I was five years old when I died for the first time.
Or at least, that's how my story should've gone. If I weren't a freak.
Fast start? Sorry, let me explain.
My name is Leox Lether, and I live in a tiny corner of the Fourth World. A village called Everhurst.
My mother and father were both unawakened adults. Farmers who sent their produce to the larger cities in order to make a meagre living.
That left me uneducated. A roaming child within a small settlement.
If I were born in a city, I would have been able to receive an education. Perhaps I would have learned about the dangers that lurked within the world.
Unfortunately, I was a dumb child. I was already five, and yet I could barely even speak!
One day, my little feet carried me to the kitchen, where a knife sat on the counter. The counter that was just a little bit too high for me to reach...
No... Not if I jumped.
"Hee-yah!"
My brain might've been underdeveloped, but my legs worked fine!
I managed to grab the handle of the knife. It fell.
It pierced my eye and punctured my brain.
The screams of a five-year-old child followed shortly afterwards. They could be heard through the entirety of the village.
My mother and father ran inside to see what I was crying about. It didn't sound like the cries of a hungry or displeased child, but rather cries of agony.
They found me standing there with a knife through my skull, and blood pouring onto the carpet.
My mother screamed, and my father ran over to me.
"Mary, what have I told you about leaving knives within his reach!"
My father dropped to his knees, shakily examining the bloody face of his son.
"I... I... I'm sorry!" My mother cried, barely able to form a sentence.
And me? I simply stood there with the knife in my eye. At that point, the pain had turned to nothing but a dull throb. My tears had stopped falling, and my cries were no longer there.
My father seemed to notice this. He gave me a strange look through his face of fear.
"Kyle... why isn't he crying?" My mother asked through her tears.
"I... I don't know. Leox, my boy, can you understand what I'm saying?"
I could hear them perfectly, so I nodded my head.
I understood everything, there was just a minor problem. A knife was stuck in my brain.
Eventually, my father came to a conclusion. Somehow, his son was alive, despite the terrible injury.
He hurried me over to the village healer. An Awakened man, who went by the name 'Frost.'
Frost was an older man with white hair and an eye patch over one of his eyes. When he saw the state of me, he didn't even wince.
I guess as a healer, he had already seen injuries worse than this. Or even experienced them himself.
Frost examined me in front of my parents. He cleaned the surrounding area of blood before looking at the knife and checking how deeply it had been lodged into my face.
"No doubt about it." The man spoke in a rough voice. "Knife's entered his brain."
My mother let out a weep, and my father could only palm his face.
Their little brain had ended up like this, purely because of their mistakes.
"But," Frost continued. "The boy is somehow still alive. Even I don't understand this."
For a moment, my mother's weeping stopped and she looked down at me.
It was a fair assessment to say that this injury should have killed me. After all, I was Unawakened, with no magic in my body to somehow keep me alive.
Under no circumstances should I have survived this.
This led Frost to a theory. A theory that he didn't explain to anybody else at that moment.
Instead, he convinced my parents to allow him to perform a surgical operation on me. One that required them to step out of the room so that he could focus.
My parents hesitantly accepted. They stepped out of the room, and I lay down on a medical bed with a lantern light flashing on my face.
Frost scooted his chair over to me. He had a serious look on his slightly wrinkled face.
"I doubt you can understand me boy, but I think you're immortal."
I understood him perfectly. However, I couldn't find the words to respond. I also didn't know what the word 'Immortal' meant at the time.
Frost noticed this from the look on my face.
"It means... that you are unable to die. It's a crazy theory, since death has been all we've known in the Four Worlds. But as a doctor, I can't think of any explanation for this."
He explained it in words that helped me understand the situation. Even I, as a five-year-old, knew that death was common in the Four Worlds.
So that left me with the clear question
Why can't I die?
Was I cursed? Some sort of devil?
There was an answer to this question. However, it was one that I wouldn't get the answer to for a long, long time.
Never mind that. Let's focus on the knife in my brain.
Doctor Frost placed his hand on the handle of the knife and gently tugged on it. I felt the point moving around in my brain, but it didn't hurt.
"No wincing or screaming. I hope that's due to my theory being correct, and not that the brain injuries turned you dumb."
I didn't know what that meant.
Afterwards, Frost returned to a shelf where he carried jars containing a variety of herbal medicines.
He took some out and crushed them together in a pestle and mortar, creating a paste that he rubbed around the area surrounding my wound.
Afterwards, he took in a deep breath and sighed.
"Leox, if my theory is wrong... Then I apologise in advance. If I'm right, well your existence could change the very world."
Doctor Frost grabbed hold of the knife handle once again and pulled with all of his might.
The knife slid out of my brain and then my eye socket. A fountain of blood rained from my face, squirting over the doctor's white hair.
After Frost wiped his eyes of the blood, he quickly looked down at me.
I was alive, still breathing. And my eye seemed to be remaking itself.