The royal birthing chamber of High Silpatra was a place of calculated splendor.
Walls of pale marble veined with silver, etched with the flowing sigils of Aura conduits.
Braziers burned with Ether-fed flames that never smoked, casting steady light over midwives whose hands glowed faintly with healing currents.
Everything in the room had been prepared for a prince who would arrive wrapped in power.
Everything except the child himself.
Queen-Consort Liora's labor had lasted nineteen hours—longer than any royal birth in three generations.
The midwives whispered that this was a good omen: the child was fighting to enter the world, already strong.
King Aurelion waited beyond the silk curtains, flanked by his Aura guards, their armor humming softly with contained force.
Crown Prince Cassian, only twelve, stood at his father's side, eyes bright with the expectation of a brother who would one day stand with him in the Legions.
At the twentieth hour, the queen's final cry cut through the chamber like a blade.
Silence followed.
No triumphant wail of a newborn.
No sudden flare of Aura announcing the bloodline's continuation.
The head midwife, an old woman named Seris whose hands had delivered half the nobility of the kingdom, lifted the child with trembling fingers.
She turned him toward the light.
She waited.
Nothing.
No shimmer of Aura at the skin.
No ripple of Ether in the air around him.
The infant's chest rose and fell in small, stubborn breaths, but the forces that defined existence in Eldran simply… ignored him.
Seris's face drained of color.
She had seen stillbirths.
She had seen weak Aura.
She had never seen absence.
"Your Majesty," she called, voice cracking. "The prince… he has no Aura."
The curtains parted.
King Aurelion stepped through alone.
The midwives bowed low, but he ignored them, eyes fixed on the bundle in Seris's arms.
The child was small, red-faced, unremarkable.
Dark hair already thick across his scalp.
Eyes the color of wet stone, open and staring at nothing in particular.
Aurelion extended one gauntleted hand and brushed a finger across the infant's cheek.
No resonance.
No echo of royal blood.
Nothing.
Behind him, Cassian peered around the curtain, curiosity turning to confusion.
"Where's the light, Father? All babies have light."
The king did not answer his eldest son.
He turned to Seris.
"Ether?"
The midwife shook her head slowly.
"I felt nothing. Not even the passive flow every living thing carries."
A long silence stretched, broken only by the queen's ragged breathing.
Liora, pale and sweat-soaked, lifted a hand toward the child.
Aurelion did not move to give him to her.
In the corner of the room, a junior scribe—tasked with recording the birth for the royal annals—hesitated over his parchment.
He had been ready to write:
On this day, the fifth child of King Aurelion manifested Aura of exceptional clarity…
Now his quill hovered, ink dripping onto the page.
Aurelion spoke at last, voice low and even.
"Record the birth. Name him Kael. Fourth prince of House Silpatra."
Seris dared a question.
"And… the absence, Your Majesty?"
The king's gaze did not leave the child.
"Record only what is seen. Nothing more."
He turned and left the chamber.
The curtains fell closed behind him.
Later—much later, when the midwives had cleaned the child and wrapped him in silk embroidered with the Silpatra crest—something finally happened.
Kael opened his mouth and made a sound.
Not a cry.
A single, hoarse syllable, pushed out with surprising force for such small lungs.
"Meat."
The midwives froze.
Seris laughed once, nervously.
"A hungry one. That's normal enough."
But the child's gray eyes fixed on her with unsettling intensity, as if he already understood that the word had not been answered.
Outside the chamber, in the shadowed corridor, King Aurelion paused beside a narrow window overlooking the capital.
High Silpatra spread below him: towers laced with Aura conduits glowing soft blue, the great walls patrolled by Ether sentinels, the distant roar of the Legions drilling in the lower yards.
All of it built on the assumption that power was given at birth.
He looked down at his empty hands.
For the first time in his reign, Aurelion Silpatra felt something close to fear.
Not of invasion.
Not of rebellion.
Of a child who had arrived without permission.
And who, even in his first moments, seemed to want something the world was not prepared to give.