Then suddenly, the world ignited in light.
A radiance descended from the heavens—pure, divine, and impossibly beautiful. It enveloped me, flooding every corner of my broken body. The brilliance was so vast that words could never contain it; it was a beauty that silenced thought itself.
Warmth surged through my veins. The pain that had once devoured me began to fade. Torn flesh mended, the hole in my chest sealed as if time itself had turned back. I could feel life stirring inside me again—quiet, steady, absolute.
That light…
It was hers.
The little girl.
The one who found me among the dead.
The one who looked at me with crimson eyes.
Was she human?
A spirit?
Or something far beyond both—a being who existed where gods and mortals touched?
When the light dimmed, I was breathing again beneath the same red sky. The battlefield remained silent, the stench of blood thick as smoke. Yet within me, there was no fear. No grief. Only stillness—like a pond after the storm has passed.
Had I always been this hollow?
Or had death simply stripped away what little remained of me?
I rose to my feet. The wind caught the tattered edges of my black cloak, brushing against skin that felt newly born yet strangely foreign. Every motion felt both familiar and wrong, as though I was moving inside another man's skin.
Among the puddles of blood, I saw a reflection.
A young man stared back at me—black hair matted with dirt and crimson, eyes the color of frostbitten sky. Calm, but not at peace. There was an emptiness in his gaze, like a flame that had forgotten what it was burning for. Seventeen, perhaps. No older.
I touched my face, tracing the outline of someone I didn't remember becoming.
So this was Carten—the name she had given me, the name that felt borrowed from a stranger.
My cloak was soaked in blood, its edges frayed. Silver earrings glinted faintly beneath my hair. My stomach ached with hunger, but I barely noticed. The battlefield stretched endlessly before me—a graveyard of men and memory.
In the distance, the remnants of a camp lay broken. Four black tents marked with red stripes, torn and half-collapsed. And beside them, a single white tent lined with blue. It stood untouched, almost sacred, though its canvas bore the stains of death.
That tent—I knew without knowing—belonged to the commander.
Outside it, the royal guards lay sprawled like fallen idols, their armor cracked, their hands still reaching for weapons they never drew.
Was the attack so swift that none had time to scream?
Or had they accepted death before it came?
I stepped carefully among them and entered the tent. The flap swayed in the wind, revealing a space where order had once lived—a desk overturned, a lamp still flickering weakly on the ground, shadows trembling against the walls.
And in the chair sat the commander.
Or what was left of him.
His body slumped forward, headless, a crimson halo pooling at his feet.
In one hand, he still clutched a book.
I pried it free. Blood had soaked through the pages, but the ink endured—rows of names, ranks, numbers. A meticulous record of every soul who served here.
For a long time, I read in silence.
The pages whispered the weight of countless lives—men who fought, who loved, who were remembered. But as I searched, one truth became clear.
My name was not among them.
Not Carten.
Not any name I could claim as my own.
I stared down at the final page, my breath trembling in the dim light.
If I had never been one of them…
Then what was I doing here?
The question settled in my chest like a blade turned inward—sharp, cold, patient.
And for the first time since awakening, I felt something stir behind the emptiness.
Not memory.
Not hope.
Something quieter.
A need to know.
I thought about it for no more than a minute before my body reminded me—
I was starving.
The hunger clawed at me from the inside, sharp and merciless. It felt ancient, as if it had been waiting long before I woke. For a moment, the thought crossed my mind that I could eat anything—anything that still resembled food, or perhaps even what didn't.
But I forced the urge down, steadying my breath.
I searched through the remnants of the camp until I found a chunk of bread, hardened and gray with mold. It crumbled beneath my fingers, tasting of ash and dust, but it was enough. Far better than the emptiness gnawing at my stomach.
When I looked up again, the world had not changed.
The battlefield remained quiet—
too quiet.
No groans.
No whispers.
Not even the desperate flutter of wings.
Only the stillness of bodies, frozen mid-fate.
I turned toward the commander's tent. The fallen lamp still flickered weakly, its flame breathing against the dark. My eyes wandered across the desk, past the blood-soaked ledger, until something caught the light—a map, half-torn, its surface stained with crimson fingerprints.
I lifted it carefully. The parchment was stiff where the blood had dried. Tracing the lines beneath the stains, I saw the shape of forests—dense, dark, endless. Near the corner, an ink-black circle marked a single word, scrawled in a trembling hand:
"Fortress of Ascalin."
The name struck a strange chord within me.
It sounded familiar, though memory offered no reason why.
Beside the map lay a bundle of papers, soaked through with blood. I could just make out fragments of writing—
notes, reports, perhaps warnings—
all of them concerning Ascalin.
But the ink had run.
The words had bled together into red smears.
Whatever truth they held had been silenced.
I stared at the map again, unease crawling beneath my skin.
Something about that place—its name, its mark—throbbed faintly in my chest, as if echoing a heartbeat that wasn't mine.
And at the edge of thought, a whisper came—quiet, certain.
Something in this world had gone terribly wrong.