Kaelith lay on his obsidian cot, the silk sheets feeling like cold, synthetic snakes against his skin. To the unblinking eye of the surveillance drone hovering near the vaulted ceiling, he was merely a three year old Dread Born lost in the shallow, erratic breaths of a toddler's sleep. They saw a failure of the Veyron bloodline, a small body with a low neural yield. They did not see the mind behind the grey eyes, a mind that was currently tearing apart the very fabric of the world it had been forced into.
I am not the boy they see, he thought, his consciousness swirling in the dark. I am the man who saw the sky fall on Earth, and I am the son of a woman they threw into the waste. His internal monologue was a sharp, jagged thing, far removed from the soft features of his new face. He began to catalogue his knowledge, a mental ledger to keep the rage from boiling over. He needed to understand the machine if he was going to break it.
The Great Harvest. The words tasted like ash in his mind. From what he had gathered, it was the ultimate truth of this universe. Atherion was not a home; it was a plantation. The Celestial Overlords, those distant, nameless gods, did not want progress or peace. They wanted energy. They harvested the collective neural output and the Aetheric resonance of entire civilisations. Every few centuries, the tally was made. If the planet produced enough, the "worthy" were taken to a higher plane. The rest? They were the slag, the biological waste to be recycled.
And the Five Central Territories were the foremen of this factory.
Atherion was ten times the size of my old world, a gargantuan beast of a planet. It was divided into five main sectors of roughly equal size. Four were the Great Duchies, and the fifth, sitting right at the centre, was the Royal Core.
House Veyron, my supposed family, held the North. They were the miners and the smiths. They dragged Aether from the earth and forged the Chronos Tech that allowed the nobility to play god. My father, that towering titan of ceramic and bone, was the lead foreman.
Kaelith felt a spike of pure, unadulterated loathing at the thought of the Patriarch. He remembered the man's hand on his chin, the clinical coldness in those azure eyes. He was not a father; he was a monster in a suit of high grade alloy. He was the one who had looked at my mother with nothing but calculations in his eyes. He was the one who had signed the order to cast her out because his "investment" in her womb had supposedly yielded a defect.
The Royal Family at the Core managed the planet's status with the Overlords, but they had not been the ones to drag Elara away. That was entirely the Patriarch's doing. It was his pride, his obsession with the Veyron purity, that had broken my life before it even began.
I hate him, Kaelith thought, the words echoing in the hollows of his skull. I hate the way he breathes the air she should be breathing. I hate how he treats the blood in my veins like a failed experiment.
To the East, the Valois family held the keys to the sky. To the West, the Thorne Duchy manipulated biology. To the South, the Solari managed the planetary grid. Each of them was a fortress of power, but they all kept their eyes on the Royal Core. That central territory acted as the bridge to the Celestial Overlords, the only ones permitted to speak for Atherion when the Harvest ships arrived.
Then there were the Voidborn. They were the anti matter glitches, the sentient erasures that occupied the unnamed continents across the vast planet. They were the reason for the walls and the weapons. But for Kaelith, the real war was closer to home.
"They think I am a baseline," Kaelith whispered in the silence of his own head. "They think my neural pathways are narrow and my sigil is dim."
He felt the Aether in the room, a low hum in the floorboards. It felt different than it did on Earth. There, it was a poison that had cooked his brain. Here, it was the very breath of the world. And because he had been saturated in it for a decade as a slave, he could feel the leaks. He could feel the pulses. He was not a baseline. He was an anomaly.
He ran the numbers again. Seven years until he was ten. That was the age of the Selection, the moment when the Patriarch would decide which sons were worth the Veyron name and which were to be discarded into the border trenches.
I have seven years, he resolved. Seven years to build a foundation that will shatter his expectations. I do not just want to survive; I want to showcase a potential so terrifying that he will have no choice but to give me the resources I need. I will make myself indispensable.
He would play the part of the slow, quiet child for a while longer. He would gather the data. He would learn the secrets of the Chronos Tech and the Aether flow. And when the time came, he would reveal a power that would make the Patriarch's azure eyes fill with something other than disappointment.
He would find a path to the Rim. He would find Elara. But first, he had to become a weapon that House Veyron could not afford to throw away.
Kaelith let out a breath, his fingers curling into a fist beneath the silk. He would not be a cog. He would not be a data point.
I am Kaelith Veyron, he thought as sleep finally began to pull at his mind. And I will make this house bow to the son they thought was a shadow.
The grey eyes finally closed, the cold logic of a dead world settling into the bones of a three year old prince. The ledger was balanced. The plan was beginning.