The blurry faces resolved, over weeks, into Momma and Papa — Lady Elara and Lord Alaric, whose warmth was so immediate and so entirely unconditional that some cynical, Ethan-shaped part of him kept waiting for the catch. It never came. That, somehow, was almost worse.
No older siblings to eclipse him here. No younger ones stealing the room's attention with a look or a giggle. He was the only child of a wealthy, sprawling manor, and for the first time in either of his lives, he was, without qualification, the exact center of somebody's universe.
He tested the boundaries anyway, because some part of him needed to. Deus's laugh still echoed somewhere in the back of his infant skull — suicide will simply not be an option — and a furious, helpless corner of him needed proof, one way or the other.
He held his breath until his tiny lungs burned white-hot, until the world went spotted and grey at the edges — and his body gasped on its own, air rushing in without his permission, like his lungs belonged to somebody else with better survival instincts. He tried to roll off the edge of his crib in the dead of night and was caught, every single time, by warm, unhurried hands before he'd fallen an inch, as if the universe itself had assigned someone to the job.
He was trapped. Genuinely, thoroughly trapped, in the most well-appointed prison a person could ask for.
Fine, he thought, with the stubborn fury of something considerably older than a newborn. I'll find the loophole eventually. I'll prove that smug bastard wrong if it takes a hundred years. For now: observe. Learn the rules before you break them. Grow.
The years did their slow work regardless, whether he cooperated or not. Elias — that was his name now, and it took him embarrassingly long to stop flinching at it — watched Lord Alaric manage the estate with a fair, tired hand day after day, watched Lady Elara hum lullabies like she meant every single note instead of performing them. He watched them notice small things and actually seem grateful: a good harvest, a quiet evening with no crises, his own gurgling, undignified laugh.
He giggled — properly giggled, helplessly — when Lady Elara tickled his feet, silk sleeves brushing cool against his skin. He gripped Lord Alaric's ring-heavy hand with his whole fist and felt something unmistakably, uncomplicatedly warm settle in his chest, something that had no ulterior motive attached to it at all.
Deus's plan, to force gratitude down his throat, was arguably working. Just not in the smug, vindictive way the god had probably pictured when he'd cooked it up. Elias wasn't grateful because he'd been ordered to be. He was grateful the way you're grateful for good weather — quietly, helplessly, because it was simply, undeniably good, and no amount of suspicion could argue him out of feeling it.
The thought made him cry, hot and sudden and entirely without his permission.
He told himself, later, that it was just a baby thing. He mostly believed it.
Five years bought him a working vocabulary, functional legs, and a much better poker face than any three-year-old had a right to. Outwardly: a cherished, ordinary little lord, quiet and watchful in the way indulged only-children sometimes are. Inwardly: a mind cataloguing every anomaly in this world like a fugitive quietly mapping the exits of a country he hadn't chosen to be born into.
The anomaly, when it finally arrived, came delivered by a maid's clumsy hand and a dropped fruit knife on a hot, lazy afternoon in the garden hut. She yelped, blood welling bright red across her palm as the blade skittered across the tile — and Lady Elara reached out without even setting down her drink, as unhurried as if she were reaching for a napkin.
A soft glow bloomed from her mother's palm, gentle as captured moonlight. Elias watched, forgetting to breathe, as the cut sealed itself in real time — skin knitting closed, the redness fading, until there was no scar, no mark, no evidence the wound had ever existed at all.
"There, there," Lady Elara murmured. "No harm done."
For the first time since he'd woken up in this life, something other than resentment lit up in Elias's chest, sharp and electric.
If it could heal, he thought, watching his own small hands with new and faintly dangerous interest, could it also unmake? Could it reach far enough to touch a soul, and slip past whatever failsafe Deus had welded shut around his?
That night he abandoned sleep for the library, padding past servants who were, with mounting and slightly comic concern, already searching the halls for the young master.
He found a leather-bound tome on "Flow" — the world's ambient life force, a current running invisibly through everyone and everything, shaped by will into fire, shields, healing, ruin. Illustrations showed it moving through the body in colored channels: green Flow for restoration, like his mother's gentle glow. Red for destruction, wielded by grim figures in the margins engaged in acts he didn't examine too closely. And tucked in a dense chapter full of swirling black diagrams: Anti-Flow, corrosive, negating, spinning the opposite direction, described in the sparest, most careful language the author could manage.
If Flow was life, and Anti-Flow was its negation — that was a hypothesis worth several sleepless nights, and possibly the answer to a question he'd been quietly asking for years.
He needed to learn to read the harder passages properly first. Inconvenient. Everything about being three, and then four, was profoundly, relentlessly inconvenient.