The first breath was fire.Not from heat, but from the memory of not needing it.His lungs filled with thick, foreign air—damp with earth and old ash. He coughed. He coughed as if something sacred had broken inside him. And as his body trembled—new, small, defenseless—his soul shrank, frozen by the certainty that he had once been something more.He had forgotten how much it hurt to be born.

  A woman’s cry tore through the silence like a taut string finally snapping.Beyond the darkness, the damp blankets, the hands holding him, the world barely breathed.A crooked wooden cabin. A well dripping with no rain. A forest so thick it swallowed the moon. And a river that didn’t seem to carry water, but time.

  He didn’t know his name.He didn’t even know if he still had one.He only knew that his eyes—blue, absurdly blue—had opened before his mouth.And the first thing they saw was the ceiling of dry branches, swaying as if greeting him.As if they remembered him.

  “Where am I?” he wondered.But not with words. He had none yet.Only an echo. An inner vibration.A scream that couldn’t find its shape.“Who am I now?”

  And then, in the tremble of raw flesh, he felt it:a murmur.Not a voice. Not a thought.A liquid, subterranean murmur, as if the well beside the cabin were talking in its sleep.

  Tears.Warm, salty, alive.Falling on his skin like an intimate rain, ancient and impossible to understand.They weren’t his. And yet, they touched him like they belonged to him.As if they were part of the silent contract that had brought him back.

  His body shook, still foreign to itself, as those clear drops marked his face like welcome tattoos.The tears came from a figure leaning over him, a silhouette made of both light and shadow—shifting contours he couldn’t quite hold in place.

  She held him with hands that trembled more than he did.Strong, calloused hands, but trembling—as if afraid to break something fragile.She was his mother.Though at that moment, to him, she was just a strange creature:a mask of flesh that surrounded him, frightened him, and at the same time shielded him from the cold creeping in from the walls.

  She had blue eyes.Blue like moonlight caught in shattered glass.Not just any blue—deep, mineral, filled with memories he couldn’t name yet.And her skin… her skin was the night.Dark as a moonless forest.As a forgotten song.

  From her skull fell a cascade of silver threads.Hair that shimmered even in the half-light, as if each strand held a shard of falling star.She didn’t seem entirely human.There was something older in her—more wild, more beautiful, and sadder than anything he remembered, even in dreams.

  And yet, when she brought him to her chest,when her warmth enveloped him and her heartbeat echoed a rhythm he didn’t understand but instinctively recognized,the fear faded.Just a little.Just enough for the world not to swallow him whole.

  He turned his head.Slowly, like someone afraid the world might change if looked at too directly.Shadows multiplied around him.Muffled voices, broken breaths, hands that didn’t dare touch him but ached to, with a reverence close to worship.Faces. So many faces.

  They looked alike—eyes like old water, skin like earth and night, hair like silver roots or charcoal vines—but each one different, like diverging echoes of the same song.Some cried with joy. Others with fear. Others simply watched, with that silence so full of love it could only be born on the edge of miracles or loss.

  His tiny body, new and still unnamed, felt too soft for so much emotion.He didn’t understand those gazes, or why they hurt to be touched by them.He didn’t know tenderness could be heavy.He didn’t know love could be a fire without flames.

  He cried.He cried because he had no other way of existing yet.Because the world was too big, too dense, too human.

  And then, without knowing why, he closed his eyes.Sleep came like a warm river, wrapping him in the promise of a place with no questions.

  For an instant—brief as the blink of a dying star—he felt safe.Maybe, he thought, without words,this won’t be so bad after all.

  […]

  A new cry.This time not from hunger, nor fear, but from pure, unfiltered frustration.Barely a year old in that tiny body and already trying to stand.A feat far harder than he had imagined.

  —Oh, darling, again? —said a soft voice, warm, but with a tinge of impatience.—Let him —answered another, deeper, slower, but just as warm —It won’t hurt him to try.—Of course it will! He’s just a little one; he shouldn’t be straining himself like that. Come, love… it’s time for sleep.

  The woman scooped him up with a resigned sigh, pressing him to her chest as she carried him through the house into a room where the night had already taken root.He didn’t cry this time. But something inside him shrank.

  He didn’t fear the dark for what it might hide.He feared it for what it already held: the emptiness.That silent abyss he had inhabited between his death and this rebirth.

  —Good night, my beloved Renatus. I’ll see you in the morning —the woman whispered as she laid him in the crib.

  Renatus.That’s what they called him.A curious name for a soul without one.As if they knew.As if someone, somewhere, still remembered what he had once been.

  At first, the sounds of the shadows meant nothing.Just a sea of noise.But in time—like something deep inside him already knew the music beneath the language—he began to understand.The tongue was strange, a broken Latin, as if learned from an echo.

  He also came to understand that the shadows were his parents.A reflection in the water confirmed it: reptilian eyes, blue like scorched glass; obsidian skin; hair like liquid silver.An extravagant combination, he thought. Excessive.As if the universe had decided to pour all its oddities into a single mold and call it mother.

  He thought all this as sleep pulled him under.No longer hostile.Little by little, this new life was beginning to feel less like a disguise, and more like a skin.

  […]

  It was midday, and the sun was cracking stones open.Renatus, sitting in the dust with the stability of a poorly placed rock, watched the world with enormous eyes.All around him, the house smelled of crushed leaves, dry sweat, and root bread.

  —We’re not getting any more water from the well if he keeps wailing —grunted the man, jug slung over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised.—He’s crying because he wants to help you, Elur —replied the woman without looking up, grinding something in a wooden bowl with rhythmic movements. —It frustrates him not being able to walk. I can see it in his hands. He moves his fingers like he’s holding fire.

  Elur snorted, but not mockingly.It was a laugh wrapped in exhaustion.

  —You know what they say about fire in the hands too early...—Are you quoting superstitions now?—No. I’m getting water. You should rest, Nai?. You’ve been on your feet since dawn.

  She didn’t answer.She just kept grinding, more forcefully now.The herbs smelled bitter mint and salt.Renatus watched her with the devotion of a little animal who didn’t yet understand words, but did understand intent.

  When Elur left, his mother leaned in and looked at him for the first time that day.

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  —Your father’s as stubborn as a boulder. But he’s got a huge heart… even if he only shows it to trees.

  Renatus blinked.The heat made his eyes itch, but her voice was a balm.She kept speaking—not to him, really, but to the air:

  —I saw it, you know? When you were born, the fire in the hearth went out. And it only came back when you cried. He says it was the wind. I say it was you.

  She went silent, running sap-stained fingers through his hair.

  —We won’t tell him. Not yet. Let him think it was the wind. Gives us more peace that way.

  […]

  He was two and a half. Maybe three.Hard to tell when time wasn’t measured in calendars, but in new flowers, in the thickness of the mud, in his mother’s voice turning into song when the nights grew longer.

  The house was old, but alive. It creaked like a sleeping animal.The mill sat out back, stuck to the forest like a scab. That’s where he liked to be.Not for the smell—a mix of damp wood, ground seeds, and something more metallic he couldn’t name—but because the mill was the only place where no one spoke to him like he was a child.

  His mother was in the next room, hanging branches of some plant he wasn’t allowed to touch.His father was out hunting.No one was watching him.And that gave him space to watch.

  He played with a handful of dried herbs. Rubbed them between his fingers.He liked the sound: scrk, scrk, like tiny bones.He closed his eyes and smelled.Sweet and sharp. Mint, maybe. Or something close to it.

  He opened his eyes.And then he saw it.

  A speck. Floating. Suspended in the air like a feather caught in a dream.Not just a bit of dust. Not with that glow.A faint shimmer, almost shy.Blue.Not sky blue, but the kind of blue his mother’s eyes had in the dark: deep, shifting.

  Renatus reached out.Not to touch. Just to be closer.As if the warmth of his fingers could convince it to stay a little longer.

  And it did.

  The speck didn’t fall. Didn’t drift randomly.It stopped. It held.As if it had found a place to be.It vibrated ever so slightly—barely perceptible—like something invisible was keeping it there, right in the center of his attention.

  Renatus tilted his head.Followed it with his finger.And the speck, obedient, slid along with him.Not fast. Not obedient like a dog.More like… curious.As if it responded to a shared instinct, an ancestral memory written between body and world.

  He smiled.And then he sneezed.

  The spell broke like a soap bubble.The speck fell—without drama.It disappeared among ordinary dust, among crumbs and bits of bark.

  Renatus blinked.Something inside him—something warm and subtle, something without a name—tightened, then unraveled.As if a muscle he’d never used had just gotten tired.

  That’s when he heard his mother’s voice from the next room.Not loud. Not scared.Just… present.

  —Don’t play with the Arkhéon dust, love —she said, as if she’d been watching the whole time. —You don’t yet know what it might show you.

  He didn’t answer.He didn’t know how.He didn’t understand the words—not all of them.But he understood the tone. The warmth. The warning.And most of all, he understood that she had known what he himself didn’t yet understand.

  The world had moved. It had responded.And his body—that new, unfamiliar body—had said something without speaking.

  Renatus looked at his fingers.Then at the air.And for the first time since he was born, he felt he wasn’t alone in his own skin.

  […]

  He was four, but his mind already worked like that of a grumpy little alchemist.

  For days now, Renatus had been replaying the moment the particle floated.Not the why, but the how.He remembered the warmth in his body, the feeling of pressure under the skin—something like the urge to sneeze... but in his fingers.That was the best he could put it.

  So, he set out to replicate it.Of course he did.

  He picked a stone. Smooth, gray, boring. Almost innocent enough that no one would notice he was planning to do something to it.

  He hid behind the shed, where the weeds were taller than him and the light barely filtered through in green ribbons.He sat down, placed the stone between his legs, closed his eyes... and thought:“Warmth. Pressure. Outward motion.”

  Nothing.

  He scowled, muttered something under his breath, and tried again.This time, he focused on his hands.Imagined heat inside them, like a tiny ball of air trapped between the muscles. Like a yawn that wouldn’t come out.

  And then… a vibration.

  Tiny. Minuscule.The stone didn’t glow, didn’t hover, didn’t burst into color.But it got warm. Barely.As if it had been left out in the sun for exactly one minute.He knew it because when he touched it, he felt that dry, alien warmth—impossible in the shade where he sat.

  He didn’t smile.Didn’t squeal in triumph.

  He simply raised an eyebrow and muttered,

  —Well. Not entirely stupid.

  And that was it.The stone. The faint heat.Nothing worth telling his parents.Nothing to brag about.

  But in his head, the important questions had already started to bloom:

  Why did it heat up? What did I do differently? Was it the stone, or was it me?

  He wasn’t chasing miracles.He wanted understanding.Like someone who isn’t after magic, but after mechanism.

  […]

  One night, four flowerings after his arrival in this world, Renatus noticed something different.Not in the air. Not in the sky.In his parents.

  They were terrified.Not worried. Not tense.Terrified.Like ancient prey that smells the hunter before the threshold is even crossed.

  —This isn’t right… —his mother whispered, to no one in particular—. It’s too soon. It only happens every five years… the night little Reni was born was the last one. No… it can’t be this soon.

  Her face, usually firm as polished stone, was now all cracks.Cracks her son had never seen.

  —This is a bad omen —said his father, hollow-voiced, dropping a sack of supplies as if the weight no longer mattered—. We have to warn the village. Help secure the food. Now!

  What broke them was the early appearance of the black moon.Nethra.

  Not black, not exactly. But that’s what they called it.A cursed, solitary moon that, on rare occasions, crossed the sky without her twin sister, Luxor.Her light was dim, bluish—like a shadow lit from within.And with her, came the worst stories.

  Nethra, the Cursed One. Bringer of plague and disappearance.Old tales claimed her reflection in water could take you if you stared too long.That her nights stole unborn children.That her blue light twisted magic and opened doors best left shut.

  Normally, Nethra danced alongside Luxor, the white moon and guide of the world.Together, they were balance. Cycle. Order.

  But tonight, Luxor was gone.

  The sky, stripped of her protection, was a deep abyss of blue.A funeral azure.And the sun, guardian and father, sank like a murdered god—retreating into the horizon as if too afraid to face what was coming.

  Renatus felt his mother’s hand gripping him with unfamiliar force.It hurt.But not as much as seeing her face—that mix of urgency and desperation no child should ever see in a mother.

  She dragged him back into the house as the wind changed direction.As the dogs fell silent.

  That night, the three of them lay together.Not out of tenderness.Out of instinct.

  His father, a man whose muscles felt like old roots, trembled.Not from cold.From memory. From omen.

  His mother wrapped around them both, with her body—and with something else: her voice.

  She sang.

  “The sea beneath the cliffIs the blue in my mother's eyesThat came from the blue in her mother's eyesThrown on down the line…”

  An old song. Distant.Sung like a spell.Renatus didn’t understand all the words.But he understood what they meant.

  And it didn’t soothe him.

  “Higher hills do not provideFor hearts born of coral and mossWhere rain won't flow beyond our streamAnd water is captive to the well…”

  The melody, fragile and beautiful, didn’t calm him like it did his father.It unsettled him.Because something inside him stirred with those words.

  He didn’t know them.And yet, he remembered them.

  When his mother finished, he dared to break the silence:

  —Mom… what was that?

  She smiled. But it wasn’t a joyful smile.It was the smile of someone who knows truth weighs more than it should.

  —Age Old Blue, —she said—. A song my family’s passed down for generations. I wish you could’ve heard it under better skies, sweetheart… but my mother and grandmother said it kept bad spirits away.

  Renatus didn’t respond.Didn’t move.Didn’t blink.

  Because he knew.Deep down—in a place where language hadn’t reached yet—he knew.

  Maybe he wanted to believe he was special.That his pain was a rare blessing. Or a unique curse.That his soul, ancient and bruised, had been chosen.

  But no.

  He wasn’t the only one.Not the first.

  And that disturbed him more than any darkness.

  Because if there were others…If more souls like his were trapped in new bodies...

  Then his pain wasn’t his.It was part of something he never chose.

  It was an inheritance.

  And in silence, while his mother sang to the blue night,Renatus wished—for the first time—not to remember anything at all.