The ghost in the machine began to stir.
Weeks bled into months, marked by the slow, agonizing progression of infantile development. Leo's body was a frustrating, clumsy puppet, his mind a captive audience to its limitations. He learned the complex physics of lifting his own head, a Herculean task that left his neck muscles trembling. He discovered the maddening disconnect between his brain's command to roll over and his body's stubborn refusal. Each small victory felt like a pathetic consolation prize.
His internal monologue, once the domain of historical analysis and existential dread, was now a frantic, silent commentary on this new reality.
Focus. Just get the hand to the mouth. It's a simple lever system. Why is it so difficult?
His tiny fist would waver, bump against his nose, and flail away. Failure. Again.
He was trapped in a state of supreme boredom, punctuated by moments of intense, humiliating dependency. He was fed, changed, and bathed by a rotating cast of nursemaids, all of whom cooed and fussed over him with a cloying sweetness that set his teeth on edge. He was a living doll, a symbol of continuity, not a person.
His only reprieve was the silence of the night, when the castle slept, and the only sound was the whisper of the wind against the stained-glass window. In those hours, he would lie awake in his crib, staring at the patterns the moon cast on the ceiling, and let his mind roam free.
He practiced. He practiced controlling his vocal cords, trying to form something other than a gurgle or a cry. He practiced focusing his eyes, forcing the blurry world to sharpen. He was a scholar conducting desperate, clandestine experiments on his own defective vessel.
His new parents were a constant, bewildering presence. Kaelia's love was a warm, suffocating blanket. She would hold him for hours, singing old lullabies in a language his mind somehow understood, her voice a balm he felt unworthy of. She saw only a beautiful, innocent child. She saw a future.
Duke Valerius was different. His visits were shorter, more formal. He would stand by the crib, his hands clasped behind his back, and deliver short, declarative statements about the state of the dukedom, as if briefing a junior officer.
"The harvest in the southern valley is abundant this year," he would say, his gaze fixed on Leo. "The trade routes from the east are secure. The northern barbarians are quiet. For now."
Leo felt like a strange artifact in his father's museum—precious, but inscrutable. Valerius was waiting for the exhibit to explain itself.
The breaking point came on a day like any other. He was propped up on a thick rug on the floor of his mother's solar, a sun-drenched room filled with tapestries and thriving plants. Kaelia was embroidering nearby, humming softly. A court historian, an elderly man named Master Theron with a wispy white beard and kind eyes, had been invited to provide "cultured ambiance." He sat in a corner, reading aloud from a heavy tome.
"...and so the great city of Aethel fell," Theron intoned, his voice raspy with age and drama, "not to sword or fire, but to the Great Silence. Its spires, which once pierced the heavens, were swallowed by the earth. Its songs were lost to the wind. All that remains are fragments, echoes in the ruins…"
Leo, who had been listlessly batting at a soft, woolen ball, went perfectly still.
Aethel.
The name was a lightning strike in the fog of his infancy. It was the city from his phone. The city from his dreams. The focus of his academic obsession in a past life. His heart, a tiny, frantic drum, began to beat against his ribs.
Theron continued, pointing a bony finger at an illustration in the book. "The Sunken Spire of Aethel, as imagined by the artist. They say its peak was capped with a crystal that could capture the light of the dawn and hold it through the darkest night."
The drawing was crude, romanticized. It was wrong. The spire didn't sink. It was shattered from the top down by a beam of inverted light. The crystal didn't capture dawn; it resonated with the fundamental frequency of creation, used by the scholars to calibrate their dimensional experiments.
The knowledge surfaced from a place deeper than memory, a place that was not Leo's. It was Altherion's. It was cold, hard fact.
A hot, sudden frustration boiled up inside him. This learned man, this expert, was wrong. He was perpetuating a myth. The compulsion to correct him, to speak the truth, was overwhelming. It was the instinct of a historian, the pride of a scholar who had devoted his life to a subject.
He opened his mouth. He focused all his will, all his nascent control, on the chaotic bundle of nerves and muscles in his throat. He wasn't trying to form a word. He was trying to form a sound. A specific, phonemic fragment from a dead language. The true name of the crystal, a word that had not been spoken in three thousand years.
What emerged from his lips was not speech. It was a babble. A string of chaotic, infantile syllables. "Aaa… thee… laa… mnnn…"
But the cadence was off. The vowels were too pure, the consonants too precise for a random gurgle.
The effect in the room was instantaneous and absolute.
Master Theron's voice cut off as if sliced by a knife. The book slipped from his fingers and thudded onto the rug. His face, previously rosy with theatricality, drained of all color, leaving his skin a pale, waxy parchment. He stared at Leo, his jaw slack, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and utter disbelief.
Kaelia's needle froze mid-stitch. She looked from the horrified historian to her cooing son, her brow furrowed in confusion. "Master Theron? What is it? What's wrong?"
The old scholar could not form words. He simply raised a trembling hand and pointed it at Leo, his finger shaking uncontrollably.
"He… he…" Theron stammered, his voice a dry whisper. "The phonetics… that was no baby talk, My Lady. That was… a fragment of the Old Tongue. The Aethelian tongue." He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. "He spoke the true name of the Dawn-Capture Crystal. A name lost to history. A name I have only ever seen in a single, disputed scroll."
Kaelia's confusion deepened into maternal concern, tinged with a dawning unease. She rose and swept over to Leo, gathering him up in her arms. "Nonsense," she said, her voice firm, but Leo could feel the sudden tension in her body. "It was a coincidence. A babe's random noise. You are letting your scholarly passions run away with you, Master Theron."
But she held Leo a little tighter, a little closer. She looked down into his face, and for the first time, he saw something other than unconditional love in her eyes. He saw a flicker of uncertainty. A question.
Leo, realizing the magnitude of his mistake, did the only thing he could. He let his focus slip, let his eyes go blurry and unfocused, and began to cry. The helpless, frustrated wails of an overwhelmed infant.
The spell was broken. Theron, flustered and apologetic, gathered his book and hastily retreated, muttering about the strain on his old eyes and ears. Kaelia soothed Leo, rocking him gently, but the worried crease did not leave her forehead.
When Valerius was told of the incident later, his reaction was characteristically pragmatic. He listened to his wife's account and the historian's frantic report in stony silence.
"The boy has sharp ears," the Duke finally said, his voice low and measured. "He must have heard you say the words and mimicked the sound. A parrot does not understand the poetry it recites."
It was a logical, dismissive explanation. But that night, when Valerius came to stand by the crib, his gaze was different. It was no longer the look of a man waiting for an exhibit to speak. It was the piercing, analytical stare of a hunter who has just seen his quarry move in the undergrowth.
He looked down at the seemingly sleeping form of his son, and his words were a soft, barely audible whisper that hung in the moonlit room.
"What are you?"
Leo, feigning sleep, heard the question clearly. It echoed the one that had been haunting him since the moment he first drew breath in this world. He had tried to speak, and in doing so, had confirmed his own greatest fear.
He was not just a child. He was a ghost. An echo. And now, the living had begun to hear him.
To be continued...