Kael woke up in a child's body when he was 4 years old and the first thing he did was lie very still and not say anything.
He remembered everything. His name from before, his apartment, the job, the specific smell of the office where he had worked for 6 years designing game systems that a few hundred thousand people had played and a few dozen critics had written about and exactly nobody had cared about when he died. He remembered dying too, not the moment itself but the approach to it, the weeks of lying in a bed while his body stopped cooperating, plenty of time to think about everything he had not finished.
And now he was 4 years old in a room that was bigger than his old apartment, in a world that was not his, in a body that smelled like soap and had short legs.
He lay there for a while and took stock.
The body was healthy. That was good. The room had a window with trees outside it, which meant he was somewhere with land, which meant money, or at least the memory of it. He could hear people moving around elsewhere in the building. He did not know who they were yet.
He decided the most important thing was to not say anything that would get him put in front of a physician.
It took him about a week to map the basics. His name in this life was Kael. His family was the Ashbornes, a minor noble house that had seen better decades. His father was named Aldric, serious and careful in the way of a man managing a slow problem. His mother was quieter. His older brother Dalen was 9 and mostly interested in sword practice and ignoring Kael, which suited Kael fine.
The world had a system. He figured that out fast.
The Firmament was what they called it, an energy field that ran through everything and could be tapped by people who Awakened at 16. It assigned grades, F through SSS, and the grades determined what you could do and how far you could go. The whole society was built around it. Noble houses rose and fell based on the grades their members produced. The military was organized by tier. Your grade was not just a number, it was your ceiling, and in Valdris your ceiling was basically your worth as a person.
Kael found this interesting in the way he found most things interesting, which was to say he spent a lot of time thinking about where the exploits were.
The Firmament also felt strange around him. He noticed this early, maybe his second or third week, a sensation like the energy of the world was paying attention to him in a way it did not pay attention to other people. He mentioned it to his father once and his father said something reassuring and unhelpful, so he stopped mentioning it. He wouldn't take anything a four year old said seriously either. He kept noticing it though.
The estate's finances got worse around the time he turned 7. He could tell by the rooms that stopped having furniture in them, and the meals that got simpler, and the way his father started spending more time in his study with the door closed. Dalen didn't seem to notice one bit but Kael noticed and didn't say anything because there was nothing useful to say.
Rhett was born when he was 8.
He hadn't thought much about another sibling. Dalen was easy enough to deal with because Dalen mostly wanted to be left alone, which was something Kael also wanted, so they had arrived at a comfortable arrangement without ever discussing it. A baby though was a different situation. Kael stood in the doorway of his mother's room on the day Rhett arrived and looked at her and thought, honestly, that this seemed like it was going to be a lot of work.
He was wrong about that.
Rhett decided early that Kael was her person. Not their mother, not Dalen, not the household staff who were much better qualified to meet her actual needs. Kael. She followed him around the estate before she could walk properly, crawling after him down corridors with total focus, and when she could walk she upgraded to following him everywhere and explaining her opinions about everything she saw.
She was 2 years old and she had a lot of opinions.
"That bird is doing it wrong," she told him once, pointing at a bird on the garden wall.
"Doing what wrong?"
"Sitting." She looked at him like this was the most obvious thing in the world. "It's sitting wrong."
He looked at the bird. "It looks fine to me."
"You're not looking right."
He was 10 and she was 2 and he did not have a good answer for that, so he looked at the bird again and tried to figure out what she meant. He didn't even know how she could speak at the age. Maybe this firmanent allowed that? She watched him look, satisfied that he was taking it seriously.
That was basically how it went with Rhett.
He taught her to read when she was 4 because she wanted to learn and their mother was busy and the tutors were focused on Dalen which further emphasized the family's deteriorating condtion. How could the tutors not do their job? Anywasys it took about three weeks. She was fast and she got frustrated when she wasn't fast enough, which was a problem he recognized. He had been the same way before, in the other life, always annoyed at the gap between how quickly he understood something and how quickly he could execute it.
"You're going to be good at things," he told her once.
"I know," she said. "What things?"
"I don't know yet. A lot of things probably."
She thought about this. "What are you going to be good at?"
He was 12 when she asked that. He had been thinking about it for 8 years already. "Systems," he said.
"What does that mean?"
"Things that have rules. I'm good at finding the rules."
She accepted this and went back to her book. That was another thing about Rhett, she asked questions until she had enough information and then she stopped, she didn't keep going just to be polite. He appreciated that.
The tutor assigned to him started giving him strange looks around this time. Kael was doing well in the Firmament sensitivity exercises, better than he should have been, and the tutor kept writing things down without explaining what he was writing. Kael chose not to ask. He had gotten good at not asking questions that would draw attention to things he would rather not explain.
He was 14 when his father sat him down and explained, more directly than Aldric usually explained things, that the family needed him to do well at his Awakening.
"I know," Kael said. But what exactly could he do? Pray to the firmanent for a SSS grade so he could save the world and get a harem full of…. He stopped when he figured he was just letting his mind wander.
His father looked at him for a moment. "I mean it's important, Kael. Not just for you."
"I know, dad." Yeah, me too dad.
Aldric started to say something else and then stopped. He was a man who had a lot of things he meant to say and often decided at the last moment not to say them. Kael had inherited that from him, or he had always had it and had just passed it along through proximity, it was hard to tell which.
"You'll be fine," his father said finally.
Kael had said yes, probably, and meant it at the time.
Rhett found him afterward. She was 8 and she had clearly been listening from somewhere she was not supposed to be.
"Are you worried?" she asked.
"About the Awakening? A little."
"Don't be," she said. "You're the smartest person I know."
"You're 8. You don't know that many people."
"I know enough." She held up two fingers. Their signal, something they had made up years ago for reasons he could not remember now, just a thing they did when words were not quite right. "You're going to be fine."
He held up two fingers back.
He wasn't sure he believed it. But it was good to hear.