Chapter 1: The Third EchoThe first death was a whisper. A fever at seven, a small body too weak to fight. It was a blur of cool cloths and my mother's weeping, then a sudden, weightless ascent into a silent, white nothing. I remembered the regret, a childish, formless thing—I hadn't finished the mud pie by the creek.
The second death was a scream. A knight, or so I'd believed, at twenty-four. A sword of corrupted light through my ribs on the sun-baked stones of the Aethelgard battlements. That life was longer, harder. I'd learned of mana, of sword forms, of loyalty and its bitter price. The regret that time was sharper: a friend's betrayal, a love letter never sent. Then, the crushing dark.
This… this was different.
Consciousness returned not with a gasp, but with a slow, viscous seep, like ink bleeding into parchment. There was no white light, no tunnel. Just an end, and then a profound, absolute blackness that held. And within it, a pressure. A presence. It was vast, ancient, and cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of forgotten graves, of the space between stars.
"A soul thrice-forged. Unusual."
The voice was not a sound. It was the resonance of a mountain collapsing in a vacuum, felt in the marrow of a soul I currently didn't seem to possess.
Who…? My thought was a feeble spark in the immense dark.
"A heir was needed. A vessel. You have been chosen. Not for light, nor for life's simple fire. You are chosen for the silence that follows the last echo. For the dominion that waits in every shadow."
Images, not shown, but implanted, flooded the void. A legion of spectral knights kneeling on a plane of ash. Beasts of nightmare and legend, their eyes glowing with intelligent malice, moving as one. An army, boundless and silent, drawn from the fallen, their strength added to a single, terrible throne. The power to command death itself.
The Shadow Monarch.
The title came with the vision, and with it, a hunger. Not for food, but for essence, for the lingering strength of the departed. A predatory, deep-bone need.
"The power is yours. The mantle is yours. The hunger… is yours. Return. Walk the world of the living once more. Gather your army from the fallen. For a storm is coming that will bleach bones and shatter souls, and the realm of the dead… must have its king."
There was no ceremony, no granting of wishes. It was a sentencing. A coronation into a crown of shadows.
The blackness convulsed and spat me out.
I awoke to the smell of damp wool, rotting straw, and unwashed bodies. Sensation returned in a nauseating wave: the rough weave of a scratchy blanket, the ache of a body too thin, the dull throb behind my eyes. I was lying on a hard pallet. Slowly, fighting a wave of dizziness, I opened my eyes.
I was in a long, narrow room with stone walls, weak morning light filtering through high, grimy windows. Rows of simple cots stretched into the gloom. A barracks. An orphanage barracks, if the small, sleeping forms in the other cots were any indication.
Memories that were not from my first two lives, but from this new, third one, slotted into place. Kaelan. A sixteen-year-old ward of the Saint Iridia Orphanage in the backwater kingdom of Valen. Parents lost to a border skirmish. A life of quiet drudgery, bullied for being too quiet, too dreamy. A soul marked by two previous lifetimes of loss, making him seem detached, strange. He had fallen ill with the wasting cough that went around the dormitory. The boy named Kaelan had, in fact, died.
And I had been shoved into his cooling shell.
I pushed myself up on trembling elbows. My body—Kaelan's body—was frail. But as I moved, I felt it. A second layer of sensation, a ghostly echo beneath the skin. A reservoir of cold, dark power, slumbering but deep. Impossibly deep. The Shadow Monarch's legacy. It wasn't active magic. It was a potential, a bottomless well waiting to be tapped.
"You're awake."
The voice was flat, unsurprised. Sister Margot, the overseer, stood at the foot of my cot, her pinched face framed by a severe wimple. "The fever broke, I see. Lazy even in recovery. The morning chores are half-done. Up. The latrines won't clean themselves."
In my first life, I might have cried. In my second, as a knight, I would have met her eyes with steady defiance. Now, I simply looked at her.
And I saw.
It was instinctual. A flicker of attention from that inner well of darkness. Around Sister Margot, clinging to her like a faint, greasy mist, were shadows. Not the ordinary absence of light, but tangible fragments of negativity—her petty cruelties, her small resentments, the faint echo of every child's tear she'd ignored. They writhed around her, unseen and unseeable by anyone else.
I could almost… taste them. A bitter, weak flavor. The hunger inside me stirred, a sleeping beast opening one eye.
I blinked, and the vision faded, leaving only the sour-faced woman before me.
"Well?" she snapped, her hand twitching as if to grab my ear.
I swung my legs over the side of the cot. The stone floor was icy. "I'm up," I said, my voice a rough scrape. It was Kaelan's voice, but the cadence was all wrong. It held the weariness of centuries, of graves opened and closed.
She frowned, unsettled for a reason she couldn't name, and stalked away.
The day passed in a blur of menial labor. Scrubbing, hauling, enduring the taunts of the older boys who sensed weakness like jackals. But I moved through it all encased in a new kind of silence. Their words bounced off the vast, dark stillness inside me. I was an ocean, and they were skimming pebbles across a fathomless surface.
It was in the woodshed, alone as dusk bled the color from the world, that I finally tested it. My body was exhausted, muscles burning from unaccustomed labor. The hunger within, the Shadow Monarch's hunger, was a quiet, persistent gnawing.
A fly buzzed near a cobweb in the corner, then fell still, its brief life spent. I stared at its tiny, dark corpse. I reached for that inner cold, not with my hands, but with my will. I reached for the silence around the dead thing.
A wisp—a tendril of darkness so thin it was barely more than a thought—coiled from the shadow at my feet. It touched the dead fly.
The insect dissolved into a mote of black light. The wisp retracted, and a minuscule, almost imperceptible trickle of something… cool… flowed into me. The fatigue in my arms lessened, just a fraction. A whisper of strength.
It was nothing. Less than nothing.
But it was proof.
I looked at my own shadow, stretched long and distorted by the dying light. It seemed deeper now. More solid. As if it held a world within it.
A slow, unfamiliar sensation pulled at the corners of my mouth. It wasn't the joy of my first life, or the grim satisfaction of my second. It was the quiet, terrifying smile of something ancient waking up.
I had died twice. I had been a sickly child and a betrayed knight.
Now, I was Kaelan. I was the heir to a throne of shadows. And in this third, borrowed life, I would not fight for glory, or love, or honor.
The world thought the greatest threats came from roaring dragons and invading armies. They were wrong.
The greatest threat, I knew, watching my shadow begin to gently pulse with a life of its own, was the quiet boy in the orphanage woodshed, learning to speak the language of the dead.