The days passed in hazy silence—nurses tending, maids whispering, and guards always stationed just outside the royal nursery. Zion lay still in his crib, his mind sharp as ever, trapped in a body no bigger than a sack of flour.
His infant cries were calculated—never too frequent, never too late. Each sound summoned new faces, and with every one, he learned something new about the world he'd been reborn into.
This kingdom, Elyndor, was pristine on the surface, but rotten beneath. The castle stank of power hoarded in shadows.
By the third week, he knew her name: Queen Arellia—his mother.
She was beautiful and cold, like winter encased in velvet. She visited him once a day, always flanked by her handmaidens, and held him like one might hold a dagger: carefully, and only with purpose.
"You're no ordinary child," she whispered one evening, her fingers brushing his cheek. "Your heart beat after your soul should've vanished. I saw your first breath—taken after your last."
She knew.
She didn't know who he had been, but she felt something ancient had taken root in her newborn son.
Zion, now Raen, had little time to dwell. At six months old, he began crawling. At eight, he could stand. His bones ached with unnatural speed, his muscles forming faster than the maids could gossip.
By age one, he spoke.
Not fluently—but enough to say names, to repeat phrases, and to scare the court into silence.
"A prodigy," the scholars called him."A blessing of the gods," said the priests."A curse," muttered the High Lord Chancellor when he thought no one listened.
Zion heard everything. The palace was louder when people thought the prince couldn't understand.
On his second birthday, an old man arrived.
Lord Therion Venn. The King's Hand. Slim, gray-bearded, with eyes sharp as a hawk and a cane he didn't need.
Zion—Raen—felt it in his bones: this was no advisor.
This man was a hunter, and he had come for a reason.
"Such bright eyes," Therion said, kneeling before him with a crooked smile. "There's fire behind them. I wonder… what kind of boy you'll grow into, little prince."
Raen did not smile.
Because Therion's aura felt too familiar.
The same weight. The same silence before a blade struck home.
The same energy Kael Duram once wore.
He didn't know how, but he knew one thing for certain:
His killer had been reborn too.