Cecilia
"Thank you, Grey." The words rasped out, thin and blood-flecked, as the cold certainty of his blade pierced through cloth, flesh, bone, and finally, the frantic, failing pulse of my heart.
He'd done it. He'd granted the only mercy left in this twisted game. His eyes, usually so guarded, held an ocean of pain—pain for me, pain from me—as he held my gaze.
The roar of the crowd, the clash of steel, the weight of expectation… it all dissolved into a ringing silence focused solely on the icy fire blooming in my chest. This was the end dictated not by the future king, but by a friend fulfilling a terrible pact. My vision began to fray at the edges, darkness creeping in like spilled ink.
Then, a flicker. Nico. His face, contorted in a mask of pure, unadulterated horror and desperate denial, flashed before the encroaching blackness. His mouth was open in a silent scream I could no longer hear.
I am sorry, Nico. The apology echoed in the dwindling chamber of my consciousness. Maybe… in another life.
A life where I am not this cursed vessel. A life where no one tears me away from you… where we are just… us. The darkness swallowed the image, swallowed the roar, swallowed the pain. It swallowed me.
———
Afterlife? I'd long ago stopped believing in such fairy tales. Not after the sterile, screaming hell of the government labs. Not after they dissected hope alongside my nerves, replacing faith with the cold certainty of monitored agony and calculated degradation.
What awaited after the final synapse fired? Oblivion. A merciful nothingness. That's what I'd clung to.
This… was not oblivion.
It was void. Utter, absolute, sensory deprivation on a cosmic scale. Not darkness, for darkness implies sight, implies something to perceive the absence of light. This was the absence of perception itself.
It wasn't black; it was null. Like I had no eyes, no optic nerves, no brain to interpret signals that didn't exist. No scent—not even sterile air or rotten smell—because there was no nose, no olfactory bulbs.
No sound, not even the phantom tinnitus of silence, because there were no ears, no auditory cortex straining. No taste, no texture, no temperature. No gravity, no direction. Just... a state of pure, undifferentiated existence, suspended in an infinite, featureless non-place.
Was it stillness? Movement required reference, and there was none. Did time pass? The concept felt ludicrous, a relic of a forgotten world governed by clocks and heartbeats. Here, there was only the eternal, dimensionless now.
And within this suffocating nullity, a terrifying question arose: did I even think? Were these concepts—void, time, self—merely phantom echoes of a discarded brain, firing its last, meaningless patterns?
Or was this the essence of "I," stripped bare? It felt less like thinking and more like… being a single, isolated point of awareness adrift in an ocean of nothing.
Then, the extraction.
It wasn't an attack. It was a profound, fundamental removal. Something immense, intrinsic, yet deeply corrupted, was being wrenched free from the core of whatever constituted "me" in this void.
The sensation wasn't sharp pain, not initially. It was a deep, grinding pressure, a tearing at the roots of my being, reminiscent of a stubborn molar back on Earth—the one that had throbbed for months, poisoning my sleep, making every bite an ordeal.
The dentists had poked and prodded, declaring it unsalvageable, decayed to the nerve. Removing it had been a violent relief: the initial, shocking agony of the pliers gripping deep, the sickening crack as the root gave way, followed instantly by an overwhelming wave of… liberation.
This was that, amplified a thousandfold. A pressure so profound it bordered on agony, a sense of something vital being ripped from its moorings.
And then… release. An immense, echoing hollowness bloomed where the weight had been. A cancerous growth excised. I knew immediately, with the absolute certainty of this void-state, what had been taken.
The Legacy.
That monstrous, double-edged curse. The decaying tooth embedded not in my jaw, but in my soul. It had ached, constantly. A dull, pervasive throb of power that promised godhood while simultaneously poisoning everything it touched.
I had loved the feeling of it, hadn't I? The raw, intoxicating surge of Ki bending to my will, the effortless dominion, the sheer, terrifying might that made people feel like sandcastles.
That feeling was the sweet, numbing syrup the dentists used before the drill, masking the rot beneath. It was addictive, that sugar-rush of control. I craved it even as it corroded me.
But oh, how I hated it. Hated the responsibilities it forced upon me—the mantle of savior or destroyer I never chose. Hated the target it painted on my back, making me a prize for monsters and manipulators. Hated how it isolated me, set me apart.
Most of all, I hated what it did to me.
The Legacy wasn't just power; it was a corrosive acid dripping onto my personality, my choices, my loves. Like that decayed tooth, its rot seeped outwards. It discolored my thoughts, made me brittle, prone to fractures of rage and paranoia.
It made me suspicious of kindness, wary of connection, because everyone wanted a piece of the power, not the person. It made me lash out at Nico, at Grey, the very anchors of my humanity, because the pressure of the rot, the constant, grinding ache of its presence, was unbearable. It turned my heart into a pulp chamber of festering resentment and fear.
In the final moments against Grey, I hadn't been Cecilia. I'd been that abscess—swollen, poisoned, bursting with toxic power and defensive fury. The Legacy had become the totality of my being, the rotten core defining the whole.
And Grey, my friend, my executioner, had been the dentist with the pliers. He'd gripped the rotten root of the Legacy's influence over me and, with one terrible, merciful thrust, cracked it free. My death was the extraction. And now, in this void, I felt the profound, echoing relief of its absence. The constant, soul-deep ache was gone.
The pressure, the poison, the rot… excised. I was hollowed, yes, but clean. Free. The irony was a stark, bright shard in the nothingness: true freedom found only in death, after the decayed tooth of my existence had finally been pulled.
Then, light.
Not the harsh glare of surgical lamps, but a soft, pervasive glow that became the void. It wasn't "seen" in the traditional sense; it simply was, infusing the nullity with warmth and presence.
Was this the fabled tunnel? The near-death hallucination Grey and Nico once described after meeting a suicidal smuggler? Ninety-one seconds of cosmic journey towards a beckoning light?
The light coalesced, resolving into filaments of pure, radiant gold. Not threads, but immense, luminous structures, stretching into an impossible, timeless distance.
And I felt their regard as an all-encompassing awareness focused solely on me. It wasn't hostile, merely… observational. Profoundly alien.
"Cecilia Sever—former Legacy—I was expecting you in this state of yours, yet I am still surprised my acting aspect did this for you."
The voice wasn't sound, words or displacement of air.
It was meaning imprinted directly onto the fabric of my awareness, resonant and vast as the filaments themselves. It used Nico's surname. Sever. We were only engaged. We never… the intimacy of the name in this cosmic context sent a ripple of confusion through my hollowed core.
"You are being reincarnated." The pronouncement was absolute, devoid of inflection. "My acting aspect—the Thwart—deemed it necessary to separate you from the Legacy before reincarnating you. A… thorough extraction."
The metaphor wasn't lost. It knew how I saw it all—intimately. It saw the decayed tooth and approved its removal.
What are you? The thought screamed silently in the space between us. Are you… God? The word felt childish, inadequate. If such a being existed after the horrors I'd witnessed and endured… malevolence seemed a more fitting attribute than benevolence.
"I am Fate. An aspect of it. The Mouth."
"Despite already knowing the Thwart's intent, it surprises me. Most instances of the acting aspect despised you. Hated the rot you carried, the chaos you seeded. Yet this one… chose to cleanse you. To offer you and Nico Sever a life unlaced by that decay."
Nico? The name was a lifeline thrown into the void. Is he…? Did he die? Was he pulled free too? A torrent of questions surged—about the Thwart, about this "instance," about the why, the how, the where.
"I have no intention of answering your questions."
The filaments pulsed, a wave of finality washing over me.
"My role here is not counsel, but facilitation. I assist my acting aspect in his function: manually intervening to ensure Fate's Grand Design unfolds. The extraction is complete. Farewell, Cecilia Sever."
The golden light intensified consumingly. It didn't feel like moving towards a tunnel's end, but like the void itself was being rewritten around me, the hollow space within me filling with the imprint of a new beginning, a life free of the festering root that had poisoned everything.
The Mouth of Fate dissolved, and the rewriting began.
———
"C-Cecil…"
The voice was a tremor in the stillness, a sound that bypassed my ears and resonated directly in the space where my heart should be pounding.
I knew it. Knew it in the marrow of whatever bones now held me together, even though it was layered with a profound, unfamiliar depth—a resonance of pain and trauma I'd never heard in Nico before.
It was his voice, yet filtered through an ocean of unseen suffering.
Opening my eyes wasn't a simple act. It felt like forcing open portals in a face that wasn't quite mine. The lids were heavy, foreign, the muscles unresponsive, as if I were piloting a stranger's body through thick mud.
Light, harsh and real after the sensory void of non-existence, stabbed through my lashes. Blurred shapes resolved slowly.
I laid on something hard and unforgiving—a pallet, not a bed. No sheets, just rough, cool stone or wood beneath me. The air tasted sterile, devoid of life, yet thick with dust motes dancing in shafts of sunlight pouring through tall, narrow windows behind me.
The architecture was jarring: clean lines suggesting efficiency, but the materials—heavy stone walls, iron fittings, the sheer absence of anything plastic, metallic, or humming with electricity—screamed medieval.
No monitors beeping, no IV lines snaking into my veins, no antiseptic smell of bleach or alcohol. Just… empty. Sterile, yet ancient. An infirmary stripped bare by time or design. And the only presence in this unsettling quietude was… him.
Nico.
He sat slumped on a stool beside the pallet, leaning forward, his face etched with a concern so deep it looked carved. Yet, he was different. Starkly so. He wasn't older; if anything, he seemed younger, stripped of a year or two of the weary cynicism that had clung to him towards the end.
His black hair was the same—that familiar, slightly unruly cut I'd smoothed down countless times. The look of worry twisting his features was achingly familiar, the way his brows knit together. But his eyes… oh, his eyes.
They were Nico's dark pools, yet now they held a glacial chill, a hardness I'd never seen, even in our bleakest moments on the streets. It was a harshness etched not just around his eyes, but into the very set of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders.
He looked like a statue of Nico sculpted from ice, trying desperately to thaw. And he was gently, almost reverently, holding my hand. His touch was warm, anchoring, a stark counterpoint to the coldness radiating from him.
He wore simple clothes—a rough-spun tunic and trousers—clearly made from natural fibers, nothing like the durable synthetics of Etharia. But it was the restraints that stopped my breath. Thick metal shackles encircled his wrists, connected by a short, heavy chain.
Another, broader band of the same ominous metal was locked around his chest, like some brutal harness.
Yet Nico ignored them utterly. His entire focus, his entire being, seemed poured into the hand holding mine, into the desperate hope in his frozen eyes.
"Nico?" My own voice emerged, thin and tremulous, like a child's. The sound startled me. This wasn't the controlled, hardened tone I'd cultivated under the government's watchful eyes.
This was vulnerability, raw and exposed. Instinctive fear prickled—they'll punish weakness. They always punish weakness.
"What... I... why are you shackled? The King's Tournament..." The words tumbled out, fractured, grasping for the last solid memory before the void.
He didn't answer with words. In one fluid motion born of desperate need, he surged forward, his arms wrapping around me.
He pulled me against him, burying his face in the unfamiliar hair at my neck. The shackles pressed cold against my side through the thin shift I wore, a jarring reminder of his captivity, but his embrace… his embrace was sanctuary.
"It's everything alright, Cecil," he breathed against my skin, his voice thick with unshed tears and a pain that mirrored the ice in his eyes.
"We are... somewhere far, far away from those who want to harm you." The words were simple, but the conviction in them, the profound, aching relief, washed over me like a balm.
It cut through the disorientation, the fear of this new body, the strangeness of this place. In his arms, the sterile room faded. The only reality was the solidity of his chest against mine, the familiar scent of him beneath the faint, unfamiliar smells of stone and dust, the frantic beating of his heart echoing my own tentative pulse. Safe. He said safe.
We stayed locked together for an eternity measured in shared breaths and the slow arc of sunlight across the floor. Time lost meaning. There was only the anchor of his presence, the slow thawing of my frozen terror, the dawning, incredulous belief that this was real. Not a dream, not a dying hallucination. Real.
"Cecil..." He pulled back just enough to look into my eyes, his gaze searching, haunted. "I know I shouldn't be asking you this now. Not now that you're confused, weak... fresh from..." He swallowed hard, struggling. "But I need to know. I have to. D-did you... did you kill yourself? When facing... Grey?"
The question landed like a physical blow. It ripped me back to the cold steel piercing my chest, to Grey's agonized eyes, to Nico's shattered face flashing before the dark.
Why ask this now? Why resurrect that agony here, in this fragile moment of reunion? But the raw need in his voice, the desperate plea for truth etched onto his face, demanded honesty.
"Yes," I whispered, the word scraping my throat raw.
The reaction was instantaneous and volcanic. Nico's whole body jerked as if electrocuted. A guttural sound ripped from his throat—half sob, half snarl. He slammed a shackled fist against the stone pallet beside me, the impact sharp and shocking.
"Fuck!" The word exploded, raw and venomous. "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!"
Each curse was a hammer blow, echoing off the bare walls. He surged to his feet, chains rattling violently, his body vibrating with pure, incandescent rage. He paced like a caged animal, the restraints suddenly seeming less like confinement and more like the only thing preventing him from tearing the room apart.
"Agrona!" he spat the name like poison. "He didn't just use me! He didn't just manipulate me! He toyed with me! Like a fucking doll! Pulling my strings, making me dance while he… while he…!"
He couldn't finish, choking on the fury, his face contorted, tears of rage finally spilling over the icy dam in his eyes. The coldness was gone, replaced by a white-hot inferno of betrayal and self-loathing.
Seeing me die, by my own choice, by Grey's hand… it had shattered something fundamental in him.
"Nico," I breathed, pushing myself up on trembling arms, the world tilting slightly. The outburst was terrifying, yet it revealed a depth of agony I hadn't fathomed. "I don't understand... what? Where are we?" The question was a plea for grounding, for something concrete amidst the emotional storm.
He stopped pacing, shoulders heaving, wiping his face roughly with a shackled hand. The rage subsided, leaving behind a profound exhaustion and that chilling, haunted look. He turned back to me, his gaze softening as it landed on my confused, frightened face.
"We've been reincarnated," he said, the words heavy with the weight of impossible truth. "I... I've been here in this world for... time. A while. While you... you just arrived. Just now."
Reincarnated. The word echoed. Fate's golden filaments, the Mouth's pronouncement… it hadn't been a dream. Tentatively, fearfully, I looked down at myself. The body under the simple shift was undeniably female, similar in age to when I died—late teens.
But it was different. Leaner, almost fragile, lacking the defined muscle built through years of government-mandated training and desperate survival. My hands… they were smaller, paler. I lifted one, trembling, to touch my hair. It fell over my shoulder—not the familiar, dusty brown, but a lighter, softer shade, like sun-bleached wheat.
A stranger's hair on a stranger's head attached to me.
"It's all good, Cecil," Nico murmured, seeing my distress, his voice regaining some of its earlier gentleness, though the underlying strain remained. He moved back to the stool, sitting heavily, his shackles clinking.
"It's all good." He reached for my hand again, his touch a lifeline.
But a wave of nausea, sudden and overwhelming, crashed over me. It wasn't just physical disorientation. It was a deep, roiling sense of… wrongness. Of intrusion.
"Who..." I choked out, pulling my hand from his to press it against my churning stomach. "Who was the original owner of this body?"
The question felt vital, a moral imperative clawing its way up from a place I thought the government had cauterized. Guilt.
Nico's expression shuttered instantly. The softness vanished, replaced by a guarded, almost dismissive blankness. "It's not important," he said, his voice flat, final. He avoided my eyes.
"No." The word came out stronger than I expected, fueled by the nausea and the burgeoning sense of violation. "It is important."
The urge to vomit intensified. I doubled over, retching dryly. Nico was instantly there, his hands surprisingly steady on my shoulders, helping me sit upright. As the wave of sickness subsided, my vision swimming, I caught a flicker of movement in the corner of the room near the heavy wooden door.
A cat. Pitch black, unnaturally so, like a slice of the void itself. But its eyes… they weren't cat eyes. They were miniature galaxies—deep, infinite blackness scattered with impossibly bright, swirling stars. It regarded me for a single, timeless heartbeat, an intelligence ancient and alien in its gaze.
Then, it was simply… gone.
"I..." Nico began, his voice tight, his gaze fixed on the spot where the cat had been, a flicker of unease crossing his face before he masked it. He looked back at me. "I didn't know her," he said, the words clipped.
"I didn't care to know her. I only cared about bringing you back." There was no remorse in his tone, only a fierce, single-minded possessiveness that was almost as frightening as the shackles.
His love was a fortress, built on ground he hadn't hesitated to scorch. He took a breath, his eyes searching my face, a new tension entering his posture.
"But... what about the Legacy?" The question was tentative, laced with a dread that mirrored my own past terror of it.
"I don't have it anymore," I said, the words light, almost giddy with the sheer impossibility of it. "I am free, Nico. Free. We are free. We can stop struggling. We can finally… just… live."
Silence descended again, thick but different now. Not the silence of disorientation or N