There was no floor beneath him.
Kindrake floated, though the word meant nothing here. There was no air, no weight, no measure of up or down. Only blackness, endless and cold, spreading in all directions like an ocean without tide.
Yet the void wasn't empty.
Fragments drifted around him—shards of light shaped like glass. Each shard carried a flicker of his life. One turned, and he saw himself at the boardroom table, tie sharp, eyes hollow. Another spun by, replaying the moment his wineglass cracked in his hand. A third lingered longer: the window exploding, red bloom across his chest, his body collapsing against marble.
He reached out. His hand was gone. Only thought moved. The shard passed through him, dissolving into specks of white.
Something warm trailed through the dark. A ribbon of light, pale blue, bending and pulsing as though it breathed. It tugged at him with an invisible thread. He felt his essence pulled forward, slow but inevitable.
Am I… falling?
The question echoed without sound, rippling across the void until it returned to him. He could still feel the wound in his chest, the heaviness of blood that no longer ran. He had died. He was certain of it. But the void refused to let him rest.
From somewhere deeper, a sound cut through the silence—alien in this weightless sea. The hiss of rain. The crash of a bottle against stone. The crack of a pistol fired in anger.
His focus narrowed. The void shivered. New shards blinked into being—memories that weren't his.
An alley, narrow and soaked in neon. A man in a leather jacket, a silver chain at his throat, messy black hair streaked with white. Eyes full of defiance, even as blood soaked his chest.
Kindrake's essence lurched. Two rivers of color appeared before him, spiraling: one pale blue, steady and cold; the other red-black, turbulent, alive with fury. They twisted, circling, pulling closer.
He knew without knowing: the red-black belonged to that man. That dying figure in the rain.
Their currents tangled, clashing like storm winds. The void trembled with each collision. He felt his being pulled into the storm, into that vessel of rage and youth.
Kindrake tried to resist—but there was no resisting. The void had decided. Fate had decided.
Is this… my second death? Or… another chance?
The blue light surged forward. The red light screamed back. And in the collision, the void itself shattered into brilliance.
The alley hadn't forgotten him.
Rain still hammered the cracked pavement, bouncing off broken glass and pooling into streams that ran red-black down the gutter. Neon from a half-dead sign flickered overhead, its sputtering light painting the walls in a sickly rhythm—on, off, on, off—like a dying heartbeat.
Arkellin K. Andy's body lay sprawled in the middle of it all. His jacket soaked heavy against him, blood running in ribbons from half a dozen wounds, eyes half-open but lifeless. Steam rose faintly where the heat of his blood met the cold of the rain.
The masked men were gone. Even Kane had vanished, leaving the corpse of their betrayal behind. Only the storm remained, relentless in its drumming.
Then the air changed.
It began as a vibration, too deep for the ear, rattling through puddles and window frames. The neon sign flickered harder. Rain slowed—not stopped, but each drop seemed to hang, suspended a fraction too long before splashing down.
And then it came.
A shaft of light, white-blue, cascading down the narrow alley as though the clouds themselves had torn open. It didn't strike the ground. It bent. It coiled, curved, and lowered itself onto Arkellin's chest like a hand of heaven reaching into hell.
His body twitched. Once. Twice.
Inside, there was nothing. No breath, no thought, no pulse. Only an echo where a soul had been.
That was enough.
The light seeped through torn fabric, through broken skin, through shattered bone, until it touched what remained of him.
And Kindrake was there.
He felt the weight first. The drag of lungs crushed by bullets, the throb of muscles beaten into ruin, the ice of rain soaking through to the marrow. It wasn't his body—but it was a body. The sensation of flesh after the void was overwhelming, like drowning and breathing all at once.
Then came the resistance.
Something stirred in the depths of Arkellin's dying frame—a voice, raw and jagged, screaming against the invasion. A second self clawing from the edge of the abyss.
This is mine. My body. My fight.
Kindrake braced against it. His essence was steady, a current that had commanded markets, armies, empires. But Arkellin's spirit was fire—wounded, betrayed, furious. The clash rattled the vessel, chest heaving though no air filled it, muscles seizing as the two forces warred.
Images struck like lightning:
Arkellin laughing in a smoky club, silver chain flashing under neon.
Kindrake sipping bitter wine alone in a tower of glass.
Arkellin's lover's scream, cut short by gunfire.
Kindrake's final breath, muttered into marble and blood.
The voices merged, screamed, resisted. The alley itself seemed to quake, rain bouncing higher from the force building inside the body.
Two rivers met.
Blue-white against red-black.
The currents smashed together—chaos, fury, grief, ambition—all colliding until resistance burned itself out. The streams bent, broke, then bled into one another, becoming a single torrent surging through every vein.
Kindrake gasped without lungs. Arkellin roared without breath.
The world snapped.
The rain fell normally again. The neon steadied. The alley stilled.
Arkellin's chest rose. Once. Shallow. Then again, deeper. His fingers twitched against the wet concrete, nails scratching grooves into the stone as if clawing his way back from the grave.
Blood no longer gushed. The wounds still marked him, raw and violent, but they no longer spread. Flesh had not healed—but something inside had closed the gates.
The light receded, folding into him, until only the storm remained.
His head rolled sideways, cheek pressed to the cold pavement. For a long heartbeat, he lay still, half man, half memory, a furnace of two lives fighting to settle in one frame.
Then his eyes opened.
The pupils shivered, washed first in blue-white glow, then stabilizing to a dark, steady black. For the briefest instant, two gazes looked out from one face.
The rain hit his eyes directly. He didn't blink. He only breathed.
Alive.
The alley smelled of iron and smoke. Rain hissed on hot brick and blood, pattering like a thousand fingers tapping out a funeral march.
Arkellin's body shuddered once, twice—then the lungs inside him convulsed. A sudden, ragged gasp tore the silence, as if the night itself had been split open. Air rushed in, burning down his throat, flooding the chest that only moments ago had been a hollow cage.
He coughed hard, blood and rain spilling from his lips. His hands slammed against the ground, fingers digging into the soaked concrete until mud and grit lodged beneath his nails. The sound of his own breath thundered in his ears. Too loud. Too alive.
Alive.
The thought pulsed from somewhere deep, a voice not fully his own. His vision blurred, pupils contracting, dilating, then flashing with a brief shimmer of white-blue light before settling into steady black. For an instant, two gazes overlapped in the same skull—one cold, calculating, from a tower of glass; the other raw, defiant, from the streets of Aurelia.
The storm pressed against his skin, each raindrop sharp, cold, undeniable. The wounds in his chest ached, not bleeding freely but sealed as though unseen hands had closed them from within. He could feel every nerve screaming, every muscle trembling, yet beneath it all… a current. Energy. Two lives braided tight, pumping through his veins.
Arkellin—Kindrake—forced himself onto one elbow. His breath rasped, shoulders shaking. The alley swayed in his vision: neon bent and broke across the wet pavement, painting the world in fractured reds and blues.
He pressed a palm flat to his chest. The fabric was torn, soaked, sticky with blood. But under it, a heart beat—unsteady, but relentless.
"…I'm… alive?"
The words cracked, more air than sound, as if his voice had been buried with him and dug up again. He didn't know if he spoke it or thought it—only that it reverberated in both minds now lodged inside him.
The rain answered.
It poured harder, drumming against dumpsters, turning puddles into mirrors. In one, he saw his reflection: hair plastered to his forehead, skin pale, eyes wide. For a moment, it wasn't one face—it was two, layered like ghosts, watching each other through the same body.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
At first faint, then rising, cutting through the storm with their shrill cry. Blue-red lights flickered at the mouth of the alley, refracted in raindrops, strobing against the walls.
Arkellin's lips pulled into something that might have been a laugh, bitter and raw. Fate hadn't even given him a minute. Reborn not into peace, but into pursuit.
His hand clenched against the pavement. Muscles protested, bones screamed, but he pulled himself upright, one breath at a time. The world didn't wait for the dead, and it sure as hell wouldn't wait for the reborn.
The sirens grew louder. Shadows shifted at the far end.
The alley wasn't done with him yet.