# Chapter 2: A Breath of Foreign Air
Biology was a prison.
In the simulated universe of Elysium, Kaelen had been a being of pure will. If he wanted to move, he simply adjusted his coordinate vectors. If he wanted silence, he set the ambient volume to zero. He had been a god of logic, unbound by the grotesque friction of meat and bone.
Now, he was a bowel movement waiting to happen.
Sylas Vane—the designation attached to this useless, flailing hardware—lay in a wooden crib that smelled faintly of pine resin and old milk. He stared at the ceiling. There was a water stain spreading across the plaster, shaped vaguely like a bruised lung. He had been staring at it for three weeks.
*Structural integrity compromised,* his mind noted, the thought sharp and distinct against the mushy backdrop of his infant brain. *Moisture seepage in the northern quadrant. Likely a roof tile failure. Repair estimate: two hours. Current capability: Null.*
He tried to lift his arm to point at the offending stain. The limb jerked, spasmed, and flopped back onto the coarse woolen blanket.
Frustration, hot and acidic, welled up in his chest. He opened his mouth to articulate a scathing critique of the building's maintenance standards, but the vocal cords were undeveloped, the tongue a clumsy slab of muscle.
"Waaaah."
The sound was humiliating. It was the noise of a leaking gasket.
Footsteps approached. Heavy, uneven. The floorboards groaned—oak, warped by humidity, friction coefficient likely high.
A large hand scooped him up.
"Easy now, little badger. Easy."
Baron Arthur Vane. The father.
Sylas found himself hoisted into the air, the sudden elevation change making his inner ear swim. His vision, still calibrating, struggled to focus. The man was a blur of grays and browns. He smelled of wet dog, iron filings, and the biting scent of winter air.
Arthur settled Sylas into the crook of his arm. The Baron was not a soft man. His tunic was roughspun linen, his jawline a jagged cliff of stubble that scraped against Sylas's sensitive forehead. But his hands, calloused enough to strike a match on, held the infant with a terrified, rigid gentleness.
"He's loud today," Arthur rumbled. The vibration traveled through his chest and into Sylas's spine.
"He's hungry, Arthur. He's always hungry."
Lilliana Vane sat in the high-backed chair by the hearth. The firelight caught the hollows under her eyes. She looked brittle. In the code of the old world, Kaelen would have tagged her status as *Critical Failure Imminent*. Her stamina bar was flashing red.
She reached out, and Arthur passed him over. The transition was jarring—from the hard, rigid stability of the father to the soft, trembling warmth of the mother.
Sylas resigned himself to the ritual. Feeding was a degrading necessity, a biological fuel injection that required zero skill but demanded total submission. As he drank, he watched her.
She hummed a tune. It was a simple, repetitive melody, off-key in the third measure.
*Inefficient,* Sylas thought, listening to the waver in her voice. *Pitch correction required. Breath control poor.*
But his pulse slowed. The frantic, static-filled panic of being trapped in this tiny body receded. The heat radiating from her was better than any thermal regulation algorithm he had ever written. It was illogical. It was chemical.
It was nice.
He hated that it was nice.
The room was dim, lit only by the dying embers in the grate. Shadows stretched long and thin across the floor. This place—the Vane estate—was not a palace. It was a fortified farmhouse clinging to the edge of civilization. Through the thin glass of the window, Sylas could see the silhouette of trees thrashing in the wind.
The Blackwood. That was what they called the forest outside.
The data he had gathered in the last month was fragmentary. The language was a dialect of High Aethel, archaic but functional. The technological level was medieval—iron, wood, stone. No electricity. No networks. Just combustion and leverage.
And magic.
He hadn't seen it yet. Not really. But he could feel the hum of it in the air, a background radiation that prickled against his dormant Architect System.
*System,* he queried, for the thousandth time.
*...Loading resources... 1%...*
Still stuck. The hardware—his brain—wasn't developed enough to run the software. He was trying to load a high-end operating system onto a calculator. He would have to wait. Waiting was torture.
"Is he down?" Arthur whispered, leaning against the mantle.
"For now," Lilliana murmured. She stroked the sparse fuzz on Sylas's head. "Have you heard from the Capital?"
Arthur stiffened. Sylas felt the tension ripple through the room.
"The tax collectors are coming next week," Arthur said, his voice dropping to a gravelly low. "The harvest was thin, Lily. The blight took half the wheat."
"We can sell the silver candlesticks."
"No. Those were your mother's."
"We eat off tin plates or we don't eat at all, Arthur. I don't care about silver."
Sylas listened, processing the data. *Economic instability. Resource scarcity. The family unit is under financial duress.*
In Elysium, he would have simply adjusted the integer value of their bank account. Here, he could do nothing but drool and sleep. The impotence was maddening. He was the Grand Architect, the destroyer of worlds, and he was currently a financial burden on two impoverished nobles.
"We will manage," Arthur said, though the conviction in his voice was thin. "I'll take the men out to the border. There's a bounty on Wolf-Bears. Two pelts would cover the tax."
"It's too dangerous."
"Starving is dangerous."
Arthur pushed off the mantle and walked over. He touched Lilliana's shoulder, then looked down at Sylas. The Baron's eyes were dark, heavy with a fear that had nothing to do with monsters and everything to do with failure.
"He needs to grow up strong," Arthur whispered. "This world... it eats the weak, Lily. It chews them up."
*Correct,* Sylas thought, closing his eyes. *Survival of the fittest is the base code of all unmoderated systems. Don't worry, old man. I intend to be the one doing the chewing.*
***
Two months later.
Progress was agonizingly slow.
Sylas had managed to gain control over his neck muscles. He could now rotate his head 180 degrees without it lolling sideways like a broken doll. He considered this a major victory.
He spent his days in the nursery, a drafty room on the second floor. The wind whistled through gaps in the stone, carrying the scent of damp earth and pine needles.
He was analyzing the physics of a dust mote floating in a sunbeam when the door creaked open.
It wasn't the nursemaid. The nursemaid, a stout woman named Martha who smelled of onions, walked with a heavy plod. This intruder moved with the erratic, scampering energy of a rodent.
A head of wild, tangled black hair popped over the railing of the crib.
Elara.
The sister.
She was four years old, missing a front tooth, and possessed the chaotic energy of a collapsing star. Her eyes, the same violet glass as their mother's, stared at him with intense, predatory curiosity.
"Hello, Potato," she whispered.
Sylas blinked. *Designation: Potato. Status: Accepted.* It was better than 'Little Badger.'
Elara pulled herself up, swinging a leg over the rail. The crib groaned. This was a safety violation. If she fell, she would crush him.
"You're boring today," she informed him, dropping into the bedding beside him. She was wearing a dress that had clearly seen a mud puddle recently. There was a smear of dirt on her chin.
She dug into her pocket. "I brought you a present."
She held out her hand. Resting on her small, grimy palm was a beetle.
It was massive, iridescent green, with pincers that looked capable of shearing through a finger. It was unmistakably alive, twitching its antennae in irritation.
Sylas stared at the insect. *Class: Coleoptera. Threat level: Low to Moderate. Hygiene hazard: High.*
"It's a knight," Elara whispered conspiratorially. "Sir Click-Clack. He's going to guard you."
She dropped the beetle onto Sylas's chest.
The insect scuttled instantly toward his neck. The sensation of six hooked legs scrambling over his swaddle was electric.
Panic, primal and infant-brained, flared. Sylas flailed, letting out a sharp cry.
"Shhh!" Elara clamped a hand over his mouth. Her palm tasted of salt and dirt. "Don't tell Mom! She hates Sir Click-Clack."
She grabbed the beetle just as it reached his chin, wrestling it back into her pocket. Sylas glared at her. If he had hands, he would have strangled her. Or at least filed a restraining order.
"You're soft," Elara observed, poking his cheek with a rigid finger. "You have to get tough, Potato. The monsters are coming."
She said it with such casual certainty that Sylas paused his internal fuming.
*Monsters.*
To a child, shadows were monsters. But in this world, the line between imagination and reality was blurry.
Elara lay down next to him, curling up like a cat. The crib was cramped, and her elbow dug into his ribs, but she didn't seem to care. She stared up at the water stain on the ceiling.
"Papa is sad," she said quietly. The manic energy had evaporated, replaced by a solemnity that sat wrong on a four-year-old's face.
Sylas stopped squirming.
"He yells at the paper on his desk," Elara continued. "And Mama cries in the bathroom when she thinks I'm asleep."
She turned her head to look at him. Her violet eyes were wide, searching his face for something he couldn't give her yet. Answers. Reassurance.
"I'm going to learn the sword," she declared. It wasn't a wish; it was a statement of fact. "I stole a stick from the woodpile. I hit the tree with it. The tree lost."
She grabbed his hand. Her fingers were sticky, but her grip was surprisingly solid.
"I'm going to be a Knight of the Rose. I saw a picture in the library. They have shiny armor and they kill dragons." She squeezed his fingers. "And when I'm a knight, nobody will make Mama cry. And nobody will eat you."
Sylas looked at her.
In his previous life, he had built AI companions designed to simulate loyalty. He had coded "love" subroutines that executed perfectly upon dialogue triggers.
This was messy. It was unscripted. This small, dirty creature with a beetle in her pocket was offering him a pact of protection based on nothing but shared DNA and a vague sense of ownership.
She was the first variable in this world he couldn't predict.
*Projected path,* he analyzed. *If the father fails to secure funds, the social standing of the unit collapses. This girl ends up a peasant, or worse, sold off for a dowry.*
The thought triggered a spike of cold anger in his gut. It was a new sensation. Protective. Territorial.
*Negative,* he decided. *That outcome is unacceptable.*
He squeezed her finger back. It was a weak, reflexive grip, but Elara's eyes lit up.
"See?" she grinned, the gap in her teeth showing. "We're a team. The Potato and the Knight."
Suddenly, the door to the nursery slammed open.
Martha, the nursemaid, stood there, hands on her hips. "Lady Elara! Get out of that crib this instant!"
Elara scrambled up, nimble as a monkey. "I was just checking for assassins!"
"Out! Your mother is looking for you."
Elara vaulted over the rail, landing with a heavy thud. She paused at the door, looking back at Sylas. She winked.
Then she was gone, leaving only the smell of mud and the lingering ghost of warmth where she had lain.
Sylas lay in the silence.
He tested the connection again.
*System.*
*...Loading... 2%...*
*Hurry up,* he commanded the darkness in his mind. *I have work to do.*
***
The storm hit three nights later.
It wasn't just rain. It was a deluge that hammered against the stone walls like a siege engine. Thunder cracked so loud it shook the dust from the rafters.
Sylas woke up screaming.
It was involuntary. The noise triggered the startle reflex hardwired into his amygdala. His adult consciousness was screaming *'It's just atmospheric discharge!'* but his infant brain was screaming *'THE SKY IS FALLING.'*
The room was pitch black. A flash of lightning turned the window into a blinding square of white, followed instantly by a boom that rattled his teeth.
He cried harder, thrashing against the blankets. He hated himself for it. He was Kaelen Vance. He had stared down a sentient computer virus. He should not be weeping because of loud noises.
But the body ruled the mind.
The door opened. No candle. Just a small figure silhouetted against the lightning.
"Potato?"
Elara.
She padded across the floor in her nightgown, bare feet slapping against the cold wood. She reached the crib and didn't hesitate. She climbed in.
"It's okay," she whispered, her voice trembling slightly. She was scared too. The thunder was loud enough to scare anyone.
She pulled the blanket up over both of them, creating a tent. A small, wool-smelling sanctuary against the chaos outside.
"I'm here," she said, wrapping her arms around him. She pulled him close, pressing his head against her chest. He could hear her heart hammering—*thump-thump-thump*—a fast, frantic rhythm.
She was terrified. But she had come for him anyway.
"The thunder is just giants bowling," she told him, her voice shaking. "Papa told me. They're just playing a game. They won't hurt us."
Another crack of thunder. Elara flinched, her grip tightening on him so hard it almost hurt.
"I'll bite them," she whispered into his hair. "If they come in here, I'll bite their toes."
Sylas stopped crying.
The warmth of her small body seeped into his. The shaking of her hands calmed the shaking of his own.
He realized something then, listening to the storm rage against the stone.
He wasn't just building a hidden organization to fix the world. He wasn't just fixing the bugs in the code.
He was building a kingdom. A fortress.
And this girl—this fierce, trembling, beetle-collecting lunatic—was going to be the first pillar.
*Objective Updated,* the dormant System whispered in the back of his mind, the text faint but legible for the first time.
**Primary Objective: Survive Infancy.**
**Secondary Objective: Secure the Future of House Vane.**
**Priority Target: Protect Elara.**
Sylas closed his eyes, listening to his sister's heartbeat war against the thunder.
*Acknowledged,* he thought.
He drifted off to sleep, not as a prisoner of biology, but as an architect drafting his first blueprint.
The world was broken. The roof was leaking. The taxes were due.
But the foundation was solid.