The northern winds howled across the high stone walls of Albrecht Keep, blanketing the courtyards in silver frost. Servants moved briskly, avoiding the west wing where the Duke's eldest son resided—alone, and by many accounts, unapproachable.
Caelum Albrecht, heir to the Duchy of Revanne, had earned himself many names by the age of ten. Brooding child, strange boy, the little lord who does not weep. To the younger squires, he was a ghost who stared too long and spoke too little. To the lesser nobles, he was a political uncertainty. To the servants, he was simply off—not cruel, but unknowable.
What none could understand was this: Caelum did not see the world as they did.
He had not cried when his mother died. Not because he felt nothing, but because grief, to him, was a puzzle. A question with no clear answer. Why did death unsettle people so deeply, when it was the only certainty? Why did love turn so quickly into obligation, or worse, fear?
The world around him spun on emotion, hierarchy, power, and appearances—but to Caelum, these felt like scripts in a play he hadn't been given. He mimicked what he saw, but never quite fit in. And since no tutor, steward, or stepmother could make sense of him, they left him be.
His chambers were vast, his library full, his attendants silent. The Duke—stern and busy—assumed his son's strangeness was a shield. He is grieving, he told himself. Let him be.
And so the boy remained adrift, navigating a world that felt alien. He watched the castle from balconies, listened to whispered politics at the feast table, and asked questions no one wanted to hear. What makes a man noble?Why do commoners laugh more than lords?Is magic a gift, or just another form of fear?
He had no answers.
Not yet.
But on the night of his tenth birthday, as snow quietly gathered along the stained-glass windows of his room, something stirred within him. Not a memory, not a dream—something older.
A voice.A presence.A system.
[Logos System Initializing...]
A warmth flooded through him, not in body but in mind. Words—foreign yet familiar—etched themselves across his thoughts.
"In the beginning was the Word."
Caelum blinked. His breath caught. The room did not change, but he did.
Suddenly, the questions that haunted him no longer felt like burdens. They were keys. And the world—a place of power and magic and silence—was about to learn the force of thought.