The growing plant

Valen was born on a rainy spring night, tucked safely into a small wooden hut at the edge of the Village. Outside, the trees swayed gently, and the wind hummed through the leaves.

His mother,elyse, wrapped him in a soft wool blanket she’d spun herself. His father, clyde, held him with rough, callused hands—hands used to chiseling stone and hammering steel, now cradling something more fragile than anything he’d ever forged.

There were no monsters that night. No adventurers, no kingdoms, no danger. Just a hut, a hearth, and a newborn with dark green eyes.

By the time Valen could crawl, he was already fascinated by everything his father did. Clyde worked behind the hut in a small shed filled with tools and scrap metal. He wasn’t a famous blacksmith, but he was a good one—good enough to keep the nearby village stocked with kitchen knives, hunting spears, and once in a while, a simple iron sword.

Valen would sit in the dirt, wide-eyed, while his father hammered heated metal on the anvil. Clyde always explained what he was doing, even if Valen didn’t understand the words yet.

“This is copper,” he’d say, holding up a lump of orangey reddish ore. “Too soft for blades, but good to be enchanted ”

And Valen would babble something back, tapping two rocks together like he was forging his own masterpiece.

His mother was quieter, softer. A healer by training, she had a shelf of worn books passed down from her grandmother. When Valen turned two, she started pointing at simple runes in one of the books, showing him how to trace them in the air.

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“This one’s lume—it makes light.”

She would whisper the incantation, and a soft glow would form in her palm. She could do it without the rune but it was to teach him

Valen would try it. No magic came, not yet—but he remembered the shape of the rune. That was enough for now.

At night, Elyse would read to him from the same books. Not fairy tales, but field guides—monster types, plant properties, basic elemental theory.Valen didn’t mind. He liked listening to her voice and turning the pages with his tiny hands.

By age three, Valen learnt a lot of the language of this world and could name more monsters than most grown villagers. He knew which ones were weak to fire, which ones had armored hides, and which ones could be tamed if raised from an egg.

He also had a habit of “borrowing” small metal scraps from his father’s forge to make pretend weapons, which Clyde always pretended not to notice.

Every morning, Clyde would lift Valen up onto the wooden table and say,

“What’s the first rule of monsters?”

Valen would grin and shout, “Don’t poke the ones that glow!”

Life wasn’t grand. But it was good.

A wooden hut. A warm fire. Books stacked on shelves. A mother who taught him to read the wind, and a father who taught him to shape the earth. He didn’t have a class or title yet. He was just valen. Curious, clever, and growing.