There is a specific kind of horror in knowing exactly what is happening to you and being completely unable to do anything about it.
I had experienced this before, professionally speaking. Watching a contract fall apart in real time while the other party smiled across the table. Sitting in a meeting where the decision had already been made before anyone walked in. That sensation of perfect clarity combined with perfect powerlessness.
Being an infant was that sensation extended into a permanent lifestyle.
I was approximately three weeks old when I first found concrete evidence that something was different about me beyond the obvious.
Mara had been carrying me around the house in that particular way she had, arm under my back, hand cradling my head, moving from room to room while she talked to me about her day. I had learned, quickly, that Mara talked to me the way some people talk to plants. Not because she expected a response, but because the talking itself was the point. She narrated her tasks, her observations, her opinions on the weather and the neighbors and the price of grain in the market two villages over.
I listened to all of it. I was learning an enormous amount about local economics.
She carried me past the window in the main room, the one that faced east and caught the morning light. On the sill sat a small clay pot with a plant in it. I did not know the name of the plant in this language yet. It was green. It had several small leaves. It had been there since the first day I was aware of my surroundings, healthy enough.
We passed within about half an arm's length of it.
The plant turned brown.
Not gradually. Not over several days in the natural way of plants that have been underwatered or placed in insufficient light. It turned brown in the span of about four seconds, starting from the stem and spreading outward to each leaf in sequence, like something had simply removed the option of being alive from it.
Mara did not notice. She was describing a disagreement she'd had with someone called Pella about a shared fence, and the fence was apparently very important.
I stared at the plant.
The plant, being dead, did not stare back.
I took careful stock of my current state. I did not feel different. I had not done anything. I had simply been in proximity to the plant, and the plant had stopped being alive. This was, objectively, a significant data point.
I filed it.
Two days later, Rynn came into the room while Mara was outside and crouched down to look at me with the expression she always wore when she was about to make a decision. She had decided, it seemed, that she was going to take my hand.
She reached out.
She took my hand.
Nothing happened.
She was completely fine. She held my hand for a moment, seemed satisfied by this, and then left to do whatever it was Rynn did in the afternoons.
I thought about this for a long time afterward. The plant had died. Rynn had not. The difference, as far as I could determine, was that the plant had not been a person.
This was useful information.
The second significant discovery came from the mirror.
Aldus had one in the room where he kept his tools, a small, slightly warped piece of polished metal that reflected things approximately correctly if you tilted it at the right angle. He carried me in there one morning and set me down on the workbench while he looked for something on a high shelf, and I had a clear line of sight to the mirror for about forty seconds.
It was enough.
On the outer edge of my right ear, there was a mark. Pale, slightly raised, shaped with a precision that did not belong on something that had arrived naturally. Not a bruise. Not a discoloration.
A triangle.
Perfectly formed. Three equal sides. Sitting on my skin like it had always planned to be there.
I had noticed it before, in the vague unfocused way of a newborn who cannot control where his eyes go. But seeing it clearly now, in reflection, with the thinking capacity of a thirty-two-year-old businessman behind my eyes, it landed differently.
Aldus found what he was looking for and picked me up again. He noticed me staring at the mirror and made a small sound that I had already catalogued as his amused sound.
'Admiring yourself already,' he said. 'That's your mother's side.'
I looked at my hand again. Small. Soft. Capable, apparently, of ending plants.
The triangle on my ear caught the light for a moment and seemed, just briefly, to be the wrong color for something that was simply sitting still.
So. I was alive again. I killed plants by existing near them. I had a geometric mark on my ear that no one found unusual enough to mention. And something very large was watching me from a direction I could not locate.
Great start. Really. Excellent.