This is un-fucking believable. He thought to himself, squirming around, trying to grasp at something anything through the weakness in his limbs. His voice croaks, feeling sore — raw…

“Guuuu…”

A baby’s voice.

His eyes are blurry, but still, just barely he could make out his hands.

Baby’s hands.

You must be KIDDING!

But there was no joke. He was a baby, for the second time in his life.

He thought he heard murmurs, voices nearby, but the world was too blurry and far too messy to even comprehend. Everything came through in vibrations, his ears too undeveloped. He thought he felt a warmth on his forehead, but before he could curse internally anymore, he fell into a slumber, his feeble mind unable to bear the weight of consciousness.

—

Imagine being tied down, your arms trapped, bound — legs the same. Unable to shit but your pants, and all you can do is scream. That was the reality of being a conscious infant. A hell in of itself.

How many more years must I suffer. He thought to himself. Things had started to make a little sense. The world had begun unraveling in faint images. The clearest of all of them was the face of a man with long, black disheveled hair and a scruffy beard. A pair of dark eyes and a tanned face that seemed to always look down at him in sadness.

I wanted to cry just at the sight of the guy.

With a little deduction he was able to come to conclusion that the dark haired man constantly looming over him was his father. The man kept saying a word over and over, to which he deduced to be a name.

Tyrian.

Tyrian’s life as a baby was rather bleak, being lugged from place to place, trying to make sense of the world through stunted senses. It wasn’t until, what felt like years, or probably a couple months, that he was able to see, and even properly think with his slowly growing brain.

He was able to conclude a few things: His mother had died in the birthing process, which explains the sad faced dad. Her face didn’t even register in his own memory, but from the constant wailing that his father did late into the night he could come to the conclusion her name was Maria.

Secondly, he was a peasant.

Or at least it seemed so with the nasty state of things.

His home was a single room, woven out of bamboo planks. In one corner was a bed and his cot, opposite was a raised set of stones used as a kitchen adjacent to a small fireplace for heat and cooking. The rest of the home was used as storage, with a middling amount of shelves, and herbs hung up to dry with rough woven rope and racks holding an assortment of different tools.

All made of rough looking metal that was dark, like iron.

It was the tools that gave away his social status. A plow, a sickle, a hoe, an axe and a small hand-length knife.

Fucking great.

And I must be in bum-fuck rural nowhere if our living circumstances were to go by.

Tyrian couldn’t recognize the culture at all. He was surprised that there wasn’t a hint of modern technology in the slightest, but such places were still a thing… right?

As he continued to be a baby, against his will, he met the lady who would fill in for his mother, a wet-nurse. Her name was Aunty Amun, she didn’t share the same pitch black features of hair and eye as did his father, but instead had brown hair with hints of greying. She was a plump yet rather muscular woman, strong-headed and homely. She would throw a fuss at the sad old man whenever she’d visit, the poor guy would just stand there with his head down as she berated him. He almost felt bad for his dad, but again, they were living in squalor, so he couldn’t blame her.

She was quite rough with the man-handling, but alas, Tyrian wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds, not that I could. It was nice when she came around, because she’d speak about things rather than wail about his dead mother.

While she was over, Tyrian’s father would gather his tools and leave for work. She’d spend the time trying to clean the house a little, but mostly just tend for Tyrian before leaving him in his cot to rest and sleep.

Life was simple, and he was growing.

But yet on one fateful day, Tyrian witnessed something rather absurd.

It was on the first outing from the confines of the hovel he was calling home. Wrapped up in a bundle of rough furs, his father, who he came to learn was named Lucas, brought him outside.

The first thing he ever saw of the outside world was an overcast sky, filled with large smatterings of uniformly grey clouds that hung close to the ground. Below those were fields of purple and reds, long thin, tube-like reeds that grew to about waist heigh. They filled farms as far as his little baby eyes could see. A breeze brushed across the fields of purple and red reeds and they clattered about like an army of wind chimes.

The house was in a large clearing, dominated wholly by the fields of reeds. Tyrian only saw a handful of other houses nearby, it seemed they lived on the periphery of a greater village he could only just barely make-out in the distance.

Just behind the house was a great forest of bamboo. The border for his current known world. Large stalks of torso-sized shoots dominated the horizon, stretching ominously high into the sky, blocking any hope of a better vista. Below, different fauna grew, what looked to be ferns to flowers, creeping vines and moss that clung to the colossal shoots of bamboo like parasites.

It was so foreign from anything Tyrian had ever seen at least on…

On? Fuck where the hell did I use to live? New—er… earth?

And that was when it hit him. The memories of his former life were fading away, being pushed out to make room for his growing baby brain. Panic consumed him immediately, he tried recalling everything he knew, but there were only two things he could remember, his name: Kane — and how he died.

Stabbed to death.

He would’ve cried, wailed as hard as his little baby voice could if his father’s actions didn’t pull him out of the ensuing spiral of panic.

“Shhhh… Look, Tyrian.” He said, or at least Tyrian assumed he did. Lucas held Tyrian in a single arm before turning his palm towards the field of purple and red reeds.

With a flick of his palm, out of seemingly thin air, a fist-sized ball of water conjured into being. Tyrian’s large baby eyes widened in disbelief, his tiny little mouth agape. His panic all but frozen in the momentary stupor.

Lucas continued his movements, swiftly slicing the orb of water in two with the edge of his palm vertically, then horizontally before flicking with all of his fingers, sending the four much smaller orbs of water flying out across the fields.

The orbs arc’d through the air, loosing some size in the process before Lucas suddenly closed his fist and the orbs burst. Water exploded over the fields, falling to the purple reeds. The muted thumps of droplets landing on the reeds filled the air in a crescendo of noise.

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What the…

And again, for the second time that day, Tyrian had another revelation. Though his specific memory of his former life was a jumbled mess, there was something quite certain.

The Earth he was from had no such magic.

—

The first winter was a terrifying affair for Tyrian. As it turned out, winter in the world, was more ice than snow. Every waking moment was spent in utter fear that the rickety roof would cave in under the thunderous pounding of hail.

Not only was it freezing cold, the hearth in the home barely able to properly heat the small room, Lucas was CERTAIN that his hairy chest was the only way he could prevent Tyrian from dying of frostbite. This was how Tyrian learnt of, or more so smelt, the distinct lack of personal hygiene present.

This might be hell.

But in a way it was touching, I am his son… I think?

It was a — disturbing thought.

Winter was spent being fed and wrapped so tightly he could hardly breathe. All he could do was shit and listen, and shit and listen he did.

—

Four some years went by since those fateful winter nights.

He was four something years old now. Which was precisely old enough to help his father in the fields according to… his father.

“Tyrian bundle.” The gruff man said, cutting and throwing an armful of Ouy to the floor. Tyrian followed Lucas through the field, collecting the reeds into a bundle and tying them off with rough rope woven by the old weaver down the road. He unwound another small length of rope and cut it loose from the coil with his father’s small iron knife for the next bundle. It seemed like a waste of rope but apparently the Temple would pay for any rope used when collecting tithes.

Harvest was a hard affair, taking a few weeks to complete for the both of them, made harder by the fact that Tyrian was quite, quite small.

“Tyrian bundle.” His father said again, and so Tyrian followed lugging the coils of rope with him.

Tyrian had come to learn that Lucas was a man of few words.

In the time he had spent together with him, the man had grieved, and at the end of his wailing, crying and tears he found but an empty shell. A husk that kept toiling the fields, a pair of weathered hands with scant purpose outside of planting and harvesting.

That was Lucas, a man who plants, then waits, then harvests.

I really wonder what the man was like before her death.

But it was like trying to converse to a brick wall, Tyrian had gotten a grasp on the language through his long winter nights and moments of listening and shitting, piecing together the sparse words he’d get from his father. It was truly thanks to Aunty Amun that he was able to converse at all, otherwise he’d probably be relegated to—

“Tyrian bundle.” Lucas called out again, before stopping for the day. He turned towards the sky, which was near permanently overcast. Wherever they lived, it seemed to have three terrible seasons.

Spring, or Sprig as they called it here, was planting season. The start was a couple of cold months, but the only time he could appreciate a clear blue sky. Too bad he spent the majority of it bent over, shoving the ends of dried Ouy’s into the fields.

Summer, was really only defined as the either Sprigs end, or Frost’s beginning. A overcast, humid and hot season regardless, that made for the perfect cocktail of discomfort while working through harvest, sleeping and just existing in general.

That was the current month. Harvest season.

Lucas stared at the overcast mass of uniform grey. A blanket of clouds that would continue to darken until it began to rain, then snow, then hail. Such was Frost.

“We’ll stop here.” The man said, to Tyrian’s surprise, it was barely past mid-day, they’d generally toil for another five hours until it got too dark to safely be outside. Usually, Tyrian wouldn’t question the early stop, like an employee who stumbled into a moment of respite. But today felt different.

“Why father?” He asked in his childish voice, while tying off the final bundle of Ouy.

Lucas pulled his eyes away from the clouds, looking over final section of Ouy left to harvest. They’d be done in less than a weeks time, faster than last year, with a little over a month left until first rain.

“We will talk about your upcoming [Orb] today.” This made Tyrian straighten up, an excitement welling up from within himself. He couldnt keep his lips from curing into a smile, desperately trying to keep his poker face.

Lucas saw the attempt and could only shake his head.

“Come, Tyrian. Help me collect the bundles.” To which Tyrian nodded without delay.

Finally, is it time? I honestly haven’t been counting my days, but am I nearly five already?

Five years of age, five years spent in this new world. In that time he had learnt many things, but at the same time, nothing at all. He hadn’t been allowed to venture past the closest neighbors. The weaver up the road, the herbalist on the edge of the clearing and the nearby family of farmers who owned the field next to theirs to borrow a fire-starter during a terrible frost in his third year.

Though all the knowledge paled in comparison to anything pertaining to [Orb].

It was magic.

Granted by the Five divines to every child at the age of five.

The two of them packed the bundles of Ouy reeds onto their shoulders. Lucas carried the bulk, while Tyrian struggled with just two, his arms too short to properly wrap around. They had to make multiple trips to the storage shed beside the house and by the time they were done it was already getting dark out.

“We’ll talk over dinner.” Lucas said and grabbed two reeds to bring inside.

Ouy was a versatile plant, made of a hard outer-shell that could be peeled to create woven products as the old weaver had done so, while the inside was filled with a mushy almost pumpkin like flesh that tasted similar to a sweet potato.

Tyrian had seen a couple ways to prepare Ouy, the most common and easiest was to just roast the reed over a bed of coals. The outer-shell would act as a thermal layer, charring until the inside was cooked. He had seen other methods, mostly performed by Aunty Amun, she’d mash the Ouy flesh into paste, mold them into shapes and mix them with other herbs she’d collect and fry them in the pot or turn them into a soup.

Unfortunately she’d stop coming over ever since Tyrian had begun to walk. So he was left with his father’s preferred method of roasting the reed wholesale over a bed of coals.

“Sit.” Lucas said while taking his usual spot on one of the two bamboo stools before the fireplace. He lightly threw the Ouy reeds into the fireplace, watching the embers shift and glow before they settled once more.

Tyrian took the spot next to him, feeling the warmth of the embers on his fingers and toes. The smell of cooking Ouy was pleasant, a starchy aroma that quickly filled any room it was in.

“You are nearly five.” The man said, staring into the embers. “When you turn such, you will receive your Orb from the divines. Do you remember them?” He asked.

Tyrian nodded. This was taught to him at a young age by both Lucas and Amun. “Lumia of Light, Gaia of Earth, Zephi of Wind, Igni of Fire, Aquil of Water.” He recited.

The five Divines, which still, to this day, had Tyrian unsure if they were true to life Gods, or merely beings of great power.

Though at a certain level, is there even a difference?

Lucas continued, “There are others, sons and daughters, but not of our concern.” He shifted a little in his seat, reaching over to flip the Ouy. “As you know I have been blessed by Aquil, and received my [Orb of Water]. Which means there is a chance you will be the same…” He said, his voice trailing off into a whisper. He adjusted his throat, as if there was something lodged inside. Tyrian could see a flare of pain in Lucas’ dark eyes. The man stared into the embers as if there was something far beyond the roasting Ouy.

“...but, your mother had a different [Orb]. [Orb of Light] blessed by Lumia.” Tyrian held still, silent as to not trigger his father’s edge of reminiscences. This was the most he had ever heard of his mother, and the first time he had heard about her Orb.

After a moment of silence, Lucas was able to bring him back from whatever spiral he was staring down at. “Between the two blessings, which one you’ll receive, I don’t know. Some say that there’s hierarchy between the Divines, yet I’m unsure, as such thoughts are blasphemy but… you have her eyes.” That he did. Bright, almost silver eyes that contrasted his dark hair. It had given him a fright when he first saw his own image in a still bucket of water.

Lucas pulled out the two Ouy, setting one down before preparing the other. He crushed the top and peeled back the shell revealing a steaming black length of starchy flesh within. After peeling a decent amount he passed the Ouy to Tyrian who thanked him as he received it. Careful not to burn his little child hands.

“Whatever [Orb] you receive, you need to know two things. The first is your Capacity, it is what tells you how many Orbs you can use repeatedly. When I first got my Orb I had the average 1 Orb, but as time went on and I kept practicing and growing, I came to the current 9 Orb Capacity I have today.” Lucas peeled his own Ouy, but didn’t take a bite out of the flesh.

“Secondly, when you’re able to reach 15 Orb, you have a chance to change your Orb into something greater according to your will. This is hard, and many fail.” He paused for a moment.

“I failed… but your mother did not.” Again, the man paused trying to hold back a tide of tears. “She was able to change her Orb into [Light Hands] which was able to heal minor injuries and ailments… but was still not enough to save—” he stopped himself. Knowing that any further and he’d spend the rest of the night a wailing mess.

Tyrian could only listen. His father did not like to be pestered with questions, he could only wait and hopefully ask the weaver down the street or Aunty Amun next he saw her for further clarification.

“Thank you father.” Tyrian said, and his father nodded.

The father and son duo sat in silence, eating their Ouy under the faint ember light of the night.