Death was not what Victor expected.
There was no tunnel of light, no parade of life's memories, no judgment before divine authority. There was only darkness, profound and absolute, stretching in all directions forever.
He floated in that void, or perhaps he was the void, consciousness without form, thought without body. Time had no meaning here. He might have existed in that state for seconds or centuries. There was no way to tell.
Then came the pull.
It started as a distant tug, like gravity asserting itself on a falling object that Victor tried to resist, tried to hold onto the nothingness he'd found, but the force grew stronger as the darkness began to fragment, light bleeding through cracks.
The pull became a current, became a torrent, became everything.
And then—
Pain!
This wasn't the slow, grinding pain of starvation. This was immediate and overwhelming, a full-body assault that made his nervous system scream. Pressure from all sides, squeezing. Liquid in his lungs where air should be. Heat and cold and sensation all mixed together into incomprehensible noise.
Victor tried to scream and couldn't. Tried to move and found his limbs wouldn't respond properly, too weak, too small, flailing uselessly in the confined space.
Then the space was moving, or he was moving through it, pushed by contractions he couldn't control. The pressure increased until it seemed impossible that his body could withstand it.
And then—
Air!
It rushed into his lungs like fire and ice mixed together. His chest expanded as his vocal cords vibrated with a sound he didn't recognize.
He was crying. A newborn wailing in a high-pitched cry.
As consciousness settled into his new body, he felt something else. A wrongness. As if the act of dying and being reborn had changed him at a fundamental level. His soul felt... fractured? Expanded? Different in ways he couldn't articulate.
Large hands grabbed him. His eyes couldn't focus properly. Everything was blurred, oversaturated, too bright after the darkness, and he heard voices speak in a language he almost understood, words that felt familiar but just slightly wrong, like a tune played in a different key.
"A boy," someone said. The words resolved into meaning after a moment's delay. "Healthy. Strong lungs, certainly."
"Let me see him." A woman's exhausted voice, but filled with wonder. "Let me see my son."
Victor felt himself being moved, placed against warm skin. A heartbeat thundered in his ears, far too loud and close. The woman's scent filled his nostrils. Sweat and blood and something else, something chemical his infant brain couldn't process but his adult-like mind recognized.
Oxytocin. The bonding hormone. His new mother's body was flooding with it, preparing her to love him unconditionally.
The realization hit hard now.
He'd been reborn. Literally reborn. This wasn't metaphor or near-death hallucination. He was an infant, minutes old, with what he would consider an adult consciousness trapped inside a newborn's body.
Horror and fascination warred inside him. His mind, sharp and analytical despite everything, began taking in details. The language was similar to what he'd spoken in his previous life but distinctly different. It had the same root structure, but different evolution. The beautiful but tired looking woman holding him wore clothing of a quality he'd never seen in Ashfeld, fabric too fine, dyes too vibrant. The room itself was lit by something that wasn't candlelight or torchlight, a steady glow that came from glass fixtures on the walls.
"What shall we name him?" The woman's voice pulled his attention back. She was looking down at him with eyes that were dark, kind and completely exhausted.
"James," a man's voice answered from somewhere outside Victor's limited field of vision. "After your father. James Aldric."
"James Aldric," the woman repeated, and smiled. "Welcome to the world, little one. Welcome to Blüthaven."
James. Not Victor. That name was dead, left behind in a forest beside a forgotten village.
He tried to hold onto his old identity, tried to assert that he was Victor Morningstar, son of Elara, survivor of Ashfeld's brutality. But the infant body's needs were overwhelming. Hunger gnawed at him, different from starvation but no less demanding. Exhaustion pulled at his consciousness like an anchor.
His new mother guided him to her breast, and instinct took over as he bit hard on her nipples and fed, hating the indignity of it, hating the helplessness, hating that his brilliant mind was trapped in a body that couldn't even control its own bowels.
But beneath the hatred was something else. Something he hadn't felt in his previous life's final weeks.
Safety, warmth and the promise of survival.
His eyes closed despite his efforts to keep them open as sleep claimed him, deep and dreamless, and when he woke again hours had passed and the light through the windows had changed.
The next weeks were a special kind of torture.
Victor—no, James, he had to remember that now, was trapped in an infant's body with an adult's awareness. He couldn't speak, couldn't move with any coordination, couldn't even control basic bodily functions. Every need had to be met by others. Every moment was spent in helpless dependence.
It was humiliating beyond measure.
But it gave him time to observe. To learn and understand where, and when, he was.
The world he was born into was wrong. Fundamentally and impossibly wrong.
The lights in his room weren't gas or oil. They simply glowed when his mother touched a plate on the wall, powered by something he couldn't see or understand. The clothes people wore incorporated materials that looked like cotton but behaved differently, more durable, stain-resistant in ways that natural fibers shouldn't be.
And then there were the books.
His new father, Grayson Aldric, was a scholar of some kind. The man's study was visible from the nursery, and James spent hours staring at the shelves lining the walls. The books were numerous, bound in uniform sizes and styles that suggested mass production, and their spines bore titles he could barely make out at this distance, but certain words appeared repeatedly.
Fundamentals of the Arcane.
Introduction to Spell Matrices.
The Schism: A Historical Analysis.
Principles of Mana Manipulation.
Magic. They were talking about magic like it was normal. Like it could be studied and taught.
The old woman's book had hinted at this. Had suggested that what people called magic was really just applied understanding of deeper principles. But here, in this world, it seemed to be an accepted fact and common knowledge.
His infant heart would have raced if it were capable of it.
James forced himself to be patient. Forced himself to play the role of a normal baby. Crying when hungry, sleeping when tired, responding to stimulation in developmentally appropriate ways. He couldn't risk anyone discovering that he was different. Not yet. Not until he understood the rules of this world.
He learned the language first. It was close enough to his native tongue that comprehension came quickly, though pronunciation would have to wait until his vocal cords developed properly. He absorbed vocabulary from his parents' conversations, from the maid who came to help with his care, from the books Grayson read aloud in the evenings.
The world was called Velatria. It had been unified once, thousands of years ago, when magic and what they called "technomancy"—the science of manipulating natural laws, had coexisted peacefully. Then came the Great Schism, a war so catastrophic it had literally split the world in two.
On one side: the Magic Dominion, where power came from channeling mana, the ambient energy that flowed through all living things. Mages could manipulate reality directly through will and knowledge, bending the laws of physics through force of intent.
On the other side: the Science Imperium, where power came from understanding and exploiting natural principles. Technomancers built machines that harnessed fundamental forces, creating effects that mimicked magic through pure application of physical law.
The two nations existed in a state of cold war, separated by the Schism Scar. A miles-wide chasm of twisted reality where both magic and technology faltered, where the laws of nature had been so thoroughly broken that nothing could survive.
And between them, in the borderlands, were the Neutral Territories. Places like Blüthaven, where Grayson Aldric worked as a historical archivist, documenting the history of the Great Schism for future generations.
It was forbidden to practice both disciplines. The Schism had proved that combining magic and science led to catastrophe. Both nations had laws, strict and violently enforced, against anyone attempting to walk both paths, not like it was possible to do so anyway.
James absorbed this information with growing excitement.
A world literally built around the division he wanted to transcend. Two systems of power that claimed to be incompatible. Rules that existed solely to prevent people from attempting what he wanted most.
---
The months passed and James's body developed with frustrating slowness. He learned to control his neck muscles, to focus his eyes properly, to grasp objects with tiny, useless hands. Each milestone felt like a victory and an insult simultaneously.
His parents were good people. That complicated things.
Grayson was patient and scholarly, more interested in books than people but genuinely loving in his awkward way. Eliza, his new mother, was warm and attentive, singing lullabies and playing games that James found intellectually unstimulating but emotionally... not unpleasant.
They loved him genuinely and unconditionally.
It should have meant nothing. They were just another set of adults who would eventually disappoint him, eventually prove themselves as limited and fearful as everyone in Ashfeld.
But when Eliza held him, when she smiled down at him with those kind eyes, something in his chest calmed. Some part of him that should have died in that forest beside his first mother's grave was still alive, still capable of responding to affection.
And he hated that weakness. But he couldn't seem to eliminate it.
By six months, he could sit up unsupported. By eight months, he was crawling, exploring the house with single-minded focus. His parents thought it was adorable, the way he made straight for his father's study whenever possible.
James used those expeditions to examine the books, to study the diagrams visible on Grayson's desk, to begin building a foundation of knowledge about how this world operated.
Magic required an Affinity, an inborn connection to mana that manifested around age twelve. Without Affinity, you couldn't become a mage, couldn't channel power, couldn't learn even basic spells.
Technomancy required a different kind of aptitude, like spatial reasoning, mathematical ability, understanding of mechanical principles. It could be learned by anyone with sufficient intelligence and education, but mastery required a kind of intuitive grasp that was equally rare.
The two systems were supposedly incompatible. Mages who tried to study technomancy found their Affinity weakening until it was gone completely and Technomancers who attempted to learn magic experienced what was probably an IQ drain in relation to their scientific knowledge. The texts were vague on specifics, but the message was clear: choose one or suffer.
At one year old, James spoke his first word. His parents had been expecting "mama" or "dada," something normal and appropriate.
Instead, he looked up at Grayson from a book he'd been trying to puzzle out and asked, "Read?"
The silence that followed was profound.
Grayson and Eliza stared at him like he'd spontaneously combusted. James realized his mistake immediately. Normal one-year-olds didn't speak in complete words, didn't show reading interest, didn't look at their parents with the kind of focused intelligence he'd just displayed.
He needed to be more careful.
"Did he just..." Eliza's voice was faint.
"I think he did." Grayson knelt down slowly, studying James with new intensity. "James? Can you say that again?"
James considered his options. He could play dumb, pretend it was a fluke. But they'd already seen. Already knew something was different. Better to control the narrative than let them draw their own conclusions.
"Read," he repeated, pointing at the book. Then, with effort, he added. "Please?"
Grayson's hands shook slightly as he picked up the book. It was a children's primer, basic words and pictures. He opened it to the first page.
"Alright. Let's... let's read together."
Over the next months, James's precocity became impossible to hide. He was speaking in full sentences by eighteen months. Reading simple texts by two years and doing basic arithmetic by two and a half.
This made his parents thrilled and terrified at the same time. And with what they had, they brought in specialists, educators, physicians and everyone agreed: James Aldric was gifted. Possibly one in a generation. The kind of prodigy that appeared rarely enough to make history.
They should enroll him in advanced programs, get him proper tutoring, nurture his brilliance.
But beneath the praise, James saw something else in their eyes. Wariness and uncertainty. The same look people in Ashfeld had given his mother when she'd performed healing they couldn't understand.
Fear of the exceptional.
He learned to moderate himself after that. Still brilliant, still advanced, but not impossibly so. Smart enough to get access to resources, not so smart that people questioned whether he was entirely human.
It was a delicate balance, and he hated every moment of the deception.
But he'd learned patience in his previous life, had learned it dying in a forest over the course of weeks. He could wait, no matter how uncomfortable that was. Could play the long game. Could be whatever he needed to be until he was strong enough to be himself.
As the years passed, James grew. Learned, and plotted.
And deep in his chest, where his heart beat steady and strong in this new body, where his mother's love had planted seeds he couldn't quite uproot, a plan began to form.
He would master both systems. Would prove the Great Schism wrong and become something this world had never seen.
Not for revenge... his first life's enemies were long gone, irrelevant.
Not for justice... that was a fiction people told themselves to justify their actions.
For something simpler.
To prove it could be done, and make absolutely certain that no one, ever again, could make him feel helpless.
James Aldric was five years old when he fully accepted who and what he was.
Not Victor Morningstar. Not entirely. That boy had died in the forest.
Not James Aldric either. That was just the name this world had given him.
He was something new. Something neither world had seen before.
And one day, when he was ready, the world would learn exactly what that meant.
But first, he had to survive childhood.
Again.