Death was cold. Familiar. Veyne had lived among the dead so long they had become his only companions—lifeless faces that never judged, never spoke.
His soul drifted in black eternity. Below, a light grew—at first hopeful, then monstrous. Hellfire, and the gnarled hands of demons reaching to claim him. He sank toward them. The same creatures he had wielded in life now waited to devour him in death. Fitting.
He fell—lower and lower—until a green astral chain looped through the void and latched to him. Weak. Amateurish. Whoever threw it hadn't been careful. He could have ripped free, but he didn't.
The chain pulled. Veyne's vision blinked into a hospital of gray—black and white, one eye useless, pain to every nerve. He tasted nothing. He could not speak. He saw his left arm, rotten: muscle shredded, tendons hanging by threads. His chest gaped; lungs punctured. His right arm and leg were bone. He was in a corpse.
Panic flared, then calculation. The ceiling looked familiar. This place—old and reeking of dust—was his first lab. Of course. If anything survived, it would be here.
He tried to stand. Pain tore through him. He crawled, dragging himself toward a small cupboard, blood congealing along the tiles. The vision in his ruined eye blurred. His fingers fumbled. He hammered uselessly at the cupboard until the strength faded.
A thought—sharp, ridiculous—cut through the fog. He could not move his other arm but he can use it. With a howl, Veyne ripped his right arm from its socket. Pain exploded; the world tiled. He gripped the detached limb and, with the last of his will, thrust it up onto a shelf, knocking something down.
Something clattered by his head. He seized it blindly and forced it into his throat.
Warmth. Blood. Muscle knitting like wet clay. The world reassembled itself. He gasped—air rushed into lungs that had minutes before been shredded. He felt skin, then sight, then tremulous laughter.
"It worked. I'm alive!"
He pulled the object free. A unicorn horn, cracked and crumbling, fell from his hands like a spent relic. It shattered to dust. Veyne stood naked in a body not his own and grinned around the iron taste of convalescence.
First things first: where was he? The lab was exactly as he remembered—stone bench, old cauldron, a dusty mirror over the mantle. He wiped the glass and stared at a face that churned memory and guilt.
Ah. The first man I ever killed.
Ninety‑nine years ago, sixteen‑year‑old Veyne built this place on the village's edge. He learned, scavenged, and invented. Necromancy had been a whispered sin; he practiced in secret, animating insects and small beasts. For three years he grew in knowledge and appetite—until a villager threatened exposure. In a blind rage he killed the man. He preserved the body, learned to bind souls, and fled when soldiers came, abandoning the lab to time.
Now, the old lab showed his inexperience at preservation—but it also held his beginnings. He tested the body, feeling for traces of old spells, murmuring the same analyses he'd spoken as a boy. The corpse's flesh was crude; the bond was badly made. The unicorn horn had fixed the immediate wounds but had not restored magic or strength.
Three problems stacked before him like a to‑do list from hell.
The underground entrance had long since caved in. He would need outside resources.
His right arm—though reattached by violence—was gone. He needed to reforge or reclaim it.
Most dangerous: this body had no magic. Without an affinity, he would be weak. To take revenge he'd have to rebuild an arsenal from scratch and retrain the body's magic—if that was even possible.
He flexed the partial shoulder where the arm had once been and smiled with the terrible calm of a predator.
"I'm restarting from the beginning," he said. "Except now I bring a century's worth of skill. I will find them. I will collect what I need. I will tear them down—no matter the cost."