mergehold is a machine. A living system disguised as faith.
The "city" part is just decoration. The real core is the temples—especially ours, devoted to Thartozh, the Devourer of Balance. Every temple claims a parent-deity, but Thartozh's halls are the most extreme. The most controlling.
Rin knew that.
Rin lived that.
And now so do I.
I swallowed a spoonful of porridge, tasting none of it.
The orphans the temple directly brings in—kids like me, kids like Rin—we're the ones who matter most. We see the inner workings. The rituals. The training. The experiments. We know we're awakened, even if the world doesn't.
Because no one else does.
That's what makes this place truly rotten.
I handed Toony a piece of bread, smiled at her, then went back to analyzing the truth sitting behind Rin's childhood memories.
The Empire forbids unregulated groups of awakened children.
Bans them outright.
Too afraid of rebellions. Too afraid of history repeating itself. A thousand years of cowardice disguised as law.
And yet here Mergehold stands—an illegal reservoir of awakened kids hidden behind a façade of piety and charity. Every smiling nun. Every morning prayer. Every tithe bowl. All camouflage.
Then there are the Waiter Children.
I watched two of them march past our table now—blue-robed, rigid, stone-faced. Temple enforcers trained from childhood. Not guards. Not acolytes. Something worse. They obey the nuns without hesitation. They endure harsher drills, brutal conditioning, punishments that would break adults. They keep the rest of us in line.
If the awakened children are the fuel,
the Waiter Children are the chains.
And finally… the robe colors.
Rin's memories flicked before my eyes:
Red for the gifted.
Blue for the enforcers.
Gold for the chosen.
Black for those whose destinies were decided before they could speak.
White… for the useless.
I glanced at my robe.
White.
The bottom tier.
The ones too weak to generate value. Too low-affinity to follow their Sage Paths. Too starved of mana to ever rise. The ones Mergehold sends to die if they ever attempt to become adventurers.
I stirred my porridge again, hiding the tightness in my jaw.
Rin was smart.
Sharp-minded.
Observant.
But physically?
Magically?
He was nothing.
A resource they barely invested in, because resources must give returns.
A labor market.
That's what he finally understood before he died.
A hidden one. Illegal. Protected by a god's name.
And now I am in his body.
Weak.
Mana-thin.
Affinity-frail.
Or… that's what they think.
Taylor bumped my shoulder, giggling at something Matthew said. I forced a small smile, the kind Rin would give, gentle and unassuming.
But inside, my thoughts burned.
Things will be different now.
Very different.
Because Rin lived his entire life believing he was trapped in the lowest rung of a system designed to exploit him.
I don't believe that.
I know how systems break.
How labor markets collapse.
How power vacuums form.
How empires crumble under the weight of their own fear.
Mergehold may think it's studying me.
Using me.
Sorting me.
But I already began studying it the moment I woke in this body.
And unlike Rin, I intend to win.I lifted my eyes for just a second, past the steam curling from the bowls, past the rows of shaved heads bent over food, and toward the slit windows carved high into the dining hall walls. And there they were—the outer walls of Mergehold, far in the distance but impossible to ignore.
A shadow drifted across the window. Then another. I angled my head just enough to see them: scaled beasts with wings like stretched leather, bone ridges gleaming in the sun. Dinosaurs—old bloodlines the Temple had no right to command—gliding on thermal winds as calmly as domesticated hawks.
I will escape Mergehol--
Some tapped my head a little bit harshly I turned to see who it was
"Hello, Corny," I muttered, dropping onto the bench.
Her smile was small but bright enough to pull half the table into laughter. Shoulders shook. Bread nearly flew. I forced another spoonful down, letting the heat burn—pain had a way of reminding you you're still here.
She blinked, tilted her head, and her smile softened in that way she did when she was studying someone. "Welcome back, big guy. I heard you were sick. You're okay now, right?" She slapped my belly lightly; it responded with a deep, traitorous rumble.
Corny ate like she breathed—calm, measured, entirely present. She was the strongest in Mergehold if we were talking pure ability, but she never acted like it. Instead of climbing the ladder, she pretended it didn't exist, spending time with the ones at the bottom—including me. A strange friendship, but she never treated it like charity.
"Did you see what Sister Mael did to Taro yesterday?" Matthew whispered.
Mira nearly spilled her soup snorting. "He was sneaking into the library after curfew again! Poor Taro froze like he was turning into one of the garden statues."
Taro flushed red but kept eating. "I just wanted to read," he muttered, jabbing meat with unnecessary violence.
"Sure," Matthew said. "That's usually Rin's territory."
Corny scraped her spoon, then looked at me without fully lifting her eyes.
"I heard you awakened. Why hide it?"
My stomach tightened. The stairs had already killed my appetite, but I kept my face blank.
Matthew leaned closer, grinning. "Yeah, spill it."
I shrugged. "It's probably nothing."
Corny snorted softly—too softly. "Nothing worth hiding still counts as something."
She shifted the conversation with a sip of porridge. "Anyway, did you see Taylor? Came in yesterday. The whole hall practically lost oxygen."
Matthew jabbed my arm. "She's hot. You probably shouldn't even look."
I paused mid-spoon, let a dry laugh escape. "Of course."
Corny's eyes flicked to me again—not judging, just… noting.
Dinner bled into chores. Chores bled into prayer. Prayer stretched into the kind of silence that made the walls feel too close. By the time the lamps dimmed, the hallways had fallen into their nightly stillness.
And when the last flame died, the compound shifted into its true shape—thin, watchful, listening.
Finally, it was night.
I waited. Not because the darkness comforted me—it didn't—but because dark things didn't ask questions. They just moved.
The bells had a pattern: one long toll, two short, then a pause while the nuns made their rounds. I learned it on the second day. Timed my breathing to it. Inhale, hold, step on the third count.
I slid from my cot when the two short chimes faded, wrapped my watch in cloth until the thrum went quiet, and kept my fingers cold to calm the pulse.
Climbing the wall made noise. Noise made problems. So I used the cart that took buckets to the garden—a chore every kid in Mergehold knew by heart. It always creaked when the wind hit from the wrong angle.
Tonight, I needed the wrong angle.
I nudged the cart into position, tucked myself beneath the tarp, and waited. Two patrols passed, shadows slicing the canvas. The third drifted away. I slipped out with straw stuffed into my sleeves to blur my outline and walked along the shadow-line of the outer wall, where the moon carved blind alleys in the hedges.
"When lanterns turned corners, I froze. When dogs barked, I learned to stop breathing."
Finally I was in view of them. Trees impossibly tall—trunks wider than houses—rose around the temple yard, their branches arcing so high they seemed to stitch into the clouds. Flowers sprawled across the grass—red, blue, violet—but each petal was perfectly even, like someone had drawn them with a compass.
I rubbed my eyes. Either I was dreaming, or this place hired gardeners with a disease for perfection.
I found my favorite spot and looked to the sky. The constellations glittered like stitched frost. I breathed out, letting the quiet do its work.
Then something moved in the dark. Not a shadow, not a shape—a soft, controlled step, the kind you only hear when the person isn't surprised to be discovered.
"Your guard dropped when you saw I was small."
She nodded without turning. Voice clipped. Precise.
"That can get you killed."
My mouth went dry. Instinct shoved me backward—the old reflex to fight or vanish. But she was small, a girl no older than me. A blade was strapped across her back, absurdly earnest: a wooden stake polished to a point, wrapped with twine like some stolen storybook sword.
I forced a smile.
"Why wouldn't I drop my guard? You're a tiny girl with a makeshift Excalibur. You look like an Arthurian parody."
She snorted, flat and unimpressed.
"Not a parody. It does damage."
"Didn't the rules say we should be sleeping?" I asked—question clumsy, a little too loud in the hush.
"What are you doing here?" she shot back immediately.
I frowned.
"It's not safe here."
Then—bolder than I felt—I added,
"And if you hadn't come out, you'd have increased my chances of not being caught."
Her laugh was small, surprised—like she hadn't expected humor from someone who sounded like he was narrating his own obituary.
"That's an odd way to sound like death," she murmured. "You speak like the ones in those old journals."
It was too dark to see her face properly. She'd tied something over the lower half—maybe a scarf—so I could only read her by silhouette. Moonlight caught on her hair: a storm of curls spilling wide around her shoulders, swallowing where her ears should've been. She stood with shoulders square, weight low, ribs tucked—her whole body aligned like a trained blade.
"Wait," I said before sense could stop me. "Are you the new kid?"
She tilted her head. A grin flickered under the scarf.
"Yeah. You took your time noticing."
Heat climbed up my neck. I looked away.
When my eyes returned, her stance hadn't shifted.
Still. Balanced. Ready.
"You're awfully confident for a kid," she said, like she wasn't also one.
"More sure of yourself than I was the first dozen times I did this."
"How do you know this is my first time?"
She didn't answer. Instead, she sat beside me. The the roof plate creaked. She lifted her eyes to the sky, and the silence that followed felt practiced—like she'd grown up talking to starlight more than people.
"I come out because my father likes watching the constellations," she said finally. Voice steady, almost too steady.
"He thinks it keeps the dark honest."
"What about you?" she asked, turning it back at me.
I chewed the quiet and found the only answer that made sense.
"The curse of knowledge," I muttered. "You see how things are built; you can't unsee the hinges."
A pause.
Then, softer:
"I'm not good at conversation. What's your name?"
She laughed—a brief, odd sound.
"You don't ask a girl her name the first time you meet her. Not in my culture."
"Which place?"
"A tribe called Zah in Harmont."
Her voice flattened, became a line with no vibration.
I nodded like all this information would be asked in an exam.
"So… what's your story?"
Her eyebrows went up.
"Story?"
"Yeah, story. I'd noticed most kids here were awakened because of the trauma they faced so young. I'd gone around asking, and my God… it only got worse the younger the kids were."
"I think you're a smart boy."
She looked up when she stressed the word boy.
"So you must know colonies in the Dominion don't do well. We aren't protected, and all those kinds of things. We kept sending letters to the Imperial Council, begging them to send at least one Imperial Hero because of how the monsters kept increasing there."
"They didn't," I finished for her.
She nodded.
"An awakened pack of deinonychus hit a settlement near us. It cut off the chief's head. My father… he got taken. I watched him get eaten."
She said it without tremor—trauma so old and rehearsed it had no room left for shaking.
"I'm sorry," I said, because decency is a habit that refuses to die.
She shrugged, eyes still on the sky.
"I didn't lose totally. I found an old drunk who taught me ways to fight for myself. It's why I learned to always be grateful."
"My dad was executed," I said before I could stop myself.
"That's how I awakened."
Then, stupidly:
"I think I even met Tharzoh in the Wildworld."
Her mouth formed a small circle.
"Tharzoh? No way. That's a name to keep to yourself."
"I'll find you tomorrow, then," I said. It came out sounding like a promise—
or a threat—
depending on how you tilted your head.
She pushed herself to her feet and laughed, sharp and bright.
"I won't allow it."
She tapped my leg with the toe of her wooden sword.
"It's late. Go back in."
Her face turned toward the compound, then back at me.
"If you find me tomorrow… maybe we can talk about who Mama is."