He spent his infancy gathering information.
This was not as strange as it might sound. Infants spent a great deal of time observing the world — it was more or less their primary occupation, given that the range of available activities was limited by their bodies' capabilities. Kaelith simply observed with more focus and considerably more analytical structure than was standard.
House Draeven, as it emerged through weeks and then months of careful attention, was exactly what his memory had suggested and also more than that in the ways that mattered.
Count Gareth Draeven was a Silver Knight — respectable, competent, the product of genuine effort rather than exceptional natural talent. He was a man of deliberate habits and quiet loyalties, the kind of person who was not impressive in any single dimension but was thoroughly reliable across all of them. He managed his territory with the conscientious attention of someone who understood that the people on the land were not abstractions and their wellbeing was directly related to everything that mattered. He was fair in disputes, consistent in his expectations, and privately — in the moments when he thought no one was observing him, which Kaelith always was — of a tenderness toward his family that he expressed through action rather than declaration.
He was, in the specific assessment of a man who had extensive experience of what the alternative looked like, a genuinely good person.
Countess Lyrea Draeven was not a cultivator. She had no Aura Core, no Mana Channels. She had, instead, a mind that processed social and political information with an efficiency that left most trained court operators behind, a laugh that could genuinely be described as room-altering, and a management capability that kept the Draeven estate functioning at a standard that significantly exceeded what the family's resources alone should have been able to produce. She ran the external relationships of the house — the alliances, the obligations, the careful maintenance of goodwill with neighboring families — with the quiet mastery of someone who had been doing it since before it was formally her responsibility.
Kaelith had enormous respect for her within the first month of his new life. He refined this assessment upward approximately weekly thereafter.
His sister Mira was two years old when he was born — a small, serious person with their mother's auburn hair and their father's grey-green eyes and the particular quality of authority that some eldest children develop very early as a matter of necessity and never fully relinquish. She regarded her new sibling with an assessment that was, for a two-year-old, remarkably comprehensive, and then apparently decided he would do, because she began including him in her activities with the proprietary ease of someone who has expanded their jurisdiction.
She was, Kaelith noted, already showing signs of what would later confirm as Mage potential. At two, she occasionally made small nearby flames flicker without appearing to notice she was doing it. This was generally considered an indicator of early fire-affinity development, which Gareth had quietly flagged for the family's Mage tutor and which Lyrea was very carefully not making too much of in front of Mira on the grounds that Mira already had enough opinions about her own importance.
The Draeven estate itself was three stories of solid stone construction with a working farm attached, a training ground that six household knights used every morning with the disciplined routine of people who had signed up for something real and intended to deliver on it, a library of several hundred volumes, and gardens that Lyrea maintained with the specific investment of someone who considered growing things a practice in sustained attention.
Kaelith absorbed it all and found, to a degree that he had not anticipated, that he was content.
Not merely satisfied with the strategic positioning. Not simply relieved by the safety of a low-profile household. Genuinely, quietly content in the way he had not been in his previous life since early childhood — before the Awakening Ceremony failures had begun reshaping how the world understood him. There was something in the straightforwardness of the Draeven household, in the uncomplicated nature of the love moving through it, that answered something in him he had not known was asking a question.
He was careful not to draw attention.
He was an extremely calm infant. He ate when fed, slept at predictable hours, and observed his surroundings with what his mother described as *an unusual degree of focus* and his father described privately, to Lyrea, as *something that makes Ser Brant uncomfortable and I'm not entirely certain why.*
He adjusted his observable behavior incrementally toward something more convincingly infantile after he noticed his father's discomfort. He was not, he reminded himself, twenty-three years old anymore. He was whatever age his new body was, and the performance needed to match.
He was somewhat obvious, he acknowledged to himself. He was working on it.
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He walked at ten months.
This was early by any standard. He did it quietly — pulled himself upright on a chair leg one morning while Mira was in the room, took four steps, sat down deliberately, and then did nothing of particular note for the next week while his mother recovered from the surprise.
He talked at fourteen months — full sentences, which was not supposed to be possible at fourteen months, and which he had the good sense to soften by making his first full sentence *want bread* rather than anything that would have required his parents to sit down.
By eighteen months he was having conversations with the household staff that the staff found either charming or deeply unnerving depending on their individual comfort with the unusual.
By two years old he was in the library.
Not because anyone had put him there — no one thought a two-year-old belonged in a library, including his parents — but because he had figured out the door handle and let himself in. His mother had found him sitting on the floor with a book open in front of him, turning pages with methodical care.
"What are you doing?" she had asked, in the specific tone of a parent who has encountered something unexpected and is maintaining composure pending further information.
"Looking," he had said, which was accurate and incomplete in equal measure.
She had stood in the doorway for a long moment.
Then she had come in, sat on the floor next to him, and begun reading aloud.
He had listened with visible attention, which had produced in Lyrea Draeven an expression he would come to know well — the expression of a woman who loved her son completely and straightforwardly and was simultaneously, with growing frequency, finding him genuinely puzzling.
He loved her for both parts of it equally.
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