He locked his door — an eight-second ordeal on legs that still occasionally betrayed him mid-stride — and sat cross-legged with the meditation chapter open in his lap, quill and journal within reach in case something worth recording happened. Turn inward. Find the current. Simple, the book promised, in the breezy tone of an author who had clearly never tried it as a toddler.
He closed his eyes, pushed away the distant, muffled sound of servants calling his name through the halls, and reached for the gentle stream the book had so confidently described.
He fell into an ocean instead.
The pressure was immediate and enormous, a black weight that threatened to crack his mind clean in half like an egg. It was nothing like the calm silver current in the diagrams. It was a storm with no visible surface.
Oh, hell, he thought, and then, with a spike of pure animal panic that outran every careful plan he'd made: I am not drowning again. Not after everything. Not because of that smug bastard's little test.
He clawed upward with a fury that outsized his three years by several centuries, refusing every instinct that told him to simply let the pressure win, and burst through the surface of his own soul gasping —
— just before the world exploded.
The roar tore through the manor's left wing like something enormous had exhaled all at once. Lord Alaric and Lady Elara ran from their study into a hallway choked with smoke and screaming servants, half the west rooms reduced to rubble and drifting ash, and found their son cradled in the wreckage of his own bedroom — dazed, entirely unhurt, staring at his own small hands like they belonged to a stranger who'd just done something impressive without asking permission.
"You're not in trouble, my love," Lord Alaric told him, kneeling in the debris to stroke his hair while masons were already, somewhere behind them, being urgently summoned.
"This just — happens, sometimes, when someone awakens this young. We'll rebuild. Don't you worry about it."
Elias barely heard him. He was still looking inward, at what he'd glimpsed in the instant before the blast: not a pool, not even a lake, but a vast, black, star-flecked sea stretching to a horizon he genuinely could not find, no matter which direction he turned to look. An infinite well of something that should, by every rule he understood, have a bottom.
He sat very still amid the chaotic, relieved celebration of his own survival, servants cheering that the young master was unharmed, and was, privately, thoroughly horrified.
He was immortal. Not resilient. Not lucky.
Immortal, in the specific, total sense that made the word feel less like a gift and more like a verdict.
Weeks later, still sulking beneath an embroidered coverlet while the west wing rang with the sound of scaffolding, Elias let his mother feed him rice pudding and dutifully allowed everyone to believe the sulking was about the house.
It wasn't.
"Fuck that," he thought, with real, uncomplicated feeling. He was furious at Deus. Immortality wasn't a gift; it was a leash with considerably better upholstery than the standard model.
"Don't dwell on it, my love," Lady Elara said, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. "Your father didn't awaken his Flow until quite late, you know. Long past when most nobles his age would have. They called him 'Flow-less Alaric' — rather unkindly — before he became 'Alaric the Still.' He never gave up. Studied every text he could find. Practiced meditations considered beneath a lesser talent, and beyond a greater one, and simply refused to stop until it worked."
Elias, despite himself, felt something like respect stir underneath the resentment.
"To awaken this young, this powerfully," his mother went on, glowing with a pride that made something in his chest ache in a way he didn't have a name for yet, "makes you nothing short of a prodigy, Elias. We will leave no stone unturned in your training. No master unconsulted."
"Yes, Mother," he said, and let her feed him another spoonful, filing away one grim, private hope in the back of his mind alongside everything else: even Ethan's favorite old stories had given their immortals a catch. A weakness. A rule with a fine-print asterisk somewhere. Surely Deus wouldn't break a pattern that old just to spite one insufferable teenager.
He nearly choked on the pudding, laughing internally at his own optimism, and his mother rubbed his back with worried tenderness while he cleared his throat.
Somewhere in an endless white room, a god watched him choke on rice pudding and grinned into a goblet of distilled starlight. Start asking questions, little mortal, Deus thought, delighted beyond measure. There are no loopholes. That's rather the whole point of the exercise.