The heavy oak door of his quarters thudded shut, the sound a dull, final thump that sealed him inside the cold silence of his room.
Brandt paced the confines of the granite cell, the rhythmic slap-slap-slap of his boots against the stone measuring out the boundaries of his cage.
A servant had come and gone, leaving a wooden tray with the remnants of a meal—a picked-clean bird carcass and a smear of gravy on a pewter plate—sitting on his desk.
The food settled like a heavy, warm stone in his stomach, fueling the feverish activity of his mind.
The migraine had finally receded.
The agonising, white-hot spike of pain from the library, the physical price for Silent Acquisition, had dulled to a low, persistent throb behind his temples. It was a reminder of the sheer volume of data he had forcibly shoved into his brain.
He wasn't just recalling the information. He was dissecting it, sifting through the dry text to find the ugly truths hidden between the lines.
'One in one hundred.'
The statistic from the faded text echoed in his mind—a one per cent chance for a child to Awaken when their mana pathways fully formed.
He stopped at the arrow slit, staring at the sliver of bruised, purple sky. The numbers didn't sit right. For a gift this profound, this reality-altering, one per cent wasn't scarcity; it was a statistical anomaly. In a natural population, the variance should be higher or lower.
It shouldn't be this consistent.
'It's not chance,' he concluded, his lips curling into a cold sneer.
The dusty tomes hadn't stated it outright—they were too steeped in reverence for the ruling class—but the subtext was screaming. The nobility's obsessive, almost religious focus on bloodline, on pure lineage... it wasn't about vanity or preserving tradition.
It was a breeding program.
The texts noted that two Awakened parents drastically increased the odds of an Awakened child.
Add Awakened grandparents to the equation, and the chance became a near certainty. The aristocracy of this kingdom hadn't just hoarded wealth and land; they had hoarded evolution. They had spent centuries selectively breeding themselves into a biologically superior species.
'This isn't just a social hierarchy,' he mused, the thought bitter and cynical. 'It's a biological arms race.'
The commoners weren't just poor; they were genetically disarmed. They were livestock, kept around to till the fields and die in the wars of their betters.
Augmenters. And Conjurers.
Brandt resumed his pacing, his small hands clasped behind his back.
The books were clear. Augmenters were the vast majority of the Awakened population. They were the grunts. The foot soldiers. Their internal physiology forced mana inward, driving it into their own muscles, bones, and sinew. They reinforced the body, becoming faster, stronger, and unnaturally durable.
They turned themselves into weapons.
But the Conjurers... they were the artillery.
They didn't just trap the energy; they projected it. They sensed the elemental particles adrift in the atmosphere—the fundamental building blocks of reality—and bent them to their will.
'Fire, Water, Earth, Wind.'
He ticked them off in his mind. The basics. Tools of creation and, more often, of spectacular destruction.
And then, the deviations. The rare, potent affinities that only manifested in specific, coveted bloodlines. Lightning that could stop a heart from across a room. Ice that could shatter steel. Gravity that could crush a man's bones into paste. Metal, Light... even, the texts whispered, Darkness and Void.
A Conjurer with a high-tier affinity wasn't just a mage; they were a strategic asset. A walking catastrophe. A human-shaped deterrent. It explained the reverence. You didn't just respect a Conjurer; you feared them, because they could level your house with a thought.
He stopped in the centre of the room, closing his eyes. He reached back to the memory of the infirmary, stripping away the fear and the confusion, focusing on the physical sensation Maester Vorin had described.
The inward pressure.
Brandt remembered it. He had felt it in his marrow. In that moment of transition, of rebirth, the power hadn't sought to escape. It hadn't pushed outward, seeking to shape the world.
It had collapsed into him. It had imploded, rushing to fill the void, reinforcing the vessel until it nearly cracked.
He opened his eyes and stared at his small, pale hands. He flexed his fingers, feeling the latent energy humming beneath the skin. He felt no disappointment. In its place, a cold, profound sense of relief settled in his gut.
'Good.'
He didn't want to be a spectacle.
He didn't want to be a walking piece of artillery, a flashy, high-value target that screamed his power to every enemy on the field. Augmentation was subtle. It was internal. It was brutally efficient. It was the path of the survivor, the path of the predator who hid his strength until the moment of the kill.
It suited him perfectly.
A new, colder thought surfaced, souring the relief.
'But was it my path?'
Maester Vorin had called his early Awakening a miracle, a sign of prodigious Rimescar talent. Brandt knew better. This hadn't been a natural, biological maturation. It had been an intervention.
'Lilith.'
In the nightmare, in that false library, she had snapped her fingers. The barrier had formed. The pressure had begun. She had kick-started the process.
'Would this body... would Brandt... have Awakened at all?' he wondered, the thought chilling. 'Or was he a dud? A genetic failure, a shame to his house?'
Was he just a broken toy she'd fixed to make their game more interesting?
He pushed the useless, corrosive thought aside. It didn't matter. The engine was running now.
He moved on, dissecting the remaining data.
The books had listed the anomalies—the freaks.
Deviants. A clumsy, catch-all term for the outliers.
Maester Vorin. The old man wasn't just a Conjurer; he was a deviant channelling Light magic. A healer. In this brutal world, that kind of power wasn't just valuable; it was priceless. It made Vorin, in his frail, grandfatherly shell, perhaps the single most indispensable person in the entire Marquessate.
You could replace a soldier. You couldn't replace the man who stopped the soldiers from dying of gangrene.
Then, the Diviners.
Brandt felt a flicker of professional disgust. People who prayed to dead gods and received fractured glimpses of the future. The books were vague on the mechanics, but explicit on the cost. It was a fool's bargain. They traded their own vitality, their own lifespan, for fragmented, unreliable, and often metaphorical data.
'Amateurs.'
He had built his entire life on predicting human behaviour, on dissecting the past to map the future. That was a science. This... this was self-destruction.
And finally, the theoreticals. The unicorns.
Mages who walked both paths. Dual-types.
The texts dismissed them as myths or as spectacular, messy failures. The internal systems were physiologically opposed. One locked mana in, the other cycled it out. To attempt both was to invite a civil war within your own veins, a catastrophe that usually ended with a ruptured, explosive death.
'Jack of all trades, master of none,' he mused. 'Or, more likely, just a corpse.'
He filed it away—improbable, but not impossible. His mind always made room for the one-in-a-million outlier. They were the ones who changed the game.
The adrenaline of the study session finally drained away, leaving a heavy, leaden fatigue in its wake.
He walked to the massive, four-poster bed and collapsed onto it, face-planting into the dusty, animal musk of the fur pelt.
The mental processing was as exhausting as a physical brawl. He lay still, his small body aching, staring up at the darkened stone ceiling.
He had the map. He had the rules of this new, magical game. He knew what he was, and he knew what he was up against.
But knowledge wasn't power. Knowledge was just potential.
He was still standing at the starting line. Weak, nine years old, and utterly, profoundly, alone.
He stared at the rough-hewn stone of the ceiling, his thoughts circling back to the cruellest variable in the equations he had just devoured.
Capacity.
The texts had been ruthless on this point. An Awakened could spend a lifetime widening their channels, eroding the impurities in their veins to allow for a higher-pressure flow—increasing their output—but the reservoir itself? The fuel tank?
That was fixed.
It was a biological lottery, decided at the moment of conception and solidified at Awakening. You got what you got. If you were born with a thimble, you would never hold an ocean.
'A hard ceiling,' he thought, the realisation settling like lead in his gut.
It rendered the concept of hard work partially obsolete. An Awakened with a massive initial capacity and raw, unrefined channels would still outlast a master with perfect technique but a shallow reserve. In a battle of attrition, genetics beat discipline every time.
It was an inherently unfair system, rigged from birth to keep the powerful in power and the weak in the dirt.
Thomas felt a spike of cold anxiety. Where did he fall on this spectrum?
He had no reference point. No baseline.
The System displayed his status with clinical detachment, but the world didn't run on levels. It ran on mana. He had blacked out after a few minutes of intense exertion the previous night. Was that normal for a novice, the expected result of pushing unrefined channels too hard?
Or was it a symptom of a shallow reservoir?
'I need data.'
He couldn't theorise his way out of this physiological trap. He needed empirical evidence. He needed to know whether he was a prodigy, a mediocrity, or a genetic dead end.
He sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. The room was freezing again, the heat from the dying fire long gone.
He needed to sweat.
The library had given him the theory, but theory wouldn't stop a blade. He needed practical application. He needed to understand the limits of his body.
His mind drifted to the dining hall and the man who had sat at the head of the table.
Falk.
The Master-at-Arms was a terrifying wall of scarred muscle and cold authority, but he was also the gatekeeper. He controlled the garrison. He controlled the training.
'I need him.'
Brandt formulated the approach. He couldn't just ask for training. That sounded like a bored child asking for a new toy to pass the winter months. Falk would give him a wooden sword and a pat on the head.
It was, after all, precisely what he had done in the past.
No. He needed to frame it as a resource acquisition. He needed a tutor. A private circle of guards to beat the lessons into him until they stuck.
He needed violence.
In his previous life, Thomas had been a man of the mind. He dissected psyches, not bodies. He understood the criminal impulse, the geometry of rage and desire, but in a physical confrontation?
He was useless.
The memory of the train station flashed in his mind—visceral and humiliating. The push. The fall. The way his body had locked up, paralysed by shock, while the train roared toward him.
He hadn't fought back. He hadn't moved. He had frozen.
'Never again.'
The vow was cold and absolute. He needed to scour that weakness from his soul. He needed to learn how to hurt people efficiently, how to take a hit without shattering, how to turn fear into fuel. He needed to become dangerous.
He looked toward the narrow arrow slit. The light was failing. The bruised purple of the twilight was darkening into the deep, hostile black of a Rimescar night. The passage of time felt different here, marked not by the ticking of a clock but by the encroaching cold.
Evening was approaching.
He stood up, his joints popping, and walked to the heavy wooden wardrobe.
He pushed aside the furs and linens until he found a tunic of dark blue wool, embroidered with the silver thread of his house.
It was formal, but sturdy.
He dressed with deliberate care, fastening the belt, smoothing the fabric. He wasn't dressing for a family meal. He was dressing for a negotiation. He needed to look like an heir who understood the weight of his station, not a confused boy playing dress-up.
As he buckled the belt, a sharp, twisting pain cramped his stomach.
Hunger.
It wasn't the polite appetite of his old life. This was a biological imperative, a desperate, clawing demand from his cells. His new body was burning fuel at a terrifying rate, the mana channels likely siphoning calories to maintain their integrity.
'The cost of power,' he noted, pressing a hand against his abdomen.
He resolved not to miss a meal again. In this environment, calories were ammunition. Starvation was just another way to die.
He moved to the small basin on the washstand. The water inside was skimmed with ice. He broke it with his knuckles, splashed the freezing liquid onto his face, and stared at his reflection in the distorted metal.
A stranger stared back.
A nine-year-old boy with auburn hair and pale skin. But the eyes... the eyes were too old. They were hard, weary, and filled with a cynicism that didn't belong on a child's face.
He took a breath and adjusted the mask.
He softened the glare. He widened his eyes slightly, injecting a feigned innocence, a look of serious, dutiful curiosity. He practised the expression he would use when presenting to Falk.
He needed the veteran soldier to see potential. He needed him to see a determined heir ready to shoulder his burden. He definitely did not need him to see a forensic psychologist trapped in a stolen body, analysing the room for threats.
He had to thread the needle between precocious and suspicious.
He turned away from the mirror.
The room was dark now, the shadows stretching out from the corners to claim the space. He walked to the heavy oak door, his boots sounding loud in the silence.
He gripped the cold iron handle.
He wasn't Thomas the consultant anymore. He wasn't the victim on the tracks.
He was Brandt Rimescar.
And he was going to war.
He pulled the handle, and the heavy door swung open with a groan, revealing the now torch-lit corridor beyond. He stepped out of the sanctuary of his room and into the exposed, dangerous ecosystem of the keep.
He was ready to play the game.