Hii!! Welcome to my first ever book! Enjoy Reading!
The frost in Melbourne did not look like the frost in London, but to a boy born under an unyielding sky, it carried the exact same scent of static electricity and iron.
He was born in the autumn of 1842, though the parish registers of Melbourne's earliest settlements would eventually crumble, their ink fading to brown dust long before the first asphalt layout was poured over the dry grass of Victoria. In the early census logs, he was recorded simply as Oscar; his surname was fluid, changing across decades like the shifting boundaries of the cattle stations along the Yarra River.
To his mother, a woman whose hands were permanently rough from lye soap and coarse wool, he was an unsettlingly quiet infant. He did not cry when the midwinter draft whistled through the gaps in the timber cottage. He merely lay in his bassinet, his small, un-blinkingly dark eyes tracking the slow, geometric path of the morning sun across the whitewashed ceiling.
"He doesn't breathe right, John," she had whispered into the dark one night in 1845, her hand resting over the child's chest.
"The boy is sturdy," his father had grunted, turning back toward the wall. "He's just quiet. Better a quiet lad than a sickly one."
But his mother knew. A normal child's heart was a frantic, erratic thing—a tiny bird trapping itself behind ribs. Her son's chest was a heavy, cold anvil that gave a slow, deliberate thump only once for every four breaths she took. When he scratched his knuckles on the rough cedar fencing at age seven, the blood did not rush; it pooled, thick and dark like motor oil, clotting into smooth, seamless marble skin within a matter of minutes.
By 1860, the gold rush had transformed Melbourne from a collection of muddy tracks into a city of stone banks and iron foundry chimneys. The world was accelerating. Steam engines began to slice through the bush, their heavy iron pistons pounding out a rhythm that Oscar found himself tracking from miles away.
While the other young men spent their wages in the public houses along Flinders Street, Oscar would stand by the rail tracks, his long, pale fingers resting against the cast-iron fences. He wasn't watching the passengers; he was watching the valve gears. He was calculating the exact margin of delay between the stroke of the piston and the release of the pressure gauge.
He didn't age.
When 1880 arrived, his father had been buried in the dry soil of the general cemetery for a decade, and his mother's face was a map of deep, silver-lined wrinkles. Oscar still stood at the exact height of a young man in his late teens, his jawline clean, his skin completely devoid of the sun-spots and weather-scars that claimed every ordinary human in the colony.
"You have to leave, Oscar," his mother told him on a night when the southern wind brought the smell of bushfires into the city. She didn't look at him with fear—only with the profound, exhausting grief of a woman who knew she was temporary. "The neighbors are talking about the surveyor's boy who died in '62. They say you look exactly like the lad who carried his coffin. Go where the crowds are too big for anyone to remember a face."
He left before the sun cleared the horizon, taking nothing but a small pocket watch with a steel balance wheel. He walked into the vast, dark interior of the continent, away from the coast, away from the registers. For nearly forty years, he became a shadow in the timber camps and the railway construction crews, a silent, tireless laborer who worked the night shifts when the air was cool enough to let him breathe without the artificial pretense of human gasping.
He discovered that if he remained perfectly still, the liquid amber rings deep within his irises would stabilize, allowing him to perceive the mechanical universe not as a series of random events, but as a dense, mathematical grid. He could see the exact fatigue point in an iron coupling link before it snapped; he could hear the single, unaligned tooth in a massive steam shovel's gear train from across a quarry floor.
