The taste of copper filled his mouth as blood pooled beneath his cheek. Above him, storm clouds gathered like vultures, their shadows dancing across the corpse-littered battlefield. Thunder rumbled in the distance, or maybe that was just the ringing in his ears from the explosion that had torn through his squad.
*His* squad. The men who had sworn brotherhood with him. The men who had left him behind.
"Should've seen it coming," he wheezed, each word scraping against his ruined throat like broken glass. A bitter laugh escaped his lips, sending fresh waves of agony through his punctured lung. Of course they'd abandon him. In the end, everyone did.
The radio crackled nearby, half-buried under debris and the arm of Sergeant Hayes—or what was left of him. Static and distant voices bled through the speaker, coordinates being called out, extraction points being discussed. They weren't coming back for survivors. There were none, officially.
Except him.
But not for much longer.
He stared up at the darkening sky, feeling the warmth leak out of him with every heartbeat. Twenty-eight years old. Twenty-eight years of following orders, trusting the wrong people, believing in causes that didn't believe in him. And this was how it ended—alone, forgotten, bleeding out in some godforsaken wasteland that wouldn't even make the evening news.
His vision blurred. The clouds above began to spin, merging with memories that felt both distant and immediate. His childhood home. His first deployment. The faces of friends who'd died in other wars, other betrayals. The letter from Sarah that he'd never answered, too proud to admit she'd been right about everything.
"If there's a God..." he whispered, though he'd stopped believing years ago. "If there's anything after this... just give me one more chance. Let me be strong enough that no one can abandon me again."
The words dissolved into the rain that had started to fall, each drop washing away more of what little warmth remained in his body. His fingers, already numb, loosened their grip on the service pistol he'd been clutching—his last defense against an enemy that had already moved on.
Thunder crashed overhead.
And then, nothing.
---
Darkness.
Not the gentle darkness of sleep or the terrifying void he'd imagined death might be. This was something else entirely—a crushing, suffocating weight that pressed against his consciousness like being buried alive. Time meant nothing here. Seconds or centuries could have passed.
Then, like a spark igniting in an oil spill, *something* blazed to life inside him.
Memories that weren't his own flooded in like a broken dam. A world of magic and monsters. Knights in shining armor and dark wizards in twisted towers. A story he'd read years ago during a particularly boring deployment, something to pass the endless hours between patrols.
*The Chronicles of Aethermoor.*
He remembered laughing at some of the characters back then—particularly the bumbling villains who seemed to exist solely to make the hero look good. One in particular had stuck in his mind, if only because of how pathetically he'd been written.
Lukas Vain.
Third son of a minor noble house. Arrogant beyond his meager talents. A bully who picked fights he couldn't win and made enemies he couldn't handle. In the original story, he'd died in Chapter 7, killed by the protagonist in what was supposed to be a throwaway scene to establish how righteous and powerful the hero was.
A nothing character. A speed bump on someone else's road to glory.
The irony wasn't lost on him, even as consciousness began to slip back in around the edges of that borrowed identity. From one abandonment to another. From dying forgotten on a battlefield to being destined for an equally meaningless death in someone else's story.
But as warmth began to return to limbs that weren't quite his own, as sensation crept back into a body that felt wrong in all the right ways, one thought burned brighter than all the rest:
*Not this time.*
This time, he wouldn't be the one left behind.
This time, he'd be strong enough to make them all remember his name.
Even if he had to tear this entire world apart to do it.