Silence.
The kind of silence that is louder than any scream. It filled the grand hall, thick and heavy, broken only by the frantic drumming of rain on stained glass.
All eyes were nailed to the boy in the coffin. The boy who had been a corpse. The boy who was now breathing.
Aarion's—Elian's—question hung in the perfumed air, a ghost that refused to leave.
"Where… is my sister?"
The woman with the mother's eyes, Lady Valeria Von Crest, stared as if he'd spoken in a forgotten tongue. Her hope shattered, replaced by a fresh, bewildered grief. "Elian," she breathed, her voice trembling. "You have no sister."
The words were a physical blow. They stole the air from his new lungs. The memory of Lyra was the one solid thing in this shifting nightmare—her small hand in his, her laugh like wind chimes, her final, terrified scream. It was the anchor to who he was.
And this woman, this stranger wearing a mother's face, was telling him it was a lie.
"No," he rasped, the word tearing from his throat. He gripped the velvet-lined edge of the coffin, his borrowed hands trembling. "Lyra. My sister, Lyra."
Confusion rippled through the mourners. They saw a disgraced noble son, babbling nonsense. He saw a world that had erased the most important person in his life.
The glowing, golden text still hung in his vision, a silent, celestial spectator.
[SOUL DAGGER SYSTEM INITIALIZING... 15%]
[MEMORY INTEGRATION IN PROGRESS...]
And with it, the memories came. Not his. Theirs.
Elian Von Crest. Fourth son of a fading noble house. No talent for sword or sorcery. A disappointment. A boy who preferred dusty books to dueling yards. A boy who, three nights ago, could no longer bear the weight of his family's expectations. A bottle of wine. A handful of sleeping pills. A quiet surrender in a silk-lined room.
Aarion saw it all. The crushing pressure. The lonely despair. It was a different kind of death from his own—slower, colder, just as final.
He saw no Lyra. No demon blade. No heroic sacrifice. Only a sad, quiet end for a boy the world had forgotten before he was even gone.
A man, tall and stern with a face like granite and a sword at his hip, stepped forward. Lord Theron Von Crest. The father. His eyes were not filled with tears, but with a cold, hard fury.
"Enough of this charade, boy," he boomed, his voice cutting through the tension. "You disgrace us in life, and now you mock us in death? What dark trickery is this?"
Aarion looked from the father's fury to the mother's confusion. He was a ghost in a stolen body, a piece of the wrong puzzle forced into the wrong box. The two souls within him—the hero and the coward—clawed at each other, a civil war in a single skull.
The world began to swim. The faces of the mourners blurred into a pale, horrified mask. The scent of roses became the smell of a grave. He felt the phantom pain of the demon blade in his chest, a searing brand of a life that no one here remembered.
He stumbled, trying to climb out of the coffin, his legs weak, unfamiliar. Silk and lilies tangled around his feet.
"Stay back!" Lord Theron commanded, his hand going to his sword hilt, as if the son he had just buried was now a monster risen from the crypt.
The rejection was a colder death than the one he had already experienced.
And in that moment of utter desolation, the whisper returned. The voice of starlight and sorrow. Softer this time, filled with an infinite, aching sadness.
"They cannot see your truth, my king. Their world is a small, sad song. But I remember. I have always remembered."
A warmth bloomed in the center of his chest. Not the burning of a blade, but a gentle, silver heat. A comfort. A promise.
The golden text in his vision shimmered, the words shifting, solidifying.
[MEMORY INTEGRATION: 32%]
[CORE TRAGEDY CONFIRMED: DEATH IN SACRIFICE]
[SOUL RESONANCE DETECTED: 5%]
[PRIMARY SOUL DAGGER IDENTIFIED: LYRA - STATUS: DORMANT]
Lyra.
The name was a lifeline. It was real. She was real. The system knew her. The voice knew her. He was not going insane.
He looked at Lord Theron, at the drawn sword, at the sea of frightened faces. He was a stranger in a strange land, a warrior in a coward's skin, a brother without a sister.
He stood on shaking legs, the funeral clothes hanging loose on a frame that was not his own. He met his "father's" furious gaze, and for the first time, Aarion Vale's soul looked out through Elian Von Crest's eyes.
"It is no trick," he said, his voice low, but steady now, carrying a weight it had never held before. "The boy you knew is gone."
He took a step forward, away from the coffin, leaving the shadow of his second death behind.
"But I am here."
And somewhere, across time and space and the impossible walls between lives, a silver dagger began to weep with joy.
To be continued...