There was no sky.
Only the impression of one, like a memory worn thin.
Thalric floated—though the word felt wrong. He had no breath. No limbs. No pulse. Only awareness, untethered and stretching into what might have once been a corridor. The world was… shifting. Not dark. Not light. Simply absent. A hush carved from hollow wind.
Something ancient stirred behind the silence.
He tried to scream. Nothing came.
It began slowly—a pricking at the edge of what might've been his senses. Heat. Cold. Words. Foreign. Human. One after the other, they stitched themselves into him like broken hymns.
"Failure."
"Glory."
"Betrayer."
"King."
"Monster."
He remembered dying.
Then he remembered everything else.
The sigil. The soul-rending invocation. The way the world cracked open like wet stone as he spoke it. The final shudder of magic leaving him—leaving forever.
"This is not the Vale of Ancients," he whispered.
"This is... elsewhere."
Something shifted ahead. A pulse. Faint and violet. It flickered like a beacon through the fog of not-place. He reached for it—though he had no hands—and the world convulsed.
Suddenly, he wasn't alone.
Figures bloomed around him, formed from smoke and colorless flame. Some he knew. Some he'd condemned. Others... others were him.
One wore the crown he forged in the Elarian Peaks.
One wept at the corpse of a child he'd had executed.
One turned its back and vanished.
Then, a new voice echoed, deeper than time.
"You would not pass on, Thalric of Veymar."
"You would not forget, or be forgotten."
He stood—somehow—on nothing, naked in the mind, the weight of guilt and glory both pressing into him like brands.
"I cast the spell," he said. "I gave up my name. My soul. Let me pass. Let me see another dawn."
The voice rasped.
"And what will you do with that second dawn? Rule again? Destroy again? Or simply... become?"
The light surged.
And then—
Pain. Flesh. Hunger. He slammed into being like stone through ice.
Thalric woke in fire.
No, not fire. Flesh.
His lungs convulsed. His heart stumbled. The world exploded in sound—shouts, scraping wood, the clatter of metal onto tile. A woman screamed. Someone swore in clipped English.
He opened his eyes. Light stabbed him in the face.
He tried to rise and fell. Hard. His body—this body—was not his. It groaned. It rebelled. It was wrong.
Thalric choked on his own breath and rolled sideways, vomiting bile onto the floor.
"Dear saints, he's alive!"
The voice was not familiar. Nothing was.
Someone hauled him upright, too rough for a courtier, too fast for a servant. Thalric caught a glimpse of a man in a soot-stained vest and round spectacles, hair wild with panic. A healer?
"Percival," the man gasped. "Stay awake, lad. Don't fade again!"
Percival.
That name rang inside him like a funeral bell.
There were more voices now. Boots. Crashing doors. Then two hands, lighter—more cautious—pressed against his temple.
"Give him air. He's lucid. For the love of—fetch clean water, you dolts!"
A woman's voice, crisp and calm like sleet on stone.
Thalric blinked again.
The room swam into focus. Velvet drapes. Gilt furniture. A chandelier trembling above him with every thump of chaos. And across from him, on the far wall, a portrait. Half-finished.
A round-faced young man. Pale, soft-limbed. Eyes dull, mouth slack.
He knew that face.
He was in that face.
"What... is this?"
No magic answered. No connection to the Leyline. No divine echo. He tried to call fire. Ice. Even the simplest sigil of illumination.
Nothing.
Not even a flicker.
Terror coiled around his ribs like iron wire.
He remembered the spell.
He remembered dying.
But this—this was worse.
This was surviving.