The room is quiet.
Books are scattered across a desk against the wall. A chair lies overturned beneath a beam where something sways. A creak breaks the silence. Then a snap. A dull thud.
A man lies motionless on the floor, a broken rope loose around his neck. There is no pulse. His chest does not rise. Outside the window, horse hooves clop past in the distance.
His eyes open.
He gasps, choking as he claws at his throat, lungs burning as he struggles for air. A faint glow gathers around his neck and hand, fading as breath finally forces its way back into his chest. He lies there, trembling, fingers pressed to his throat.
The room feels wrong.
Pain detonates behind his eyes.
He screams once before collapsing, hands clutching his head. Just as suddenly, the pain is gone. His body slackens, and darkness takes him again.
Cold comes first.
Not the cold of air, but something deeper, seeped into his bones. His breathing is shallow, each inhale scraping raw. He tries to swallow and can't.
Fragments surface.
The rope.
The chair.
The fall.
His eyes open.
Wooden beams stretch overhead, old and dark. Firelight flickers nearby, casting slow, uneven shadows. This is not the room he remembers.
He shifts. Pain tightens around his neck like iron. His hand flies to his throat—no blood, no torn skin. Only faint marks beneath the surface, glowing briefly before fading.
"I… I died?" he whispers.
Footsteps sound nearby.
He scrambles back, heart pounding. A pressure blooms inside his skull—not pain, but insistence. A warning.
A tall, cloaked figure steps into the light. They regard him calmly, without surprise.
"So," the figure says, "you lived."
He tries to speak. To demand answers. The pressure tightens, and images force their way into his mind—streets he has never walked, names that mean nothing to him, a sky split by fire and gold. Something stirs beneath the panic, heavy and unfamiliar.
The figure moves closer.
"You should not have," they say. "But now that you have, there will be consequences."
Heat coils around his throat.
The world drops away.
Memories flood in—sharper this time. Clearer. In every one, people speak a name he has never worn.
Quinn.
A woman's voice calling him to dinner.
A younger boy tugging his sleeve.
An older brother's hand on his shoulder.
A classroom, quiet except for his own voice as he explains a lesson he somehow knows how to teach.
Then the pressure recedes.
Firelight. Beams. Silence.
The figure is gone.
He twists around, searching desperately, but his strength drains all at once. He collapses to the floor, breath ragged, as hurried footsteps thunder somewhere downstairs.
Instinct moves him before thought can catch up.
He stands. Hands shaking, he pulls the rope free and rights the chair, setting it back beneath the desk. He sits, opens a book at random, and lowers his gaze.
He pretends to study.
"Don't act like me. Act like Quinn." He says internally
The door begins to swing open.