The darkness was not empty. It was heavy, like being buried under a mile of ocean water.
There was no pain here. That was the first surprise.
The last thing the soul remembered was the blinding flash of light, the screech of tires, and the sudden, shattering impact of metal against a fragile human body.
A car accident on a rainy Tuesday. A mundane, meaningless death in a world ruled by laws, coffee shops, and deadlines.
Then, there was this. The Void.
Am I dead? The thought floated without language, a concept rather than a sentence.
Yes, the universe seemed to whisper back.
You are finished.
The soul drifted.
Time had no meaning. It could have been a second or a century.
Memories of the old life began to fade, eroding like sand castles in the tide. The face of a mother.
The taste of a burger. The stress of an unpaid bill. All of it, dissolving into the nothingness.
But the soul refused to dissipate entirely. There was a kernel of stubbornness at its core. A refusal to let go of the concept of self.
I want...
The thought rippled through the darkness.
I want to matter. I want to stand.
In the previous life, he had been nobody.
A cog in a machine. He had followed the rules, kept his head down, and died without leaving a mark on the pavement, let alone history. He had been soft.
Not again, the soul pushed back against the crushing weight of the void. If I go back... make me hard. Make me iron.
The universe shifted. It was a subtle turn, like a great wheel groaning into motion.
The darkness began to thin.
The cold silence was replaced by a dull, throbbing rhythm. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. A heartbeat. But not his own. It was a rapid, terrified fluttering.
Sensation returned with the violence of a sledgehammer.
Cold. Biting, freezing cold.
Pain. A sharp, stinging slap against raw skin.
Sound. Screaming. Not the screaming of the dying, but the wailing of the new.
The soul was sucked downward, spiraling into a vessel that felt too small, too fragile, yet vibrating with potential.
"He breathes!" a rough voice shouted. The language was guttural, harsh, but somehow, the soul understood it. "Thought the little rat was stillborn."
"Does it matter?" another voice sneered. "One more mouth to feed. Throw him to the mother."
The world rushed in. Blinding, grey light. The smell of wet straw, unwashed bodies, and excrement. The air tasted of soot.
The soul tried to speak, to assert its existence, but all that came out was a high-pitched, desperate cry. He couldn't move his limbs; they were swaddled in rough, scratching burlap.
He was being held by a large hand, calloused and dirty.
He was passed roughly through the air and dropped onto a pile of straw.
"Here, woman," the rough voice grunted. "Your fourth. Try not to let this one die before he can hold a shovel. The Lord needs hands for the mines."
Warm arms wrapped around him. They were thin, bony, shivering, but they held him with a ferocity that defied the harsh voices.
He looked up, his infant eyes struggling to focus.
A woman looked down at him. Her face was gaunt, smeared with dirt, her eyes hollowed out by exhaustion.
She looked like she was twenty, but aged to forty by hardship. She wore a collar of iron around her neck, dull and rusted.
"Hush now," she whispered, tears cutting tracks through the grime on her cheeks. "Hush, little one. I'm here."
He tried to process this new reality. The cold stone walls. The iron bars on the high windows.
The collar on his mother's neck.
He was not a hero.
He was not a king.
He was not even a free man.
He was livestock.
The soul that had asked to be iron settled into the frail body of the child. He stopped crying. He watched the woman, and then he looked at his own tiny, pink hands.
So be it, the mind behind the infant eyes decided. Start at the bottom. But I will not stay there.
Outside the stone hovel, a horn blew—a deep, mournful sound that echoed off the mountains. It was the sound of Northwatch. It was the sound of a war that had just begun for him.