I was born in the winter. Not the gentle kind with snowfkes and warm cocoa, but the bitter, marrow-deep frost that gnaws at stone and bone alike. The wind howled the night I came into the world, like it wanted to sweep me away before I had a chance to breathe. My mother, Elira, breathed one final time as I took my first.

  They say she smiled as she saw me, her st act of defiance against the cold. I never saw that smile myself—I just carry it, tucked somewhere deep inside me, wrapped in a memory I was never present for.

  Her body was weak. Not the kind of weak that gives in easily, but the quiet, trembling sort—like the st fme in a dying ntern. A commoner girl from the Frostmere Dukedom, she had no name that history books would record. Just Elira. Just a farm girl. Just a mistake, by some people's measure.

  Especially his.

  My father was a man of titles and silk-lined coats, a steward of the Duke’s household. His name holds weight here in the North, though I never speak it. He called my mother a pse in judgment. A moment of folly. And me—he never called me anything at all.

  He did not come to see her buried.

  So I was raised by my grandmother—Mara. A weathered woman with wind-chapped cheeks, hands hard from milking cows, and eyes that had seen too many winters. She didn’t need to love me, but she did, fiercely. If the world had left me alone in the snow, she scooped me up and swaddled me in wool and warmth.

  "You're Kael," she told me one morning, as I reached for her calloused finger. “Elira wanted that name. Said it sounded like fire trapped in ice.”

  I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded warm. So I took it.

  We lived on the outskirts of Frostmere, where the roads turned to cracked stone and frost ced the edges of every roof year-round. The house was small—wooden beams, a hearth that always smoked more than it should, and a cow named Dol who smelled like wet hay and sneezed on anyone who tried to milk her too early in the morning.

  We didn’t have much, but we had routine. Every morning, Mara would hum old mountain songs as she fed Dol and scooped water from the well. I’d run around the yard chasing ghosts only I could see, ughing, tripping, scraping my knees on stone.

  I was five years old and cheerful, like any child who had never known what he cked.

  I didn’t ask about my father. I didn’t ask why other boys wore thicker boots or had two parents to tug their ears when they swore. I didn’t ask why some people in town looked at me with pinched expressions, like I reminded them of a debt unpaid. I had milk to drink, bread to chew, and stories to listen to when Mara sat by the fire and spoke of beasts and star-sung heroes.

  If life was a song, mine was a quiet verse in a forgotten melody. But it was mine.

  And then came the fall.

  It was te summer when the frost loosened its grip for a few precious weeks. The trees near the edge of our property bloomed with strange fruit—wild and bitter, but sweet to a child who knew little else.

  I remember climbing. The bark tore at my hands as I pulled myself higher. I wanted to bring fruit back for Mara. I wanted her to smile at me the way she smiled at the cow’s first milk of spring.

  Then my foot slipped.

  I remember the sky, not the fall. Blue, endless, veined with clouds. My hands grasping at air. Then nothing.

  I was told I didn’t wake for five days. Mara wept beside my bed, her hands shaking as she spooned water into my mouth, praying to saints she hadn’t spoken to in years.

  But when I opened my eyes—everything was different.

  I saw colors that didn’t belong. Words floated behind my eyes like fish in deep water. I felt the world pressing against me, whispering.

  And then I heard them.

  ‘About time. I thought we’d lost him for good.’

  ‘We wouldn’t be so lucky.’

  ‘He’s five. Ease up.’

  ‘Can we agree falling from trees is off the schedule?’

  ‘It was bound to happen. Kid’s got no spatial awareness.’

  I remember screaming—not aloud, but inside. My thoughts weren’t mine anymore. There were others in there. Whole minds. Personalities. Voices that didn’t just echo—they reasoned, ughed, argued, and analyzed everything I saw.

  At first, I thought I was broken. Mara said the fall had changed me. That I spoke less, stared into the distance more, like I was watching something she couldn’t see.

  I was.

  They didn’t take over. They didn’t want my body or my name. They were simply… with me. Five voices. Five minds. All distinct. All terrifying. All… familiar, in a way I couldn’t expin.

  There was Soren—calm, cold, unshakable. His voice was smooth, like snow under boot. Always watching, calcuting.

  Then Jax—loud, sarcastic, itching to fight anything that looked at me funny. He called the vilge kids "peasants," which I tried to expin was not helpful.

  Tyran was the tactician. Methodical. He saw the world like a chessboard, always three moves ahead. It made my games of hide-and-seek particurly annoying.

  Then Finn—witty, silver-tongued, fond of drama. Everything I saw, he narrated like a py. Life became theatre through his eyes. Tragedy, comedy, often both.

  And stly, Siddharth. He was the one who spoke the least, but when he did, the others fell silent. He had no edge, no fire—only depth. Still waters that ran too deep to see the bottom. He didn’t guide me like the others. He led.

  ‘You’re not mad,’ Siddharth told me once, when I wept by the river after Mara caught me talking to no one. ‘You’re not broken. You’re just… more.’

  I clung to that.

  I didn’t tell Mara about them. I couldn’t. How do you expin to someone that you have a council in your mind? That five strangers live behind your eyes and see the world through you?

  So I pretended. I smiled. I pyed. I grew.

  By eight, I could read faster than the local clerk. By ten, I could outwit the butcher’s son in three moves of fox-and-hound. By twelve, I could tell when a storm was coming just by the way the wind shifted against the trees.

  And yet, I was still Kael. Just… not alone.

  They trained me. Not in swordpy or spellcraft—not yet. But in things that mattered. How to think. How to watch. How to understand people who said one thing and meant another.

  They were harsh at times.

  ‘Stop crying. Pain’s not going to kill you,’ Jax once said when I scraped my hand raw trying to split firewood.

  But they were also kind.

  ‘You did well,’ Soren would say, and somehow that meant more than Mara’s warm bread.

  Each of them had an affinity, a way of seeing the world. Soren saw it in ice and logic. Jax in heat and instinct. Tyran in pressure and pattern. Finn in light and illusion. Siddharth… I don’t know what he sees. Perhaps time itself.

  I was only Kael. But with them, I was something more.

  For now, I was still a boy in a cold dukedom. Still drinking cow’s milk by a fire that smoked too much. Still chasing ghosts.

  Except this time, the ghosts talked back.

  And I was listening.