The void was suddenly replaced by an avalanche of sensations. There was a dull pain in his back and the rough feel of sheets against his skin, along with the weight of a blanket on his legs. Kael instinctively inhaled, and the air that filled his lungs didn't taste like ash, but rather like the familiar, dusty smell of a room that had been closed for a long time. He opened his eyes, seeing no gray sky or desolation. Instead, he saw a dark wooden ceiling, with a thin crack he knew by heart. A cold, pure panic seized him. He thought it was a trap set by the Silence—an illusion to torture him before erasing him.
He threw himself out of bed, his movements clumsy and his body strangely light and weak. He landed heavily on a floor that creaked under his weight. It was his own floor. His room. His eyes, those of a soldier accustomed to analyzing every detail of a battlefield, scanned the room. Every object was a relic, a ghost of a past he had thought was lost forever. The wooden practice sword, given to him by his father for his tenth birthday, rested against a wall. A stack of books on the "Tactics of the Ancient Kings" that he had devoured sat on his desk. And on the wall, a yellowed poster of the Sun Knight, the hero of his childhood, gazed toward a horizon full of promises. A broken promise.
He staggered to the mirror on his dresser, his breath caught in his throat. The face staring back at him wasn't his. It wasn't the face of a thirty-six-year-old man, marked by a thin scar that ran across his left cheek and eyes in which all light of youth had been extinguished. The face in the mirror was that of a sixteen-year-old adolescent, with a soft chin and delicate features. A face full of a nervousness and innocence he had long forgotten. He brought a trembling hand to his cheek. It was smooth, with no scar. Yet, he could still feel the phantom pain from the blow that had caused it, and the memory of the monster that had inflicted it on him. The weight of twenty years of war, survival, mourning, and massacres fell upon his mind, contained within this frail body that no longer belonged to him. It was a prison.
His eyes landed on the calendar hanging on the wall. Each month was illustrated with a different landscape of the kingdom of Axton. He approached, his heart pounding. His fingers brushed the paper. The current month was that of the "Flowering". And a date, the one for the next day, was circled in solemn red ink. "The Awakening Ceremony". He had returned. Truly returned.
The relief he should have felt never came. Instead, a cold, calculating rage settled in his veins. This wasn't a second chance. It wasn't salvation. It was a redeployment. The soldier hadn't died on the battlefield; he had been sent back to the beginning of the war, alone, with the knowledge of every defeat to come. He clenched his fist, his adolescent knuckles turning white from the effort. The world outside was still sleeping, ignorant of its fateful destiny. But in this small room, a ghost had just woken up, and he wouldn't let history repeat itself.