The world tasted of mud and iron.
Kael knew the flavor intimately. He knew the gritty texture of the soil as it coated his tongue and the sharp, copper tang of blood—sometimes his, sometimes the man's next to him. Today, it was both. He spat a pinkish-brown glob into the trench bottom, the sucking sound it made swallowed by the symphony of a world dying.
Rain, thin and miserable, fell from a sky the color of a fresh bruise. It turned the churned earth of the trench into a greedy slurry that clutched at his boots, promising to steal him given half a chance. Distant screams, the percussive thump-thump of war drums, and the wet, hacking cough of the man to his left—these were the only constants.
The man, a boy really, with peach fuzz on his cheeks and a stupid, beautiful hope in his eyes, offered Kael a weak smile. "They say the Baron's cavalry is coming. We'll break them today."
Kael didn't answer. He just ran a thumb over the worn leather grip of his short sword, the motion automatic, ingrained by a hundred lifetimes he couldn't explain. He knew the boy's name was Finn. He knew Finn had a sister back in a village called Oakhaven who wove him a small charm for protection, a charm currently tucked inside his tunic. He also knew that in approximately eleven minutes, that charm wouldn't do a damn bit of good.
"You don't talk much, do you, Kael?" Finn asked, his voice wavering slightly as a particularly loud scream echoed across the no-man's-land of gore and splintered wood.
"Nothing to say," Kael grunted, his eyes fixed on a specific section of the trench wall opposite them. He knew that section was weaker, packed looser. A detail no one else would notice. A detail that meant nothing.
He wasn't gifted. He wasn't a prodigy who could feel the flow of Aura in his bones or see the shimmering Circles of magic in the air. His senses were plain, his body unremarkable save for the fact that it didn't seem to age. His only "talent" was a bone-deep weariness, a knowledge that felt older than his own face. It was a knowledge written in a language of phantom pains. Right now, a dull ache throbbed in his left knee—the ghost of a crossbow bolt from a life he'd lived last week. A faint, prickling sensation traced the line of his jaw, the spectral memory of a blade's caress.
These were his guides. His library of failure.
A horn blared, a mournful, ugly sound that cut through the rain. It wasn't their horn.
Finn fumbled with his shield, the hope in his eyes curdling into raw fear. "What was that? Is that them?"
Kael just stared at the horizon. It started as a tremor in the earth, a vibration felt more in the teeth than in the ears. Then it became a low rumble, growing steadily into a thunder that had nothing to do with the weather.
"Get down," Kael said, his voice flat.
But it was too late. They crested the hill. The Baron's cavalry. Not a glorious charge of shining knights, but a tide of steel and screaming horseflesh, their armor dark and functional, their lances lowered like the spines of some great, metallic beast. They weren't charging the trench line head-on. They were flanking. Heading for the weaker sections of the wall, one of which was directly opposite them.
Kael had lived this moment seventeen times.
In the first loop, he had died in ignorant terror. In the second, he'd tried to warn the commander and was flogged for desertion before the charge even hit. In the fifth, he'd managed to rally three men to reinforce the wall, only for them all to die together, crushed and suffocated. In the tenth, he'd tried to run and was shot in the back. In the fifteenth, he'd simply accepted it, closing his eyes.
This time, he didn't know what he was doing. He just watched.
The ground shook violently now. Men were shouting, screaming orders that were whipped away by the wind. The world dissolved into chaos. He saw Finn, his face a white mask of terror, trying to mouth a prayer. He saw a veteran warrior, a man who'd boasted of surviving a dozen campaigns, vomit down the front of his own breastplate.
Then the wall of earth opposite them exploded inwards.
It wasn't a lance or a spell. It was the sheer, percussive force of a dozen warhorses hitting sodden earth at full gallop. Mud, wood, and men were thrown into the air. A horse, its eyes wide with animal panic, stumbled into the trench, its leg snapping with a sound like a giant cracking a branch. It thrashed, screaming a sound that was horribly, unnervingly human.
Kael didn't move. He knew his spot. He knew his fate.
A shadow fell over him. He looked up into the face of a knight, his helmet forged in the shape of a snarling wolf. The knight's lance was already slick with gore. There was no malice in his eyes, no emotion at all. This was not a battle. It was an extermination. The lance dipped down.
Kael tried to raise his shield. He was too slow. He had always been too slow. His talent wasn't in fighting; it was in dying.
But this time, his death came from a different direction.
A flailing hoof from the thrashing, dying horse lashed out sideways. The impact was not sharp, like a blade. It was a dull, total-body concussion. The universe compressed into a single, shattering impact against his chest. He felt more than heard the wet crack of his own ribs. The air was stolen from his lungs in a single, violent gasp. He was thrown backwards, his head connecting with the hard-packed rear wall of the trench.
His vision swam, the grey sky and the snarling wolf-helm of the knight blurring into a meaningless smear. He felt a strange warmth spreading through his chest, and he distantly recognized it as his own blood, pooling inside his crushed torso. His last sensation was the taste of mud and iron as his face slumped into the filth. The world didn't fade to black. It simply... stopped.
Not light. Not darkness. A snap.
And Kael was standing again, whole and unharmed, his lungs filled with clean, rain-scented air.
He was in the trench. Finn was beside him, offering that same weak, hopeful smile. "They say the Baron's cavalry is coming. We'll break them today."
The words were identical. The tone, the look in Finn's eyes, the miserable drizzle—it was all the same. Nothing had changed.
Except for Kael.
The pain was gone. But its memory remained, a perfect, incandescent scar burned onto the back of his mind. He could still feel the crushing weight, the splintering of his own bones. The ghost of a hoof was still stamped on his chest.
He looked down at his hands. They were steady. He looked at Finn, at this boy who was, for all intents and purposes, alive and well, with no memory of the gruesome death that awaited him in eleven minutes.
The cause of his death was not the knight. It was the thrashing horse. The cause of the horse being in the trench was the cavalry charge hitting the weak point. He had regressed to the beginning of the cause. To the moment the horn blew.
He raised a hand to his own chest, pressing against the solid bone and muscle. He could feel his own heart beating a steady, healthy rhythm. But underneath, in the secret space of his soul, he could also feel the memory of it bursting like an overripe fruit.
He had died. And now, he was going to have to live through it all again.