The world beyond death was not darkness, nor silence, nor oblivion.
It was white.
White flowers stretched endlessly across the horizon, bowing gently under a breeze that carried no scent.
The sky was awash in pale gold, as though the dawn itself had been trapped forever in this place. A crystal fountain rose in the middle of the meadow.
Beyond it stood a monument carved of ivory stone, and columns that stretched toward eternity.
Aron stood barefoot upon the meadow. He remembered pain, the sting of blood in his lungs, and his comrades, dying and fading into silence. He remembered the Demon Lord's last roar and his own blade finding the monster's heart.
Victory, peace, and then nothing.
So why was he here, surrounded by paradise?
"Aron."
A voice, soft. Around turned his gaze behind him, and sitting upon a stone slab near the fountain was a woman cloaked in a white dress.
Her hair was silver as moonlight, and tied into a simple ponytail. Her beauty transcends beyond that of human comprehension-- perfection even. Yet, she looked too simple for a goddess.
"Come."
He obeyed before realizing his feet had moved. When he stood before her, she smiled-- not the distant smile, the kind a mother gives a suffering child.
He sat beside her.
For a time, she said nothing, and the fountain sang for them both.
Her hands moved preoccupied and carefully, drawing a needle through white fabric stretched taut across her lap.
"You're quiet," she finally whispered, her gaze fixed on him.
"Most souls cry. Or beg. Or rage. You… do none of these."
"…I've done enough of all three already."
The needle slipped, then resumed. "You fought so long didn't you, my child? Longer than anyone should. And now the burden's gone."
"Is it?" He replied.
Her hands paused on the cloth. She glanced at him, then back to her stitches.
"You carried much."
Carried, that was the word. He carried hunger as a child of a prostitute, abandoned to the filth of the slums, where survival meant stealing or starving.
He carried chains at fourteen, when the guards seized him for his crimes, only to release him because he was still just a boy.
He carried resolve when he begged those same guards to let him join them, hoping to crawl out of the muck of his birth.
The thread drew taut.
"Did you find what you sought?" she asked.
"I found war."
War had welcomed him with open arms. The Demon Kingdom's shadow stretched long over the frontier, and his city found in the frontlines bled for its survival.
The guards had taken him in, trained him, tempered him. He rose through the ranks, quicker than anyone expected, until they called him knight, then commander.
And on the day of his ascension, when the Church and King blessed him, another hand came forth from the heavens-- unseen and divine.
Bellum, the God of War, had claimed him. From that moment, he was no longer Aron. He took the title of the Hero.
The Hero of Mankind who would then save countless of human lives, forge empires, and slaughter demons who had become humanity's bane of existence.
But the title was forged with blood. His men, his comrades, one by one left behind on the battlefield. Until finally, he carved open the Demon Lord himself-- only to collapse from wounds that victory could not erase.
He clenched his fists. "…And here I am."
She tied off a knot and studied it. "The burden is gone. The Demon Lord has perished. Yet you sit beside me with a different heart."
"Killing the Demon Lord didn't kill the cruelty in men's hearts."
He remembered all to well.
The slums, where starving children slit each other's throats over stale bread while the city guards laughed and wagered coins on who would survive.
He remembered the barracks, where men he had trained with for years were discarded as "acceptable losses" by nobles who never once set foot on the battlefield.
He remembered the court, where jealous lords whispered that he was a mongrel unfit for command, scheming not against demons but against him, their supposed hero.
And worst of all, he remembered the faces of the civilians he saved, and how quickly gratitude soured into resentment when rations ran short, how easily they turned on one another the moment fear outweighed hope.
His comrades didn't die for these things to happen.
"…I saw it too many times to believe otherwise."
Her gaze flickered from her sewing to his face. "Then what would you ask, if given the chance?"
He leaned forward, eyes hard.
"Don't give me rest. Don't give me dreams of peace. If there's another life, give me the blade again. Let me cut out the rot."
She let out a sigh. For a long time she said nothing, only drew the thread through the fabric.
"…You are a tragic man, Aron," she whispered at last. "And perhaps it is someone such as yourself that have the power to reshape the world."
She tied one last knot, cut the thread, and the flowers bowed around them.
"Then so be it. A hundred years shall pass. You will return not as you were, but as another. Carry your burden again, if that is your will. But know this--"
Her eyes met his, with pity and awe.
"--the path you choose will consume you more than the last."
"I hope your path does not end where His began."
The needle slipped from her fingers.
And then suddenly, light devoured him, and the last thing he heard was her whisper, soft as mourning:
"Tread well, Executioner."
The stench of iron. The sound of water dripping somewhere in the dark.
Aron awoke choking on a gasp that was not his own. His wrists burned with blood that should have drained the life out of him, but the wounds were healing-- threads of crimson closing the wounds. Bellum's power in him surged, keeping him alive.
He sat up, trembling, and only then noticed the reflection in the broken mirror next to him.
Not a warrior.
A girl.
Pale, delicate, with long hair spilling like silk over her shoulders. A face in her youth, fragile, eyes too wide and too hollow. A beauty that would have been admired, even worshipped, if not for the darkness that clung to it.
"…What is this?" His voice caught in a throat that wasn't his.
And then pain. A memory surged through his head in speeds of light. But it was not his.
Amelia von Blutracher.
The daughter of the late Duchess Lynette von Blutracher. Cherished once by both the Duke and the Duchess. Until her mother fell to a curse that no healer could unravel.
And when her coffin was lowered into the earth, the love around her turned rotted into neglect. The Duke remarried. The new wife smiled with painted lips, but her eyes were knives. Her daughter followed, a reflection of spite.
Rumors spread, whispered first by servants, then by neighbors, then by the city beyond: Amelia is cursed. A child who brought death to her mother. A blight upon the house.
Sixteen years turned into suffering.
Kindness turned to avoidance. Avoidance turned to cruelty. Maids shrank from her touch, mocking her when backs were turned. Some shoved, some spat, some left broken glass where her bare feet might find it. Each day, she unraveled a little more.
Until finally, with trembling hands, Amelia slit her wrists and begged the silence to take her.
Aron saw it all in fragments. He felt her loneliness. Her despair. Her final desperate prayer.
And then he realized.
It was his soul that had answered.
Aron clenched his, her fists.
The blood on the floor had stopped pooling; Amelia's wounds were nothing but faint scars now. But her memories lingered, suffocating him.
"She wanted to live," he whispered to the empty chamber.
His reflection in the glass shards shifted as he leaned closer.
"And they drove her to this."
The power of the God of War stirred in her veins, answering his wrath. His rebirth had been no accident.
"Evil wore many masks-- demon, tyrant, human."
Amelia had been crushed beneath the pettiest, ugliest kind of evil.
Aron's lips curled into a bitter smile that did not belong to a sixteen-year-old noble girl.
"Very well. If they believe Amelia is cursed, then..."
"I will show them what a curse truly is."
END OF CHAPTER ONE