Kael Veyra grew up in the humming silence of an orbital colony Horizon Prime lower districts.
The people there were workers, technicians, and families too poor for noble titles but too necessary to be ignored. Their lives were lit by the dull glow of maintenance drones, repair scaffolds, and the faint vibration of reactors that never slept.
For Kael, the sound of machines was a lullaby. Even as a child, he could sense them. At first it seemed like coincidence—doors that slid open a second too early, cleaning drones that paused near him, lights that flickered when he stared too long. The adults laughed it off as quirks of old equipment.
But Kael knew it wasn't chance.
He had always been… different. His mind grasped things too quickly. At age five, he moved with the quiet calculation of someone far older, as if invisible hands guided him. When other children played tag, Kael instinctively mapped escape routes, corners of cover, and ambush points. The instincts came from nowhere—yet felt as natural as breathing.
Sometimes at night, when the colony dimmed its lights, flashes struck him.
Not dreams. Not quite memories either.
He would see boots stomping in rhythm, smell gunpowder and metal, feel the crack of recoil in his arms. Then it would vanish, leaving him trembling and too young to put it into words.
Kael never told anyone.
Life went on. His mother worked long hours in the docks, while his father—once skilled at repairing air filters—slipped further into drinking. The man who should have been Kael's shield became another burden the boy quietly carried.
One night, when Kael was barely three, the news came. His father had stumbled drunk into a loading bay, where a cargo lift crushed him before anyone could react.
The lower districts mourned little; men like his father were common, lost to the bottle and the grind. But for Kael's mother, the grief was sharp and suffocating. She drowned in it, her days turning hollow.
Kael watched her silently. Too young to comfort, too old in spirit to cry like the other children. Something inside him hardened then.
Sometimes, he wondered if the strange instincts inside him were trying to teach him a lesson: that weakness was unforgiven in this world, and the unsteady were the first to fall.
Machines still bent to him. Once, at age six, he placed a hand on a malfunctioning vending drone. Its display glitched and reset, then—obediently—dispensed a snack without payment. Kael blinked, more curious than shocked. He didn't understand how. Only that it responded.
And so his childhood was a quiet rhythm of hidden instincts, grief that weighed heavier than his years, and unspoken oddities.
Kael did not yet know what those flickers meant.
He did not yet know that the fragments buried deep in his mind were not his own.
He only knew one thing with certainty:
He was meant for war.