The Oracle Story

At three months old i could talk somewhat comprehensibly, but as per my agreement with mother i kept it simple. If i wanted something or had a question, i would simply point and say one or two words. Even though i was making words at three months old, i had to at least try and act like a normal baby.

After my falling out of the crib, my father started spending more time at home than out working. I did not mind this because the entire family would go out in the front or back yard almost every day and relax together or do chores around me. I enjoyed getting to watch and listen, but most of the interesting stuff came from Gryn.

Gryn seemed to be something of a Chad, but with his open and kind personality he was way better than the actual Chad i knew. Many of the girls in our generation seemed to be his friends more than the guys, but he still had a close circle of guy friends. The stories he would share about he and his friends were the kinds of things i wanted to start doing.

These kids had complete freedom after morning classes in the temple, going out and about town or even outside of it to do as they pleased. More often than not they would follow the river beside town into the surrounding forestry and just get lost for hours. Of course, after doing this for years, it was hard to get lost anymore.

He would often bring home odds and ends that he finds like a strange flower or a pretty stone, the exact kind of thing i had once imagined myself doing. I was honestly pretty grateful to have an adventurous older brother, his experiences would save me a lot of time and trouble.

His lessons learned would be problems i would not have to go through.

Sadly, this also meant that my own explorations and discoveries would lose their novelty. If i found something, he would already know what it was. If we went somewhere, he would already know the way.

Hopefully, there was enough of an age gap between us that he would be busy chasing skirts by the time i was chasing butterflies.

Sometimes it would just be mother and I out in the yard. She would often just show me the flowers and trees and tell me their names or properties if they had them. The common flowers with magical properties were something like a tulip with a long blossom but they grew up with multiple heads like a lily. These were wardblooms, flowers that naturally repelled undesirable energies and entities.

Alongside the wardblooms were light lilies, plants that not only converted light into food but also stored warmth from the sun. During the night, they would release their warmth to attract dew and nocturnal insects. Which would then become paralyzed in its pollen and become plant food.

There were a few other plants in the yard that were grown for medicinal purposes, like cleaning wounds or breaking fevers, but the most impressive was the citrus tree out front.

This fruit tree was something called a spirit fruit tree and the fruits were used to make powerful magical potions and tinctures. To eat the fruit raw would replenish most of a magic user's energy in just a few bites. To brew it down into something more powerful, somebody like my mother could make a tea that increased the strength of one's magic.

On the days when i was alone with my father, we did not do much but laze around and watch the sky. Unlike with my mother who was always holding me, my father had no problems letting me crawl around in the grass. However, i could tell just from the feel of his hawk-like gaze that he was watching me at all times.

Other times, he would stand out in the yard and go through practice drills wielding a weapon. Sometimes he used a giant sword that was half as broad as his body, other times he used much more normal sized blades in either hands. Once i even watched him use a massive poleaxe, spinning it about his body while taking steps with thrusts and swings that whistled through the air.

I committed every placing of his foot, bend of the knee, brace of the hips, bow of his back, and swing of his arms to memory. I wanted to learn how to do these things when i got older, to make the wind roar with the swing of a weapon. I was already as strong as the average adult, i bet i could double that by the time i reached my previous age.

When i was four months old, i decided to start taking my first steps in the open after having practiced it in private at night for a while. Even though it was already pretty early, my first tooth had also started crowning so it was obvious my body naturally developed faster than average.

There was no other explanation, it's not like doing crunches in my crib could make a tooth grow.

My family were overjoyed with my expedient progress and i would often catch them talking to one another about how they gossip with others about me. I was not even a toddler and i was just a few inches shy of three feet tall. If they did not boast about me with pride, they would lock me away in a basement or attic out of fear. So, i was more than happy to let them show off their blessed baby.

Now fully aware of my mobility, my parents became much more relaxed and would even often leave my crib open. Mother already knew i could have gotten out at any point in time, so it was obvious i was being given this freedom. Luckily, i had been keeping my word for the most part and taking things 'slow'.

I could not go upstairs where Gryn's and their rooms were, i was still too small to allow on the stair. However, Gryn never had any problems with bringing his collections of rocks and dried plants and even random animal parts. As it turned out, some of these things had actual value such as an ivory horn he said had come from some kind of giant rodent creature.

Gryn even had a few war stories to share, tales of having gone hunting with father and all the different animals they had seen. Since Gryn was usually there, our father could not go out and fight every big game animal they came across, but they often found many mundane and magical creatures. Many of which were of the herbivore variety.

On a few occasions, however, my father had been forced to use his great strength and prowess to bring down the big game they usually avoided. His favorite story was of how our father fought off something akin to a bear but with six legs and upper arms like a gorilla. All father had used was the single sword he brought on the trip with them.

Gryn even still had the lower jaw of the beast, big enough to wear like a crown on top of his head with its teeth perfectly intact.

With a month of relative freedom to travel about the house, i quickly overcame what little awkwardness was left in the use of my limbs. Now i could strut my stuff almost casually about the house. As long as i had clothes on, rather, because even as a baby i did not like the idea of being naked.

Before long, i was testing my boundaries with the stairs. I was already as big as the average toddler and i had proven to have greater reflexes on several occasions. Not once in my few months of life have i fallen without catching myself- the crib incident aside.

Even with my size, though, the stairs were individually too tall for me to simply walk up and i was forced to crawl and climb. When i was finally caught in action, it was by my father. I was immediately allowed to climb as high up the stairs as he was tall where he could reach comfortably through the thin wooden slats supporting the banister.

Not for the first time, I received an Endurance notification after over an hour of playing on the stairs. My endurance had gone up by over ten points in the past few months, but my Strength had yet to rise. It was clear to me for more than a few reasons that my Strength was more than just high for my age and it would take effort to increase naturally.

Even though i had an only vaguely pudgy body with oddly pronounced, if stretched, biceps, there was only so much physical development any body could safely undergo. My father was huge, but my brother was not, so it was likely i was naturally taking after him in my physique.

Besides the scowling eyebrows, i also inherited some of the richness of his naturally tanned skin and the general build of my body- obviously. However, my eyes themselves were a hazel mix of both their blue and green colors and the shape of my nose so far took after my mother.

My father, sadly, had a very large and pronounced nose that proportionally fit his large head and face. From what little i had seen of myself, my ears were somewhat large, but what baby or toddler did not go through a big-eared stage?

Luckily, they both had the same dark brown hair so mine came out pretty much black. Other than this, both of my parents had angular faces with almost pointed chins. Even though my everything was still under development, my face had no baby fat left from its exercising and was vaguely squarish as of yet.

Like it was in my past life.

Nobody seemed to notice the differences like i did, possibly because only i knew what i used to look like- or that only i knew i used to have a whole other face. More than likely, it was because i had inherited dad's freakishly angry eyebrows so there was no point questioning anything else. Ever.

Gryn was a pretty boy, as much as i hated to admit it, but it fit his personality to have shoulder-length rather than short or medium length hair like a Chad. He had dad's eyes and mom's eyebrows, which were a dark and sharp blue under relatively thin and light brown lines. He, luckily, had been born without the tribal flair.

Finally, deciding to deepen my bond with my father on a private level, since we usually did not do much together when it was just us in the yard, i walked up to him while he was doing unarmed postures for long periods of time.

The first reaction he had was to smile brightly before saying, "Finally ready to try and learn something from your old man, hey son? I've been awaiting the day since before i started letting you watch me train!"

Shaking my head slowly, i look down and around to give the impression that i was uncertain of words before saying, "Not... yet? Body... ready, not." In more ways than one, teaching a baby, no matter how big, martial arts was a NO.

"Ah..." he says with a visible deflation and loss of enthusiasm. "Well, Chuck, what was it you needed?"

Pointing at my eyebrows, i simply state more than ask, "Where from."

Frowning slightly at the way i had asked the question, my father says, "You don't have to sound angry about it." Then, looking around as if making sure we were alone, he turns back to me with a very frank and honest look on his face before dropping a bomb.

"When you talk like that, it's honestly a disappointment. You're supposed to be some genius who was born with an omniscient consciousness, talk normally. Even if it's just between us."

Okay. My parents knew way more than i thought they did, and not all of it was even accurate. But, if i play my cards right, i could use this.

"Mom wants me to stay a baby as long as possible," i say with an exaggerated, almost relieved sigh. As if talking normally was the world's biggest weight on my shoulders and it had just been lifted. "How much do you guys know, though?"

Sitting down on the ground in front of me, he still towered over me with his legs crossed while i was standing. Waiting until i, too, sat down it was a few moments before he said anything again.

"Before we found out your mother was pregnant with you, a traveling fortuneteller came to visit us," he said after several breaths. "This old lady was strong magic, as old as our head priest Father Narmen- if not older. At first, we didn't want to believe her, but then she proved your mother was pregnant then and there...

"After that," he continued after a brief pause, as if carefully considering his next words. "I stopped talking and started listening. It was still hard to hear, she was telling us about how our son would be marked by the gods.

"Normally when you hear about something like this, its either a curse or a blessing, but she made the mark you received sound way worse. For our child, they would be born with some unknown form of omniscient comprehension, which is your Divine Translation. On top of this, you as a person would be different from everybody else in your generation. And that's not even the worrying part!

"Apparently, the gods... 'cut the strings of fate that bind you'. They did not know what it meant but it obviously scared them, but as far as your mother and i can tell it means that your future simply is not written.

"Where one child would occasion an oracle at birth about its future gains or woes, ours simply had no future at all. That scared me when they explained it, but your mother... she laughed and laughed as if it was the most foolish worry in the world. Of course, this upset the prophetess.

"The fortuneteller lost their calm and said, 'your child could grow up to become a new lord of hell, and you laugh?' Your mother took a second to stop laughing and countered with, 'he could even grow up to be the next emperor, or even a new god. Hell, he could be a farmer for all i care, all that matters is he gets to grow up."

That was honestly pretty touching and meaningful to me, and it also kind of explained why she wanted me to be like a normal baby. My mentality and development probably scared her for a number of reasons. Possibly, unless my father and his brand of people developed like this, it was likely i would just keep growing and aging at abnormal speeds.

i was already growing roughly twice as fast as the average baby with a third tooth most of the way grown. However, my father was untroubled, so her fears were likely just the uncertainty of my actual future. This would make her want to keep me as a controllable and easily protected child.

Nodding my head slowly with a broad smile creeping across my face as my father remains silent, i sagely look up and say, "It means that my future is whatever I make it to be."

*