I raised my hand and looked at my fingers. No scars, no sword calluses. Just smooth, delicate skin. I clenched my hand into a fist. It was weak. Useless. And yet, I felt a hidden muscle memory within it. Not a memory of fighting, but of holding crayons, stacking blocks, petting a dog. Memories that weren't mine, yet my new nervous system recognized them as absolutely my own.
"Aidan! Get to the bathroom, or the potatoes will get cold!" A woman's voice, Mom's, pulled me from my contemplation. It sounded gentle but firm.
Aidan. That was my name. That name triggered a strange reaction, a slight tightening in my chest, an automatic lifting of my head. The body knew this command. The body responded to it.
I placed the cube on the table, among the other toys. Its golden particles glowed brighter for a moment, as if protesting being abandoned, before their movement became slow and regular again. I turned and, shuffling in my soft socks, headed in the direction of the voice. My legs carried me on their own across the threshold into the bright, soap-scented bathroom.
I stood before the sink. The mirror above it reflected my entire form. A short boy in blue pajamas, with bright, tousled hair and wide-open eyes. I raised my hand and touched my reflection. Cold glass. The reflected boy did the same. His gesture was uncertain, childish. My mind's eye still saw shattered armor and blood on the ground.
I washed my hands as instructed. The water was warm and pleasant. The smell of soap, flowers and something sweet, filled my nostrils. It was so normal. So overwhelmingly normal.
When I returned to the living room, a woman was already sitting at the table. An empty chair stood opposite her. She was setting the table herself, placing a smaller plate with a cartoon motif next to a large one.
"Dad's running late," she said, not looking up, bustling around the serving dishes. "Don't worry, you can start."
I sat in the indicated chair. The wood was hard under my small thighs. I stared at the steaming food. My hands, on their own, reached for the fork. They were clumsy but knew how to hold it.
"So? How's your crystal? What did it show you today?" she asked, pouring juice into my cup.
Her question hung in the air. The crystal. The cube. It wasn't an ordinary toy. I felt it.
My eyes widened, the fork froze halfway to my mouth. She knows? The thought flashed like lightning, cold and sharp. But when I looked at her face, I saw only warm, maternal curiosity. She wasn't looking at me like an intruder, but like her child playing with a favorite toy.
I had to answer. This body, this mind, knew the procedure. They knew what to say.
"Nothing important," my high, thin voice squeezed out. It sounded natural, though I felt emptiness inside. "It was just glowing."
That was part of the truth. The cube now, lying on the table among the other toys, merely flickered gently, listlessly. No messages. No warnings. Just golden particles dancing in a pointless, slow waltz.
Mom smiled, wiping her hands on her apron.
"Right, sometimes it does that. But if it shows you something, remember to tell me, okay? Daddy will want to know."
Daddy. That word triggered another physical reaction, a slight excitement mixed with respect. The body remembered. It was waiting for him.
I nodded, pretending to be engrossed in chewing a piece of roasted carrot. The taste was stunningly real, sweet and earthy.
Before the meal ended, we heard the scrape of a key in the lock. The front door opened with a quiet hiss.
"I'm home!" a male, slightly tired voice rang out.
Mom immediately stood up, her face lighting up with genuine joy.
"Perfect timing! Aidan, Daddy's home."
The man who entered the living room was a tall, broad-shouldered figure, carrying a faint scent of herbs. His face was strong, etched with slight wrinkles of concentration around the eyes, but it brightened at the sight of the table. His gaze briefly pierced me before resting on Mom. It was quick, analytical. Like a scan.
"How's our little engineer today?" he asked, approaching and placing a large hand on my head. His touch was warm but firm. It had a ritualistic quality to it. Like an inspection.
The body reacted on its own, tilting my head into his hand, like a cat.
"Fine," I managed, looking at the tabletop.
"He was playing with his cub.." Mom started, but stopped when Dad raised his hand in a gentle yet unambiguous gesture.
"Not now, Elenoa. Report later." His voice was soft but brooked no argument. He headed to his place setting. "Dinner smells excellent."
We fell silent. We ate in quiet, interrupted only by the clatter of cutlery and the sounds from outside the window, crickets and the distant hum of a city. I felt the man's gaze on me. It wasn't hostile. It was... assessing.
When we finished, Mom started clearing the dishes.
"Aidan, go to your room, okay? Play for a while. I need to talk to your father."
I nodded and slid off the chair. My small, soft-footed hosts carried me through the living room. As I passed the open door to the study, I saw "Dad" take a flat, metal panel from a cabinet. Its screen glowed with a bluish light identical to the one that had surrounded me in the void.
In my room, among the ordinary toys and furniture, the cube waited on a shelf. The particles inside it were now swirling faster, almost nervously. As I closed the door behind me, thin, sharp letters flashed across its perfectly smooth surface. They were no longer messages. It was an order.
[THE WEAVE PROGRESSES. The tapestry of this new life accepts your thread. But take care, your grip on this reality is tenuous. To resist the vessel's memory is to risk being unmade, your soul cast back into the void.]
The heart that wasn't mine, but was beating in my chest, began to pound faster. It explained the fog in my thoughts, the gap between who I was and who I was supposed to become. Between the warrior and the child. Aidan.
The cube now pulsed with a steady, bluish rhythm, casting flickering reflections onto the teddy bears and colorful books on the shelf. It was the only element here that didn't fit this domesticated picture. A gateway to another world.
I approached it. My small, child's hand rose to touch it, but hung in the air. Instinct told me to recoil, to fight, to grasp a sword. But my sword was dust and my armor a memory. I touched the surface of the cube.
It wasn't cold or hot. A barely perceptible vibration ran through it, as if a beating heart lay beneath its perfect geometry. Where my finger met the transparent material, more lines flashed, this time pulsing in rhythm with my own, accelerated heartbeat.
[THE SOUL-FORGE IGNITES. STEEL THYSELF. THE BINDING WILL BE VIOLENT.]
There was no time to react. The world was torn from its axis.
It wasn't physical pain. This was deeper. As if someone had grabbed the threads of my consciousness and yanked them, unraveling and weaving them back together. Images and sounds invaded me, uninvited, foreign, yet instantly recognizable by this new, young cortex.
Cold wind on my face, snow crunching under boots. A large, hairy hand holding my small one. A man's voice, deep and calm: "Look, Aidan. The first snow this year. Pristine, like a blank slate. You can write a new history on it."
The smell of old books and dust. The gloom of a library. A woman – Mom – reading quietly, and me tracing letters on the page with my finger, letters that suddenly ceased to be abstract shapes and formed a word: 'home.'
A scraped knee. A burning pain, a hot tear rolling down a cheek. And her voice, full of compassion: "It's okay, sweetheart. It's okay. My, what a brave boy you are."
These weren't my memories. And yet they were. They flooded into me like a raging river, inundating every corner of my mind. I felt their weight, their emotional charge. This was life. Aidan's life. My life.
The convulsion subsided, leaving me trembling and drenched in sweat on the carpet of the child's room. The cube on the shelf now pulsed more calmly, its golden particles swirling in a harmonious, soothing rhythm. I got up, leaning against the bed. My knees were like jelly.
My head was chaos. The image of the burning city was still vivid, burned onto the back of my eyelids, but now other images superimposed themselves. A birthday with a cake. Fear of the dark. Two realities, two streams of memory, fought for dominance, creating a nauseating mix of disorientation and grief.
The disorientation slowly receded, like a wave pulling back after hitting the shore. It left behind not clarity, but a strange, painful synthesis. I was no longer just the warrior on burning ruins. I wasn't just Aidan, a child waiting for dinner. I was both people at once, and my soul was a battlefield where neither side could win.
I rose from the carpet. My body no longer shook as much. I knew where the bathroom was without having to remember. I knew which faucet dripped if you didn't turn it all the way to the left. That memory surfaced on its own, smoothly and naturally, as if it had always been there. At the same time, my hand, reaching for a glass, instinctively made a motion as if gripping the hilt of a sword. I paralyzed it mid-gesture.
I looked in the mirror. The boy's face looked back at me with reproach. His, my, eyes were wide, but somewhere deep, behind the iris, a different ember smoldered. An ember that remembered fire and ash. Who am I? I thought, and the voice in my head sounded foreign, young, but its tone was old and tired.
The door to my room creaked open slightly.
"Aidan? Is everything alright?" It was Mom's voice. She didn't come in, just peeked. Her gaze was alert, full of maternal concern, but in the corners of her eyes I detected a tension that didn't belong to ordinary worry about a boisterous son.
"Yes, Mom," I replied, and my voice sounded more stable this time, less foreign. The body took control of the vocal cords, suggesting the right tone. "I just... tripped."
"Be careful, sweetheart," she said, and her smile seemed slightly forced. "Daddy's finished. Do you want to say goodnight to him before bed?"
I knew it wasn't a question. It was an order. Gentle, wrapped in warmth, but an order nonetheless. I felt it in the stiffening of my new, small muscles.
"Yes," I nodded.
I left the room, my small feet sinking into the soft carpet. The hallway seemed different now, not an enemy lurking in the shadows, but a place marked by a foreign, domestic memory. I smelled wood and clean wool, but my nose, attuned to the scent of smoke and char, detected something else underneath. A sweet, metallic note, like the air in a forge after a new sword is hammered, or the smell after a lightning strike. Magic. Alchemy.
The "father's" study was not a chamber I expected. There were no leather-bound books, dusty scrolls, or weapons on the walls. The walls were smooth and white, shining like polished marble, but without the soul of stone. It was cool inside, and the air tasted of metal and something sharp I couldn't name, like the air after lightning strikes freshly forged steel.
The man I was to call father stood with his back to me, bent over a flat, shiny slab that glowed with its own cold, blue light. On its surface, symbols danced and flew, similar to those I had seen in the void when my soul was ripped from the burning wreckage. They weren't letters I knew, but their movement and order betrayed purpose.
He didn't turn as I stood in the doorway. His shoulders were tense, focused.
"Come closer, Aidan," he said, and his voice, though quiet, filled the entire room. It no longer sounded like the voice of a father returning to the family nest. It sounded like the voice of a commander, a warden, or an executioner.
My steps were quiet in the soft leather slippers I wore. I stood next to him, not even reaching his waist. I looked at the flickering slab. The symbols were like magical runes to me, unreadable, but their power was palpable. I felt it on my skin, like a static storm.
"Interesting," he muttered, more to himself than to me. "Progress. But still too slow. The body and mind are fighting each other like two wolves in one cage. One must devour the other."
Finally, he looked at me. His eyes were no longer tired or kind. They were the eyes of a craftsman assessing material, a blacksmith looking at white-hot metal, ready for forging.
"You feel it, don't you?" he asked. "The rift. The crack. The memory in this child's bones."
I was silent. My tongue, this childish one, wanted to deny it, to play the innocent. But my old spirit, the warrior who had seen souls and cities break, knew that lying here was pointless. I just nodded, once, briefly.
"Good," he said, and a note of respect? sounded in his voice. "This is not an illusion, boy. Not magic or delusions. You don't know what's happening, so I will start from the beginning. You died. A long time ago. My son, Aidan, did too, not long ago. A stellar sickness, as they say. The soul dies in the body and only the shell remains. I... I did something unforgivable." The man looked at me. "Trying to save my son, I broke every rule, reached into the sea of transcendence, and stole a soul. Your soul. And I anchored it in my son's body. You must forget."
"Forget?" I whispered, my high voice trembling. "Forget the battle? Forget who I am?"
"Forget that you were someone else," he corrected me sharply. "That man died. His destiny was fulfilled. You are Aidan. My son. Your destiny is... to live. To learn. To grow. For that to happen, your old soul must bend, melt with the soul of this body. Otherwise, you will go mad, and this... vessel... will reject you and you will truly die. Forever."
His words hung in the cold air of the study, heavy as a sentence. Forget. It wasn't about suppressing memories, but erasing them. About allowing this foreign, childish past to consume my own, to erase the warrior and replace him with the boy.
"She... Mom..." I whispered, the word "Mom" foreign and bitter on my tongue. "She doesn't know?"
The man's face, which a moment ago had been hard as a blacksmith's hammer, softened for a fraction of a second, revealing a crack, a deep, throbbing pain. He shook his head, and his gaze momentarily fled towards the closed door.
"Elena... your mother..." he corrected himself, consciously using that form, cementing the new order. "No. And she cannot find out. It would kill her. She lost him once. She wouldn't survive the knowledge that her son... that this vessel... is just a simulacrum, that the real Aidan didn't return. She believes you miraculously recovered, that her prayers were answered. Your role, your duty, is to maintain that illusion. For her. For her peace."
The sense of alienation, of being an intruder, intensified a hundredfold. I wasn't just to steal someone's body, but to play a role for a woman who looked at me with love meant for someone else. It was more cruel than a sword blow.
"I have to... pretend?" I asked, and my voice held both the warrior's defiance and the child's helplessness.
"Not pretend," he hissed, grabbing my arm. His grip was strong, almost painful, reminding me of the physical weakness of this body. "Be. You must be her son. You must think like him, feel like him, react like him. Every one of your memories is a nail in the coffin of this endeavor. And of her sanity. Do you understand?"
There was no room for discussion in his eyes. Only desperate determination and the threat of absolute loss. I nodded, feeling the weight of this secret burrow into my new, fragile consciousness, becoming a part of it.
"Good, we'll talk about the rest tomorrow," he muttered, releasing my arm. His expression became neutral again, masking the storm beneath. "Now go to her. Tell her goodnight. And make her believe."
He turned back to his glowing slab, cutting off the conversation. I was just another parameter to calibrate, a problem to solve.
I left the study, and the door closed behind me with a quiet, final hiss. The corridor seemed infinitely long now. I felt the weight of her ignorance upon me, her tender looks and warm embraces that were directed at a ghost, not at me. Every step in those soft slippers was a step into a great lie.
The door to the living room was ajar. Warm, yellow light seeped through the crack, and with it came the quiet rustle of a book page being turned and the soothing murmur of a coffee maker. It was a scene so perfect, so idealized, it hurt. A picture straight from a memory I didn't have, but now had to steal.
I took a breath. The smell of homemade cookies and tea. Her perfume – light, floral. The smell of safety. For me, it was the smell of a trap.
I pushed the door.
Elena was sitting on the sofa, her legs tucked under her. She held an open book in her hands, but her gaze was fixed on the flame of a candle on the mantelpiece. A quiet, sad pensiveness was painted on her face. When she saw me, she immediately brightened. That smile was like sun breaking through clouds, sudden, intense, and just as fragile.
"Aidan, darling!" she called, putting the book aside. "Finished talking with Daddy?"
I nodded, unable to force out a word. I stood in the doorway, like an intruder who had just broken into someone's paradise.
"Come here," she said, spreading her arms.
Her gesture was so natural, so expected by this body, that my legs carried me to her on their own. Small feet moved silently across the carpet. I felt every muscle tense, fighting the instinct to flee.
I sank into her embrace. Her arms surrounded me, gentle, yet incredibly strong. She smelled of soap, warmth, and that one, unique scent that my new memory, Aidan's memory, simply identified as mom. Her hand smoothed my tousled hair, and every nerve in this body responded to that touch with a pure, animal sense of security. It was like bathing in warm milk – soporific, stupefying.
"It's okay, sweetheart," she whispered in my ear, her voice vibrating through my chest.
"Everything is okay now."
But it wasn't okay. In my nostrils, beneath the sweet smell of her perfume, I still caught the stench of the burning city. Beneath her warm touch, my skin remembered the chill of steel armor. Closing my eyes, I saw not the warm living room, but the red and yellow of flames devouring stone. I was torn in two. The body snuggled against her, seeking comfort, while the spirit screamed in silent terror, trapped in this sweet, soft hell.
"I love you, Aidan," she whispered, kissing the top of my head. "I'm so glad you're healthy again."
Those words were like a dagger. Healthy. Not alive. Not saved. Healthy. As if what had happened was merely an illness he had recovered from. As if her real son had simply gotten better, not been replaced by a foreign soul torn from the afterlife. Her love was real, but it was directed at a ghost. I was just its echo, a mirage meant to deceive her.
"I... I love you too, Mom," I choked out, the words burning my throat like betrayal. They were automatic, learned, flowing from the muscles of the larynx and memories that weren't mine. They sounded convincing.
Elena held me tighter, and I felt her tremble slightly. Was it joy? Relief? Or was there, beneath the surface of her perfect maternal delusion, some primal, subconscious anxiety? An instinct that whispered to her that something was wrong, that her son's gaze was sometimes too old, too sad, that his embrace was sometimes stiff, as if he were fighting himself?
"Come on, I'll put you to bed," she said finally, releasing me from the embrace. Her eyes were moist. She took my hand and led me through the living room towards my room.
The corridor seemed shorter now. Her presence, her warm, innocent faith, created a bubble around us that my inner hell couldn't penetrate. But under my feet, I felt not the chill of this polished floor, but the cold, stone slabs of the fortress that had been my grave.
She put me to bed, tucked me under a duvet that smelled of sunshine and laundry. She kissed me goodnight on the forehead. Her lips were soft and warm.
"Sleep well, my little one," she said quietly.
She turned off the light, leaving the bedroom door slightly ajar, letting a sliver of yellow light from the hallway seep in.
I lay motionless, listening to the sound of her receding footsteps. When they disappeared, silence fell, broken only by the quiet hum of the simulated world outside the window, the chirping of crickets, and the distant rustle of wind in the tree branches.
Silence reigned. But inside me, a storm still raged.
I closed my eyes, trying to push away the images of war. Trying to summon Aidan's memories. Birthdays. First steps. Reading with Mom. They were there, vivid and tempting, ready for me to immerse myself in them and let them consume me. To forget.