POV – Azra'il
Human bipedal locomotion is, from any practical standpoint, an architectural design error. The phase that precedes it, however, the humiliating act of dragging oneself across the floor on all fours like an overdeveloped insect, is a crime against existential dignity.
Several months had passed since the fateful day Zenith put her foot down and gave me a name. The harsh winter outside had kept us confined to the Greyrat family's rustic house, forcing me to endure the oppressive tedium of infancy. In time, my body had acquired the minimum firmness required for crawling. It is an inefficient, exhausting method of locomotion that leaves my knees perpetually marked by dust and invisible splinters from the wooden floor, but it was my only means of escape from that claustrophobic wicker cot.
I despised every second of it.
〈Eos, remind me again why I cannot simply levitate using basic telekinesis. I managed it perfectly well in incarnation number 117, when I was born as a plasma entity.〉
[Because, Azra'il, your current body is composed of flesh, cartilaginous bone, and fluids. Furthermore, your trunk muscles require gravitational resistance to develop properly. If you levitate now, you will arrive at the age of ten with the bone density of a bread pudding. Continue crawling. Consider it an exercise in humility.]
〈I have no need of humility. I need legs that function. And a glass of full-bodied red wine, preferably, though I suspect my six-month-old liver would give out immediately.〉
Despite my motor indignation, the shift in the household dynamic compensated for some of the daily stress.
Lilia, the servant with oval spectacles and impeccable posture, had undergone a rather fascinating evolution. In the first months, she could barely look at me without the fear of a demonic curse haunting her eyes. My biology and my luminescent blue eyes were a walking taboo to her superstitious mind. Daily proximity, however, has a peculiar power to transform the bizarre into routine.
Lilia had grown accustomed to me. But what truly accelerated that process of acceptance was not my undeniable composure, nor my quiet behaviour. What made Lilia adopt me as her "favoured child" was my twin brother.
Rudeus.
Ah, Rudeus. The fellow who had shared the womb with me. From the day of our birth, his indifference to crying and the analytical, silent manner in which he stared at the ceiling made it plain that he was no ordinary newborn. He displayed behaviour far too suspicious for a brain that ought, in theory, to barely know how to coordinate its own eyes.
It would not have been the first time I had crossed paths with a dimensional traveller. Across my thousands of existences, I had encountered a handful of other reincarnates. Very few, admittedly, and in the overwhelming majority of cases they were nothing more than ordinary, mediocre, pathetically normal mortals who had been granted a second cosmic chance through boredom, a miscalculation, or the sheer caprice of some deity of highly questionable character.
If Rudeus was one of those accidental passengers, and I was wagering every last chip I had that he was, then perhaps he was simply another tragic, quiet hero, or some weary former warrior seeking a peaceful and anonymous life.
I could not have been more wrong. Whatever past inhabited that boy's mind, he was, without the shadow of a doubt, the most deplorable and contemptible creature I had ever had the displeasure of calling a relation.
And Lilia was the first to suffer the consequences of that depraved mind conveniently concealed within the body of a chubby-cheeked baby.
The revelation occurred on a dull afternoon, as the winter sun washed over the sitting room. Zenith was resting in the bedroom, Paul had gone out to whatever physical labour he performed that involved swords, and Lilia was in the room with us, sweeping the dust near the stone fireplace.
I was seated on my thick rug, mentally cataloguing the patterns of a spider's web on the ceiling, when Rudeus stopped playing with his wooden blocks and fixed his gaze on Lilia.
She was bent over, cleaning the lower shelf of a bookcase. The servant's dress she wore pulled slightly against her hip.
Rudeus did not merely look. He assessed.
I watched his green eyes widen. His breathing, previously the soft murmur of a baby, grew faintly heavier. He blinked slowly, and a wet, revolting smile, utterly devoid of any childlike innocence, spread across his small face. It was not the gaze of a curious child. It was the hungry, leering, heavy-lidded gaze of a decrepit old man ogling a courtesan in a roadside establishment. I had executed noblemen in my palaces for casting less lascivious looks at my servants.
Lilia's instincts, honed by the life of someone who knows the world is dangerous for women, fired almost immediately. Her shoulders tensed as she turned her head slowly. When she found Rudeus's gaze fixed on her thighs, the colour drained from her face. She gathered the hem of her skirt with a subtle movement, cleared her throat, and took two quick steps back, visibly unsettled by the predatory attention coming from a creature still in nappies.
Lilia looked desperately around the room, her eyes full of mute panic. They found mine. I was simply sitting there, wearing my most glacial and indifferent expression, silently passing judgement on the entirety of our family's genetic lineage.
The relief on Lilia's face was instantaneous. She walked briskly to me, bent down, and scooped me up with something approaching desperation, settling me on her hip. She was using me. I had become a human shield, or rather, a social shield, a physical and psychological barrier between herself and my degenerate brother.
You are welcome, Lilia. Had I been capable of holding a sword, I would have severed the meridians of his eyes already. Count yourself fortunate that I am temporarily unarmed.
[Behavioural analysis complete. The patterns of pupil dilation, elevated heart rate, and facial microexpressions displayed by your adjacent sibling are scientifically consistent with adult-level sexual arousal. Preliminary diagnosis: Your twin brother is not a reincarnated hero. He is a high-functioning chronic pervert with severe moral deficiencies.]
〈The universe has a sadistic sense of humour. Not only did it give me a brother, it gave me one who looks at his own nursemaid as though he wishes to devour her. He is the lowest of the low. Add it to the file of his deplorable peculiarities.〉
[File updated. Continuous surveillance is advised.]
Shaken, Lilia carried me to the far side of the room, well out of Rudeus's direct line of sight. She set me back on the floor near a pile of old cushions and muttered a flimsy excuse about needing to check the stew in the kitchen. She disappeared down the corridor at a pace that bordered on running.
I remained there, seated with the posture of a matriarch, and proceeded to observe my brother.
Rudeus appeared put out by the flight of his target, though the disappointment did not last. With Lilia out of the room, he realised he was free of adult supervision. His green eyes gleamed with a determination that, had it been directed towards learning magic or the martial arts, would have made him a prodigy. Unfortunately, his focus was of a considerably filthier nature.
He turned towards the small corridor connecting the sitting room to the house's washroom. There in the corner stood the wicker basket where Lilia and Zenith left the day's soiled laundry.
With the agility of a sewer rat in pursuit of crumbs, Rudeus began to crawl. His hands and knees struck the floor in a feverish, coordinated rhythm, a furtive, purposeful scuttle. It was like watching a tragic parody of an espionage operation.
〈He is not going to do it. Eos, the mathematical probability of him doing what I think he is about to do must be negligible.〉
[Evaluating trajectory and the complete absence of moral inhibitors... Probability of him raiding the laundry basket for undergarments: 99.8%.]
〈What a repugnant creature.〉
I crossed my arms over my chest, or attempted to, given the rudimentary motor coordination of my short little arms, and watched the horror unfold.
Rudeus reached the tall wicker basket. He braced his chubby little hands against the rough edge, his knuckles whitening as he used a strength I hadn't known he possessed to haul his own weight upward. He rose onto his tiptoes, a remarkable feat for our age, and leant over the rim.
He plunged his arm inside, rummaging blindly through linen shirts and dresses. His brow furrowed in concentration. Then his face lit up as though he had just discovered the answer to immortality.
With a swift tug, Rudeus extracted his prize from the bottom of the basket.
It was a pair of knickers.
Made from plain, rough cotton fabric, without any decoration, but clearly belonging to Lilia by size and cut.
Rudeus slid back down to the floor, landing seated. He held the undergarment in both hands, lifting it to eye level as though it were the most sacred relic in a cathedral. His eyes grew misty with pure emotion. And then, the wretch pressed the fabric to his face, buried his nose in it, and inhaled deeply, eyes closing with a muffled groan of satisfaction.
The silence in the room became deafening.
I blinked slowly. In thousands of years of existence, I have seen warlords massacre villages for gold; I have seen gods consume entire worlds out of boredom; I have witnessed atrocities that would shatter the mind of any ordinary mortal. But those evils had a certain grandeur to them. They were vast. Epic.
This? This was simply pathetic. A depravity so small, so petty, so utterly squalid that I felt a genuine urge to bring up the breast milk I had consumed earlier.
〈Eos. I demand the immediate release of my dimensional inventory. Bring me the Lance of a Thousand Afflictions. Thirty seconds only. I promise to clean the blood from the rug afterwards.〉
[Release of the dimensional inventory denied, Azra'il. Your current body would detonate if you attempted to wield a mythic-tier weapon. Furthermore, the murder of a first-degree relative in the first months of life raises considerable social suspicion and may compromise our cover in this life.]
〈You are a killjoy, Eos. And he is a pestilent little pervert. Karma ought not to take this long to act in a world that has magic.〉
Karma, it appeared, was listening.
Rudeus was so thoroughly intoxicated by his moment of revolting fetishism that he lost all spatial awareness. He leant back to better admire his trophy, his heels knocking against the base of the wicker basket, which he had already destabilised on the way up.
The tall basket swayed forward and back. Rudeus opened his eyes, finally registering the enormous shadow falling over him. But the adult brain inside a baby's body was not quick enough to calculate the inertia.
The rustic basket toppled sideways with a hollow crash.
Rudeus startled and attempted to scramble back, but his chubby arms gave way beneath him. He fell backwards onto the hard wooden floor, and as he did, his right arm swung out and struck with surprising violence against the sharp corner of a heavy wooden chest that Lilia used to store old blankets.
The sound of rough timber meeting thin, fragile skin was dry and unpleasant. The dull impact echoed down the corridor.
There was one second of absolute silence. That classic interval between the blow and the neurological response of a baby's body. And then the dam broke.
Rudeus let out a raw, piercing, genuine shriek, very different from the grumbling he produced when hungry. He rolled on the floor, dropping the knickers and clutching his own forearm, which now bore a deep, ugly gash from which scarlet blood was beginning to flow freely, staining the floorboards.
I simply tilted my head slightly to the left and watched with the detachment of someone observing rain fall through a window. To me, that cut was insignificant. I have lost limbs, organs, and heads on battlefields that smelt of burning flesh and despair. But for a baby, even one harbouring an adult's depraved mind, this was the most traumatic experience of the week.
Oh dear. The tragic consequences of one's own actions. Let me search for where I keep my empathy. Ah, wait. I haven't any.
Rudeus's hysterical wailing tore through the silent house.
Within seconds, frantic, desperate footsteps echoed heavily on the floor above, then down the wooden staircase. Zenith burst into the doorway of the sitting room like a blonde tempest, her face as white as wax.
"Rudy! By the gods, what happened?"
Zenith's voice was trembling, full of that instinctive maternal panic that makes the lungs burn. She ignored the toppled basket, and, by the grace of whatever deity watches over me, ignored the knickers abandoned on the floor beside his foot, and dropped to her knees beside my brother, pulling him into her arms.
"Good Lord, your arm... how did you—" Zenith choked as she took in the blood running freely down his small, chubby forearm.
The cut was ugly, a clean gash exposing the flesh beneath the thin skin, bleeding abundantly. Lilia appeared just behind her, coming from the kitchen, breathless. At the sight of the blood, the servant's eyes went wide, though her rigid bearing kept her rooted to the spot.
"My lady, I— I shall fetch bandages and an herbal salve at once!" Lilia announced urgently, already turning away.
"No need, Lilia. Stay calm," Zenith interrupted, her voice suddenly shedding its panic and assuming a clinical composure that caught me off guard.
That was not the tone of a mother in distress. It was the tone of a veteran. I adjusted my position on the floor, resting my weight on my elbows, and paid close attention.
Zenith did not rush about the room. She did not weep over her son's blood. Instead, she closed her eyes, drew a slow breath, and placed her right hand, palm down, a few centimetres above the exposed, blood-soaked wound.
The air in the room changed almost instantly.
I have dealt with mystical energy my entire life, or rather, across thousands of entire lives. What followed was no occult process; to my soul and to Eos's sensors, it was as clear as daylight. A subtle shift in atmospheric pressure, followed by an inaudible yet palpable hum in the density of the room. Zenith's mana channels contracted perceptibly, her internal energy reorganising with the controlled precision of someone who has executed that particular movement hundreds of times before.
Then she opened her eyes. Her gaze, ordinarily gentle, now brimmed with unquestionable authority. And she sang.
"By divine power, source of mercy and life, let this wound be purified and the flesh restored... Heal!"
The words were spoken in the local tongue, yet they carried a powerful resonance. The moment the final syllable of "Heal" left her lips, a blue-green light, intense, yet warm and soft burst from her palms.
The magical glow flooded the rustic room, bathing Rudeus's tear-streaked face, the dirty floor, and the wooden walls in an ethereal, sacred light. The light enveloped the boy's wounded arm like a liquid, luminous glove.
I watched, transfixed, as the magic worked. The blood stopped flowing as though a tap had been turned off. The raw, torn flesh began to shift and move from the outside inward. Muscle fibres knitted together in the space of milliseconds; the skin stretched, sealing the edges of the gash with absolute perfection. When the light finally dimmed and dissolved into the cold air of the room, there was no scar, no red mark, not so much as a scratch. My twin brother's forearm was perfectly intact, smooth and pink, covered only by the remnants of dried blood that no longer belonged to any wound.
Rudeus gave one final sob, his green eyes wide with absolute shock. He stopped crying immediately, staring at his own arm and turning it back and forth as though Zenith had just rewritten the laws of physics before him.
For the grubby little pervert, this was doubtless an immaculate miracle. An absurd novelty that shook the foundations of his understanding of the universe.
For me, the shock was of an entirely different nature.
I had already known this world contained magic. Eos had confirmed it in my first minutes of life, and I could feel the mana permeating even the rotting wood of this cottage. What I had not anticipated was the execution and efficiency of the process at the hands of our quietly domestic progenitor.
〈Eos... give me a full analysis of what just occurred. What is the structure of that spell?〉
[Magical analysis processed, Azra'il. The spell executed by the progenitor belongs to the formal class of Healing Magic, provisionally classified as an intermediate level of Restoration within this planetary system. The mechanism is not illusory; it is purely biological-arcane.]
〈She used mana to accelerate cellular replication and override the Hayflick limit in order to force instantaneous cicatrisation. Is that correct?〉
[Precisely. The local system appears to convert raw magical energy directly into catalysts for somatic regeneration. It is a technically primitive method compared to the Jade Emperor's Bone Restoration Techniques you employed in your life as a Martial Cultivator, but the thermodynamic efficiency for a chanted spell is impressively high. It demands excellent control and focus.]
〈And my opinion of the blue-eyed blonde has just risen another three notches.〉
I looked at Zenith, who was now smiling with relief, wiping away the last tears from Rudeus's chubby face before pressing a kiss to his forehead. Lilia approached swiftly with a damp cloth, cleaning the blood from Rudeus's arm and the floor, skilfully pretending not to notice the undergarment lying beside the basket, which she quietly snatched up and stuffed to the bottom of the wicker.
Zenith. The gentle woman who had insisted on celebrating my birth, who had defended her "defective" child with sharp claws against her own husband and against society. The woman who spent her days humbly cooking potato soup. That woman was no simple medieval housewife. She was an active, trained, and capable practitioner of restorative magic. The incantation had been steady; she had not stumbled over a single syllable; she had not wasted a moment searching for ingredients. The mana had flowed through her physical channels like water through the bed of a deep, ancient river.
I held my gaze on her for a moment. Who was Zenith Greyrat before she ended up at the edge of the world, married to a weeping, muscular swordsman?
As the family commotion gradually settled and Zenith carried my brother out of the room to clean him up properly, I was left alone on the rug. For the first time since my birth, a slow, genuinely dangerous smile curved the corner of my infant lips.
〈Forget the idiot Rudeus and his shameful fixation with dirty laundry, Eos. He is nothing more than a crawling parasite the universe has forced me to tolerate. But what our progenitor just did, I believe we have finally found something in this Dark Age that is truly worth dissecting and studying.〉
[Understood, Azra'il. The database for cataloguing local magic has been activated. I recommend we begin closely observing and mapping any grimoires or books in this house as soon as your skeletal structure can bear the weight of a hardcover volume.]
〈Patience, Eos. The body is growing, the muscles are adapting. Let my pitiful little brother play with the nursemaids.〉
I lay down on the wooden floor, feeling the residual pulse of Zenith's magic still echoing through the walls of the house.
〈Soon, I shall be on my feet. And when I am... the real game begins.〉