The First 100 Days

Archmund Granavale staggered to top of a hill on the Granavale Estate, overlooking fields of golden wheat maintained by their tenant farmers. He was barely nine-years-old, but his body had been weakened by the Crylaxan Plague, a nationwide pandemic that had consumed the nation for half a decade and killed his mother and siblings.

He was the last hope of House Granavale, but the plague had weakened his body. So despite the gentle sun upon his face, filtered through the leaves of apple trees, he eased himself down a tree trunk and closed his eyes.

And he dreamed.

He sat in front of a bright, flat rectangle. There was a half-sphere in his right hand, cool to the touch, and his left hand danced over a strange abacus. Like a machine, he dragged the sphere, and highlighted a sentence on the screen. He stretched his hands — holding the mouse and keyboard for hours on end had strained them, and he would be here for many hours more.

The world outside the window was dark, but hours of work remained on the computer. At least his office was brightly lit, so he wouldn’t fall asleep.

Another few months, and this bout of work would be over, only to return again in a year’s time. This was his life — sitting at a computer at 10 pm, moving numbers around and building spreadsheets, doing nothing meaningful.

Was this all life had to offer?

Archmund Granavale jolted awake. The sun was still high in the sky. Yet now the clouds cast wide shadows upon the rolling fields.

His heart hammered in his chest. He felt tense and restless — anxiety. And his stomach felt heavy as if he was going to throw up — despair. He’d felt tragedy before, when his mother had died, so long ago he could barely remember her, but this was different.

This was a lack of hope.

Archmund Granavale had never wanted for anything in his life before. As the last heir of House Granavale, he had been spoiled by his father and their servants alike. He had never known lasting pain, for they immediately brought forth the Gems to heal him. He had never known boredom, for his days were filled with tutelage about the lands and titles he was to inherit. And he had never known a lack of purpose, because he was to rule as Lord Granavale once he came of age.

And suddenly all of that was terrifying.

“Fuck,” he said under his breath. “Fuck.”

Then he paused.

That word had been in English. The word “fuck” had been in English, which was the language he used to know in that memory. It was a generic profanity for being frustrated or angry, but it also meant fornication — something that he was sure he hadn’t been taught, yet made perfect sense as something that could happen. He didn’t even know if any swears existed in his native tongue, though now that he thought about it they obviously did.

He never used to think like this. Before, he’d had proud yet simple thoughts about how great nobles were, or how good the harvest was, or how much he hated tutoring. But now his mind was expanding far beyond what it had been.

If that had been a dream, it had been extraordinarily vivid and detailed. Now that he’d pulled the thread, he began remembering more and more about English. It had a subject-object-verb grammar, which differed from his native language, and was very very liberal about borrowing loanwords from other languages, to the point where it’d borrowed words from every language on Earth.

And that was another thread. That he’d lived in another world, called Earth. That Earth had so many languages, so many countries, its own systems of religion, power, and culture that were like nothing he’d known. That he knew about so many of them. That if he tried to remember, he did.

This wasn’t a normal way of thinking. His was a mind given to strange circuits and loops, that held onto strange trivia like a sponge and went places other minds would not.

They had called him “gifted” in his previous life. He was sure of it. He’d studied Physics in college (which was like going to the Imperial Academy, but for commoners), and later more advanced math, and even some soft sciences like finance — and he’d been a voracious reader, absorbing books and their trivia like a sponge in water — though strangely enough, in none of his memories did he actually use most of that knowledge for anything at all.

And yet something didn’t make sense.

He had been “gifted”. Earth had been a paradise world. Disease had been conquered. Famine was a thing of the past. War was a distant rumor. So why had he been so miserable?

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Whenever the Lord Reginald Granavale was at his estate, as opposed to schmoozing in the Imperial Capital, he would share dinners with Archmund. Normally, Archmund would eat alone, watched by the servants, after a day of tutelage in all the topics a young lord needed to know.

Until now, Archmund had always looked forward to these dinners. Now, he wondered if he could hide his true self.

“Archie, my son,” said the Lord Granavale.

“Father,” Archmund said.

The dinner was elaborate yet oddly quaint, almost simple. Steamed greens with butter sauce, white bread, and steak, rare. Archmund had taken this at face value before; now, he had so many questions.

This was a meal fit for a noble house that was comfortable but not extraordinarily rich. Butter took hours to churn by hand but much less by machine, which suggested the kitchen staff could spare the time to do this or that there was a centralized industrial butter factory. White bread, similarly, meant someone could separate germ from wheat or that there was a machine to do so. And steak? That was a dead cow. One that a peasant family could use to turn grass into milk reliably for years on end.

The food was a bit lacking in salt, however — far less than the ultraprocessed snacks of his previous life. Salt had been valuable enough that the Roman Empire, which men thought about daily, had paid wages in it; he wondered if that was true of this world’s Empire as well. And it was unspiced.

“Are you enjoying the meal?” said his father. “I spare no expense for you, my son.”

“Truly?” Archmund said.

“Archie?” Lord Granavale said, blinking, before breaking out into a beam. “Whatever do you mean?”

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“This amount of salt — I have no complaints with the flavor, but is this healthful or is this all we can afford?”

“Entirely health reasons,” said the Lord Granavale. “In the Capital, the meals are loaded with salt and lard. Far too rich for my simple country tastes.”

Archmund realized this was the first time he’d asked an actual question of his father in years. And, if he stopped to think about it, he had been on the path to being a spoiled, pampered brat. The last son of Lord Granavale, the last hope of House Granavale, given every privilege from birth, endowed with the burden of his clan. No one in this estate or the neighboring towns would ever have told him “no.”

“Do you want more salt?” said Lord Granavale. “Would that make you happy? I can get you more salt.”

“How much would it cost us?” Archmund said.

“Pennies. A trifle. It’s no large matter.”

“And if I wanted it for the rest of the year? Until I go to the Academy?”

“It would be fine!”

“What if I started asking for extravagance? Cakes for dinner, meat for breakfast, exotic spices at every meal.”

“There comes a time in every dutiful lord’s life,” said the Lord Granavale, “where he must learn temperance. Temperance, the virtue of moderation—”

“So it would bankrupt us if I did,” Archmund interjected. “Was it the spices?”

“Why would you think that?” said the Lord Granavale. His voice wasn’t reproaching or scornful. It was curious.

“Meat, sugar, and eggs we can levy as a tax. Perhaps unfairly, but life is good enough in our lands that it wouldn’t cause mass unrest. Spices we would have to import.”

“Did I teach you this?” said the Lord Granavale, in wonder.

Archmund shut his mouth. Regardless of whether those memories had been delusions, they’d given him instincts and intuitions that were correct. He wondered if he’d said too much. He wondered if he’d started talking like an unearthly child, someone far too wise for his years. It was certainly possible — perhaps those memories had been more than memories, but also behaviors, mannerisms, and tics.

“I’ve always known you were a smart boy, Archie, but I’m proud of you,” said the Lord Granavale. “You’ve got a keen eye and a keener mind. You’ll find the Academy a breeze. Gods above, I might be able to abdicate early and leave the hopes of Granavale to you. I’ve known it all along, but you have a gift.”

And a cold, creeping chill wrapped around Archmund’s heart. Yes, this was the world that awaited him. This was the role he was born for. This was his original fate.

“Tomorrow,” said the Lord Granavale, unaware of Archmund’s increasing agitation, “we should begin your training in earnest. What it means to be a lord, the full account of our holdings, and matters of policy and politics.”

Yes, this was his duty and his burden. To live a life being tutored in the ways of the lordship. To go to the academy to find a wife suitable to rule besides him. To bounce between the city and the country begging for money and military support in the bad times. To have sons or daughters capable of carrying on the family name. And to die, content, with nothing having changed.

In this world, that was the duty of “gifted children”.

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He remembered what it meant to be gifted in that previous life.

Only children were ever labeled as “gifted”. Children who, for some reason or another, exceeded their peers. Who from some accident of birth seemed smarter or stronger than those around them, and for that brief period of strength got to live blessed lives. They didn’t have to practice. They didn’t have to study. They could just succeed.

But that never lasted. The gifted grew up faster than their peers, but rarely further. One day, inevitably, their peers grew to meet them. And the gifted children, who never had to practice or study because of an accident of birth, suddenly were just average. And not long after that, they would be surpassed, because everyone else had learned how to study and practice and compensate for their own weaknesses.

And then they would fail. The prophesied greatness of their early years would come to nothing. At best, they could hope to be normal.

He had failed. By the time he’d been an adult, he had been so deeply tired. Completely and utterly burned out, and disillusioned with the world.

Archmund was under no delusions this time around.

He might’ve been “gifted” in his last life and ended up burned out because of it. He was still as sharp as ever, but it was flagrantly obvious that he was in the same boat.

His major advantage was decades of memories from a previous life. But by definition the advantages granted by aged memories wouldn’t last. Sure, he had the life experiences of a thirty-something-year-old — but in three decades, so would all of his peers, and an extra thirty wouldn’t mean much.

To make something of this life, he needed to seize this early advantage of precocious knowledge, and use it to build a life that he truly wanted.

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Archmund's Journal:

Year 0, Day 0.

I remember my past life. I hated it.

The normal future for me means being the Lord Granavale. Having a loveless political marriage for status and a mistress if my wife permits it. Spending all my time begging for Imperial funding.

I would hate that too.

Before, duty would compel me to accept that life.

Now, I can imagine another way might be possible.

But to find that way, I need to know more.

And to remember.

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Yet deep within the Guts of Hell and the Arched Vaults of Heaven, along the Axis Mundi that speared this and all other worlds, an entry in a great cosmic ledger shifted.

Think of it as a library if you wish, and the System guiding it. A “people management system”. A vaguely classist cosmic mechanism for separating the haves from the have-nots.

Here is how Archmund’s entry changed

He would be seeing it sooner than he realized.

Archmund Granavale

Lifespan: 9/90 Stat Value Titles Achievements Bound Items Relationships Skills Strength 5 Granavale Heir (*new*) Reincarnated Memories N/A Lord Reginald Granvale, Father N/A Dexterity 5 Lady Sophia Granavale, Mother (deceased) Constitution 5 Amelia Granavale, elder sister (deceased) Intelligence 5 Linus Granavale, elder brother (deceased) Wisdom 5 Calla Granavale, elder sister (deceased) Charisma 5 Luck 5