[Nicholas Anstalionah.]
I walked, legs burning and lungs raw, a cough tearing from my chest with every step.
I pulled my scarf up and pressed my hand against the stinging snow.
Darkness and white braided together until the world thinned to a smear, and I kept moving. It was because standing still meant watching the same scene repeat.
Then I saw her. Mirabel, slumped against a boulder, her sword broken at her side.
Blood spread beneath her like a dark flower, her body too still for a world that had no mercy.
Griffin turned, smiled once as if some cruel film had flicked, and the tableau snapped back to the beginning of that same forest of shadow.
The torture was precise, eternal, sacred in its cruelty.
I stared down at my hands, the skin split and flaking, and felt blood warm between my fingers.
"Destrarossa, this is over. I cannot waste any more time. Set me free." My voice shredded the hollow air, but the only ears that heard were my own, fragile and useless.
I ran then, a rush that bent time and space, but even that speed could not cheat the constant of this world. I arrived late.
I always arrived late. Mirabel fell before me. Griffin's blade found her heart, and she died again.
I had watched it play out until my mind frayed at the edges.
In this place, every instant stacked on itself, every possibility folded into the same point, and the same grief replayed like a wound that would not scab.
The image of her lifeless body had been shown to me an infinite number of times.
It kept looping as I forced my thoughts outward, an unrelenting machine designed to dismantle my resolve.
Only then did the name of the Regalia that bound me become clear. I had decided something in that breaking moment.
I did not need my gift. I did not need the ease it promised. I needed the curse. I needed the burden.
Blood spilled from my lips as I roared, "Destrarossa!" I stomped, making the world buck beneath me. "Set me free!"
The next moment, I stood in the cave and faced him, and his disgust was a visible thing. Destrarossa's pale blue hair haloed his head.
His skin was a faint, wrong red, horns curled like a demon's crown, and behind them a fractured halo drooped like a ruined moon.
He wore rough brown robes and carried a walking cane that hummed with more power than I had ever seen. His eyes were white and black, twisted with contempt.
"You fool," he spat. I dropped my sword. "This is useless. How long has it been? I am no stronger. I can feel them clashing, each and every one, and I am still too weak."
He sneered. "And you think going now will change anything? With your strength, even Satire could kill you."
Destrarossa Anstalionah. The first king.
The founder who had reached beyond the stars and pierced Heaven, only to be cast down and hollowed out. He built our kingdom and then left it to stand without him.
He had been my trainer and my tormentor, forging me into tools I had not yet learned to wield.
For what purpose? I had nothing to show for it but the bitter realization that I was small, truly weak.
"I do not care who could kill me. I will save Mirabel. I will not let her life end."
I turned to leave, but his hand fell heavy on my shoulder and the world folded into darkness.
This darkness was different.
It was of me.
[It was the blessing of time and the curse of remembrance.]
"That is right, Nicholas," Destrarossa said. "Give up, like you did before." This was my past, my lostness, my sin.
I was a lazy bastard in that memory, and the proof lived in the bones of a boy I had once failed. I was small then, a gangly frame with too-limp muscles.
I was making my way to the royal castle, but I begged my father to let me walk the mountains.
Veritas had been a place of grey stone and ordered libraries, and that route along the cliff had no name anyone bothered to remember.
I looked down over the lip and saw a figure clinging to the crumbling edge.
A servant boy, frail and scholarly in the way he carried himself, all thin wrists and nervous hands, with a stack of loose papers tucked under one arm.
His eyes were wide and terrified, his hair a pale, lifeless wheat.
He had the look of someone born to books rather than to battle, glasses cracked at the bridge of his nose, hands ink-stained.
I knew him. I knew his father had left only minutes before, running toward the village to fetch help, shouting that he would return with ropes and men.
The father's voice still echoed in my memory, promising rescue like a tether.
But the servant boy's foot slipped. He tripped on the loose stone.
For a heartbeat, thin as a breath, I thought the father would appear with aid. He did not. The fall began.
I reached out. My fingers closed on paper and sleeve, not on bone. The boy smiled at me, a small, astonished thing, believing I would hold him.
The weight was more than I expected. I was lighter then, a shell of courage and less of the man I tried to become.
The cliff trembled under his body and mine.
The papers, his lean life, slid like water.
I did not mean to let go. I had no desire to betray him. And then my grip failed.
He fell. I watched him drop into that yawning freight of bodies and cloudless sky and knew… before the air finished its long scream, that he would not rise.
The boy had not cultivated, had not tempered himself with the arts that made survival possible.
He had no foundation of spirit to catch him. The absence of cultivation is final in ways flesh cannot forgive.
And yet, oddly, my memory began to buckle as if under my own hand.
The cliff blurred; the boy's clean face folded into shadow; the sound of his father's running steps thinned until it was almost nothing.
I felt the world tilt and then I was back in that black cave.
Destrarossa stood before me, his contempt magnified like a lens. "You really are that delusional, aren't you?" he spat.
My eyes flickered. My mind felt slick and evasive, like water over stone. I forced my voice level. "No. I hate delusion. I remember that memory perfectly."
His features snapped. He struck me hard enough that the cave reeled. I fell, nose bleeding, and before I could rise he hit me again.
My head cracked the ground. "Remember it right, you putrid, lazy bastard!" he screamed.
The darkness folded, and I was back at the cliff. The boy's hands clung to my sleeve, trembling with desperate relief.
"Please," he begged, voice brick-rough with fear and snow and tears. "Pull me up. Please."
I smiled then, and the smile was a small, brittle thing. "I really do like saving people," I said, calmly.
His grip tightened, hope burning in the angle of his knuckles. For an instant, the memory sat with me like a hot coal.
Then, carefully, deliberately, I let go. He fell.
His scream tore the air. Mine did not. My smile did not falter, though something in me recoiled.
The weight had been too much, and I had chosen to let the rope slip from my hands.
I had chosen to look away. I had chosen to unwrite that thread from the tapestry of myself.
When my vision snapped back to the cave, Destrarossa's expression had changed. The disgust burned out and left something colder: pity.
"I see it now, Nicholas," he said softly, like a man delivering a verdict.
"You truly are hollow. Is this all a game to you? A ploy for favor?"
[Nicholas understood why he had screamed then, he knew. Yet the contradiction gnawed: how could knowing and not knowing exist at once?]
A laugh bubbled up, hollow and surprised.
I brushed my hair from my face as if dusting off an old photograph. "Oh, wait. I remember now. His name. I finally remember his name."
Destrarossa did not flinch. He drew the thin blade from the cane at his side, the metal whispering old grief.
"You deserve death," he said. "Maybe that will awaken you, Nicholas. Maybe then you will come back."
The blade fell. Over and over it sank through me, a rain of ice and proof. Each strike should have broken the part of me that had slipped the memory away.
Instead, through the pain and the blood, one stubborn syllable rose like smoke I could not snuff.
Lornell.