The first satisfying thought Garrett Cole had in his new life was this: I'm not dead, and someone is going to regret that.
The second thought was more practical: assess before revealing awareness. An old habit from reconstruction sites in places where the wrong flag on your vest could get you killed. He kept his eyes closed and catalogued sensation. Rough wood against his cheek. The sway of a cart. The smell of unwashed bodies and animal dung. His own body ached in patterns that felt wrong—muscles sore at unfamiliar angles, joints that bent differently than memory insisted they should.
He listened. Voices speaking a language he'd never heard but somehow understood, the meanings arriving fully formed like memories he'd always possessed.
"—three more days to Ashenmire, if the weather holds."
"Weather's the least of it. Heard there's Thornblood raiders working the eastern pass."
Bored professionals. Men doing a job they'd done a hundred times.
Garrett opened his eyes.
Gray canvas above. A wagon. He lay on bare planks alongside a dozen other bodies—men and women, filthy and still, chained at the ankle in a long line. He was one of them. Iron bit cold against skin that felt too smooth, too young.
His hands were wrong.
He lifted them slowly, examining fingers that didn't belong to him. His hands had been a map of thirty-four years—calluses, scars, the permanent crack in his thumbnail from a dropped hammer. These hands were younger, softer, unmarked. A stranger's hands attached to arms he was somehow operating.
Panic flickered. He smothered it. Panic was for people who hadn't spent years in places where panic meant death. Whatever this was—afterlife, psychosis, something else entirely—it was happening, and things that happened required analysis, not emotion.
He catalogued the body clinically. Early twenties. Male. Malnourished. Taller than he'd been. No wounds beyond general wear. The rough-spun clothes smelled of someone else's fear, which meant this body had a previous owner. Disturbing, but not immediately actionable.
The woman chained beside him was watching. Hollowed eyes, a face carved down to angles by deprivation.
"New fish wakes up," she said flatly. "Thought you might be dead."
"Where are we?" His voice was wrong too—higher, softer.
"Slavers' cart. Ashenmire-bound." She said it the way you'd say Tuesday. "You were bought in Verath. Don't remember?"
"No."
"Might be a blessing."
She turned away. Conversation over.
Garrett lay still and let it settle. Slavers. Slaves. He was property now, in transit to somewhere called Ashenmire, inhabiting a body that wasn't his. Dream logic said he should be terrified, searching for escape. But dreams didn't smell like this. Dreams didn't have chains that bit when the cart jolted.
He was somewhere else. Someone else. And the part of him that should have been horrified was instead quietly interested.
Three days taught him the basics. This world had normal physics—sun, weather, gravity. The other slaves were war prisoners, debtors, heretics. Heresy meant questioning the church, and the church apparently ran everything. The guards feared their overseer, a priest named Demos who rode at the convoy's head with the permanent expression of a man who'd never been told no.
Garrett watched. It was what he did—finding load-bearing elements, stress points, the places where systems failed. People weren't different. Everyone had architecture.
The guards were professional but not zealous. The slaves were broken in varying degrees. The convoy prioritized survival over speed, which meant the cargo had value. He was merchandise. The thought should have been degrading. Instead, he found it clarifying. Merchandise had parameters. Parameters could be worked within—or around.
Ashenmire revealed itself on the fourth morning: a valley that looked like the earth had developed a skin disease. Great pits scarred the landscape, surrounded by scaffolding and strange machinery. Smoke rose from furnaces. The air tasted like metal.
"Welcome to the Ashenmire Reclamation Facility," a guard announced. "Property of the Ascendancy of the Eternal Flame. You are now assets of the church. Serve well and earn redemption. Serve poorly and earn a quick ending."
Processing was efficient. Slaves sorted, rechained, assigned. A bored clerk recorded names without looking up.
"Garrett Cole." The stylus paused. "Not from around here."
"No."
"Place of origin?"
"I don't remember."
"Head injury. Common enough." A note scratched. "Pit Fourteen, Deep Ore Extraction. Report to Foreman Aldric."
Deep extraction. He filed that as he was shuffled toward the grimmer section of camp, where the air grew thicker and the workers' faces more gray. This was where they sent people they intended to use up.
Foreman Aldric surprised him—a man who still had something behind his eyes, wearing slave clothes but carrying himself like choice. He gathered Garrett's group and assessed them like resources, not people.
"You're miners now. Doesn't matter what you were. The church wants godite. You bring it up." He paused. "The ore does things. Colors that aren't there. Sounds that shouldn't exist. Some adjust. Some don't. Those who don't... the work goes faster than you'd think."
Godite. The word meant nothing, but Garrett caught how the others flinched.
"Follow protocols. Don't touch raw ore bare-handed. Don't look into the deep veins. And if you hear something calling your name from the dark—ignore it."
When the group dispersed, Garrett lingered. Aldric noticed.
"Something else?"
"The ore," Garrett said. "It does things to people. Makes them see, hear. Is that connected to how the church... works?"
Aldric studied him. Something sharpened in his gaze.
"You ask dangerous questions. The kind that get men burned."
"I'm not interested in trouble. I'm interested in understanding."
"You're in a mine. You dig. That's all the understanding you need."
But he didn't walk away immediately, and Garrett read the hesitation. This man knew things. Might, under the right circumstances, share them.
"Thank you for the orientation."
He made it three steps before the screaming started.
A slave was running—sprinting toward the perimeter with the desperate speed of someone who'd decided death in the attempt beat death in the pits. Guards shouted, moving too slow.
Overseer Demos was not slow.
The priest stood a hundred yards away. He didn't run. He didn't raise his voice. He simply lifted one hand and looked.
Fire.
Not fire from anywhere—not thrown or launched. Fire that simply was, erupting from the slave's body as if combustion had been applied directly to his existence. One moment a man. The next, a pillar of flame shaped like a man, screaming at a pitch that would haunt sleep. Then nothing. Ash. A heap of gray powder and the glint of a half-melted chain.
Demos lowered his hand, expression unchanged. "Let that serve as reminder that the Flame's justice is swift. Return to your duties."
The camp resumed. Machinery grinding. Workers working. And Garrett stood motionless, staring at the settling ash.
He should have been horrified. Some distant part of him knew that. A man had just been erased—burned without fuel, without physics, without any mechanism that should exist.
But horror wasn't what he felt.
It was fascination.
Magic. Real, functional, weaponized magic. And the priest had used it like a man swatting a fly—casually, efficiently, cheaply. Which meant it was a system. Systems had rules. Rules had inefficiencies. And inefficiencies could be exploited by someone patient enough to find them.
Garrett looked at his new hands. He was property, at the bottom of a hierarchy he didn't understand, in a world that operated on impossible principles. No allies. No resources. No knowledge.
But he'd built in war zones. He'd solved problems that started with "this can't be done." He'd spent his whole life finding leverage where none should exist.
The fire didn't come from anywhere, he thought. It simply was.
That was impossible. And impossible just meant his model was incomplete.
Garrett Cole had died saving people he barely knew—not from heroism, but from a momentary weakness he'd spent years regretting. Whatever accident had deposited him here had given him something his old life lacked.
A system worth breaking. And no one left to disappoint when he broke it.
He turned toward the barracks, already designing experiments, already thinking three moves ahead.
The overseer's fire had been meant as warning.
For Garrett, it was an invitation.