The first thing Alex knew was the cold. It was not the crisp, comfortable chill of an air-conditioned office, but a deep, bone-searing cold that seemed to come from the inside out, settling around his heart like grave dirt. The second thing was the ache, a pervasive, draining misery in a body that was emphatically not his.
He was staring up at a ceiling of rough, smoke-stained planks, lying on a cot of scratchy straw, wrapped in threadbare wool. Where am I? The last thing Alex, the thirty-something accountant from Seattle, remembered was a dull headache and the blinding white light of a car airbag.
Now, memory fragments—brutal, swift, and alien—forced themselves into his consciousness: Elian. Oakhaven, Dark Ages, Resentment, Tainted.
He was no longer Alex. He was Elian, a gangly, underfed teenage boy in a forgotten corner of a forgotten kingdom. And Elian, he realized with a chilling certainty, was truly gone. He was merely an accountant inhabiting a shell that was already tainted.
The immediate, overwhelming distress wasn't the magic; it was the hunger. Alex was accustomed to routine and nourishment. Now, the hollowness in his gut made him dizzy and nauseous, his thoughts swimming like eels in murky water. He couldn't concentrate; the new, terrifying reality was blurred by the crippling lack of calories. This was going to be a harder adjustment than the whole 'reincarnation' thing.
He blinked, his eyes settling first on the blurry outline of the room. A massive, shadowy figure slumped near the dying embers of a hearth on the far wall. That was Theron, Elian's uncle. Alex felt no intrinsic fear of the man, only a clinical wariness of his physical strength. Theron was a brute, powerful and volatile, a force of nature that this new, pathetically weak body was ill-equipped to handle.
He tried to shift, to push himself up onto his elbows and gain some perspective. His muscles spasmed and failed him. The effort sent a sickening wave of vertigo through his skull, and he collapsed back onto the straw, breath hitching in a thin, reedy gasp that definitely wasn't his own. He was weak, painfully weak. Every sensory input—the roughness of the wool, the stench of the shack, the pounding hunger—was overwhelming.
As he lay there, pinned by his own feebleness, the chaos of sensation began to coalesce around a single, strange anchor.
The cold pressure that radiated on him—heavy and encompassing, like wearing a cloak woven from shadows—shifted. It wasn't the air. It was a subtle, constant draw toward stillness that Elian's body naturally attracted. He was a focal point, wrapped in the wrong kind of frequency.
But then, the sensation changed, sharpening the chaos into direction.
The general, suffocating cold pressure focused, drawing his attention to a single spot beneath him. The plank was located directly beneath the wooden frame of his cot, easily accessible. It was a subtle, compelling pull, a cold vibration that promised a deeper, more specialized chill—a pinpoint of intense clarity amidst the dizzying hunger.
He had to see what it was. Driven by this strange, compulsive pull, he managed to roll onto his side. The moment his bare feet touched the packed-dirt floor, he felt the intensity of the focused cold.
He didn't need to search. The pull was strongest right where he knelt. His eyes fixed on the plank, and he realized he was already perfectly positioned over the source.
With trembling hands, he pried up the rough plank. The scent of damp earth and something acrid hit him.
Inside the shallow hollow, lying in the dirt, was a small, black rabbit corpus. It looked weeks old, yet unnaturally preserved, like jerky cured in ice. This was the source of the focused chill. The rabbit was merely dead, but this chilling condition was different—it was the deepest cold he had ever felt, and it offered a strange sort of clarity amidst his dizziness.
This power... it touches things where life has gone. The knowledge was not terrifying or absurd; it was simply a new, lethal data point. The game had changed, and he had just found his first piece of essential equipment.