CHAPTER 2: LIFE IN HARLOW'S BEND
When he woke the second time, it was to the smell of straw and milk and the thin, urgent sound of a midwife.
The world he found himself in was not Earth's. The sky had a harder blue to it; the houses were low, thatch-backed; people moved with a practical slowness. He was cold, wet, and howling, and the midwife set him on his mother's breast as if she had been waiting for orders. Someone called his name — Kaelan, then corrected to Kael — and the syllable settled against his ribs like a small, new weight.
Memory of the truck came back in shards: the coffee, the crosswalk light, the shock. Earth was a map he could reach for but always missed edges. Other memories arrived too: the goddess's voice, the voice's cadence; a name — Adaptive Habitation — like the memory of a melody. His newborn self accepted these things without framework; the world supplied a different language.
Harlow's Bend had a bell on a low tower and a field that smelled of clover. It had neighbors who borrowed sugar and returned tools with a smile. His mother — Mara — was a woman with hands marked by tasks, who wrapped him in patience and taught him the names of birds. His father — not present in the early ledger of his days — was a man who left one winter and did not return, and that absence learned him how to measure disappointment quietly.
Childhood passed in the measured way children's lives do: small triumphs, repeated chores, the slow accretion of skill that comes from doing. Kael learned to run along the ridge of the river without tripping; he learned to cut and mend cloth; he learned to set a snare and to skin a hare. He kept a small notebook, folded into waterproof paper and stashed under a flat stone by the creek — a habit he took from a sliver of an old life, the skeleton of a person who liked lists. He wrote things that mattered and things that did not: weather notes, the names of stars he could not yet see as more than lights, recipes altered by mismeasurement, a sketch of a bell tower.
He was not a prodigy. He was not outwardly remarkable. He failed at archery before he learned to succeed. He burnt his first batch of bread twice. He tried, and then tried again, and sometimes succeeded; sometimes not. People noticed his persistence more than anything else. There was a quietness to his watching, a tendency to take a step back and catalog what had failed. That habit bored some, impressed others.
On clear evenings he dreamed in Brisbane's skyline and the smell of diesel. He dreamed in mundane fragments: the taste of instant coffee, his city apartment's thin walls, the bus stop that had been painted the wrong gray. He could not say whether the dreams meant something; the goddess's promise hummed like a far machine at the edge of those images.
When he was small he would sit at the lip of the river and press his palm to the stone that kept his papers dry and say things into the water that sounded like bargaining and sometimes like prayer. He wanted, in the furtive way of children, to be more than he was. He wanted the particular, bright shape of achievement he had never had: the moment when a crowd notices; the day he could show that he was not simply ordinary.
Others had clearer trajectories — the smith's son with his broad shoulders and quick temper, the innkeeper's daughter whose laughter bent men into being kinder. Kael learned to be useful without needing praise for it. He learned to plan practical things and to set small goals. He kept repeating tasks that felt like logic: lift, carry, run, sleep. He cataloged how his body did them and how it failed. He could not see how those catalogs would someday rearrange his life.
Time in Verandil is measured by seasons and rites, by the slow accumulation of ability and the occasional, decisive change. For now, the change had not arrived. The promise of AdaptiveHabitation slept like an unlit hearth. He was ordinary enough to blend into Harlow's Bend, and observant enough that someone might notice if he did not.
At twelve he found a book of maps in the loft of the inn and traced roads with a stub of coal until his fingers were black. At fourteen he tried to run the ridge faster than any local boy and failed so thoroughly his ribs ached for days. At sixteen he argued with a recruiter from the distant town about what it took to be a guildman and came away with more questions than answers. He kept the notebook under the stone and added to it: a list of skills to practice, a small ladder of goals he did not let himself forget.
Eighteen was a number he circled in his head like a pebble worn smooth. It was a marker without meaning the way a seed has no meaning until it sprouts. He thought of it sometimes as if it were a schedule: change at eighteen, then everything else. Mostly he went back to the chores, the small repairs, the steady beat of days. The promise of greatness is an unreliable engine; the daily grind keeps being necessary whether an awakening comes or not.
On the morning he turned eighteen, Harlow's Bend smelled of rain and bread. Kael woke before dawn, because that is what people who train do: they wake to give themselves the best odds. He dressed in clothing he had mended and carried his waterproof notebook to the river, the stone where he had kept his plans for years.
He did not feel power. He felt the ordinary ache of someone who had pulled himself out of bed. He thought about the goddess's words and found the memory of them as steady and spare as a stake driven into the ground.
He picked up the notebook, ran his fingers over the small lists, and then heard, from down the lane, the bell. Not the guild bell — that one was farther off — but the little bell Harlow's Bend used for assembly and notice. It rang three times: clear, purposeful, insistent. The summons was for recruits passing through the town on their way to the regional sign-up. People murmured. Faces turned.
Kael set the notebook back under the stone and stood with the river at his back. The bell's ring folded into itself and became a taste at the base of his tongue. He had no idea if the life he'd been promised would awaken or if the goddess had been poetic and not literal. He had only the habit of trying and the knowledge that sometimes, repetition rearranged the world.
He walked toward the lane where the recruits would pass, toward a future he had been told to expect and which still felt, in the warmed, bright way of youth, uncertain and possible.