"Cahllen Von Wolver!"
The sound of glass shattering ripped through the silence, sharp enough to rattle the marrow in his bones. The boy jerked awake, breath caught in his throat. His small frame trembled as his sluggish mind tried to catch up with reality.
Cahll blinked, forcing his eyes open. The sensation was disorienting—like drowning and clawing his way back to the surface. His vision finally steadied on the man looming in front of him. An older figure, sharply dressed in a pristine tailored suit. His white-streaked hair was slicked back, and the golden cane in his hand was less for support than for authority. Every line etched into his face was harsh, severe, and his eyes—cold, piercing, indifferent—looked at Cahll as though he were something less than human.
That stare alone made Cahll feel as though he didn't belong in this place. It wasn't recognition in those eyes. It was contempt.
Cahll tilted his head slightly, still dazed. Who is this man? Why is he looking at me like that? And—why does he keep calling me by that name?
"Still not answering?" The elder's voice was steel, threaded with annoyance.
Before Cahll could so much as form a word, the man picked up a heavy book from the desk at his side. Without warning, he hurled it toward him.
Cahll's instincts screamed at him to dodge—his muscles remembered the years of training, the reflexes of an assassin honed through countless battles. But his body didn't obey. It was too slow, too frail.
The book struck the side of his head with a sickening thud. Stars burst behind his eyes, and his knees buckled. He hit the cold marble floor, palms splayed against its polished surface.
For a moment, he could hear only the echo of his own heartbeat, pounding erratically in his ears.
He lifted his gaze again, dazed, and caught sight of his own hands. Small. Soft. Tiny fingers trembling uncontrollably. These weren't the hands of a twenty-year-old assassin who had once slit throats in silence and dismantled crime rings from the shadows. No. These were the fragile, unscarred hands of a child.
What the hell…?
The realization clawed at him as he turned back toward the towering elder. The man's broad figure looked impossibly large now, filling the entire space like a suffocating shadow.
This—this wasn't right.
"I don' know wat yor talking 'bout." The words slipped out against his will, slurred and broken by the lisp of an undeveloped tongue.
Cahll's own voice betrayed him. High-pitched and childish.
His chest tightened. Panic threatened to spill out, but he forced himself to remain calm. He was trained for worse. He could handle this. He had to.
The elder's lips curled into a sneer. "You don't know? Hah! How amusing." He stepped forward, each footfall echoing heavily in the quiet chamber. "How dare you speak to me like that. Do you think you're special just because you're a Wolver?"
That word—Wolver.
It hit him like lightning.
Déjà vu crept in, chilling and unnerving. He knew this scenario. He knew this scolding. He had read this before.
His sluggish memory churned until it clicked. Cahllen Von Wolver. A minor character in the novel Bright. A pitiful sub-villain whose only role in the story was to serve as a foil to the true heirs of power. Born into the prestigious but deranged Wolver family, Cahllen was known for being spoiled, weak, and ultimately—pathetic. The kind of character no reader ever rooted for. The kind of character who faded into the background, remembered only for his foolish end.
And the elder standing before him… Hyre Wolver. The Wolver patriarch. The grandfather who ruled his descendants with an iron fist, molding them into weapons or breaking them beyond repair.
The realization stung.
Cahll's chest rose and fell rapidly. He struggled to keep the puzzle pieces from scattering, but his head throbbed from the book's impact.
So… I died. Somehow. And now… I'm here? In this child's body? This weakling?
The sheer absurdity of it was enough to make his lips twitch in disbelief.
Hyre's voice droned on in scolding, but Cahll's thoughts spun too wildly to follow. His assassin's mind, sharp and methodical, tried to weigh his options. He was inside the novel's world. That much seemed undeniable. The question was why him—and why this body.
Every assassin was trained never to lose composure, no matter the situation. But this—this was beyond training manuals. His heartbeat roared in his ears, and the floor seemed to tilt beneath him.
His child's body swayed.
This can't be happening. I can't… I won't survive here like this. Not in this weak shell. Not under him.
The thought pushed against him, heavy and suffocating, until his vision began to blur.
The elder loomed closer now, cane tapping against the floor with measured rhythm, as if mocking Cahll's trembling breaths. His scent—sharp cologne mixed with old smoke—clung to the air, choking and suffocating. The chamber itself, lined with dark mahogany shelves and towering portraits of severe-faced ancestors, felt less like a study and more like a throne room of judgment.
Hyre's cold presence swallowed every corner of it. He wasn't merely a man—he was a force, an iron weight pressing down on anyone in his path.
Cahll tried to cling to something—anything—of his assassin's discipline. Observe, analyze, strike. But there was no strike left in this small body, only the tremor of weakness and the suffocating reminder that this wasn't his world anymore.
His last coherent thought was bitter amusement at the irony of it all. An ace assassin who once prided himself on control, composure, and precision—brought down not by poison, not by an enemy's blade, but by the fragile body of a child he'd been forced to inhabit.
Yes, you read that right. Cahll, feared assassin, master of shadows, had fainted.
The world tilted sideways, colors bleeding into each other. The last sound he heard was Hyre Wolver's disdainful scoff as darkness swallowed him whole.
"Pathetic," Hyre muttered, his voice echoing coldly in the boy's fading consciousness.