The boy woke up, the sharp taste of blood in his mouth and the stale, musty scent of bodies crowding around him. Chains bit into his wrists, against his already tender skin. Outside the wooden fence, the market roared to life, a mix of merchants barking their sales, cart wheels rattling over cobblestones, and gulls screeching from the harbor, where the air was heavy with salt and the smell of fish.
The early morning light peeked through the gaps in the wooden slats, casting sickly yellow stripes across the dirt beneath him. He slowly pushed himself up, feeling the weight of the manacles. The metallic clinking sounded as familiar to him in this dismal place. At his feet sat a cracked clay bowl, the remnants of yesterday's meager porridge clinging stubbornly to its sides.
The slave pen was heavy with its true essence: the stench of sweat, and the morning breeze that brought from the ocean.
In his mind, a fleeting memory emerged—not his own, but from someone. A man stood at a swinging gate, gripping two ropes. "The tension needs to be balanced on both sides," the man mused, or maybe he simply understood it instinctively. But just as quickly as it appeared, the memory vanished, leaving the boy with an odd awareness of the physics behind ropes.
He shook his head, trying to push the thought away. These unwelcome intrusions popped up now and then—snippets of equations, images of pendulums, the sharp smell of poisons crafted from spices. They felt like memories of someone else's experiences, and knowledge his mind could access but couldn't quite comprehend. Useful, yet completely alien to him.
The pen felt almost alive. Other slaves leaned against one another, their bones creaking like fragile branches as they tried to stretch their stiff limbs. A guard, dressed in worn-out leather, paced the borders, his boots echoing heavily against the wooden floorboards. The boy watched him stride, his mind automatically keeping track of the rhythm. Forty-two steps from one corner to the next. Three seconds between each thud. It was all so predictable.
Next to him, a woman coughed, a deep, rattling sound that suggested her lungs were giving up. She offered him a piece of her bread crust, her fingers trembling slightly. "Take it," she urged, her voice rough like the ground. "You're too thin."
He nodded, grateful, tearing the crust in half and giving a piece back to her. In this harsh place, such small acts of kindness felt incredibly valuable.
"Where do you come from?" she asked, her voice hoarse from years of breathing in dust.
"The battlefield," he replied. "That's where they found me."
"Same here," she echoed, nodding as she took a small bite of bread. "The trader got three silver for me. Said it was a good price." There was no bitterness in her voice, just a weary acceptance from someone who had learned to measure their worth by their captors' standards.
The boy remained silent. He had no memory of being bought or sold, only the vague recollection of awakening hungry in a roadside camp, surrounded by the dead and dying bodies.
Suddenly, the slave master appeared at the pen's entrance, ledger in hand. "Line up!" he bellowed, his tone dripping with the lazy authority of someone who owned lives and found them burdensome. "Names and markings!"
The line of enslaved individuals shuffled forward, their chains scraping against the dirt. The master made his way along the row, scribbling notes in a worn notebook with a charcoal stylus, his expression one of utter disinterest.
"Name?"
Each person either replied or fell silent. Some had names to offer, while others were reduced to mere labels. When the master reached the boy, he looked up, impatience evident in his narrowed gaze. "What's your name, boy?"
The boy said nothing—he had nothing to say.
With a dismissive sigh, the master recorded his observations. "No name?" He noted a K in his book. Without a pause, he continued onward.
The boy watched the ink dry, the solitary K appearing as a sharp, small mark pressed into the page. It wasn't a name, just a record of his existence.
Later that morning, as the slaves swept the market area, the boy found something peculiar. While discarding a chunk of hardened bread crust, he noticed a small, dark kernel hidden within. It resembled a pebble from the midnight sky, pleasantly dense and cool against his skin. There was no glow, no obvious magic, just an odd weight that felt strangely substantial, as if it contained something compressed beyond belief.
He pocketed it, his hunger overriding his curiosity. When he found a moment of solitude, he rolled the kernel around his tongue. It tasted metallic, with a texture that was different from anything he had ever known. He swallowed it down with a gulp of water from the communal bucket, pondering if it might be a rare spice or mineral that had accidentally mixed in with the bread.
Time passed as he continued his sweeping task, but soon an odd sensation began to stir in his stomach—a cold thread spreading throughout his body, a pressure that felt like a clock winding tight. The metallic taste lingered in his mouth. Suddenly, the sounds of the market shifted. He could hear the rhythmic creaking of cart wheels, the tautness of ropes, and the deliberate steps of the guards.
A memory flickered in his mind, the man's lost in thought, stood before a tangled web of pendulums, calculating their motions. It wasn't a vision but rather a stream of information his mind could effortlessly grasp.
"Hey, you! Pick up the pace!" a guard barked, cutting through the boy's concentration.
Still lost in thought, the boy nodded, his mind racing to keep pace with the changes in his perception. The world surrounding him fragmented into a web of balances, and he started unraveling their true meaning.
Suddenly, a commotion drew his attention. A guard had grabbed a younger slave, no older than eight—accusing him of stealing an apple from a nearby stall. The guard raised his hand, ready to strike the child, his face twisted with rage.
Something inside the boy reacted.
He snapped his fingers.
"Domain," he whispered softly.
In that instant, reality seemed to stutter. Everything felt as though time had slowed to the consistency of thick syrup; dust particles floated in the air, hanging there a bit longer than usual. The guard's arm, caught mid-swing, noticeably decelerated, changing its path. He couldn't stop his own momentum, causing him to trip and stumble right past the child.
He crashed into a market stall, crates and goods toppling around him in a noisy chaos that drew everyone's attention.
"What the hell?" the guard yelled, scrambling to his feet, his face a mix of embarrassment and confusion.
The boy was already in motion, his mind racing with calculations. He spotted a sturdy barrel nearby with a rope coiled next to it. Memories of the man's lessons on levers and stored energy flooded his mind. He grabbed the rope, using the barrel as a pivot to redirect his own momentum into a narrow gap between stalls.
"Stop that boy!" someone yelled.
A trader swore as his display of pottery crashed to the ground, shards of clay scattering across the cobblestones.
The boy managed to slip through a narrow gap and into the alley, his heart pounding in his chest. He pressed himself against the wall, struggling to catch his breath, and pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper from his pocket—the ledger page with the single letter K that he had snatched unnoticed.
He examined the mark, then looked down at his hands. Something had changed inside him. To test if it was real, he quickly scratched a formula in the dirt—the pendulum equation from the man's memory. It worked. The math fit together perfectly; all the calculations were accurate.
He didn't fully understand everything that was happening within him, but one thing was certain: he has a power and a name—K. It felt like a lock without a key.
Across the market, a Stormhold scout who had witnessed the entire scene noted in his official report, "Possible seed-bearer. Mark: K." He looked up towards the alley where the boy had disappeared, a thoughtful expression on his face. This was the kid who had stopped a swing with just a word and a snap. The scout had encountered Seed users before, but never one so raw and unrefined.