He waited two weeks before approaching his father.
The waiting was strategic. He needed the breakthroughs to settle — for the Bronze Knight Aura Core compression to complete, for the Journeyman Mana Channels to widen and stabilize — before anyone who knew what they were looking at could examine him. He spent those two weeks reading, training in the small movements that developing cultivators were supposed to practice in the early stages, and calibrating exactly how much he intended to reveal and to whom and in what order.
What he intended to show: a child who was beginning to feel the earliest signs of Aura formation. Early. Remarkably early. But within the range of *exceptional* rather than *inexplicable.*
What he actually was: a Bronze Knight with Primordial Flame Aura operating at the heat output of a Silver Knight, and a Journeyman Mage whose Void-Current Channels had already developed to the level that an Adept Mage's would require years to reach.
The gap between these two things was something he would manage with the same care he had always applied to the management of difficult situations. Precise disclosure. Strategic timing. Enough truth to be credible, not so much truth as to be dangerous.
He found his father in the training yard on a Tuesday morning, working through the solo forms that Silver Knights used to maintain their Aura Core density. Gareth Draeven trained every morning with the consistency of a man who understood that what was not maintained was lost.
"Father," Kaelith said. "I think something is happening."
His father paused, hand on his sword hilt, and looked at his son with the careful attention of someone who had been noting things for four years without yet understanding what they were noting.
"What kind of something?"
"Behind my sternum. Something warm. It's been there for a few weeks." He held his father's gaze directly, which was a thing he always did with people he respected and intended to be honest with, within the limits of what honesty required. "It feels the way you describe your Core. When you talk about what it felt like at the beginning."
A silence.
His father set down his sword. Crossed the training yard. Knelt — this was the thing Kaelith had noted from his very first memories, that this large, solid man consistently brought himself to his children's level rather than looking down, and how much it mattered that he did — and pressed two fingers with careful gentleness to the center of Kaelith's chest.
A long silence.
His father's expression, when he finally processed what he was feeling, was unreadable in the specific way of a face that is handling something it did not prepare for.
"I'm going to get Tutor Aldis," he said quietly.
"Is it a problem?"
"No." A pause, the longest one yet. "No, Kael. It is very, very far from a problem." He stood. He looked at his son for a moment with an expression that had too many components to easily name. "Stay here."
He went.
---
Tutor Aldis arrived twelve minutes later, still in his indoor clothes, carrying the Awakening crystal in its leather case with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had been doing this for decades and knew the protocol.
He sat across from Kaelith at the garden table that Lyrea used for her correspondence and placed the crystal on the wood between them.
"Place your hands around it," he said. "Don't grip it. Just cradle it."
Kaelith did.
He was careful about what he put into the contact. He let through enough — the Bronze Knight formation, the Journeyman Channels, the beginning of the elemental affinity expression — to produce a result that was extraordinary without being incomprehensible. He kept the deeper layers locked down, the Mythic-grade affinity signatures subdued, the actual heat of the Primordial Flame banked to something that read as intense-but-manageable rather than *cosmologically significant.*
Even so.
The crystal blazed.
Not orange or blue or the muted colors of ordinary awakening. It blazed gold-violet — gold for the Aura Core, violet for the Mana Channels, the two colors occupying the crystal simultaneously in a way that was not supposed to be possible at this stage, in this age, in these proportions.
Aldis went very still.
He was quiet for thirty-seven seconds. Kaelith counted.
"Both," the tutor said at last. His voice had the quality of a man choosing each word with extreme care. "Both formations. Simultaneously. At age four." He looked at the crystal. Then at Kaelith. Then at Count Gareth, who was standing slightly behind his son with his arms crossed and his face doing something complicated. "Both at—" He stopped again. "The elemental affinities. I can see them in the color. Gold suggests fire. Violet suggests—" He frowned. "Void affinity. I've only seen Void affinity twice in thirty years. Both times in adult cultivators." A pause. "And this is dual formation, which means—" He stopped a third time.
"What does it mean?" Gareth asked.
Aldis set down the crystal very carefully.
"My lord," he said. "I need you to understand that what I am about to tell you is based on thirty years of experience, extensive reading, and what I am currently observing with my own senses, and that even so, I want you to have it independently confirmed before you act on it."
"Tell me."
"Your son is — at age four, without any formal training, having formed both an Aura Core and Mana Channels simultaneously — presenting affinity signatures that I would classify as Legendary grade at minimum. Possibly above Legendary. I have no personal reference for *above Legendary* because I have never encountered it." He paused. "The combination of fire and Void affinity in a dual cultivator is something that appears in the historical literature as—" Another pause. "As the signature of the Founding Heroes. Of whom there were seven. And the last of whom died four hundred years ago."
A silence settled over the garden.
Gareth Draeven looked at his four-year-old son.
Kaelith looked back at his father with what he hoped was an appropriately four-year-old expression of patient curiosity.
"What does this mean for him?" Gareth said finally.
"It means," Aldis said carefully, "that if this development is allowed to proceed naturally, and I cannot conceive of a reason it would not, your son will become something that the Kingdom of Ashveil has not seen in four hundred years." He paused. "It also means that word of this must not leave this estate. Not yet. Not until he is old enough and strong enough that it no longer matters who hears it."
Gareth was quiet for a long time.
"How long?" he said.
"Years," Aldis said. "I would say years."
Another silence.
Then Gareth looked at Kaelith. The complicated expression had settled into something more specific: a fierce, private protectiveness that Kaelith recognized because he had felt it himself, in another life, toward the people he had been too weak to protect.
"We train quietly," his father said.
"Yes, my lord. Very quietly."
Gareth nodded. Looked at his son one more time. Extended his hand.
Kaelith took it.
His father's grip was careful — the grip of a man who had been told, for the first time, something of the scale of what he was holding, and was adjusting his hold accordingly.
"Shall we begin?" Gareth said.
"Yes," Kaelith said. "Please."
---
*And so they began.*
*The training was real, and the growth was real, and the years that followed were the most quietly purposeful of any life Kaelith had yet lived.*
*He was four years old, and a Bronze Knight in truth and an Iron Knight in appearance, and the road ahead of him was long.*
*But the road, at last, was open.*
---