The first days were a prison.
His newborn body obeyed instincts he loathed — crying for warmth, flinching at cold, jerking at sudden sounds. His mind remained the storm it had always been, but it was bound inside fragile meat, too small for the weight it carried. Every movement felt sluggish, every breath shallow.
He could feel how mortal he was now. The absence of his former strength was a constant ache, like missing limbs he still expected to move. No claws. No wings. No abyssal fire thrumming under his skin. Only soft flesh and bones that would snap beneath a child's kick.
The only advantage was this: no one suspected.
The midwife, a narrow-faced woman named Yrren, fussed over him as though he were nothing more than a helpless babe. His mother — Lady Elvara of House Raelthorn — clung to life long enough to name him Kael. The name was meaningless to him, but he filed it away.
On the third night, she died.
He felt her heartbeat falter before the final breath left her lungs. Her death did not move him — Abyssal lords had seen billions die without flinching — but he recognized its consequence. The house had just lost its lady, and the master of the house…
Lord Raelthorn, his new father, was not what the Abyss would have called a lord. The man's hands were calloused from actual labor — something no strong noble in this world would stoop to. His voice carried weight only because the crumbling manor still technically bore a crest.
Through feverish human eyes, Veyrith studied him. The man was tall for a mortal, his hair black streaked with gray, his shoulders still broad but sloped from years of strain. His eyes held a weary defiance — the look of someone used to losing but unwilling to yield completely.
For the first weeks, Veyrith learned.
Not to walk, not to speak — those were trivial. He learned the air. It was thin of mana, so thin it felt almost dead. In the Abyss, every breath was power; here, he had to stretch his senses far just to taste a flicker of energy. It flowed in narrow streams, bound to the bones of the land and trickling sluggishly through the air.
Still, it was magic.
And magic, no matter how weak, could be devoured.
He began drawing it in. Slowly, carefully — so little that even a skilled mage wouldn't notice the drain. It came into him like water through a cracked jar, pooling in the pit of his soul where the Abyss once burned. His body reacted to it in strange ways: the air grew warmer around him, his skin cooled slower, his cries were softer than other babes.
By the second month, he had learned to imitate normal infant behavior perfectly. If he wanted warmth, he cried. If he wanted silence, he slept. If he wanted to listen, he fixed his gaze on nothing in particular and pretended to be fascinated by dust motes.
They had no idea.
The Raelthorn manor was a skeleton of a house that had once mattered. Its halls echoed from emptiness, its walls patched with mismatched stone, its banners faded to ghosts of color. Servants were few and mostly old, their loyalty not to the family's glory but to its lingering dignity.
It was in those overheard mutterings — while pretending to sleep in his cradle — that Veyrith pieced together the shape of his new prison.
House Raelthorn had been a military house generations ago, granted land after a war whose victors were now long dead. With peace came decay. Wealth dwindled, political influence rotted, and stronger houses began circling like carrion birds.
The surrounding lands were rocky and poor for farming. The small village under Raelthorn protection paid taxes reluctantly, its loyalty swayed by richer neighbors. And now, with the lady dead and the lord without an heir older than weeks, the house was effectively crippled.
It was… perfect.
In the Abyss, conquest was often loud — armies clashing, worlds burning. But here, in this brittle little corner of existence, conquest could be quiet. The fewer eyes upon him as he grew, the better.
By his third month, his mana sense had sharpened enough to map the flow of energy in the manor itself. There were traces in the stones — faint runes of old warding magic, cracked and leaking like forgotten cisterns. Beneath the house, deeper than any servant went, he felt a faint throb of something… older.
It was not pure Abyss, but it tasted of it.
A relic. A shard. A seed.
Whatever it was, he would have it.
But time. Time was his greatest leash now. This body needed years to grow before it could handle real power. So he studied in silence, committing every detail of this realm to memory.
The language came first. He picked apart the rhythm of speech, the structure of words. By six months, he understood nearly everything spoken around him, though he could not speak back.
The people themselves were as fragile as the air — bones easily broken, minds dulled by superstition. Their magic, from the snippets he overheard, was a patchwork of rituals and rote incantations, relying on inherited grimoires and narrow traditions. There was no hunger for deeper truth, no ruthless experimentation.
It was pathetic. And exploitable.
One night, lying in the cradle under the cold flicker of a candle, he let his newborn eyes close while his mind stretched downward — past the manor floors, past the stone foundations, toward that faint pulse in the deep.
It answered.
Not with words, but with a vibration through his soul, so faint it could have been imagined.
He smiled — or rather, his infant face twitched in a way that would have looked like a reflex. In truth, it was the first real expression of satisfaction he had allowed himself in this world.
The seed of the Abyss was here.
And in time, so would his throne.