Darkness.
Then warmth.
Then something that was not quite a sound and not quite a thought but occupied the space between them — present the way gravity is present, unremarkable and inescapable and simply *there.*
*Initializing.*
He was aware. This was the first remarkable thing, because awareness was not something he had expected to have. He had been aware that he was falling, and then there had been an impact, and impacts of that kind from that height did not produce ongoing awareness. They produced, he understood perfectly well, the complete absence of it.
And yet.
He was aware.
He was somewhere that had no geography — not dark, not light, but something prior to both, a space defined by its potential for either rather than by what it actually was. He had a sense of himself — of being Kaelith Varen, of possessing the memories and the mind and the particular accumulated weight of twenty-three years of careful living — without having any particular physical form to anchor these things to.
He was a person without a body, existing in a place without dimensions.
He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was calm.
*Evaluation complete.*
The words arrived in his mind not as external communication but as understanding — knowledge placed directly into his awareness with the efficiency of information that has always been there and is only now being accessed. He grasped it all at once, the way one sometimes understands a complex truth not by reasoning toward it but by suddenly seeing it from the right angle.
There existed, woven into the fabric of existence itself, things called Systems.
Not gods. Not demons. Not the conscious creations of any individual will. They were older than that — intelligences that had emerged from the accumulated experience of entire civilizations, attached to the foundational laws of reality itself, activated by conditions of sufficient imbalance. They identified souls whose potential had been so severely unjustly truncated that the cosmic accounting of things had, somewhere in its vast and impersonal ledger, registered an error that needed correcting.
His soul had registered as such an error.
Not a small one.
*Soul Rank: Sovereign Class.*
*Status: Sealed — external seal of Grand Archmage tier, applied at age three. Cause of death: direct result of seal suppressing natural defensive response.*
He sat with that for a long moment.
The seal was something he had not known about — could not have known, because it had been buried so deeply in his spiritual architecture that even the best Awakening crystals in the kingdom had failed to detect it. He felt it now, in retrospect, the ghost of it — a weight that had been lifted that he had not known he was carrying. A hand pressed over his potential with precise, deliberate force, preventing it from surfacing, ensuring that the vast power waiting inside him would remain waiting forever.
He had not been tested four times and found wanting.
He had been tested four times and found immeasurable — so far beyond the instrument's capacity to read that it had returned nothing.
He was not talentless.
He had never been talentless.
He had been, all his life, something the ordinary measures of talent had no framework for assessing. An ocean in a world that measured depth with a teacup. A fire in a world that measured heat with instruments calibrated for candles.
And someone — some specific, known individual with the power and the knowledge and the deliberate intention — had looked at him when he was three years old and decided that this was unacceptable.
Had reached into the spiritual architecture of a child and locked the door.
Had walked away and left him sealed and sleeping in a world that would judge him by what he could not reach.
The cold that moved through him was not anger. Anger was too immediate, too consuming, too much a thing of the moment. What he felt was larger and slower and more patient than anger. It was the beginning of a purpose — the specific purposefulness of a man who has understood something important and is integrating it into his plans with the calm precision that was, had always been, his most fundamental characteristic.
Someone had done this.
He was going to find out who.
And before he did, he was going to become the thing they had been afraid of.
*The Sovereign's Path System,* the awareness said, *has evaluated this soul and found it compatible. Reincarnation is granted. Bonding initiated.*
Something settled into him — not with force but with the particular quality of a key turning in a lock, a thing clicking into its correct position.
Then the warmth became light.
Then the light became everything.
And then, for the second time in his existence, Kaelith Varen was born.
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