The creditor arrived on a Wednesday, which Kael knew because Wednesdays were when his father reviewed the estate accounts, and the timing was either a coincidence or it wasn't.
Kael was 10 and he'd gotten pretty good at being in a room without anyone noticing, so he sat on the stairs above the entrance hall with a book open in his lap that he wasn't reading.
The man's name was Forden and he was from a lending house in the capital. He handed Aldric a document and waited while Aldric read it, hands clasped in front of him.
Aldric read it twice.
"The terms were extended last year," Aldric said.
"The extension has concluded," Forden said. "We've been patient, Lord Ashborne."
Aldric looked at the document again and Kael had seen his father do that before, look at something a second time like it might have changed. It hadn't.
"I'll need 2 weeks," Aldric said.
Forden said he'd see what he could do and then left, and Aldric stood in the entrance hall for a moment before walking toward his study without looking up at the stairs.
Kael went back to his book.
He'd seen this kind of thing before, in his other life. A game studio he'd worked with had gone through the same slow slide, and the signs were always the same. Fewer staff. Simpler lunches. The way adults started leaving sentences unfinished around kids. The Ashborne estate had been showing those signs for about 3 years and the list wasn't getting shorter.
He didn't say anything about it because there was nothing useful to say. He was 10. His job was to get to 16, Awaken at a high grade, and fix it that way. He understood the plan. He also understood, from a lifetime of watching systems fall apart, that plans with one point of failure were bad plans, and right now he was the only point of failure this family had.
He was still thinking about that when Rhett found him.
She came up the stairs and sat next to him and looked at the entrance hall like Forden might still be down there.
"Who was that man?" she asked.
"Someone from the capital."
"What did he want?"
"To talk to dad about money."
Rhett went quiet for a second and then said, "Are we poor?"
"Where'd you hear that word?"
"Marta." Marta was the household staff member who'd been with the family the longest. "I asked her why we don't have horses anymore and she said we were comfortable, but she said it in the voice she uses when she means the opposite thing."
Rhett was unusually perceptive for her age. Kael didn't have a great answer for that, mostly because Rhett was right about Marta's voice. "We're fine," he said.
Rhett looked at him the way she looked at him when she thought he wasn't being straight with her, and she'd been doing that since she was 2, which was honestly a little unsettling for a 4-year-old.
"Okay," she said, and went back to looking at the empty entrance hall.
They sat there for a while and Kael actually read his book this time. Rhett leaned against his arm at some point without saying she was going to do that, which she did regularly and he'd stopped minding around the time she turned 3.
The book was a history of the Firmament's first recorded mapping, technically a tutoring text but actually pretty interesting if you read it as documentation. The early researchers had been trying to build a classification system for soul grades and what got him every time was how confident they were about it. They built the whole thing expecting it to be complete, with no handling at all for values outside the expected range.
Every game designer he'd ever known made that exact mistake at least once. You build your evaluation system around the inputs you expect and then someone puts in something you never considered and the whole thing either breaks or does something weird. The researchers had assumed the system would cover everything because they couldn't imagine what it would mean if it didn't.
Kael filed that away, the same way he'd been filing things away since he was 4 years old and first started mapping this world.
Sword training was after lunch and he wasn't good at it, and he'd stopped pretending otherwise about 2 years ago. Oswen ran him through the same forms he always did. Kael did them right, precise with no real power behind any of it, which Oswen had been trying to fix for 4 years with limited results.
"You're thinking too much again," Oswen said.
"Probably," Kael said.
"A sword form isn't a puzzle, Kael."
The thing was he understood sword forms fine. He understood the geometry and the weight distribution and the way each one set up the next, and the problem was that his body knew he understood it and that self-awareness slowed everything down. He had the same issue in his past life playtesting his own games, where knowing the systems too well made it impossible to react to them naturally. You ended up playing the map instead of the game.
He kept that to himself.
After the third form Oswen stopped him and said, "Your footwork's better."
"I've been watching Dalen."
Oswen looked at him. Dalen was 15 and a lot better at this, and the gap between watching someone and actually pulling something useful from it wasn't a gap most 10-year-olds crossed. "That right."
"He turns his back foot out more than you teach. Gives him a wider base on the follow-through."
"Most students figure that out in their 3rd or 4th year of training."
"It's pretty obvious once you see it."
Oswen was quiet for a moment and Kael recognized the look, an adult deciding whether to ask a question they weren't sure they wanted answered. He decided not to. "Show me," he said.
Kael showed him and it was better, noticeably better, and Oswen watched without saying anything else.
He walked back to the main house afterward and found his father sitting in the garden, which was unusual because the garden was his mother's space and Aldric being there alone in the afternoon was new.
Kael sat down across from him.
His father didn't say anything for a while. Parts of the garden had gone overgrown in the sections that used to have hired maintenance and Kael had counted about a dozen signs like that over the past year before he stopped counting.
"Oswen says you've improved," Aldric said.
"A little."
"He said more than a little."
Kael didn't respond to that.
His father looked at him the way he sometimes did, like he was trying to match up 2 different pictures of the same person, and Kael had been on the receiving end of that look since he was about 6 and had learned to just wait it out.
"6 years," Aldric said.
"Until the Awakening. Yeah."
His father went quiet again and Kael understood what he wasn't saying. The lending house's patience had limits and the estate had limits and the title had limits, and all of those limits landed somewhere around the same point on the timeline, which was roughly 6 years away.
"I'll be fine," Kael said.
"I know you will." His father said it the way he said things when he meant them but wasn't fully sure they were true. "I just want you to understand what we're working toward. The family needs a strong result, not for status, we're past caring about status." He stopped for a second. "For the people on this estate. For your mother. For Rhett."
"I understand."
"Do you?"
Kael looked at his father. Aldric was 44 and looked older than that, and the past few years had done something to him that Kael didn't have a clean word for. It wasn't sadness exactly, more like what happens to a person who's been managing the same problem for so long that the managing had become the whole job.
"I understand better than you think I do," Kael said.
His father looked at him with that look again. "Sometimes I believe that," he said.
They sat there without talking after that, which was fine. Aldric communicated in the spaces between things and Kael had figured that out early.
The Firmament did something odd when he stood up to leave.
It was brief, a small shift in the energy around him like a room adjusting when someone moves furniture in it, and by the time he stopped and paid attention it was already gone. He'd been noticing this more over the past year. The Firmament had always felt off around him but lately it was doing things without him trying to make it do anything, little responses to nothing he could identify, and he hadn't mentioned it to anyone because he didn't know how to describe it and also because he was pretty sure that describing it would open conversations he wasn't ready for.
He went inside and Rhett was at the door with grass on her knees from the lower garden and the look of someone who'd been thinking about something the whole time he was outside.
"Kael," she said.
"Yeah."
"Is the Awakening going to fix things?"
She was 4 years old and she'd just asked the question his father had spent an entire conversation working toward and then backed away from.
"That's the plan," he said.
"But you don't know for sure."
"Nobody knows anything for sure."
She thought about it for about 2 seconds. "Okay," she said. "But you're going to try really hard, right?"
"Yeah," he said. "I'm going to try really hard."
That was enough for her and she went inside, and he followed and meant it, he'd been trying since he was 4 years old and woke up in a child's body in a world he didn't understand yet and started figuring out how it worked.
The thing he didn't say, the thing he was only starting to understand himself, was that trying hard inside a broken system didn't guarantee anything. You could play the game right and still lose if the game was badly designed.
6 years. He had 6 years to figure out whether the system was worth playing.