From the moment Kaelen opened his eyes, he didn’t cry. He listened.
The world came to him not in sights or sounds, but in layers. Structure. Balance. Pattern. His cradle had been handmade from sunroot wood, carved with runes to keep away storm-spirits. Yet by the time he was six months old, he had etched new glyphs into it using a piece of charred quartz.
When Lima found them, she didn’t scold him. She knelt, traced the lines, and whispered, “Show me how you saw this.”
He simply pointed at the sky.
Kaelen was a child of quiet places and internal gravity. He didn’t babble or scream like most toddlers. Instead, he would take things apart—clocks, lanterns, keystones—and reassemble them in ways that made no immediate sense.
But they always worked.
By age two, he had built a spinning whee
