The first sensation to pierce the fog of Leon Varent's returning consciousness was not light, nor sound, but an almost aggressive assault of smells.
Damp wool, a foul sweetness he'd later identify as some sort of herbal incense meant to mask less pleasant odors, and underlying it all, the faint, unmistakable tang of unwashed bodies and stale air.
It was a far cry from the sterile, ozone-tinged scent of his old university's engineering lab, or the crisp and the sharp, metallic scent of a new construction site: memories that felt both achingly familiar and impossibly distant.
This life, his second, had begun with such olfactory confusion. (Distorted Smell)
The actual first moment of this new existence, the one that had shattered his understanding of reality and plunged him into a years-long existential crisis cleverly disguised as infantile gurgling, was the dawning horror of realizing he, Kaelen Park, a thirty-something civil engineer with a promising career and a mild coffee addiction, was now… a baby?
A tiny, helpless, and exceedingly loud baby, swaddled in rough linen and surrounded by giants speaking a language that sounded like rocks tumbling down a hillside.
Nearly two decades had crawled by since that bewildering rebirth. Eighteen years, if his attempts to correlate the chaotic local calendar: a bewildering tapestry of saints' days, harvest festivals, and wildly inconsistent lunar cycles, compared with Earth's steady solar progression, were even remotely accurate.
Now, Leon Varent, as he was known in this medieval-fantasy realm of Eldoria, stood by a tall, leaded-glass window, its panes thick and uneven, distorting the view of the sprawling Varent Duchy. Below, meticulously cultivated fields, a patchwork quilt of greens and browns, stretched towards rolling hills.
In the distance, mist clung to the jagged peaks of the Dragon's Tooth Mountains, while closer, the ancestral seat of House Varent, a formidable castle of grey, lichen-stained stone and impossibly slender turrets, dominated the landscape.
It was a picture of feudal order, a world where magic was an accepted, if not always understood, force, and the circumstances of one's birth were the ultimate determinant of one's worth. If they had one.
Leon, by the standards of this world, was proving to be remarkably worthless. He possessed not a spark of discernible magical talent. Numerous tutors, teachers, and self-proclaimed arcane diagnosticians had poked and chanted at him throughout his childhood, only to sigh in collective disappointment.
His mana pathways were, apparently, as barren as the Blighted Marches themselves. Nor did he exhibit the brawny physique or the instinctive aggression that marked a promising warrior, another highly prized asset among Eldorian nobility.
His mind, still stubbornly wired with the analytical precision and problem-solving paradigms of an engineer, found the theatrical flourishes of local swordsmanship and the often strange, rule-bending nature of magic to be… frustratingly inefficient.
He yearned for blueprints, for stress calculations, for the predictable elegance of physics, not flamboyant incantations or the brute force of a well-swung mace.
He let out a soft sigh, the sound swallowed by the heavy velvet drapes and the thick tapestries adorning his chambers. Luxurious, yes, but it felt more like a gilded cage, a constant reminder of his deviation from the ducal norm.
Even the basic amenities, or lack thereof, grated on his sensibilities. Chamber pots, emptied with a distinct lack of discretion by grumbling servants. Bathing, a rare and elaborate affair involving lukewarm water hauled in buckets, rather than a simple, daily expectation.
The pervasive smells that constantly hit his nose he'd first noticed as an infant still lingered, a testament to a world that hadn't yet grasped the fundamentals of sanitation or public health. He often found himself mentally redesigning the castle's plumbing, sketching out schematics for aqueducts and sewage systems in the margins of his unwanted spellbooks, much to his tutors' despair.
His only solace, the only genuine warmth in this often-chilling second life, had emanated from his mother, Duchess Elara Varent. A woman of gentle smiles and melancholic eyes, she possessed a quiet strength that seemed out of place in the boisterous, often brutal, Varent court.
She alone had seemed to understand his incessant, often 'inappropriate,' questions about how things worked, why structures stood or fell, why water flowed in one direction and not another. She had listened to his quiet observations about the inefficiencies of their farming techniques or the structural flaws in the castle's newer, hastily built wing, observations that others, including his father, dismissed as the ramblings of an odd, un-noble child.
It was Duchess Elara who, just a few short weeks ago, her breath already a shallow whisper against his cheek, her hand, once firm and reassuring, now a fragile, trembling thing in his own, had pressed a small, intricately carved wooden box into his palm.
Inside, nestled on a bed of faded, sapphire-blue silk, lay a tiny, exquisite glass bottle. And within that bottle, swirling with an internal, impossible light, was a miniature castle. It was a marvel of craftsmanship, complete with impossibly fine turrets, delicate battlements, and walls that seemed to shimmer with captured starlight, all contained within a vessel no larger than his thumb.
"A keepsake, my Leon," she had rasped, her voice thin as spun glass. "From my mother's line. Ancient. Powerful, in its own way. Keep it safe. Keep it… close to your heart. It may… guide you when other lights fail."
He hadn't grasped its full significance then, beyond the crushing weight of it being a final, precious token from a dying mother.
Now, with her chambers silent and the scent of medicinal herbs replaced by the funereal aroma of lilies, the little bottle, tucked securely in an inner pocket of his tunic, felt as heavy as a millstone.
It was his last tangible connection to the one soul in this harsh, alien world who had seen him not as a ducal disappointment, a flawed cog in the Varent machine, but simply as her son. Her Leon.
The heavy oak door to his chambers creaked open, announcing the arrival of a liveried servant who bowed with practiced deference, though his eyes held a familiar mixture of pity and apprehension.
"Young Master Leon," the servant intoned, his voice carefully neutral, "His Grace, Duke Alaric, requests your presence in the Great Hall. Immediately."
Leon's stomach, already a knot of grief and anxiety, tightened further. A summons from his father, Duke Alaric Varent, was rarely a precursor to anything pleasant, especially not now.
As the third son, the 'spare' in every conceivable sense of the word, he was a living, breathing testament to the Varent lineage's failure to produce another powerhouse mage or a legendary warrior in his generation.
His elder brothers, Valerius and Cassian, more than fulfilled those expectations. Valerius, the eldest, was a mage of considerable, if somewhat arrogant, he has talent as his affinity for elemental fire made him the shining pride of the family.
Cassian, the second son, was an obvious prodigy with the blade, his martial prowess already earning him accolades in royal tournaments and the grudging respect of seasoned knights. He was strong, skilled, and everything Leon was not.
And then there was Leon. The quiet one. The one who, to his father's eternal fear, preferred dusty tomes on ancient architecture, treatises on siege engineering (a purely theoretical interest, of course), and smuggled texts on agricultural rotation to the Varent library's extensive collection of grimoires or swordplay manuals.
He was, in the unsparing eyes of Duke Alaric and the lavish ducal court, an anomaly, a regrettable deviation, a stain on the otherwise impeccable tapestry of their 'great' noble bloodline.
He forced himself to smooth down the front of his somber, well-made but simple tunic, which was a deliberate, if subtle, rebellion against the flamboyant silks and velvets favored by his brothers. He followed the servant, his footsteps echoing awfully loud in the cold stone corridors.
The path to the Great Hall was a gauntlet of disapproving ancestral portraits, their painted eyes seeming to follow him with silent judgment, each stern Varent face a reminder of his perceived inadequacies. The air grew colder, heavier with each step, the unspoken weight of his family's disappointment pressing down on him like a physical burden.
He knew, with a certainty that settled like ice in his veins, that this summons was no mere formality, no casual ducal whim. The whispers in the castle had been growing louder, more insistent, in the days following his mother's passing.
Her death had cast a long, dark shadow over the duchy, and in such shadows, Duke Alaric was known to make his boldest, often cruelest, moves. For Leon, any significant change orchestrated by his father had invariably meant one thing: a further, more painful, descent into marginalization.
He clutched the small bottle in his pocket, its smooth, cool glass a small point of focus in the rising tide of his apprehension. Whatever was coming, he had a sinking feeling it would change his already unstable existence finally.
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Chamber pots - Basically worse than Toilets