Riven Everblade had watched people line up to beg for reincarnation like it was a miracle ticket, not knowing, not caring, what fate the other side handed them. He could hardly blame them; he had once been guilty of the very same wishful ignorance. Privilege or no, he had no right to sneer. He had made the same bargain once: trade certainty for hope.
His memory of that life arrived in sharp, jagged flashes. Poverty had been a cloud that never left him. His mother left when he was five or rather, she slipped away from the stench of debt and the cold that gnawed at their walls to run into someone who smelled richer.
From his side, he had nothing left for her but bitter wishes: may she choke on her choices, he thought once, though he rarely let himself remember the exact words.
His father, crushed under a mountain of bills that even a ten-generation-long line could not repay, chose a solution that left Riven hotter with anger than with grief.
To cut he story short, he cut things short by briefly ending his life.
His actions left Riven the ledger of debts and a very small, very angry heart to manage them.
Riven reached twenty by what felt like an act of stubbornness.
Work after work after work, ten-hour shifts stacked on ten-hour shifts.
Deliveries, odd jobs, anything that paid a few coins that instantly disappeared into the mouths of creditors.
He slept when he could and woke with the same incantation on his lips: Today will be better.
Call it a lie, wishful thinking. Yet one that kept his sanity intact... Mostly intact.
He was not a quitter, not by nature. He had grit. He had plans, even if they were small, an extra shift, a saved coin, a better month. But fate has a way of laughing when plans are lined up like dominos.
One evening, while racing against time to deliver a package, a truck clipped his bike from the side. He flew in a way that didn't make sense, as if the world decided to show him the sky all at once. He landed in his own blood.
People gathered. Some wore pity like a shawl; others watched like critics waiting for the curtain call.
A handful whipped out phones and took pictures. Riven wanted to laugh and scream at the same time.
To laugh at the absurdity and scream at the indifference.
He had wanted money, a life that didn't feel like punishment, maybe a little peace. Instead, he stared up at a grey ceiling of clouds and thought about a rumor everyone throws around when they're desperate: reincarnation.
If reincarnation existed, would it be kinder than his twenty-something years of scraping by?
He had expected, in that yawning moment, some pleasant rewrite: better life, less hunger, maybe a fairer hand at an afterlife reborn.
He had been so wrong.
When he opened his eyes again, the world had traded the city's diesel smell for the sharp tang of hay and woodsmoke. The sky looked too wide. People moved differently. His name, Riven Everblade, felt foreign in his mouth but familiar in his bones.
He tried to anchor himself to the small comforts he remembered: breath, pulse, the stubborn ache that said he hadn't given up.
Then the realization settled like a stone in his gut: he had not been born into a comfortable home or into some grand destiny. He had been reborn a slave.
The irony gouged him. On Earth he had complained about choice and chains, but at least he had been free to choose how to ruin himself. Here, his choices had been auctioned off. "Reincarnation" had not saved him; it had exchanged one set of shackles for another.
° Clan, Oath, and the Taste of Iron
At first, things hadn't looked too bad. He woke into the body of someone from a small countryside village. Fields rolled out like stitched cloth, and people greeted one another by name.
Villages like this had a rhythm, simple, unvarnished, communal. He almost believed himself lucky for a breath or two.
They all shared one surname: Everblade. A clan, then. Riven felt a spark of pride in the shared name, an identity like a familiar garment.
That spark burned out fast.
The Everblades were not ordinary villagers. Their existence carried something that made them targets rare enough to be sold for the price of a small nation.
The clan lived by a bitter code, one that valued lineage over life: never let yourself fall into wrong hands.
It was an oath that had lasted generations, a law written in scars and honor and the kind of fervor that cleaved families to principle.
When the raiders came, the village chose ritual over survival. One by one, the clan members set their faces like stone and obeyed the oath. They made their stand in silence and in ceremony, preferring to die than to be caged and sold.
Riven watched as neighbors, kin, elders, even children followed a grim script he could not accept. He remembered the clan leader's gaze, not just disappointment, but something like accusation.
He had expected to feel guilt at being the one to refuse. Instead, his chest was a furnace of fury.
"No." The word was simple and volcanic in his mind.
Fuck the oath. Fuck anyone who thought dying for principle was nobler than living dishonorably.
He would not be dragged into someone else's idea of sanctity. He would not give his life to a law that tied people to the past and left the present to rot.
Riven refused. In a village that had chosen collective self-immolation as an answer, his resolve made him an outlier. He moved not toward the cliff the others approached but away from it, running with a humiliation-grimed fear in his bones that the world did not owe him pity.
He would live. He would survive. He would... Get caught by the raiders.