The candle flickered, its light casting long shadows across the desk where the scholar sat hunched over his final work. Time was a commodity he no longer possessed in abundance, but knowledge, that remained his sole pursuit even as his body betrayed him.
His quill trembled between withered fingers, leaving inconsistent trails of ink across parchment. Not ideal. Not precise.
But then, nothing about death was precise, was it?
The scholar, Axel Pryn cataloged each failing system with detached interest: elevated heart rate at irregular intervals, shallow breathing at seventy percent normal capacity, peripheral vision degrading by approximately six percent per hour.
He had calculated his remaining time with reasonable accuracy. Four hours, perhaps five if his cardiovascular system proved more resilient than projected. Sufficient time to complete his final theorem, the continuity of consciousness beyond neural termination.
"Probability approaches zero," he murmured, voice cracking from disuse. "And yet..."
Axel coughed, specks of blood staining his equations. An inconvenience, nothing more.
He wiped them away, smearing crimson across years of work. Strange, how the body fought so desperately against its statistical inevitability. He felt no fear, only mild irritation at the interruption.
His pulse skipped, then slowed. Sixty-seven beats per minute. Fifty-nine. Forty-three.
His hand trembled more violently now, the quill scratching erratic patterns as he tried to finish the proof, the one question that had eluded him throughout his life's work.
If consciousness arose from neural complexity, what happened when that complexity unwound? Did awareness simply cease, or was there a transformation, a conservation of information?
The equation remained incomplete as his breath fractured into uneven gasps.
'Fascinating,' he thought as pain bloomed then receded like a tide. Time stretched around him, seconds expanding into hours of perception. The candle's flame now moved with glacial slowness, wax dripping in suspended animation.
His awareness lifted, detaching from the failing mechanism of flesh. Not dissimilar to observing an experiment from multiple angles, he noted.
The fear response one might expect was absent, replaced by analytical curiosity. His neural patterns were unwinding like clockwork gradually losing tension, yet he could observe the process with perfect clarity.
The scholar's study, once solid, transformed into something more fundamental. Walls became planes of probability, the desk resolved into vectors of force and mass.
Light scattered around him not in rays but in fragmented geometries, breaking apart like shattered glass reconstructing itself in reverse.
No voices called to him from beyond, no divine hand reached out. There was only a vast, mathematical hum, the sound of underlying reality stripped of perception's illusion. It resonated with a structure he had always suspected but never proven.
And then, a moment of perfect understanding: thought persisted after the final neural impulse faded. He existed beyond biology.
'The theorem was correct,' he realized, observing his own dissolution from within. 'Consciousness transcends its substrate.'
Motion pulled at him then, not physical but mathematical, like being drawn through differential equations made tangible.
Patterns of light pulsed around him with a rhythm entirely inhuman. His awareness compressed, folded, and reformed according to laws he could almost grasp.
Then everything stopped.
The first sensation was suffocation. Crushing pressure surrounded him as blinding light seared through what should have been eyes. Everything felt wrong, proportions distorted, sensations magnified beyond tolerance.
His limbs, small, weak, foreign, thrashed uselessly. Lungs that had never drawn breath burned as they expanded for the first time. Sound crashed against him with physical force, voices, murmurs, the thunderous beat of nearby hearts.
"The heir draws breath," someone announced, the words melodic yet incomprehensible.
Rough hands held him, passed him, wrapped him. Minutes stretched as his analytical mind struggled against sensory overload, processing the horror of his situation piece by piece.
'My body is an infant's,' he realized. 'I have been... reborn.'
He tried to speak, to reason, to control anything, but nothing responded to his will. His new form obeyed only instinct and reflex. All he could do was perceive…blurred faces hovering above, vibrations of strange syllables, and something else, a current in the air that seemed alive, pulsing with potential.
His mind worked furiously, cataloging and analyzing. The warm golden light emanated not just from lamps but from crystalline structures embedded in the walls.
The woman holding him radiated a faint luminescence beneath her skin. The air itself carried patterns of heat and energy his former senses would never have detected.
"He has your eyes, Liriane," came a deep voice, resonant as thunder behind glass.
"Yes," the woman, Liriane, replied, her tone measured and cool. "Green as summer leaves. Unusual for a newborn to open them so soon."
Her voice washed over him, somehow soothing despite its lack of warmth. She held him with practiced efficiency rather than tenderness, studying his face with analytical detachment that mirrored his own internal state.
Axel, no, that person was gone, formulated his hypothesis with cold certainty before his new body's emotional systems could fully engage.
Rebirth. Impossible, yet empirically undeniable.
For the first time in either existence, he lost control completely. Thought collapsed beneath the weight of infant physiology. His new lungs expanded, vocal cords tightened, and he screamed, not from fear or confusion, but because the body demanded it.
Light refracted through tears he couldn't control. Warm arms enclosed him more securely. And somewhere above, a name was bestowed:
"Riven Valoria," the woman declared. "The unexpected son."
The scholar's final theorem had found its answer in the most unanticipated form. Existence continued, but never as expected. Consciousness persisted beyond death, only to be trapped in new flesh, new circumstances, new constraints.
And as infant Riven Valoria quieted, his adult mind began its first true task in this new world….observation.