The silence lingered like a bad smell.
The clerics fidgeted. Orren adjusted his glasses for the fifth time in under a minute. Even the ever-composed Lady Caelia remained still, her gaze unreadable. The Tier-Four mainline crystal sat inert between them all—an expensive paperweight currently failing its one job.
"Well?" Caelia asked again, not with urgency, but with a dangerous calm.
One of the clerics, clearly the younger of the two, cleared his throat and straightened his spine. "We'll need to perform recalibration, my lady. The crystal might've been—ah—oversensitized by transport. It may have failed to distinguish dormant mana signatures from… clutter."
'Clutter,' Aelius echoed mentally. 'I'm glad to be categorized alongside pantry dust.'
The older cleric nodded gravely, as if divine insight had just been passed between them. "A re-evaluation with stricter isolation. Perhaps a fasting protocol for the subject. Infants often display magical noise from nourishment."
Caelia raised an eyebrow. "You think my son is magically bloated?"
"N-not in so many words…"
"Then find better words."
They exchanged panicked glances, bowed stiffly, and retreated with their crystal contraption like two failed magicians dragging off a broken wand. The double doors shut behind them with a hollow thud.
And just like that, the room exhaled.
Caelia remained standing, but her focus returned to the crib—no, to him. She studied Aelius not as a disappointment, nor as a miracle. Just… curiously. Quietly.
Orren didn't leave.
He took a slow step forward. "My lady, if I may—"
"You think it was the child, not the crystal."
"I think it's possible he wasn't reacting because he'd already started thinking."
Caelia tilted her head slightly. "Infants don't think, Scholar Orren. They sleep, scream, and soil."
Aelius felt personally attacked.
Orren, however, didn't back down. "This one observed. That's… different. Unsettlingly so."
For a long moment, no one spoke. Then, Caelia nodded toward the cradle. "Observe, then."
She left the room without another word.
---
The room settled into a sharper kind of quiet, one without judgment or spectacle.
As the footsteps faded, Orren approached slowly, kneeling beside the cradle like he was bowing before a riddle.
"You're not normal," he whispered, adjusting his glasses.
'What gave it away?' Aelius thought. 'The complete lack of infantile crying or the soulful disdain in my eyes?'
He didn't move. Let the scholar stare.
"Your aura… doesn't echo. Most children at this stage reflect their environment—noise in, noise out. You, though… You're absorbing it."
'Absorbing is such a clinical term. I prefer "siphoning chaos for analytical dissection."'
Orren reached into a side pouch and pulled out a thin metallic strip, not much longer than a finger. It had minor etchings along the edge—runes, but elegant, economical. He placed it lightly on the blanket near Aelius's side. It began to glow faintly.
"Mana fluctuations," Orren murmured. "Passive reading only. No harm."
Aelius's stack model stirred like an idle machine suddenly fed a problem. He didn't will anything—it just happened. Input detected. Analysis initiated.
He could almost see it.
The strip vibrated with a low harmonic signature, attempting to measure ambient mana. The stack pulled the waveform apart like a puzzle, dissecting pulse intervals, identifying repeat patterns, isolating which runes created which interpretive logic.
Then something… shifted.
Aelius didn't push energy. But he thought, what if I mimicked the signature? A fragment of code formed—a pattern, symmetrical, simple. A test.
The strip blinked erratically, then glowed brighter for two seconds—just two—before fading.
Orren froze.
His hand hovered above the strip. "It reacted."
Aelius blinked slowly.
"You mimicked the probe," Orren whispered, awed. "Not just output. You replicated the reading protocol."
'Please don't start worshipping me. I already have one cult following in my past life. Didn't end well.'
Orren didn't speak again. He just stood, pocketed the probe, and walked out—quiet, contemplative, possibly afraid.
The air he left behind was still humming.
---
That quiet didn't last.
The afternoon arrived on the back of a lecture.
Not one aimed at Aelius, but at someone else. Down the hall, muffled through the thick stone walls of House Virelith, voices echoed—Caelia's and another man's. Not angry, but tense. Academic.
Words like "awakening delay," "shard anomalies," and "dangerous curiosity" floated through the cracks.
Aelius, tucked into a sunlit reading room inside a bassinet lined with silk, listened without needing to understand every term.
He was used to reading between lines—truths always tried to hide behind adjectives.
Later, Orren entered. Again.
This time he brought books.
He didn't speak to Aelius—not directly—but he opened a leather-bound volume and began reading aloud. A strange choice of activity for a three-day-old, unless of course, that three-day-old had a minor obsession with the metaphysics of magical systems.
"The mainline crystal," Orren recited, "is attuned to bloodlines of noble descent, carrying both historical affinity and amplified purity. It is capable of mapping inherent traits, elemental bias, and future potential."
Aelius rolled his eyes inwardly. 'It's a glorified Hogwarts Sorting Hat, isn't it?'
"But shards," Orren continued, flipping a page, "are fractured mana cores—less refined, often unstable. Commoners who awaken through shards tend to experience chaotic surges, non-linear abilities, or fatal misalignment. Still, some of history's greatest mages began as shard-born."
Now that was interesting.
A system that favored nobility with clean awakenings but left the rest of society to gamble with their lives? Predictable. Cruel. Efficient.
He'd seen worse. Systems built to reward blood instead of merit. Power handed down like property deeds. The same ugly cycle, world after world.
But this time… he had a foothold early.
He would understand it. Twist it. Maybe even break it.
Even if no one else knew he had already begun.
---
Evening brought quiet.
Not the tense, anticipatory kind from earlier—but actual peace. The manor dimmed under golden lamps. Servants padded softly through corridors. Aelius found himself cradled in Caelia's arms, seated beside a fireplace in her private chamber.
No words. Just her presence. Steady. Silent.
She hummed something under her breath. An old tune, unrecognizable but oddly warm. A lullaby meant for peace.
He watched her face—noted the small lines near her eyes, the set of her jaw when no one was looking. There was tiredness there. Not weakness—restraint.
'She's a mask-wearer,' Aelius thought. 'Like me.'
She looked down.
"You don't cry," she murmured. "Not like the others did."
Aelius didn't blink.
"Your silence is… unsettling. But also comforting." She smiled faintly, like the words surprised her. "Strange child."
'You have no idea.'
Her hand rested against his chest—calm, protective.
Aelius didn't know what to do with that kind of gentleness. It wasn't transactional. It wasn't political. It wasn't even particularly expected.
It just… was.
His processor stuttered for once. Unable to categorize.
'Is this what affection feels like when it doesn't come with a leash?'
The thought made him oddly tired.
---
The night was close.
Stars peeked through high windows.
Shadows lengthened.
Caelia tucked him gently into a bassinet lined with fine wool, whispered something in Old Ceran he couldn't quite parse, and left the room. Aelius remained still.
The manor was quiet. But not empty.
Something clicked.
Not a door. Not a voice.
An idea.
The stack flared—not with power, but precision. Aelius's mind traced back the entire event: the crystal test, the reaction with the mana strip, the diagrams that flashed in his mind.
He hadn't failed the test.
He had passed it in a way the system wasn't built to recognize.
The resonance had occurred—but not externally.
Internally, his magic had mirrored the scanning spell, then absorbed it. Folded it into his understanding. There was no external flare because he hadn't let one escape.
He hadn't aligned to the crystal.
He had deconstructed it.
And in doing so, hidden his true nature behind false negatives.
Not deliberately. Not yet.
But what if… next time, he did?
What if he could control what these tests saw? Choose which element "resonated"? Shape their expectations?
'A false resonance,' he thought. 'A tailored mask.'
The potential made him smile internally. A child god hiding in plain sight.
And then—
A creak.
The door to the hall hadn't opened… but a sound echoed nonetheless. A soft rustle. Fabric brushing stone.
His eyes slid toward the shadows near the wardrobe.
Nothing moved. Not visibly.
But his instincts, sharpened across another lifetime, whispered one word:
Watcher.