Time, in this place, was not a river, but a gentle, warm lake of love.
Days bled into weeks, weeks into months, months into years. The initial, screaming panic of being an imposter faded, not because it was resolved, but because it was slowly, meticulously soothed away. The world itself seemed to be in on the conspiracy to make me forget.
My wife—her name eventually settled in my mind not as a word, but as a feeling: happiness-
was the kindest person i ever met.
She was patience itself, answering my fragmented, confused questions about "our" life with stories that felt like legends.
A century of picnics under the silver-leaf trees. A century of quiet conversations in their crystalline library. A century of a love so deep and steady it had become part of the landscape. A century of a story that wasn't mine.
I stopped thinking of the body as borrowed. The calluses on these strange hands—from gardening, she said—felt like mine. The way this body knew the paths through the garden without looking became my knowledge. The hollow space inside me, the one that had ached for so many years, didn't just go quiet; it felt… deeply filled. Not with the cold serpent of despair, but with light and peace.
I saw "myself" in the garden sometimes— a strange guy who'd been watching me since that first day. He was the groundskeeper. Raphael, they called him. He was quiet, respectful, always keeping his distance. Our identical faces were just a curious fact of this world, a quirk no one really questioned. He would nod from across a lawn, and I would nod back, walking away as quickly as possible. The ghost of my past life acknowledging the caretaker of my present one. The jealousy, the fear, it all melted away into the tranquil rhythm of this place.
I forgot the taste of fear and sadness. The sound of Kephriel's chains became a half-remembered nightmare. The faces of Dao, Niran, Preecha, even Julia, softened into the blurred features of my amazing childhood friends I'd long since outgrown.
I was happy.
Truly, completely happy. I had a home. I had a purpose that was simply to be. I had a wife who loved me, i had kids that looked just like her...
One evening, years deep into this peace, I stood with -her- on a balcony overlooking the gardens, now painted in the deep blues and purples of the twin suns setting. The air was cool, smelling of night-blooming flowers. She leaned into my side, and I put my arm around her, the gesture as natural as breathing.
"It's perfect, isn't it?" she murmured, her voice part of the evening's song.
I looked out at the world that had saved me. The world I had somehow, against all odds, been given.
"Yes," I said, and my voice was my own—calm, whole, content. "It is."
I believed it. I was Rafael Sakda, an husband, keeper of this quiet corner of paradise. The boy, the loser who had wanted to die so bad was a story I'd read once, about someone else.
The last sliver of my old self, the one that remembered the cold and the dark, finally let go. It dissolved into the perfumed twilight.
My soul slowly recomposed.
I was home.
And in the deepest part of my soul, where the Mindbreaker's chill had once lived, a single, treacherous thought formed: I hope nothing comes back.