POV – Azra'il
It took a considerable amount of time, thousands of humiliating tumbles, and what felt like decades of suppressed impatience, but I finally managed it. I was walking. Running, even. Bipedal control was once again in my hands, or rather my legs, marking the definitive end of that revolting indignity known as crawling across a floor that needed sweeping twice a day.
The life at the Greyrat household had taken a direction that, in all honesty, surprised me on more than one count. I have been born into thousands of different eras, acquainting myself with the full spectrum of human cruelty and moral bankruptcy in parenthood, but I was forced to admit: I had struck grotesquely good fortune with this family in the middle of nowhere.
My relationship with my immediate carer had improved substantially once again. Lilia no longer looked at me as though I might leap at her throat and drain her soul. The presence of Rudeus in the house and his deplorable voyeuristic instincts had ensured that Lilia gravitated consistently into my orbit. In her eyes, I was the household sanctuary. When she prepared my morning broths and bitter-leaf infusions, a pastime to which I had gradually educated her out of sheer desperation for gustatory survival, her hard features softened. In short, I had become the quiet, compliant junior mistress of the house, whilst my twin brother had become the hazard zone that Lilia actively worked to avoid.
My progenitor, Zenith, had proved herself a gentle enigma of formidable calibre. She never so much as blinked at my peculiarities. To Zenith, my perennial silence was not a macabre symptom of some disorder; it was simply the calm, mature manner of the daughter whose name "God had guided her dreams" to bestow. Her embraces smelt of sunlight, clean herbs, and healing magic. In the few lives where I had known maternal warmth entirely free of bloodline interests or court politics, I had counted such blessings on one hand and a half. I found myself, strangely, savouring those brief minutes whilst I rested my silver head against Zenith's shoulder.
〈I am growing dangerously accustomed to this. When things fall apart in this life, I genuinely would rather not witness the blonde weeping.〉
[That is what we systemic intelligences categorise as emotional bond development, or filial attachment, Azra'il. And judging by your diastolic pressure every time the progenitor offers mutual attention to the twins, it is at surprisingly healthy levels.]
Even Paul, that immense calloused wall of muscle, managed to surprise my cynical side. By the time I turned two, I had noticed how the doubt-ridden features of the "great patriarch" had been swallowed whole by the paternal shame of having very nearly abandoned his peculiar infant at the edge of a superstitious precipice.
These days, he compensated for that guilt with a protective dedication that was almost feral in its volume. I recall some time ago, having pulled myself upright and tottered across the courtyard during one of his ridiculous sword practice sessions, Paul halted his heroic display of aerial slashing mid-stroke. He took hold of my small arms to steady me, brushed a little mud from my cotton clothing, and smoothed the top of my silver hair with the thick knuckles of his calloused fingers.
He fixed his gaze on my luminescent blue eyes, which had always unnerved every villager who encountered them, and spoke in a voice thickened with sweat and blunt sincerity.
"Now listen here, little one. If some ignorant lad from the village... or even some adult fool tries to give you grief on account of your appearance, or your... condition," he paused, jaw tight with a pre-emptive anger, "you come and tell me. Immediately. I'll give the wretch such a thorough hiding he'll forget which way is forwards. Nobody lays a finger on a daughter of Paul Greyrat."
〈He is remarkably simple-minded,〉 I reflected inwardly at the time, without allowing so much as a flicker to cross my face. 〈He appears to genuinely believe that waving a piece of metal with sufficient brutality resolves every educational failing of an entire continent.〉
[Behavioural alert: The neurological signals of specimen Paul indicate a primary violent disposition linked exclusively to the protection of his immediate biological unit. Functional tribal loyalty level at 92%.]
〈A brute, and a somewhat loud one, yes. But apparently one who cares deeply for his own family. Rather like a rustic guard dog, thoroughly devoted to protecting his mistress's territory and their offspring. He has his uses.〉 I had permitted, on that occasion, a rare and faint curve at the corner of my lip. It had made Paul smile and very nearly come undone with relief for the better part of the afternoon.
I never said any of that aloud, naturally. A soul of millennia does not surrender its vulnerabilities without charge.
Time passed, and suddenly I was nearly three years old.
For an ordinary mortal, those three years represent a considerable portion of a short life. For me, they were approximately the equivalent of an afternoon nap. But in this particular existence, those three years had been, informative.
The body had finally begun to obey with some semblance of dignity. My legs, formerly a pair of trembling twigs that insisted on depositing me against any irregular surface, now bore my weight with the steadiness of someone who has run through arrow-storms and descended chasms on foot. Fine motor coordination was establishing itself. My voice, previously confined to the embarrassing monosyllabic vocabulary of "yes" and "no" and "hungry," had expanded into complete sentences, though I employed it with the same economy that an alchemist applies to rare ingredients: only when necessary, and never in excess.
The local village remained a collection of wooden houses and thoroughly predictable medieval attitudes. The neighbourhood children watched me from a distance with that irritating mixture of fascination and fear I had known since the cradle, quite literally. None of them had yet attempted to intimidate me at close range, which was reasonable evidence that the childhood survival instinct still functioned in certain species.
Rudeus, for his part, was an irritatingly constant phenomenon at the periphery of my existence.
My twin brother had revealed himself to be precisely what I had suspected since the earliest days of our new existence: an adult consciousness operating within a child's chassis, possessed of zero moral inhibitions and a considerable talent for social dissemblance. He had learnt to speak and comprehend the local tongue at a speed absurd by any standard, which was entirely unsurprising given that he was clearly no linguistic novice. Around the adults, he performed the role of "prodigious yet normal boy" with a competence that, under any other circumstances, I might have found almost admirable.
Around me, he simply, kept his distance.
It was not an outright hostility. It was something more akin to the primitive instinct of a small animal that senses, without fully understanding why, that the creature in the corner of the room does not belong to the same food chain. Paul felt it. The villagers felt it. And Rudeus, for all his supposedly adult mind, felt it with an intensity that sometimes made him stutter mid-sentence when I entered the same room.
I found that moderately satisfying.
〈Eos, analysis of the adjacent specimen's behaviour over the past several weeks.〉
[Pattern identified: Specimen Rudeus displays regular absences from the family living space. Average duration: forty to sixty minutes. Frequency: daily. Consistent destination: upper level of the residential structure. The location the residents designate as the "storage loft."]
〈The loft.〉 I filed the information away without acting on it for a few days. 〈And what precisely does a three-year-old boy seek repeatedly in a dusty loft with such regularity? Beyond further material for his deplorable hobbies, which I sincerely hope he abandoned following the incident with the wooden chest.〉
[Probability of recurring voyeuristic behaviour: 34%. Probability of interest in stored objects: 21%. Probability of autonomous intellectual activity: 45%.]
Forty-five per cent was a sufficiently high margin to unsettle me. Intellectual curiosity in Rudeus was a possibility I had not discarded, but neither had I investigated it with the rigour it deserved. And carelessness with relevant information was a habit I had abandoned approximately eight hundred lives ago.
On the afternoon of an unremarkable Tuesday, whilst Zenith folded fabrics in the sitting room and Lilia grumbled to herself in the kitchen, I watched my brother rise from his rug with the expression of someone who had just arrived at an important decision. He glanced discreetly around the room, noting the position of each adult with a precision that bordered on professional, then moved silently towards the staircase leading to the upper floor.
I rose thirty seconds later, unhurried, without announcing myself to anyone.
〈Let us see what the little pervert is getting up to this time.〉
[I advise caution. Should this prove to be another expedition to the laundry basket, I recommend immediate withdrawal and selective erasure of short-term memory.]
〈I have no such luxury, and you are perfectly aware of that.〉
The wooden staircase creaked on three specific steps, which I had mapped and learnt to avoid in the first weeks of vertical locomotion. I ascended in absolute silence, following the faint trail of footprints pressed into the dust of the upper corridor. The loft door stood ajar, a thread of yellow lamplight escaping through the gap.
I pressed myself against the wall beside the door and waited.
No suspicious sounds. No rustling of fabric. No mortifying groan of perverted satisfaction.
Only the sound of pages being turned with some difficulty. Then a long pause. The taut silence of someone stuck on something.
I pushed the door open with the tips of my fingers.
The loft was exactly what the name promised: a forgotten space of low, sloping ceilings, stacked wooden crates, furniture draped in cloth, and the persistent smell of old wood and dust compacted by years of neglect. The faint light of an oil lamp set on a low crate illuminated the figure of Rudeus seated on the uneven floorboards.
He had a book open in his lap.
Not just any book. It was a sizeable volume, thick-spined and worn with use, the sort of weight that children ordinarily avoid on account of sheer physical aversion to effort. The spine bore embossed lettering that I recognised immediately by the technical hand characteristic of academic magic texts.
Rudeus was hunched over the open pages, his right index finger sliding slowly beneath a line of text, his lips moving soundlessly as he attempted to decode something that clearly resisted every effort at translation.
〈Ah.〉 The understanding arrived with the composure of someone whom almost nothing surprises. 〈So that is it. The idiot is attempting to learn to read.〉
[Analysis of visible text: Elementary Treatise on Water Magic, local edition from the Kingdom of Fittoa, estimated publication approximately fifteen years prior. The paragraph open on the current page addresses the fundamentals of hydraulic flow manipulation through incantation. The linguistic level is intermediate by local standards. For a reincarnate adult without familiarity with the local alphabet, the difficulty would be considerable.]
I watched him for a few moments longer. He was genuinely frustrated. Brow furrowed, chin slightly thrust forward, fingers drumming with impatience against the edge of the page. It was the expression of a mind accustomed to absorbing information at speed, confronted with a system that refused to cooperate.
I understood that feeling better than he could possibly have imagined.
At some point during the thirtieth incarnation, I had found myself in a similar bottleneck. The arrogance of an old soul does not eliminate the need for basic groundwork. It is a lesson the universe takes particular pleasure in repeating.
I approached without sound, skirting a low crate and positioning myself slightly behind and to one side of him, close enough to read the text over his shoulder.
The line where his finger had stopped contained two words in sequence, within a paragraph describing the basic mechanics of a controlled-flow spell. Two technical words of local archaic root, with no obvious equivalent in any other tongue Rudeus might have carried over from his previous life.
I waited a few more seconds. He tried again, his lips forming incomplete sounds. He came close, but mishandled the central vowel of the first and the final consonant of the second, rendering the meaning entirely unrecognisable.
"That word means water," I said, with the ease of someone remarking on the weather. "And the other one means pressure."
The silence that followed was the kind that has texture.
Rudeus did not turn immediately. His finger stopped on the page as though the ink had frozen beneath his touch. His shoulders, previously curved slightly in concentration, rose two centimetres in an involuntary stiffness. I counted four full seconds before he finally turned his head in my direction.
His green eyes met mine.
It was not the look he ordinarily gave me, that mixture of instinctive discomfort and swift evasion. It was something else. It was the look of someone who has just received a piece of information that does not fit the model of the world they have carefully constructed over the past three years.
He looked at me. Then at the book. Then back at me.
"You..." Rudeus began, his voice slightly different from the "prodigious boy performing normality" tone he used with the adults. More direct. Drier. "You read that."
It was not a question. It was a hypothesis being tested.
I did not respond immediately. I sat down on the floor at a reasonable distance, crossed my legs, and looked at the open volume in his lap with the genuine interest that had brought me there.
"It is a treatise on water magic," I said, studying the flow-diagram illustrations on the facing page. "From what little I have read, the technical terminology is inconsistent. They use two different terms for the same concept of a mana channel, which must be making the reading rather confusing."
Another silence.
This one longer.
Rudeus was looking at me with an expression I had seen on faces far older and far more experienced than his. It was the expression of someone quietly reorganising a series of memories, revisiting past interactions in the light of new information, and arriving at conclusions that destabilised premises they had considered secure.
I knew precisely what was passing through his mind, because I had run the same calculation about him years before.
Azra'il can read.
Azra'il has never learnt in front of anyone.
Azra'il is not surprised by a magic treatise.
Azra'il speaks like someone who is not three years old.
〈Well then, chubby-cheeks. How long will you take?〉 I asked silently, without altering my expression.
[Behavioural analysis of Rudeus: Heart rate above baseline. Controlled shock microexpression. He is clearly processing the dissonance between the model of reality he has constructed and the evidence now before him. Estimated time to conclusion of reasoning: thirty to forty seconds.]
It took twenty-two.
"How many words do you know?" he asked at last. The voice was careful. Calibrated. The voice of someone testing ground.
I looked at him. Then at the book. Then back at him.
"Enough," I replied.
Rudeus closed the book slowly, holding his gaze on me with that new attention, entirely unlike anything he had directed at me before. It was not instinctive discomfort. It was not the peripheral fear of simple children and villagers. It was something that came perilously close to cautious recognition.
I extended my hand towards the volume.
He hesitated for precisely one second before handing it over.
I opened it to the page where he had stopped. The problematic paragraph was indeed poorly structured, with an overlap of terminologies that ought to irritate anyone attempting to learn the system from nothing. I turned back two pages, located the point where the inconsistency had begun, and indicated it without comment.
Rudeus leant forward slightly to look.
Neither of us said anything for several minutes. I pointed. He looked. Occasionally he asked a short question about a specific word, and I replied with the same economy of syllables.
It was not a friendship. It was not affection.
It was two reincarnates seated on the floor of a dusty loft at the edge of the world, reading a magic treatise of dubious quality by the trembling light of an oil lamp.
For the time being, that was sufficient.
〈Eos.〉
[Yes?]
〈Check whether there are any further volumes in this loft.〉
[Scanning the environment. Result: four additional volumes identified behind the crate to the left. Total: five books in the room. Estimated composition: one volume on the history of magic, two elementary magic treatises including the one currently held by specimen Rudeus, one on magic circles, and one on basic healing magic. Given the average cost of literary production in this region and the particular rarity of volumes concerning magic, the collection represents a considerable family investment. Someone in this household took the study of magic seriously at some point.]
〈Five books.〉 I processed the information without altering my expression. 〈All on magic. And the boy chose the elementary magic treatise to study alone in secret in the loft. At the very least, the pervert has his priorities in order.〉
[The dedication is technically admirable, given the circumstances.]
〈Do not repeat that in front of him.〉
Beside me, Rudeus pointed to a line of text with a hesitant finger. It was a simple paragraph, dense with technical vocabulary that he was clearly attempting to decipher syllable by syllable, with the quiet stubbornness of someone who refuses to concede defeat.
I looked at the line. Then at him.
"You are reading from right to left," I said, with the neutrality of someone noting that it is raining. "The local alphabet runs in the opposite direction. Begin here."
I touched the left margin of the line with the tip of my finger.
Rudeus blinked. He looked at where I was pointing. Then at the page as a whole, with the mildly embarrassed expression of someone who has just realised they have been assembling a puzzle upside down for the past half hour.
"This letter," I continued, indicating the first symbol on the line, "corresponds to the sound ven. It is not intuitive because the upper stroke is misleading. It resembles something else."
"Looks like a b," he murmured, more to himself than to me.
"To someone coming from a different alphabetic system, yes." I did not elaborate. He understood enough. "The next is dra. Together they form vendra, which means current. In the context of this paragraph, a mana current."
Rudeus repeated the word softly, testing the sound. Then he returned to the beginning of the line and attempted to work through it on his own, this time from left to right, his finger moving slowly, his lips articulating each syllable with a concentration he was clearly attempting to disguise as casual.
He stumbled on the fifth word. A long vowel that the local alphabet marked with an almost invisible accent.
"That one has double length," I noted, before he could press on with the wrong pronunciation. "The accent is small, but it changes the meaning entirely. Without it, the word means empty. With it, it means expansion."
Rudeus stared at the minute accent for several seconds.
"Who decides these things?" he murmured, in a tone that sounded considerably less like a three-year-old and considerably more like someone who had held strong opinions about inconvenient writing systems in other circumstances.
〈Welcome to the club.〉
"Linguists with a great deal of spare time and very little self-awareness," I replied aloud.
The corner of his mouth moved. It did not quite become a smile, but it was close enough to be noted.
We returned to the text without further comment. He pointed. I corrected when necessary and remained silent when it was not. Gradually, the rhythm of his reading grew less halting, the pauses between words shortening as the pattern of the alphabet began to make sense within the framework I was offering.
It was not a lesson. There was no blackboard, no notebook, no declared methodology. It was simply two pairs of eyes on the same page, and one voice that corrected when needed.
And then, for the first time in nearly three years of forced cohabitation, my twin brother turned the page and continued reading without looking at me with fear.
It was a beginning.