The first thing Kieran learned in this new world was that hunger had teeth.
It gnawed at him from the inside out—every morning, every night, until it became a second heartbeat. His ribs jutted like kindling through his shirt. His limbs were too thin for his body, and his stomach had long since given up on growling. There was nothing left to protest with.
The second thing he learned was that his name didn't matter here.
The old man who'd found him didn't ask for it. Instead, he grunted and called him "Boy" like a curse, or occasionally "Rat," depending on the day. No one in the village of Hollow's End cared about names unless you were a noble, a merchant, or a magic-blooded freak with glowing veins and a family crest burned into your chest.
Kieran was none of those things.
He was a five-year-old pauper with dirt under his fingernails and half a memory of a world that no longer existed.
And he was alive.
That was all that mattered. For now.
---
He spent most days working the goat pens or collecting weeds for stew. The old man—"Daerun," though Kieran suspected it wasn't his real name—was a former soldier with a limp and a bad temper, but he didn't beat him. That alone earned the man a strange kind of reverence.
Daerun didn't talk much, but he watched Kieran. Watched the way the boy picked herbs with perfect precision, or sorted tools without being told. Watched how he calculated the value of trade goods in his head when the peddler came around. Watched him mimic the butcher's movements when cleaning goat bones.
"You learn fast," he said one day, tossing him a half-rotted apple.
Kieran caught it, wiped it on his tunic, and bit in. "Had to."
Daerun grunted.
"You've got ghost-eyes," the man added later, sharpening a hunting knife. "Like someone shoved too many lifetimes in a body that's barely grown."
Kieran didn't reply. He stared at the fire and quietly counted primes in his head to keep the grief away.
---
He learned the rules of the world slowly.
Ashvale was a border province at the edge of the Empire of Caeldor, too close to the Demonlands for comfort and too poor for the capital to care. Hollow's End was a speck on the map, a forgotten scrap of mud and mist with less than two dozen families, most of whom were gaunt and bitter and had never seen a mage in their lives.
Magic existed, yes—but it belonged to the highborn. The gifted. The star-touched.
Starborn, Daerun had called him once, and Kieran hadn't asked what that meant. Not yet.
There were stories, of course—about the Arcanum Tower, where elites trained to command the elements with a flick of their wrist. Of the Imperial Sword Academy, where the children of nobles sparred under the eye of immortal instructors. Of the Demon Kings who once ruled half the continent before the stars fell from the heavens and scattered magic across the earth like wildfire.
But those were stories.
Kieran had no magic. No sword. No name. Only bones, bruises, and a mind no one here understood.
And yet...
At night, when the world quieted and Daerun's snores filled the cottage, Kieran would sneak outside and move through the forms.
Stances he remembered from Earth's martial arts books. Breathwork from tai chi. Motions from boxing, Muay Thai, aikido—all half-forgotten fragments of what his old body had studied in secret, adapted now to the slender, flexible limbs of a malnourished child.
There was no dojo. No mat. Just frost-hardened dirt and moonlight.
But it was enough.
Each punch grounded him. Each kick reminded him he was still here.
Still fighting.
---
A week after his sixth birthday—if he'd calculated the strange calendar right—everything changed.
A carriage arrived.
Not a merchant's rickety cart or a traveling tinker's wheelhouse, but a real, actual nobleman's carriage. Lacquered black wood, gold trim, and six white horses.
The village gathered like ants to sugar. Women smoothed hair and hid their bruises. Men straightened spines. Children were shooed behind fences.
Kieran watched from behind a stack of hay, his violet eyes wide.
The carriage door opened, and a man stepped out—tall, thin, in a velvet coat with silver runes stitched along the cuffs. He didn't speak, but his eyes moved over the crowd like a hawk choosing prey.
Behind him stepped a boy.
Kieran sucked in a breath.
He was maybe ten—older than Kieran by a few years, but not by much. Pale gold hair, long and tied back with ribbon. Ice-blue eyes, sharp and cold. Dressed like a miniature prince in polished boots and a midnight-blue tunic embroidered with what looked like constellations.
He looked like someone who belonged in the book Lina used to read. Not someone who belonged here.
The nobleman cleared his throat. "We are looking for a child."
The villagers went deathly still.
"Born under a red moon," the man continued, "on the first frost of winter. A star-marked soul. We have reason to believe one resides here."
Murmurs broke out.
Kieran felt his heart seize.
Me.
The old woman who ran the tannery pointed with a bony hand. "That one. The rat-boy Daerun picked out of the snow last winter."
All eyes turned to him.
He froze.
The boy with gold hair turned too, gaze resting on Kieran with an expression that wasn't quite disdain—but close.
"Bring him forward," the nobleman said.
Daerun's hand clamped on Kieran's shoulder from behind. "Don't move."
"But—"
"Listen. You go with them, you don't come back."
"I—"
"Starborn are tested. Measured. If you're lucky, they'll just take your blood. If you're not…"
He didn't finish.
Kieran shook his head, mouth dry. "I don't want to go."
"You might not have a choice."
But then—
The nobleman took a scroll from his sleeve. "Any such child must show the Mark. Without it, they are nothing."
Kieran held his breath.
The Mark.
The red star-burst on the chest—the one the original novel's heroine had. The one that flared with power when she reached maturity.
He had no such thing.
The nobleman gestured for Kieran to step forward.
He did, slowly. Silent. The nobleman flicked his fingers, and a glowing orb appeared, floating above his palm. Light scanned over Kieran's face, neck, chest.
Nothing.
The nobleman frowned. "No response. Likely just a fever-born orphan. Nothing more."
The golden-haired boy stared longer than necessary. "His eyes are strange."
"Many children born under the ash skies have strange eyes," the nobleman said briskly. "They rarely live long."
They turned and left.
Just like that.
Kieran stood in silence as the carriage rolled away.
---
Later, in the safety of Daerun's home, he curled up by the hearth, shivering.
"They were looking for the heroine," he murmured. "But she's not here."
Daerun raised a brow. "You talking to ghosts again?"
"No," Kieran said. "Just remembering the wrong story."
---
Three months later, the monsters came.
A shadow beast, tall as a barn, with a wolf's head and tendrils of black mist spilling from its eyes. A scout from the Demonlands, pushed across the border by shifting ley lines.
The village panicked.
No one had weapons. No guards. Only Daerun, with his old spear and bad leg.
Kieran didn't run.
He moved.
He remembered everything he'd read—every pattern, every weak point, every motion from the forms he'd practiced nightly. While the others screamed, he leapt, drove a sharpened staff between the creature's ribs, and drove it down.
It wasn't clean. It wasn't magic.
But it worked.
And when it ended, the villagers stared at him with a new kind of fear.
Not awe.
Not gratitude.
Fear.
"Demon-blooded," someone whispered.
"No child should move like that."
"Those eyes…"
---
That night, Daerun gave him a bag of coins and a pack.
"You've outgrown this place," the old man said gruffly. "They'll start locking their doors. Or worse."
Kieran looked up, stunned. "You're sending me away?"
"I'm giving you a head start. There's a monastery two days north. They take in strays. Learn a trade. Keep your head down."
Kieran clutched the pack, heart pounding. "Why are you helping me?"
Daerun shrugged. "You remind me of a boy I once knew. Clever. Quiet. Died too young."
Kieran didn't cry. But something inside him ached.
"Thank you," he said, voice small.
"Don't thank me yet," Daerun muttered. "The world doesn't care how smart you are. Only how long you survive."
---
And so, with frost crunching beneath his feet and stars burning cold above, Kieran left Hollow's End with nothing but a pack, a broken name, and a fire in his chest he didn't know how to name yet.
Not hope.
Not revenge.
Something deeper.
Something dangerous.
The will to rise—no matter how many times the world tried to keep him down.
---