He awoke to a world that didn't feel like his own.
The stars were the first thing he noticed. Not the dull pinpricks of light he remembered from Earth, but a sky drenched in shadow, pierced by a thousand burning constellations—far too many, far too bright. They gleamed with eerie clarity, cold and indifferent, like eyes etched into the firmament.
For a moment, he just lay there—half-submerged in damp earth, his back pressed against gnarled roots, breath shallow in the heavy night air. The silence was oppressive. No crickets, no wind, not even the whisper of distant traffic. Just stillness. Deep. Expectant.
"I died, didn't I?" he whispered hoarsely.
The words felt strange in his mouth—his voice familiar, yet off. He slowly sat up, grimacing at the ache in muscles that weren't his. The trees around him stretched high and narrow, bark blackened like charcoal, their twisted branches forming a jagged lattice against the starlight. The whole forest felt… wrong. Like a painting touched by something ancient and unkind.
He pressed a hand to his chest. His heartbeat was steady. His breathing normal. But everything else—
He looked down.
His hands weren't his own.
The fingers were longer, the skin paler. Calloused in places he didn't recognize. A strange, silvery mark was etched into his right palm—delicate and circular, faintly glowing like moonlight on water.
A sigil. Intricate. Alive.
A chill ran down his spine.
Jack Summer had died.
He didn't remember how. Maybe an accident. Maybe something more cruel. But he was dead. He remembered the life he'd left behind: city lights, cheap ramen, glowing phone screens, webnovels read under the covers at 3AM. He remembered thinking—If I ever transmigrate, let it be somewhere with magic, mystery, and no taxes.
Now, it seemed, someone—or something—had been listening.
He forced himself to stand. His balance was off, as though the body responded with just a half-second delay. Not unused to the concept, he muttered under his breath, "This has to be transmigration. Soul displacement. Maybe even possession."
He looked up again, scanning the impossible sky, then turned toward the faint golden glow on the horizon. A city? A beacon? Or a trap?
"Okay, Jack," he said, trying to steady his thoughts. "Think. What do you know? I've read enough stories to know this isn't Earth. This isn't a dream. And this—"
He flexed his fingers, staring at the glowing sigil on his palm.
"This isn't normal."
A memory bubbled up. A name. Not his.
Michael Vaelborne.
He didn't know how he knew it—but it rang clear, sharp as a bell struck in the void.
That was the name of this body. Michael Vaelborne.
And he was no longer just Jack Summer.
Then it hit him.
A spike of pain cracked through his skull—sudden, white-hot, and blinding. Jack collapsed to his knees, clutching his head, the cool earth spinning beneath him. His breath hitched. The stars above blurred into streaks of motionless light.
And then—
Memories.
They came in a flood. A torrent of thoughts, places, people he'd never seen, but now somehow remembered.
A chamber of stone lit by blue flame. Shelves of tomes bound in metals that pulsed faintly. Diagrams of sigils—some still glowing—drawn with maddening precision. The scent of burning ink and something… stranger. Familiar, but wrong.
Michael Vaelborne.
That was the name that surfaced, rising like oil on water. A young scholar. Reserved. Brilliant. A newly accepted apprentice at the Noxhollow Institute of Esoteric Arts—NIEA.
He had studied the foundational theories of metaphysical construction: disciplines that explored the architecture of the soul, the geometry of thought, and the symbolic frameworks behind power. Concepts like "inner chambers," "conceptual bindings," and "resonant truths." Fields Jack had no knowledge of, yet now recognized by feel—like instinct buried in borrowed bones.
One memory hovered at the edge—faint, flickering.
A dimly lit hall. A masked instructor speaking in hushed tones. Symbols glowing faintly beneath the skin of an open palm. Words he couldn't quite remember.
A phrase that returned again and again like a whisper caught in the wind:
"Truth is power. But power always demands a cost."
He didn't know what it meant. Not yet.
There had been something more.
A lesson interrupted.
A truth half-learned.
Michael had been on the verge of something—some initiation, some deeper comprehension. He had felt it like a heartbeat beneath his skin.
And then… nothing.
A sudden stop.
Darkness.
Death.
Now Jack stood in Michael's body, reeling from the aftershocks of a life not his own.
Jack touched his palm, and though it felt normal, he could swear something shimmered just beneath the surface.
Waiting.
Whatever this place was, whatever this body was, he hadn't just fallen into someone else's life.
He had stepped into something far stranger.
And it was only just beginning.
---
Now Jack stood in the shell he left behind.
Or rather, the one Michael Vaelborne had left behind.
The memories still buzzed faintly at the edge of his mind—unsettled, unclaimed—but one thing stood clearer than the rest. Not a place, or a spell, or even a truth... but people.
A man with tired hands and soot-smudged skin, whose back had long since bent from years at the forge. Dalen Vaelborne—Michael's father. A smith by trade, working the lower district kilns that fed Noxhollow's iron veins. Not a man of high station, but respected among his peers. He rarely spoke, but his silences carried weight. A life of smoke, steel, and long hours had left him hard—but not cruel.
Michael had admired him, once. Or perhaps only feared disappointing him.
Then his mother:
Thalia Vaelborne.
Her memory came with the scent of parchment and lavender soap. She had been a scribe and a copyist, working for one of the city's public scriptoria. Her days were spent bent over long scrolls and binding threads, copying edicts, ledgers, and sometimes half-forbidden texts with aching precision. In her youth, she'd studied at the periphery of esoteric thought, but never crossed the threshold. She was clever, quick with words, and slow to anger. It was she who taught Michael to read early—who whispered stories of hollowed gods and veiled truths when the lanterns burned low.
She'd once told him: "Truth isn't always bright. Sometimes it hides in the margins."
Their faces, names, and feelings—they weren't Jack's. But they sat in his chest like old roots, heavy and inescapable.
Who had Michael been to them?
And what would they see now, if they looked into their son's eyes?
They wouldn't. Not anymore.
Grief echoed through the tangled corridors of memory. A fever, maybe. Or a sickness that moved too fast for any cure. Fragment exposure? No—more mundane. A season of rot in the slums. He remembered candlelight. Cold cloth. Quiet prayers that never reached the Veil.
They were gone. All that remained of the Vaelborne bloodline were Michael's three siblings:
Simmon, the eldest—already apprenticed to a merchant house when the sickness came.
Judith, sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, studying law under a city clerk.
And Sorae, the youngest, barely ten when their parents passed, raised half by her siblings and half by the city's memory.
Jack didn't know them. But Michael had. And now…
Somewhere in between, he stood—caught between memory and identity.
A stranger wearing a familiar soul.
---
His legs moved before his thoughts could catch up—instinct and uncertainty threading together into a shaky stride. The trees thinned in places, then thickened again, their branches twisting like ink spilled across a canvas. Here and there, strange white blossoms hung low, emitting a soft glow like fallen moonlight.
The forest breathed around him.
Not like the woods back on Earth. This place pulsed—softly, slowly—like lungs beneath moss and stone. Every tree stood too still, every shadow a little too long. The night sky above stretched impossibly vast, a canvas of unfamiliar stars that whispered of constellations not yet named.
In the distance, past the veil of trees, something gleamed.
Not starlight. Not moonlight.
Citylight.
Faint, but unmistakable—like fireflies gathering on the horizon. It pulsed with a strange rhythm, as if the city itself breathed along with the forest. A cold shimmer of unnatural luminescence that hummed faintly against the base of his skull.
Noxhollow.
He didn't know how he knew—but the name settled into his mind with weight and certainty. Home—at least, for Michael. And now, for him too.
Each step forward scraped at the divide between self and self. Jack Summer: born in the 21st century, a man who knew of transmigration only from fiction. And Michael Vaelborne: apprentice of arcane structure, a soul bound to mysteries yet unsolved.
The sigil on his palm flared briefly—just enough to draw his gaze. Faint light, like silver caught in frost. He didn't understand it.
Not yet.
But it waited.
Watching.
The trees began to slope downward. The wind shifted. And far ahead, perched between the bones of hills and the breath of fog, Noxhollow rose—its towers crooked and beautiful, spires gleaming like stained glass kissed by shadow.
The city called.
And Jack—Michael—walked toward it, heart pounding with a fear he couldn't name.
As he approached, the forest fell behind him like a memory. The ground hardened beneath his boots—no longer soil and root, but pale, time-worn stone etched with old lines of passage. Weeds grew between the cracks, undisturbed.
The outer wall of Noxhollow rose from the mist like the ribs of some sleeping giant. Tall. Silent. Carved from blackened limestone streaked with faint veins of violet crystal that caught the dim starlight and fractured it into ghostlight.
He slowed as he neared the gates.
They were open.
Not wide—but enough to step through. Twin monolithic doors of cold iron stood slightly ajar, embedded with strange, angular runes dulled by age. No guards. No lights. Just the whisper of wind and the dull hum of the city's breath beyond.
Too quiet.
Jack—Michael—paused. He half expected some barrier, some presence. But there was nothing.
Only the weight of silence. And the pull of the path forward.
He reached out, fingers brushing the edge of one gate.
It was cold.
Then the world spun.
Not the sky, not the ground—him. His vision narrowed, breath caught, the headache from earlier slamming back through his skull like a bell rung too hard. The sigil on his palm pulsed again, unseen beneath the bandage. Silver light leaked through his skin.
A voice—not heard, but felt—slipped through the folds of his mind like oil on water.
"...One fragment stirs. A new bearer walks..."
He collapsed.
Just beyond the gate.
Half in the city. Half in the past.
And the darkness took him, cradled in silence and the scent of stone.