He arrived screaming.
This was not voluntary. The lungs did what lungs did in the first seconds of existence, which was to inform the surrounding world of their presence with the maximum possible volume, and Kaelith's lungs were, like the rest of him, not inclined toward half-measures.
He was aware. Mostly. The awareness was filtered through the specific chaos of a newborn's sensory experience — everything too bright, too loud, too cold, too immediate, his nervous system processing more information per second than it had any framework for, every input arriving at full intensity without any of the experiential buffering that years of living provided.
But he was aware. He had his memories. He had twenty-three years of accumulated experience and knowledge and the very clear recollection of falling off a terrace and dying, and these things were present in his mind with perfect clarity, sitting somewhat incongruously in the body of a person who could not yet support their own head.
A woman's voice — exhausted, warm, and edged with something that brooked no argument from the universe: "He's healthy. He's—" A pause. "His hair."
A man's voice. Deeper. Carefully composed. "Silver-white. At birth."
"Is that unusual?"
"Somewhat."
"He's breathing. He's loud. He's mine. Those are the only relevant facts right now."
A sound that might have been a man composing himself in the face of something he was unprepared for.
Then, closer: "Ours. He's ours." A pause. "Hello."
The face that appeared above him was broad and honest — sun-weathered skin, a square jaw, grey-green eyes that were currently in the process of rearranging their owner's entire understanding of what he was prepared to feel. A large man. Solid in the way of someone who had done physical work all his life and built himself from it. An expression of helpless, enormous tenderness that he was clearly unequipped to manage because nothing in his experience had prepared him for its scale.
Kaelith, observing this through the chaos of newborn sensory experience, made his first assessment in his new life: this man was genuine. Entirely, uncomplicatedly genuine. There was nothing calculated in that expression. Nothing performed. He was simply a person who had been ambushed by the size of what he felt and was standing in it without any pretense about it.
This was already better than he had hoped.
He was placed in different arms — softer, trembling slightly, warm with the specific warmth of exhaustion that has not yet been allowed to become rest because there is still something more important happening. A face bent over him: auburn hair dark with sweat, brown eyes bright with tears and something fierce, high cheekbones, a jaw that suggested the same quality of quiet stubbornness as the man's. A woman who had been beautiful all her life without ever organizing her sense of self around it. The beauty was simply there, the way the steadiness was simply there.
She looked at him.
And then she said, with the certainty of someone reporting a fact that is not up for discussion: "Kael. We'll call him Kael."
"The full name?"
"Kaelith. I dreamed it."
A pause. "Kaelith Draeven, then."
*Draeven.*
He searched his memories, even through the noise of his new nervous system demanding his attention. House Draeven. Minor nobility. Southern midlands of Ashveil. Landed gentry — they held territory and title but no seat on the Royal Council, no significant bloodline claim. Known for producing solid, mid-rank knights across several generations. Comfortable. Respected locally. Unremarkable to anyone operating at the level of court politics.
Perfect.
A low profile was precisely what he needed for the foreseeable future.
He stopped screaming. The lungs had made their point. He allowed himself to be held by his new mother and looked at his new world through his new eyes and thought, with the measured clarity of a man doing an assessment even under objectively difficult circumstances:
*This is workable.*
Then the System notification arrived, hovering at the edge of his awareness like a patient secretary:
---
**[ SOVEREIGN'S PATH SYSTEM — INITIAL STATUS ]**
**Name:** Kaelith Draeven *(soul designation retained)*
**Soul Age:** 23 *(memories intact — full retention confirmed)*
**Soul Rank:** Sovereign Class *(seal destroyed upon death — permanently removed)*
**Body Status:** Newborn — cultivation impossible until age 4
**Knight Affinity:** All Elements | Primary: Primordial Flame *(Mythic Grade)*
**Mage Affinity:** All Elements | Primary: Void *(Mythic Grade)*
**Dual Cultivation:** Confirmed
**Growth Multiplier:** ×100 base rate *(System enhanced)*
**System Features Active:**
— Sovereign's Eye *(passive — identifies cultivation levels and affinities)*
— Path Recorder *(logs all cultivation milestones)*
— Skill Repository *(stores and levels acquired skills)*
— Suppression Breaker *(all future seals and restrictions negate on contact)*
— Heritage Vault *(personal storage — accessible only to host)*
**Note:** First cultivation window opens at age 4.
**Note:** Patience is recommended.
**Note:** You have been given a second life. Use it well.
---
He read it once.
Then again.
The growth multiplier sat in his mind with a particular weight. One hundred times the base rate of cultivation progress. The base rate — for someone with his affinities, without the multiplier — would already have been extraordinary. Dual cultivation was considered nearly impossible even for the genuinely gifted, and he had two Mythic-grade primary affinities in a world where Legendary grade was considered once-in-a-century territory.
With the multiplier applied to that...
He was looking at a trajectory that had no precedent in recorded history.
And Primordial Flame. He turned that over carefully. He had read about it in the deepest, oldest sections of the historical texts his previous life had given him access to — in footnotes and mythological accounts and the crumbling records of scholars who were themselves considered eccentric for taking the source material seriously. Primordial Flame was not fire. It was the concept behind fire — the burning that had existed before the universe cooled enough for ordinary combustion to make sense. The fire of creation. The heat at the center of things that were old enough to still carry heat from the beginning.
And his Mage affinity was Void — the element of absence, of boundary, of the space between things that defined the shape of everything that existed.
Creation fire. Defining space.
He was, apparently, a philosophical concept given a body and a grudge.
He was also, currently, unable to hold his own head up, which provided a useful counterbalance to any developing arrogance.
He closed his eyes, let his new lungs do their work, and allowed himself to simply exist in the warmth of his new mother's arms.
He had time. He had four years before the first cultivation window. He had, if he was careful and patient and built properly, the rest of a life that no seal could truncate and no betrayal could end.
He was going to use every moment of it.
But right now, in this first hour of his second chance, he allowed himself exactly one thing that had nothing to do with plans or power or the long road of purpose ahead of him.
He allowed himself to feel safe.
---