Aeron

Seventeen years old, raised by the hunter Petr in the fishing village of Raeik-Cove at the edge of the map, Aeron wants the one thing the world keeps refusing him: to be counted a man. Penned in by chores and a stepmother's grip, kept "a child until the next festival," he walks the fields talking to himself while his friends take rings and keys and names on doors. By his own account he has been "buried alive in the place I was born."

Then the Northmen come. The raid burns his village, his friends, the whole small world that caged him; and in a single night the boy who longed for escape is granted it in the cruelest form there is. He kills his first man at the barn with a dagger, saved at the last instant by Therros's arrow.

Fleeing through the woods, something in him answers for the first time: the world slows, his mind goes void-quiet, and he outruns men who should have caught him, before he collapses into a winter stream, where the Watcher, Rielle, pulls him out and tends him in her glade. A power he never asked for has begun to wake, and it will not be put back.

What follows strips him further (of his certainties, even of who he thought he was), but he doesn't turn for home. He follows Rielle and Therros north, after a stolen relic and into stranger company than a farm-boy ever dreamed, choosing the road over the safety he was raised in. Therros marks the passage with a Riverlander long knife: not a trophy, a promise. The cage is gone. So is the boy.