The first thing I owned in my second life was a name I didn't understand.
They said it over and over while I lay there, lungs failing to coordinate with the rest of me, wrapped in something that smelled like soap and smoke.
"Glorius."
At least, that's what it sounds like now when I remember it. Back then it was just sound. Warm sound, shaped around me.
I'd had a name before. Kendrick. Short, sharp, easy to put on a business card.
This one was softer. It carried differently in the air.
"Glorius," the woman's voice said, close to my ear. "My boy."
My boy.
That part I understood faster than the rest.
People talk about reincarnation like you wake up fully yourself in a smaller body and start min-maxing immediately.
Reality: the first months are just breathing, eating, and yelling badly.
The thirty-year-old who'd tried to push a room full of people out of an implosion didn't vanish—he just got buried under brand new instincts.
Hunger doesn't care how many contracts you've negotiated. Cold doesn't respect your high school grades. When your new chest forgets how to pull air in, you don't think witty things about it. You panic.
So yes, I remembered dying.
Yes, I remembered the chandelier bending and people folding and that stupid floating napkin.
No, I did not spend my babyhood delivering dark monologues about it. I was too busy learning how to move my fingers.
Looking back now, I can see how my voice changed. Some of the old dryness is still there, but something about being literally rebuilt from scratch shaved the edges off. There's only so much cynicism you can keep when your mother laughs just because you managed to grab her hair.
My mother's name, as far as I can tell, is Leria.
She's the first anchor of this world. Her language isn't any I knew in my first life, but the rhythm sank in fast because it came attached to warmth and food and safety.
Tall, dark hair always tied back in a messy knot, a line between her brows even when she smiled. When she laughed, it wasn't a polite little office chuckle. It came from deep and shook her shoulders.
She smelled of herbs and hot iron.
My father—Daren—smelled of dust and something sharp I didn't have a word for. Later I'd learn it was the faint metallic taste of raw magic in the air. Back then I just knew the room changed when he came home. The air grew heavier near the door and lighter when he picked me up.
He worked "at the lines," according to the way Leria said it, with a specific tension in her jaw. Whatever the lines were, they were important enough to tire him and dangerous enough to make her glance at the door every time it creaked.
Babies are clumsy spies, but I did my best.
I catalogued voices, faces, objects. The way light moved in this house wasn't like in my old apartment. For one, there were no switches. No plastic rectangles on the walls.
Instead, there were strips of stone carved with thin patterns, set into the wood at shoulder height. At dusk, Daren would place his palm on one and murmur something under his breath. The grooves lit up, pale and steady, like someone had poured moonlight into them.
The light didn't flicker. It hummed silently. Not like electricity. Like a held breath.
There were other things, too.
A frame above the doorway filled with glass that showed a different sky than the one outside—always twilight, even at noon.
A metal rod on the table that sometimes twitched toward the window with no breeze.
Symbols scratched into the threshold in chalk, refreshed every few days.
Magic, obviously. But not the staff-waving, chant-screaming sort I'd seen in games and anime. More… domestic. Embedded. Practical.
It seeped into everything, like the internet had in my last life—so omnipresent you only noticed when it wasn't working.
I didn't tell anyone I wasn't really a baby, obviously.
For one, I couldn't talk.
For another, what would I even say?
"Hi, I used to be a guy who micromanaged sprint boards for a living and died in a physics glitch, could you pass the milk?"
No.
So I did what I'd always done when dropped into a new system:
Observed first.
Acted later.
I grew.
Time in that house blurred into a long ribbon of sensory snapshots.
Warmth pressed against my cheek as Leria carried me in one arm while stirring something that smelled vaguely like stew with the other.
Daren's hands, rough and careful, when he lifted me and tossed me once, twice, always catching me with a laugh that had a tired edge.
The sound of rain on a roof made of something that wasn't tile or metal but something in between.
The first time I managed to roll over without help. The absurd pride in Leria's voice when she called Daren to come see, as if I'd just closed a massive deal.
In my old life, small wins were invisible. No one congratulated you for learning to control your own neck.
Honestly? This part wasn't so bad.
My memories of the implosion lived in the back of my head like a scar I couldn't quite scratch.
Sometimes, when the lightstones flickered as Daren took his hand away, something in me flinched. The way glass had twisted, the way people had folded—it wasn't the same as these gentle, regulated flows.
But the feeling rhymed.
I would go still, tiny muscles locking, heart hammering in my ribs.
Leria would notice.
She'd whisper something, smooth a thumb over my forehead, and say words I didn't yet understand but whose tone I got: "It's all right. It's just the house breathing."
The house breathing.
Not accurate, but comforting.
My old self would have scoffed. My new one… didn't. I let the lie sit there between us like a blanket.
By the time I was three, I could walk, fall, get back up, and make my opinions known in this new language.
I also knew one word that everyone avoided:
"Blaze."
It wasn't shouted. It was hissed in gossip and muttered in worry.
"The baker's boy, did you hear? Blaze took him."
"Don't say it so loud."
"They say the south quarter is marked now. Lines going strange there."
Lines again. Blaze again.
It didn't take a genius to connect things.
Blaze wasn't just fire.
It was something that took people, left marks on places, and messed with the "lines" my father worked on.
Magic virus. Surge. Whatever label you slap on it, it lived in the shape of the fear in adults' faces when they thought children weren't watching.
I watched anyway.
My voice inside my own head wasn't the same as it had been standing in that bar.
Back then, every thought had come with a margin note: comment, criticism, risk assessment. Now, there was more… space around things.
Some of that was just being a kid again. Emotions hit harder and sat longer. I could spend an entire afternoon obsessed with how the light through a cracked cup made lines on the table and forget that I'd once negotiated with investors twice my age.
Some of it, though, was the simple fact that I'd already seen a room full of people vanish. It took the energy out of being clever about everything.
Snark is a shield. Once you've watched the universe fold a chandelier, the shield feels thinner.
I still thought like me. Just… slower. Less interested in sounding smart even to myself.
The first time I saw Blaze with my own eyes, I was four years old.
Old enough to walk without falling every ten steps, young enough that adults still talked over me like I was a chair with hair.
It was late afternoon. The street outside our house was busier than usual: carts rolling by, voices overlapping, the faint shimmer of a ward line drawn above the gutter visible if you squinted.
I was sitting on the step, a wooden top clutched in my hand, trying to work out the exact wrist flick needed to keep it spinning longer than three seconds.
Leria was nearby, talking with a neighbor. I caught snatches of it:
"—said the east post went dark—"
"—Daren's route today, isn't it?"
"—they'll reroute him, surely, surely—"
His name pulled my attention up just in time.
Something was wrong with the air midway down the street.
At first I thought it was heat. You know that wavering shimmer above asphalt on summer days? Like that. Only there wasn't any heat. The day was cool. The shimmer was too tight, too focused. Distorting only a patch of space about the size of a doorway.
A man walked through it.
He wasn't special. Just another worker, coat dusty, bundle under one arm.
As he stepped into the shimmer, the bundle twitched, and so did the lines carved along the edge of the street. The little ward-seal on the corner post flared, then dimmed.
He hesitated.
That half-second of instinct almost saved him.
Almost.
The air around him tightened.
I felt it. Not on my skin, but somewhere behind my ribs—a wrongness that matched, in miniature, the feeling in the bar just before everything went sideways.
The world didn't fold this time.
It bulged.
Light warped around the man like someone had wrapped clear cloth around him and started twisting. His outline stretched, then snapped back, then stretched again. The bundle under his arm burst—not blood, not fire, but a rush of raw light that spilled onto the cobbles without heat.
He screamed.
Everyone else did, too.
Leria's hand clamped on my shoulder. Hard.
"Inside," she said.
I didn't move.
I couldn't.
The man's scream cut off, replaced by a sound I'd heard only once before: space itself protesting.
The little ward-lines along the street flared white, then fractured, pieces of light snapping away like chips of glass.
He didn't explode outward.
He collapsed inward.
Not as neatly as the people in the bar. This was messier. Limbs jerked, joints twisted, his spine arched. For a moment he looked bigger, bloated with light.
Then everything surged in.
The air imploded around him with a pressure you could see. When it cleared, he was gone.
Where he'd been, the stones of the street were… wrong. Bent inward around an invisible pit. Colors slightly off. The wooden cart nearby had one wheel sunken halfway into the stone like mud.
A Scar.
My second one.
The first had taken my company and most of the people I cared about.
This one took a stranger and a chunk of road.
And whatever else Blaze did, it spread.
A strip of light shot along the cracked ward-lines like water in a broken pipe. It raced past doorways, around corners, vanishing into the web above the city.
People backed away, dragging each other, shoving children behind them. Leria yanked me so hard my arm twinged.
"Inside. Now."
This time I moved.
Because I knew what came next.
The aftermath was almost more frightening than the event.
No sirens. No fire engines. No yellow tape.
Instead, robed figures from the Line Office arrived with metal rods and etched stones. They placed anchors at the corners of the warped zone. They talked fast and low, hands moving in practiced shapes in the air.
No one called it Blaze out loud.
They said "flare" and "breach" and "incident at the east line." They said "containment." They said "Index."
Leria shut the door.
Pulled the shutters.
Only then did she let herself shake.
I sat at the table, my top forgotten in my hand, and listened to her breathe too fast.
In my last life, I'd watched chaos on screens, disasters filtered through news anchors and dashboards. I'd seen graphs and actuarial tables and models that told you what would happen if something went wrong.
Here, the models were in people's heads, in the set of their shoulders.
Blaze wasn't an abstract thing.
It was a man on a street folding into nothing.
It was the wrong taste in the air.
It was ward-lines cracking like ice.
It was my mother's fingers pressed so hard into the edge of the table that her knuckles went white.
That night, when Daren finally came home—late, lines of fatigue carved deeper into his face—Leria grabbed him by the front of his coat the moment he stepped in.
"You were on east," she said.
"I was rerouted," he answered quietly. "They had us reinforcing the north spokes."
"Swear it."
"I just did."
She stared at him for a long time like she could see the Blaze clinging to his skin if it was there. Only when she let go did she seem to remember I was in the room.
Her gaze shifted to me.
Something in her eyes changed. Hardened, but not against me.
Against the world.
"We're moving you to the inner block next season," she said to Daren. "Closer to the Office wards."
"That's for overseers," he said. "We're not—"
"We will be," she snapped. "Or we'll get you there. I'm not raising him on a street that cracks."
Her hand rested on my hair briefly, a touch so quick it almost didn't happen.
I looked up at them both.
In my first life, my parents had worried about my career, my mortgage, whether I was eating vegetables.
Here, my parents worried about Scars.
And about me staying on the unbroken parts of the map.
That night, in the small bed in the small room that was now "mine," I lay staring at the ceiling.
I could hear them through the thin wall. Low voices, the occasional thump of a hand on a table, the clink of a cup.
I thought about the man in the street.
I thought about the room in the bar.
I thought about the way the ward-lines had carried that flare away.
This time, I hadn't been in the middle of it. This time, I'd been on the step, small and useless but alive.
My old promise surfaced, reshaped by this new body and this new world.
Next time it happens, I won't just stand there.
And next time, I want it to happen with me on the side that can actually do something.
At four years old, that was an impossible wish.
But wishes have weight.
Even in a world where some people have too much of it—and some lose it all.
I closed my eyes.
Somewhere, beyond our little house, the Scars in this city gleamed faintly in the dark, and Blaze moved along the lines like a rumor.
My second life had started with a scream.
This was the first night I realized it wouldn't let me stay a bystander