I died.
I do not remember how long the darkness lasted this time.
The first memory that is truly mine is cold water on my skin.
Warm hands held me under the arms while something cooler and softer than air slid across my body. I blinked. The world wobbled and blurred; light broke into trembling lines on a moving surface. Much later I would realise it was a metal basin, filled with water, in a smoky kitchen.
Back then, it was just brightness and cold.
And her voice.
"Easy, little one. Just a bit of water. Water doesn't bite."
I didn't understand the words, only the tone. Warm. Soft. Safe. Sounds of splashing wrapped themselves around her whisper. Drops ran down my cheeks and neck. Something rough brushed my face - a wet cloth that smelled of herbs and smoke.
Then I saw it for the first time.
The water shivered.
Its surface, calm a heartbeat before, lifted as if something underneath had exhaled. Tiny specks of light inside it - motes I had never noticed - stirred like dust in a sunbeam. They flowed together, turned, and the water rose in a thin sheet, catching the glow from the window.
The droplets that should have fallen back into the basin hung in the air for a moment, turning slowly. The bright specks inside them spun faster, as if listening. Then the whole cluster twisted into a small spiral and dropped exactly where she wanted it to.
On me.
No words. No chant. Just a small movement of her fingers and the steady focus in her eyes.
I didn't know it was magic.
To me, it was simply… Mother.
I almost remembered something else then.
A place with no sky and no ground. Two shapes facing each other in the dark. A single flash of light and shadow. The memory brushed the edge of my thoughts like a cold fingertip and I pushed it away, the way you turn from a nightmare before it can wake up fully.
Years later, the bath still smelled the same: smoke from the hearth, dried thyme on the beams, soap boiling in a crooked pot at the back. And water that obeyed her better than I ever did.
My parents' inn stood by the main road of a village important enough to have travellers, but not important enough to have a name. People just called it "the place by the southern river". Stone on the ground floor, wood above, thick beams holding up the roof. Downstairs - the common room, heavy with the smells of ale, stew and wet cloaks. Upstairs - a few rooms for guests.
And one tiny bed by the window. Mine.
But first there was the kitchen.
The kitchen was my mother's kingdom.
Standing on a wobbly stool, I could barely get my nose above the table. The big cooking pot hung over the fire on a thick iron hook. Steam coiled around it in slow ribbons. Mother moved between fire and water the way other people moved around their own house - without thinking. Her hand swept over the pot and the surface inside stilled or rose, exactly as she wanted.
"Don't touch," she said every time my fingers wandered too close to the flames. "Water listens. Fire doesn't."
Her hands were always a little damp. Sometimes, when she laughed and pushed my hair back from my forehead, drops clung to my skin - cool and smooth, as if the water didn't want to stay with anyone else as much as it wanted to stay with her.
I didn't yet know the words "awakening" or "mastery". I only knew that when Mother opened a barrel, she did not scoop water like everyone else. She just looked down, lifted her palm - and the water came on its own, a thin obedient stream, bright motes inside it spinning faster as they rose to meet her.
Father was different.
For him, water was just water and fire was just fire.
When I was old enough to stand without falling every three steps, I started watching him from the doorway of the common room. He stood behind the counter, broad-shouldered, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His voice was loud, his laugh louder. One hand poured wine or ale, the other scooped up coins.
What I liked most was what happened when someone overdid it.
"I said you've had enough," he would remark, calm and flat, when a guest's voice climbed too high and too sharp.
If that didn't work, he reached for the sword.
It wasn't hanging on the wall like decoration. It rested where his hand could find it without looking, hidden under the counter. Simple, without jewels or fancy carving, the grip worn smooth by use. When he drew it, the room quieted. Not because he did anything grand - his movements were unhurried, almost lazy. There was just something in that laziness that sobered even the drunkest man.
Once I saw him stop a strike.
A butcher's knife flashed as its owner lunged forward. Fire in the hearth jumped; someone screamed. Father stepped aside and lifted the blade. Metal hit metal with a flat crack and stayed there, caged, as if it had slammed into a wall. One small twist of his wrist and the knife spun out of the man's hand and clattered across the floor.
Father walked the man to the door without drawing a single drop of blood.
"The fire in me woke up only to remind me how it burns," he told me once when I asked why he never played with flames like Mother did with water. "That's enough."
Back then I didn't understand what "awakened but not mastered" meant. I only saw how long he sometimes stared into the hearth, as if he were looking for something in the embers that refused to show itself.
Sometimes, when I caught him like that, a thin crack of memory opened in me again: a line of light and a line of shadow crossing in a place with no walls. The feeling of falling. I would look away from the fire and force myself to think about tables to be wiped, plates to be carried, anything but that emptiness.
Words came to me quickly.
They stuck in my head as if there had been empty shelves waiting for them all along. First came short commands: "come", "no", "leave it", "careful". Then the regulars' names, the dishes, the curses I wasn't supposed to repeat. Mother laughed that I echoed everything like a parrot.
She laughed - but she never stopped speaking in full sentences when I was near.
One day Father carried an old wooden stool upstairs and set it by the window of my little room.
"If you're going to catch words this fast," he grumbled, placing a thin, battered book on the sill, "you might as well catch letters too."
Three faded symbols were scratched onto the cover. I didn't know what they meant. Not yet.
He taught me how to hold a bit of charcoal so it wouldn't snap, how to draw straight lines and then break them into shapes that stopped being just shapes and started being the names of things.
Letters slid into my mind so easily it unnerved me.
Sometimes seeing a sign once was enough; my fingers already knew how to copy it. It felt less like learning and more like recognising something I'd seen a long time ago and misplaced.
I didn't look special while it happened.
When I was four, I really looked at myself for the first time.
Mother set a basin of water on the table in front of me. Sunlight poured through the kitchen window and spread across the surface in a bright patch. I leaned over it, curious, feeling the warmth of her hand on my neck.
A boy stared back.
Not a hero from stories, just a boy. Dark hair, too long because my parents always found something more urgent than cutting it. Eyes the colour of rain-muddied earth - not quite green, not quite brown, shifting with the light. A nose a little too small, a mouth a little too thin. A face you could lose in a crowd and never notice.
And yet… something was off.
I couldn't name it. Something in the way the reflection moved with me, just a fraction too precisely. In the way the tiny bright specks inside the water crowded around my features, as if the basin remembered me better than it should.
"Handsome boy," Mother said, as if she'd heard my thoughts. "All from me."
"From you he only got the water," Father called from the doorway, amused.
I turned back to the basin. The water trembled, though I hadn't touched it. For a heartbeat I thought my reflection smiled a little differently than I did.
I blinked. It was gone.
The emptiness from before my birth tried to push into that gap - a memory of nothing, of being only a thought between two blades. I shoved it out, gripping the edge of the table so hard my knuckles ached. This world was solid. Wood under my hands, water in the bowl, Mother's breath on my neck. That other place wasn't.
I told myself that until the chill faded.
I found the books by accident.
The inn had a cellar, and the cellar had a far corner my parents preferred to ignore. Old barrels, broken chairs, crates no one had opened in years. Father sent me down once to "get a bottle from the lowest shelf and don't touch anything else".
Of course I touched everything else.
Behind a curtain of cobwebs, wedged between two crates with a faded crest, lay a narrow wooden box. The lid was cracked; the rusty fittings gave way when I pulled hard enough. Inside there was no gold, no silver. Only paper.
Three books. One bound in dark, dry leather, two in thick, stained parchment.
The first showed a rough map - a single landmass drawn like a triangle, split into three parts. Mountains, forests, plains. A sun scratched in the middle.
"Basic Geography of the World," I read slowly, letter by letter, until the title settled into my head.
My heart beat faster.
The second book was filled with names and dates I'd only ever heard slurred in travellers' stories: the Era of Gods, the Era of the Great War, the current Era of Peace. Places where water was said to be so pure it healed, and others where fire supposedly never died out. Whole chapters about borders between races and the great city in the centre where they all met.
The Era of Gods was short.
Just a few pages, thin on detail. Old temples, half-ruined, strange symbols no one could read anymore, mentions of beings who "walked among mortals for a brief and dangerous while". A note in the margin, written in a different, hurried hand: Too little remains. Perhaps that was the point.
The longest chapters spoke of armies and sieges, of fields burned and rivers turned red. The Great War had left scars even I could see, looking out of the window at the broken stones near the village road. The Era of Peace, people said, had lasted long enough for those scars to grow moss.
The third book was the thinnest, but it pulled at me the hardest. No title, just a simple symbol on the cover - a circle cut by a vertical line.
Inside were words about awakenings.
About those born blind to the elements and those who could see them. About water that came to people who knew its rhythm. About fire that appeared in those strong enough to hold it instead of letting it burn them hollow. About "barriers" and "trials" you had to break through if you wanted to understand more than a single droplet or spark.
I read for a long time in the dusty half-light, the muffled noise of the common room leaking through the ceiling. I didn't grasp everything, but the sentences stayed in me, building a net, settling into places that felt like they had been empty and waiting.
When I finally closed the book, I understood one thing.
The world I'd been born into was larger than our inn. Larger than the nameless village "by the southern river". Larger than the line of trees behind the hill and the distant mountains travellers talked about when the ale loosened their tongues.
It was also far more dangerous.
I touched the pages one more time until my fingers were stained with old ink.
"Hey! Where did you hide yourself this time?" Father's voice rolled down from above. "If you don't come up, your mother will start accusing me of selling you to the dwarves!"
I slammed the box shut, guilty even though I hadn't stolen anything except knowledge. The books rustled softly, like they were promising I could come back whenever I dared.
I went upstairs.
In the kitchen, water trembled gently in a bowl as Mother turned her hand, shaping it into a thin stream that washed dishes without a single splash. The tiny sparks inside it spun in neat patterns, obedient and bright.
In the hearth, fire blinked lazily as Father added another log, careful not to let the flames climb too high.
I stood between them, dust from the cellar still on my hands, new words still echoing in my head.
For the first time since I'd opened my eyes in this world, I didn't just want to watch how people lived with water and fire.
I wanted to learn what this world really was - and why a dead man like me had been allowed to start over in it.