The days bled into weeks, then into months, a suffocating blur of grey existence within the confines of the hovel. My infant body, maddeningly slow to respond to my will, slowly grew, shedding some of its most acute helplessness. I learned to control my bladder and bowels, a small victory that reduced the constant, humiliating discomfort. I learned to focus my eyes with more precision, to distinguish faces and objects from the shifting blurs. My ears, once assaulted by a cacophony, began to parse the complex nuances of human speech, allowing me to piece together a clearer picture of this bleak world.
Mara continued her relentless labor, the thwack-thwack of the loom a monotonous heartbeat of our poverty. She was a ghost of a woman, her gauntness deepening with each passing day, her cough more persistent. She rarely spoke, reserving her meager energy for work and the brief, necessary acts of feeding and changing me. Sometimes, her hand would linger on my cheek, a fleeting touch of weary affection, but I offered no response. My core remained a frozen knot of cynical pragmatism. Sentimentality was a luxury this world did not afford, and I, Elias, was learning its harsh lessons quickly.
I spent my waking hours as a hyper-vigilant observer. I listened to the hushed conversations of the other hovel dwellers – their complaints of hunger, their whispers of sickness, their endless fear of the Prince's collectors. They spoke of fines, of forced labor for unpaid quotas, of children taken as payment. The Prince was a distant, terrible god, his will absolute, enforced by men with cold eyes and sharper steel.
The Montala religion, I gathered, was the Prince's primary tool of control. Its tenets, as interpreted by the local priests, were insidious: suffering was divine will, poverty a test of faith, and obedience to the Crown a path to eternal salvation. They spoke of weekly sermons, mandatory attendance, and the swift, brutal punishment for dissent, often in the name of "purifying the soul." It was a twisted perversion of any faith I had ever understood, a theological chains-gang. My Deistic understanding of a God who gifted free will and reason was a dangerous heresy here, a thought I carefully guarded even from myself.
My frustration with my infant body was a constant, internal scream. I longed to walk, to speak, to explore, to gather information beyond the confines of the hovel. I tried, silently, to move my limbs with purpose, to mimic the sounds of speech, but my vocal cords produced only meaningless babbling, my legs mere flails. The gap between my sophisticated mind and my primitive vessel was a constant, agonizing reminder of my utter powerlessness.
Yet, my unusual stillness did not go entirely unnoticed. Sometimes, Mara would watch me with a furrowed brow, a strange, perplexed expression on her face. "You're a quiet one, little Elias," I heard her murmur once, her voice tinged with a weariness that was almost wonder. "Never cry like the others. Always watching." Her eyes, momentarily losing their usual dullness, would meet mine. And in those moments, I held her gaze, my infant eyes unnervingly direct, too knowing for a child. She would shiver, a faint tremor, and then turn back to her loom, dismissing the unsettling feeling, attributing it to fatigue or a mother's anxious imagination. It was enough for me. My strange nature was acknowledged, but not yet alarming. Not yet enough to draw the attention of the Crown's cruel gaze.
I continued to absorb. The Prince's capital, I gleaned, was many days' journey away, a walled city of gleaming stone and oppressive grandeur. The Duke, the one who oversaw this district, was a lesser tyrant, but still formidable. These were the names, the places, the powers I would one day need to contend with. The bitterness of my forced rebirth, the constant reminder of my failure through my cursed name, solidified into a cold, unwavering resolve. I was Elias, the unwanted, the cynical. And I would find a way to navigate this brutal world, to survive, and to break free of its predetermined suffering. The seeds of my future, whatever they would be, were being sown in the damp earth of this hovel.