There was no light at first.
Only a slow, dull throb that felt like the world itself was pulsing around me.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
I didn't know what a heart was yet, but I could hear it—someone else's, not mine. Fast, panicked, struggling. A woman's voice tore through the darkness, raw and hoarse with screams. Hands pressed, pulled, voices barked orders. The air around me shook with pain and fear.
Then suddenly, everything squeezed.
For a moment, I thought I was going to be crushed. Heat smothered me, pressure wrapped around me like a fist. The world narrowed into one final push—
And then cold.
Cold air burned my skin. Something struck my back, and sound ripped out of my throat before I even understood I had one.
I cried.
Harsh, loud, ugly.
My first protest in this new world.
Shapes blurred in front of me—shadows, light, movement. Someone spoke.
"A boy. Healthy. Strong lungs."
I didn't understand the words then. Later, I would. Later, I would replay them again and again until they etched themselves into my bones.
Back then, all I knew was that rough but careful hands held me, wiped me, wrapped me. The smell of iron, sweat, and burning tallow filled my nose. The beating heart that had thundered in my ears began to slow, then sagged back against soft cloth.
Another voice. Male. Calm. Heavy.
Steps approached.
When my eyes finally forced themselves open, I saw him.
A man's face loomed above me, sharp and terrifying in its stillness. Dark eyes, cold and assessing, stared down as if I were not a child but an object he was inspecting. Candlelight carved hard lines into his cheeks, casting deep shadows.
Even then, even as a newborn, something inside me recoiled.
This man is dangerous.
No one had to teach me that.
In fact, no one could have.
Because deep beneath the newness of my body, something old was still there—distant, faint, like an echo at the bottom of a well. A memory of another life. Another world. The weight of betrayal. The sting of a knife in my back. A woman's trembling apology.
"I'm sorry… I had no choice…"
I didn't remember everything. I didn't know names, faces, details. Just fragments.
But I remembered one thing clearly:
My name.
Ikarus.
That was who I had been.
And now, somehow, I was here again—small, weak, and staring up into the eyes of a stranger who had already decided what I was worth.
He took me from the midwife with practiced hands. No warmth. No hesitation. Fingers peeled back the cloth, exposing me to the chill of the room. I trembled, not just from the air, but from something colder in his gaze.
He checked my limbs, my chest, my breathing. His touch was efficient, clinical. Then he went still. His eyes closed, and something unseen pressed against me—like invisible fingers groping through my body, searching for something.
For a spark I did not have.
The air in the room seemed to hold its breath.
Then he opened his eyes.
"He has no talent," the man said.
Even though I didn't fully understand the meaning in that moment, I felt it. The way the words made the space colder. The way the woman on the bed sucked in a sharp breath. The way silence wrapped around us like a shroud.
No talent.
Later, I would learn his name: Noah Dawson.
My father in this life.
Later, I would learn what "talent" meant in this world. Mana cores. Bloodline resonance. Power.
Later, I would realize that, in his eyes, I had none of it.
He stared down at me, and something inside him closed. Whatever faint curiosity he had held as he took me in his arms simply… vanished.
"He is worthless."
The world tilted.
His hands loosened.
I fell.
For that brief, endless moment, all I knew was air and shock and the blur of stone rushing up to meet me. I didn't know what death was, but my body responded anyway, muscles seizing, mouth opening to scream—
Arms caught me.
Warm, shaky, unsteady—but fast enough.
The woman on the bed clutched me to her chest, breath ripping out of her in ragged gasps.
"Noah!" she screamed. "What are you—?!"
Her heart pounded against my back like a trapped animal. Her grip trembled, not with love… but with panic.
This was my mother. Elara.
In my previous life, I had longed for parents like this—people who would hold me, protect me, choose me.
For a second, I almost believed I had them.
For a second, I thought, Maybe this time…
Then she spoke.
"Noah, what will they say? The elders, the main wife's family—this will ruin us!"
Ruin… us.
Not him.
Not our son.
Us.
Her voice cracked, but not with grief for me—only fear for herself.
"I'm sorry," she said, still not looking at me. "I believed he would at least not shame us."
The tiny hope inside me cracked.
In my last life, I had been stabbed by someone I helped. In this one, I was being thrown away by someone who birthed me.
Good to know some things don't change.
Noah didn't flinch.
"In the Dawson line, cores flicker at birth," he said. "This one has nothing. We will not present a defect to the clan."
Defect.
I didn't understand what a clan was or why it mattered. All I knew was that the room around me agreed. The air felt unanimous. The world itself seemed to nod.
He turned to the midwife. "Take the child," he ordered. "Dispose of him. Kill him or leave him for the dogs. The house will be told there were complications. He died after birth."
The midwife stiffened. Her name, I would later learn, was Marta. Her eyes flicked down to me—just a moment—but I remembered it. The hesitation. The anger she didn't voice.
"My lord, the child is healthy. There is no—"
"No talent," Noah cut in. "That is deformity enough."
I felt Elara's arms loosen around me. Not reluctantly, not protectively—just… letting go.
"If this gets out," she said quietly, "they will call me cursed. They will say my blood pollutes yours. Noah, I can't… I can't lose my place here."
Place.
Status.
Name.
Everything she fought for, everything she clung to—none of it was me.
"Then be glad I'm allowing you another chance," Noah said. "We'll try again. This one is… unnecessary."
Unnecessary.
In my previous life, I had died wondering why people hated me. Why kindness wasn't enough. Why being good hurt so much.
In this life, I got the answer immediately:
Sometimes, you don't need to do anything wrong. You just need to be born inconvenient.
Marta took me gently from Elara's arms. I did not reach for my mother. I didn't bother. The part of me that still remembered another world watched her turn her eyes away and thought, Of course.
She wasn't my mother.
She was just the woman who happened to give birth to me.
The people who threw me away in my old life had at least pretended to be strangers. Here, they didn't even pretend.
The air changed once we left the main halls. Voices grew quieter. Footsteps turned to soft echoes on stone. The smell of incense and polished wood faded into damp drafts and old stone dust.
Marta moved quickly, but not carelessly. She held me close, wrapped tightly in cloth, shielding my face from the cold. I could feel her heartbeat too—quick, but steady.
Her silence wasn't like Noah's.
His was made of ice.
Hers was made of thought.
Outside, night hit like a slap—cold rain and harsher air. I squinted against the dark as droplets stung my skin.
"There," a man's voice said behind us. "She went this way."
Of course. Caelan wouldn't just trust a servant with his father's trash.
Orders. Soldiers. Footsteps.
They'd chased me in my last life too, in a different way.
Back then, they'd used knives.
Here, they were just starting younger.
Marta ducked, turned, slipped between walls and sheds, using servant paths and blind corners. I felt her shoulders tense every time voices drew closer.
"If I obey, he dies," she muttered under her breath once, when we paused in shadow. "If I disobey… I might."
In my first life, no one had that conversation. They just chose themselves and threw me to the wolves.
Here, at least someone was thinking about it.
We finally stopped in a narrow lane, rain dripping from an overhanging roof. Shouts and bootsteps faded in another direction as the soldiers followed the wrong trail.
Marta looked down at me.
Up close, her face was a map of years—lines around her mouth, tired eyes, the stiffness of someone who'd worked too long for too little. But there was something else there too.
Humanity. The thing everyone else in that house seemed to have misplaced.
"You didn't ask for any of this," she said quietly. "Wrong house. Wrong parents. Wrong world."
Her words slipped into the space where my old memories lived.
Wrong world.
Yeah. That sounded right.
In my previous life, I'd wanted love and got a knife. In this one, I got thrown away before I could even ask for it.
Anger surged up inside me—hot, bitter, familiar. It clawed at my ribs, too big for my tiny chest. My throat burned. Tears spilled down my cheeks.
But this time, under the anger, something else grew.
Resolve.
I'd died once not understanding why. That wouldn't happen again.
Marta's grip tightened. I felt her decision forming in the way her shoulders squared, the way her jaw clenched.
"I won't give you back to them," she said. "Not to Noah. Not to that smiling little viper Caelan."
She took a slow breath.
"From now on, you're not their mistake. You're… mine."
Mine.
In my previous life, no one had ever said that and meant it.
Not parents.
Not friends.
Not the woman who stabbed me apologizing over my body.
But this tired old midwife, standing in the rain with a talentless baby and everything to lose, said it.
And meant it.
A strange sound slipped out of me again—half sob, half broken laugh.
In that moment, a choice solidified inside me.
If this world only respected strength and talent, fine.
I would drag myself to a place where I didn't need their approval to exist.
And one day, if fate was stupid enough to put Noah, Elara, or Caelan in front of me again…
I would show them exactly what a "worthless" life could become.
The docks were a blur of shouting, lanterns, and motion. Marta argued with a captain, handed over almost everything she had, and never once loosened her hold on me.
In my old life, money had been used to buy things.
Here, she used it to buy my chance.
Below deck, the ship creaked and groaned. The air was damp and thick, full of rope, grain, and old wood. Marta settled on a crate, unwrapped my face, and studied me in the weak lantern light.
"You don't even have a name," she murmured. "They didn't bother to give you one."
In my last life, I'd died with my name barely spoken. Here, I'd started with none at all.
"Then I'll name you," she said. "Not as their failure. As my choice."
Inside, something stirred.
I already knew what I was called.
What I had been called.
What I refused to let go of.
Ikarus.
That was me.
From the moment I opened my eyes in my old world, until the moment they closed in betrayal.
From the instant I screamed in this new one.
Marta thought quietly, then spoke.
"I'll call you… Ikarus."
The word fell into the space between my two lives and fit perfectly.
I almost smiled.
Of all the names in this world, she picked the one that was already mine.
"May you rise higher than any of them imagine," she whispered.
In my first life, rising had gotten me killed.
In this one, it would get me even.
As the ship shifted and the river began to carry us away from the Dawson estate, I let my tiny hand drift until my fingers found her clothes. I curled them into the fabric with all the strength my newborn body had.
I was Ikarus before this world, I thought, faint memory and new will joining. I am Ikarus now. And I will be Ikarus when they kneel or break before me.
If they ever tried again to hurt me—or the few people I chose to love this time—
No mercy.
No begging.
No second chances.
Marta couldn't hear any of that. She just felt the weak tug at her clothes and glanced down with a tired, soft exhale.
"Hold on, then," she murmured. "We've got a long way to go, you and I."
I closed my eyes, finally letting sleep take me.
Forsaken in one life.
Forsaken at birth in the next.
Named the same in both.
My story, truly, was only just beginning.