Time doesn't move in straight lines when you're small. It moves in seasons—snowmelt, mud, new grass, longer light—each one blurring into the next until suddenly a year has slipped by without my noticing.
I don't remember deciding to grow. I just did.
There's no single morning I can point to and say there, that's when it changed. It happens the way rivers carve stone—too slow to see, too steady to stop. One day my hands are clumsy things I have to think hard to control. Then, without any single victory to mark the shift, they simply aren't anymore. My body stops feeling like a borrowed suit two sizes too small and starts feeling, however faintly, like mine.
My mother says it first, the way she says most important things—quietly, almost to herself, while she's doing something else entirely.
"He's not a baby anymore," she murmurs one morning, watching me pull myself up against the leg of the table. "Look at him."
Vereen, lacing his boots by the door, glances over. "He's been not-a-baby for a while now."
"Not like this." She kneels beside me, steadying my hip with one hand. "He's trying to stand on his own."
I am.
My legs shake. My grip on the table leg is more determination than strength. But something in me refuses to sit back down—some old stubbornness that has nothing to do with the System and everything to do with who I used to be.
A faint hum stirs at the edge of my mind.
Daily Quest Added: Stand Reward: +1 Strength
Of course.
I hold on. I don't fall. Not yet.
-----Six Months Later-----
By the time summer heat presses thick against the shutters, I've stopped needing the table leg.
My first real step happens on an ordinary afternoon, though I don't know it's ordinary—days blur together at this age, marked only by meals and light and the rhythm of my parents' voices. What I know is that my mother is across the room, arms open, and something in me decides the distance between us is worth the risk.
I let go of the wall.
One step.
My knees buckle on the second, but my mother catches me before I hit the floor, laughing so hard she can barely speak.
"He walked! Vereen—he walked—"
Vereen is through the door before she finishes the sentence, dropping an armful of firewood without a second thought. "Show me. Come on, little warrior, show me."
I don't want to. My legs feel like borrowed things, unreliable and strange. But he crouches down, arms wide the way my mother's were, and something in me answers to that the same way it answered to her.
I take a step.
Then another.
Three in total before I overbalance and he catches me, laughing, spinning me once before pulling me into his chest.
Daily Quest Added: Take a Step Reward: +1 Speed
Daily Quest Completed Speed +1 Reward: First Step Coordination Increase
My mother wipes her eyes, still smiling too hard to speak properly. "He's walking. He's actually walking."
"Course he is," Vereen says, though his voice is thick. "He's ours."
I fall down more times than I walk over the weeks that follow. Every attempt ends the same way—wobble, overreach, collapse—but I keep trying, driven by something that isn't quite pride and isn't quite instinct. Something that just wants to move.
My mother watches from the floor each time, arms ready but not always fast enough. When I go down hard enough to startle myself into tears, she scoops me up immediately, but I notice—I always notice—that she waits half a second first. Long enough to see if I'll try again on my own.
I usually do.
A soft chime marks one particularly stubborn afternoon, after I've fallen four times in a row and gotten back up every single time.
Daily Quest Added: Get Back Up Reward: +1 Will
Daily Quest Completed Will +1 Reward: Minor Resilience Increase
It's a small number. It doesn't feel small.
Words come faster than steps did, once they start.
"Ma" and "Pa" become "up" and "no" and "mine"—the small tyrant vocabulary of every child who's ever lived, though mine comes wrapped in a mind that remembers what it is to negotiate contracts and read a room. I don't use that mind, not really. Not yet. It's still trapped behind a tongue too clumsy to keep up with it.
But it's getting less clumsy.
"Say 'forest,'" Vereen tells me one evening, mostly as a joke, expecting nothing more than a garbled attempt.
"Fo-rest," I manage, and his eyebrows shoot up.
My mother, stirring the pot, turns halfway. "That's a big word for him."
"He's a big kid," Vereen says, though the pride in his voice undercuts the casualness he's going for.
I try more words after that—dangerous ones, boring ones, whichever ones I hear most. Guild. Wolf. Careful. That last one comes up so often it feels less like vocabulary and more like a house rule.
One evening I string three words together without meaning to, mid-reach for a bowl on the table.
"Want. That. Now."
The room goes quiet.
"Spirits," my mother whispers. "He made a sentence."
Daily Quest Added: Form a Sentence Reward: +1 Mind
Daily Quest Completed Mind +1 Reward: Minor Language Development Increase
Vereen laughs so hard he has to sit down. "A demanding sentence. Of course it's a demanding sentence."
"He gets that from you," my mother says without missing a beat.
"He gets everything from me, apparently," Vereen mutters, still grinning.
Lira visits not long after, stamping mud from her boots at the door before she's even finished knocking.
"I heard he's talking now," she announces, crouching down to my level with the same bright grin she's always worn since the day I was born. "Go on, then. Dazzle me."
I consider my options carefully.
"Hello," I say, with as much dignity as a two-year-old can manage.
Lira presses a hand to her chest like I've wounded her. "Hello. That's it? After all the buildup?"
"He's saving the good words," my mother says from the fire, not looking up from her stitching. "He rations them like coin."
"Smart boy." Lira ruffles my hair, then straightens, her smile fading into something more careful as she glances toward my mother. "The Guild's stretched thin again. Half the volunteer guards from last spring got called up for something out east. Nobody's saying what."
My mother's needle pauses mid-stitch. "East? That's not the forest."
"No," Lira agrees slowly. "Which is its own kind of strange, isn't it? Danger crawling closer here, but the Guild pulling people the other direction."
"Maybe it's nothing."
"Maybe." Lira doesn't sound convinced, and neither, I notice, does my mother's silence. "Anyway. I didn't come here to worry you—I came to see the miracle child walk. Well? Are you going to show me, or just stand there being handsome?"
I show her. Badly, and only for a few steps before I trip into my mother's waiting hands, but Lira claps like I've won a tournament, and for a while the worry in the room dissolves into something lighter.
-----Another Season Passes-----
Walking becomes running faster than either of them are ready for.
My mother chases me through the house more afternoons than not, her exasperation always losing the fight against her laughter. I don't run because I'm trying to escape her—I run because my legs can, finally, after months of betraying me, and the freedom of it is intoxicating in a way I don't have words for yet, sentence-forming Mind stat or not.
"Lucifer!" she calls, half stern, half delighted, chasing me around the table for the third time that morning. "Slow down before you—"
I don't slow down. I trip over the leg of the stool instead, catching myself against the wall with both hands before I fall.
A faint hum flickers through me, quieter than the others, no formal header attached to it at all—just a whisper of reinforcement threading through muscle and instinct alike.
Speed +1 Reward: Toddler Momentum Increase
My mother finally catches me, scooping me up mid-giggle. "You are entirely too fast for someone with such short legs."
"Not short," I inform her seriously. "Fast."
She laughs so hard she nearly drops me.
The furniture-climbing Vereen joked about, all those months ago, arrives not long after.
He finds me halfway up the side of a low shelf, fingers hooked over the edge of a plank, feet braced against the frame, entirely too pleased with myself.
"Absolutely not," he says, crossing the room in three strides and plucking me off before I can protest. "How did you even—"
I point proudly at the shelf.
He stares at it, then at me, then sighs the specific sigh of a man who saw this exact outcome coming and built nothing to prevent it.
Daily Quest Added: Climb Reward: +1 Strength
Daily Quest Completed Strength +1 Reward: Minor Climbing Strength Increase
"We're moving the shelves," he tells my mother later, with the flat certainty of a man who has already lost this argument with himself.
"Told you," she says, not even looking up from her mending.
Running legs mean other children, eventually.
My mother takes me to the square more often now that I can keep pace with her rather than dangling from her hip, and it's there I meet the same freckled girl from the fence, older now, bossy in the specific way older children are bossy with younger ones they've decided to adopt.
"You're the golden-eyed one," she informs me, as if I might have forgotten.
"Lucifer," I correct.
"That's a big name." She considers me the way a general considers troops. "Can you run?"
I can. I do. Badly, at first, tripping twice before I catch the rhythm of it, but the other children don't seem to mind—there's a boy with a missing tooth who cheers every time I fall, and a smaller girl who trails behind us all clutching a wooden horse like a talisman. Someone declares a game with rules that change every time someone's losing. Nobody minds that either.
For a while I forget I'm the reincarnation of anything. I forget the forest, the tremors, the two lives stacked behind my eyes. I am simply small and fast and laughing, chasing children I'll probably grow up beside for years, in a village that feels, for one golden afternoon, entirely safe.
My mother watches from the edge of the square, arms crossed, smiling in a way that doesn't quite reach her eyes.
I don't understand why yet.
I will.
Not everything about this stretch of time is climbing shelves and demanding sentences.
The forest is louder than it used to be. Not in any single dramatic moment—no massive tremor, no distant roar loud enough to wake the house—but in the accumulation of small things. Vereen comes home later more often. The Guild calls more patrols than it used to. Villagers who once talked about the weather now talk, in lowered voices, about tracks and territory and things moving where they shouldn't.
"Another meeting," my mother says one evening, watching Vereen strap on his boots for the third time that week.
"They're being cautious," he says. "That's all."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true." He crosses the room and presses a kiss to her forehead, then to the top of my head. "I'll be back before dark."
He usually is.
The village elder stops by once more that season, leaning heavier on his cane than I remember, his sharp eyes softened by something that looks almost like fatigue.
"Still golden-eyed," he says, settling onto the low stool by the fire without needing to be invited. "Still growing fast, I hear."
"He climbed a shelf," Vereen says flatly.
The elder chuckles, though it fades quicker than it used to. "Good. He'll need the confidence." He accepts the cup my mother offers, warming his hands around it before speaking again. "The forest doesn't quiet down anymore. Not the way it used to, between the bad seasons. It used to breathe in, breathe out. Lately it just... breathes in."
My mother's hands still in her lap. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know." He says it plainly, without the practiced comfort he usually wraps his warnings in, and that honesty is somehow worse than reassurance would have been. "Something's holding its breath out there. I've lived beside this forest sixty years, and I've never felt it wait like this before."
Nobody says anything for a moment. The fire cracks. I watch it, too young to understand the shape of the silence but old enough, in the part of me that used to be Erivin, to recognize dread when it settles into a room.
"We'll manage," my mother finally says, the same words she's said a hundred times before, though her voice carries less certainty than it used to.
The elder studies her, then me, then nods slowly. "You always have." He pushes himself up with his cane, pausing at the door. "Keep him close. Whatever's coming, I think it's coming for all of us, not just the forest."
He leaves before anyone can ask him what he means.
I watch him go more times than I can count that season, and each time, some small, quiet part of me—the part that still remembers being Erivin, still remembers what it means to lose someone you love to an ordinary afternoon—watches the door a little too closely until it opens again.
It always opens again.
For now.
By the time the leaves start to turn a second time since my birth, I'm not a baby by any definition. I run. I climb things I shouldn't. I speak in short, blunt sentences that make my mother laugh and Vereen wince, depending on what I say.
One evening, tucked between them by the fire, I whisper the familiar command in my mind.
Status.
———————————— STATUS ————————————
Name: Lucifer Energy: 10 — Measures vitality and stamina
Strength: 10 — Measures physical power
Speed: 9 — Measures movement and reaction speed
Will: 3 — Measures determination and mental fortitude
Mind: 8 — Measures cognition, perception, and magical capacity
Dominion: 0% — Permanently increases all stats by this number as a percent
Resonance: 0% — Description Blocked
[Blank Cards: 2]
Skills: None
Locked Skill: ?????
————————————
Double digits, in two categories now. A perfectly ordinary adult's baseline, reached by a two-year-old through nothing but time, love, and a System too patient to rush me.
It should feel like more than it does. In another life—the kind I used to read about, back when stories were just stories—a number like that would come with fireworks, a title, some dramatic system voice announcing my ascension to not entirely helpless. Instead it arrived the same way everything else has: quietly, between a shelf I wasn't supposed to climb and a nap I didn't want to take. I decide I prefer it this way. Nothing about this life has needed to announce itself to be real.
I still don't know what the Blank Cards are for. I've turned the thought over more times than I can count—copy something, from someone, somehow—but there's no one in this house, in this village, who seems to carry anything worth copying. Just steady hands and tired eyes and the kind of strength that comes from decades of chopping wood, not magic.
Maybe that's the point. Maybe I'm not supposed to understand yet.
The Main Quest Chain still sits quietly in the back of my mind, unchanged since the night I was born.
Main Quest Chain Started Part 1: Wait Reward Upon Chain Completion: +1 Blank Card
I don't know what it's waiting for.
But I've learned, over two years of small hands and smaller victories, that waiting isn't the same as doing nothing.
My mother hums the same wandering melody she's hummed since the day I was born, low and constant beneath the crackle of the fire. Vereen's arm rests along the back of the bench behind us both, not quite touching, always close enough to.
Outside, the forest groans once, low and distant.
Neither of them looks up.
I do.
I don't know what's coming. I don't have the words for the shape of it yet, not even with a sentence-forming Mind stat and two lifetimes of memory behind my eyes. I only know the sound is getting harder to ignore, season after season, and that some quiet, patient part of the System hums along with it—waiting, the same as I am, for whatever comes next.
When the fire finally burns low, my mother carries me to the small bed that's replaced my cradle—too big for me still, but not by much anymore. She tucks the blanket beneath my chin the way she has every night of my life.
"Goodnight, little sun," she whispers.
Vereen leans over from behind her and taps the wooden frame twice, the same small ritual he's kept since I was small enough to fit in a cradle instead of a bed.
"I'm right here," he murmurs.
He always says it. I've come to understand, somewhere in the two lives stacked behind my eyes, that it isn't really meant for me at all—not entirely. It's a promise he makes to himself as much as to me, tapped into old wood like a nail driven down to hold something in place.
I close my eyes before either of them leaves the room, the way I always do now, trusting the dark the way I never once trusted it in my first life.
For now, though, the fire is warm.
My mother's voice is close.
My father's hand rests near my shoulder.
And I let myself believe, one more night, that this is simply what growing up feels like.