The transition from a grizzled knight of Eterna to a swaddled infant named Leon.
'Leon,' he thought, testing the name in his mind. 'It sounds softer than Age Throne. Less like a weapon, more like a person. I can live with it.'
However, living with it meant dealing with the logistics of infancy. His new mother a woman of endless patience and shimmering white hair had spent the last few days looking at him with mounting anxiety. To her, he was too still, too quiet.
'If I don't give her something, she's going to call that nurse back with the green light,' Leon realized.
So, he practiced. He learned that if he let out a sharp, rhythmic wail and simultaneously... well, "relieved" himself, the tension in her face vanished. It was a tactical maneuver. He would poop, he would pee, and he would cry like his life depended on it. It was the most effective camouflage he had ever employed.
When night fell and his mother finally drifted into a deep sleep.
Leon didn't have much mobility, but he was observant. Over the past few days, through eavesdropping on the children's chatter and observing the few books left near his cradle, he had pieced together the state of the world. He had died three hundred years ago. The Great War of the Four Kingdoms hadn't ended with his death; it had raged for another twenty years of stalemate and attrition before a peace treaty was signed.
The Eterna he knew was gone, replaced by a world that seemed... strange.
'They don't use their hands anymore,' Leon noted, watching his mother from the corner of his eye as she slept.
Earlier that day, he had seen her use a polished wooden rod a wand to stir a pot of porridge from across the room. She had muttered something that sounded like "Akio," and the ladle had flown into her hand like a trained bird. It was the "Song," but it was being channeled through a medium, caged by incantations.
'Is the Song so weak now that it needs a stick to find its way?' he wondered snarkily.
While he lay on his mother's chest that night, feeling the rhythmic rise and fall of her breathing, he tried to reach out. He remembered the feeling of the battlefield—the raw, unfiltered power that the commanders used. He closed his eyes, focusing every ounce of his newborn will on the air around him.
Nothing.
He tried again, straining until his face turned a deep shade of crimson. He pushed his consciousness outward, searching for even a flicker of an Attunement—Ice, wind, anything.
By the tenth attempt, his vision was swimming. The effort of a grown man's soul trying to force power through a baby's undeveloped pathways was like trying to shove a river through a straw.
'Dammit... nothing.'
He slumped against her, his small body trembling with fatigue. He noticed, in his dazed state, that his mother's dress had shifted. In this era, it seemed undergarments were an afterthought, or perhaps she just preferred the freedom.
'Back in my day, a lady wouldn't be caught dead without three layers of linen,' Leon mused, a dry, perverted wit flickering through his exhaustion. 'But I suppose after three hundred years, the world decided it was too hot for modesty. Or maybe she's just tired of the laundry.'
He felt a sudden, sharp pang of guilt. The warmth she provided, the way she held him even when she was exhausted... he had never felt that. In Eterna, he was an orphan of the state, raised by the barracks and the steel. This "love" was a new type of Attunement entirely.
Before he could dwell on it, the exhaustion claimed him, and he plummeted into a dreamless sleep.
The next few days followed a brutal pattern.
Every time Leon tried to tap into the Song, he was met with a wall of silence. And every time he failed, he woke up with a hunger so violent it felt like his stomach was trying to digest his own ribs.
At the dinner table, he was no longer the "quiet baby." He was a monster.
"Oh my, Leon! You're going to burst!" his mother exclaimed, her eyes wide as she spooned more mashed tubers into his mouth. "Our little glutton boy is trying to eat the whole house!"
His older brother the one with the messy black hair and the look of a boy who frequently ate dirt leaned over and pinched Leon's stomach.
"Look at him! He's a little fat boy now!" the brother laughed, his voice cracking. "He's more of a boulder than a knight!"
Leon glared at him. 'If I could move my arms properly, I'd show you a "boulder," you little idiot.'
He had already decided he liked his sisters more. They were quiet, at least. Poldie, the girl with the ethereal white hair, sat beside him, holding a small wooden spoon.
"Here comes the wind-gloom, Leon! Open wide!" she chirped, mimicking the sound of a whistling gale.
He sighed internally and accepted the food. He needed the fuel. If his theory was right, his "Absolute Swordsmanship" talent was dormant.
After the meal, his mother carried him back to his room and tucked him in.
"Rest now, my little spark," she whispered, kissing his forehead before leaving the room.
Leon waited. He waited until the house was silent, until the only sound was the distant chirping of crickets.
He sat up or at least, struggled into a propped-up position against his pillow. He crossed his tiny legs and placed his hands on his knees in a perfect meditation pose, just as the high priests of the old Eterna Kingdom used to do.
'The Song isn't in a stick,' Leon whispered in his mind. 'It isn't in a word like "Akio." It's in the blood. It's in the breath.'
He pulled inward. He looked for the void where his soul met his flesh. He ignored the hunger, ignored the heaviness of his limbs. He searched for the one thing that had been missing for three hundred years.
Thump.
His heart gave a strange, metallic shudder.
Thump.
In the darkness of the room, a tiny, jagged spark ignited between his palms. It wasn't green, and it wasn't the dull grey of common iron magic. It was a brilliant, piercing, icy white. It flickered with the sharpness of a honed blade, casting a cold glow over his cradle.
Leon's eyes widened, reflecting the frosty light.
'I did it!' Leon exclaimed happily