The air in the bedchamber was thick with the scent of dried herbs and the metallic tang of medicine—aromas that Isaac Newton, the Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society, had spent a lifetime analyzing. At eighty-four, the man who had weighed the planets and unraveled the rainbow found himself held fast by a force even his equations could not defy: the slow, agonizing decay of the flesh.
Isaac lay beneath the heavy linens, his breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches. His mind, however, remained a brilliant, restless loom. Even through the haze of renal pain, he was calculating. He thought of the Philosopher's Stone he had never quite perfected, the hidden codes of Solomon's Temple, and the laws of motion that now felt so very heavy upon his own limbs.
He had been the "Last Alchemist," toiling over glowing crucibles in the dead of night, and the "First Scientist," bringing the cold light of logic to the heavens. He had lived a life of isolation and immense, solitary power.
"I do not know what I may appear to the world," he whispered into the dark, his voice a mere rasp, "but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore..."
With one final, lung-straining sigh, the great clock of his heart shuddered and stopped. The tension in his jaw relaxed. The variables of his life reached their final sum: Zero.
******
Death, Isaac noted with a detached curiosity, was not a dark tunnel. It was a lingering.
His soul stood in the corner of the room, a shimmer of silver light that the weeping servants could not see. He watched them wash his cold, pale body. He watched the doctors confer in hushed tones about the stones in his kidneys—the physical debris of a life spent sitting over parchment.
Time became fluid. Moments later—or perhaps days—he stood beneath the vaulted, gothic arches of Westminster Abbey.
It was a funeral fit for a king. He watched the pallbearers—two dukes, three earls, and the Lord Chancellor—carry his lead-lined coffin. He saw the sea of mourning clothes, the somber faces of the greatest minds in Europe, and the monument being prepared to mark his earthly remains.
"Hic depositum est, quod mortale fuit Isaaci Newtoni." (Here lies that which was mortal of Isaac Newton.)
He felt a strange, shimmering sense of completion. He had solved the riddles of light. He had mastered the coin of the realm. He had turned the chaotic clockwork of the universe into a readable map. He had no regrets. No unfinished business held him to this sphere of dust and shadow.
It is enough, he thought. The experiment is concluded.
Isaac closed his spiritual eyes, letting go of the Abbey, the smell of incense, and the weight of his own legendary name. He prepared to dissolve into the Great Vacuum, the infinite space he had spent his life measuring. He expected the silence of the void.
He did not expect the sudden, piercing cry of a lung full of cold air, nor the sensation of a woman's warm, trembling hands pressing a kiss to his forehead.
******
The transition from the hallowed silence of Westminster to the biting howl of a Kaedweni winter was a violent cacophony. Isaac's consciousness, once expanded and ready to merge with the infinite, was suddenly crushed back into the fragile, terrifyingly small cage of a newborn's body.
He could not see—not yet. The world was a blur of icy blues and the rhythmic, frantic thud of a heartbeat that wasn't his own. He was wrapped in thick wool and fine silk, cradled against a chest that radiated a frantic, magical heat.
Alicia Newton stumbled through the slush of the Morhen Valley. Her breath came in silver plumes, and her fingers, glowing with a faint, dying amber light, traced protective wards in the air behind her. She was a sorceress of immense power, but she was exhausted, her cloak torn by the briars of the trail. She wasn't running from an institution or a guild; she was running from a shadow she could not outfight—a danger that sought her son's potential.
She reached the iron-studded gates of the mountain fortress, her strength finally failing. She sank to her knees in the snow, her hands trembling as she adjusted the heavy wicker basket. Inside, the infant Isaac stared up with eyes that held a terrifying, misplaced depth—the eyes of a man who had seen the stars, trapped in the face of a babe.
"Forgive me, my little star," Alicia whispered, her voice cracking as the wind tried to steal her words. She pressed her forehead against his, her tears freezing on her cheeks. "I cannot keep you. To be with me is to be hunted, and I will not let your story end before it begins."
She tucked a heavy vellum letter into the folds of his blanket, alongside a small, silver nameplate—a relic from her own lineage, engraved with the name she had been moved to give him: Isaac Newton.
"I am doing this for your own good, Isaac," she sobbed, pressing one last kiss to his brow. "Live a better life than the one I could give you. Grow strong. Be a man of this world, not a shadow of mine."
With a final, agonizing surge of her remaining power, she cast a spell of warmth around the basket to keep the frost at bay. Then, she turned and vanished into the treeline, a mother's shadow fleeing into the dawn to lead his pursuers away.
Minutes later, the heavy gate groaned. Vesemir stepped out into the biting cold, his yellow eyes scanning the perimeter. He had expected a supply delivery or perhaps a straggling Witcher returning for the winter. He did not expect a basket.
He approached warily, hand on the pommel of his sword. But as he looked down, the magical warding shimmered and dissipated, revealing a silent, silver-haired infant who wasn't crying. The child was simply... observing.
Vesemir picked up the nameplate, squinting at the script. "Isaac Newton," he read aloud, his voice like grinding stones. He looked at the ruins of the keep behind him—a place of hardship and steel—and then back at the child.
"Well, Isaac," Vesemir sighed, tucking the basket under his arm as he turned back toward the warmth of the Great Hall. "You've picked a hell of a place to start a new life. But if it's protection you need, the Wolves will provide it."
Deep within his new mind, Isaac Newton felt the familiar pull of curiosity. The gravity of this world was different, the air tasted of magic, and the old man smelled of leather and ancient potions.
The experiment, Isaac realized with a surge of renewed purpose, has simply entered a second phase.