A dull throb behind his eyes was Prince Adam's first conscious sensation. The second was the soft, insistent weight of a down mattress beneath him, a far cry from the cold stone or reinforced steel he'd grown accustomed to. He burrowed deeper into the pillow, the fog of sleep clinging to him like a shroud.
The door creaked open, and light from the corridor stabbed at his closed eyelids.
A soft footstep, then a voice, hesitant and respectful. "Prince Adam?"
He ignored it. The voice was wrong. Too high. Too young.
It came again, firmer this time. "My Prince? I… I have troublesome news."
Adam grunted, turning his head away. "Go away, Selina. Let a man sleep off a victory."
"It's about the King, Your Highness." The voice wavered. "Your father… King Alfred… is dead."
The words trickled into his sleep-addled brain, not making sense. A dull ache, old and familiar, twinged in his chest. Father. He mumbled into the pillow, his words slurred. "What are you talking about, Mom? My father's been dead for years. Leave me be."
A sharp, shocked silence followed. The maid, Elara, felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach. Mom? She knew the relationship between the King and his bastard firstborn was fractured, a cold, formal thing, but this? This was delirium. She took a tentative step closer to the grand, canopied bed.
"My Prince," she said, her voice low but urgent. "I know there was… bad blood. But that doesn't change the facts. He was your father. The court physicians confirmed it less than an hour ago. Your presence is required in the throne room immediately."
Bad blood? Prince? The words were all wrong, jangling against the memories in his skull. His father wasn't a king. His father was a good man, a hero, who'd been cut down by the very people he called brothers. And Adam… Adam had made them pay. He'd burned their world to cinders for it. He was a villain, a monster. No one spoke to him like this. No one dared.
His eyes snapped open.
The world that came into focus was a blur of rich, deep blues and golds. A high, vaulted ceiling. Tapestries depicting hunting scenes. Morning light streamed through a large, leaded glass window. This wasn't his room. This wasn't any place he had ever known.
He turned his head. A young woman, probably no older than twenty, stood a few feet from the bed. She was dressed in a simple, grey servant's dress, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. Her face was pale, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and duty.
In a movement faster than a cracking whip, Adam was out of the bed. He was across the room before she could even gasp. One hand, hard as iron, clamped around her throat, slamming her back into the cold stone wall. A small vase on a nearby shelf rattled and fell, shattering on the floor. Her eyes bulged, her hands flying up to claw uselessly at his wrist.
He leaned in close, his voice a low, venomous whisper. His face, which should have been that of a pampered prince, was etched with a predator's cold fury. "Who are you?" he hissed. "What is this? If you're in my head, I have to commend you. The detail is impressive. But stop it. Now. Or I swear, when I break out of this, I will find everyone you have ever loved and I will make you watch as I wipe them from the earth."
Elara stared, terror freezing her blood. This wasn't the Prince Adam she knew. The prince she served was sullen, withdrawn, sometimes bitterly sharp with his tongue, but he was… human. This thing holding her was something else. The speed, the strength, the raw, unchecked hatred in his eyes—it was all wrong. His words made no sense. In his head? Mental manipulation?
"My… Prince…?" she choked out, tears starting to well in her eyes. "It's… Elara…"
The pressure on her throat lessened, not by his choice, but because a sledgehammer of foreign memory slammed into his mind.
His grip went slack. Elara stumbled away, coughing and clutching her bruised neck, staring at him in horror.
Adam didn't see her. He saw fire.
He saw his real father's face, smiling, then contorted in betrayal. He saw himself, powers roaring like a runaway sun, tearing the world apart at its seams. He felt the exhilarating, soul-crushing cost of that vengeance—the drain of life, the scorching of his own spirit until there was nothing left but ash and the final, satisfying snap of his enemy's neck. He had died. He had won, and he had died.
Then, a flood of another life, rushing in to fill the void.
A child, small and dark-haired, standing in a vast hall, watching a tall, bearded man in a crown laugh with a golden-haired woman. The man's eyes swept over him, not with hatred, but with a kind of weary dismissal. King Alfred. His… father.
The memories came in a nauseating wave. The Queen's cold, beautiful face. The news, delivered with barely concealed glee by a courtier, that she was finally with child. The birth of his half-brother, the "true" heir. The way the court slowly, surely, turned its back on the king's bastard, the living reminder of a moment of indiscretion. The arguments, the bitter words thrown in the throne room, the king's disappointment warring with his own seething resentment. The bad blood. It was all there. A whole life of quiet rejection and political neglect.
He was still Adam. But he was Prince Adam of Eldoria, the illegitimate firstborn of a dead king.
He looked at his hands. They were the same hands that had unleashed hellfire. Now, they were soft, unblemished, a nobleman's hands. He looked at the girl, Elara, who was pressed against the far wall, trembling, her eyes fixed on him as if he were a demon that had crawled out of a storybook.
The rage was gone, replaced by a cold, sinking realization. This was no illusion. The headache, the feel of the cold stone floor under his bare feet, the ragged sound of the maid's breathing—it was all too real.
He had not just been reborn. He had been dumped into a new game, with a new set of broken pieces, just as the board was tipping over.
He took a slow, deep breath, the kind he used to take before a battle. The action felt unfamiliar in this new body.
"Elara," he said. His voice was different. The venom was gone, replaced by a flat, weary tone that was somehow more frightening.
She flinched.
"The King," he continued, his eyes drifting towards the window, towards the spires of a castle that was now his prison… or his new arsenal. "How did he die?"
Elara swallowed hard, her hand still at her throat. "T-the physicians say it was his heart, Your Highness. In his sleep."
His heart. How… mundane. How utterly, boringly human. A ghost of a smile, thin and cruel, touched his lips. His last life ended in world-annihilating fire. This one began with a failed heart. The irony was almost poetic.
He walked back to the bed, picking up the tunic that had been laid out for him. It was fine silk, embroidered with a crest he now knew was his own—a silver hawk on a field of blue. A bastardized version of the royal golden lion.
"Tell the council I will be there shortly," he said, not looking at her.
Elara hesitated for a moment, then scurried from the room, the door clicking shut behind her with a sound of finality.
Alone, Adam pulled the tunic over his head. The fabric felt alien against his skin. He stared at his reflection in the polished surface of a silver washbasin. A young man in his mid-twenties, with dark, unruly hair and eyes that held a storm the world in this room could not possibly comprehend.
King Alfred was dead. The Queen and her pure-blooded sons would be moving already. They would see him as a nuisance, a stain to be removed.
A slow, familiar heat began to kindle in his gut. It wasn't the world-ending inferno of his past life. Not yet. This was a smaller, colder flame. The flame of a man who had already lost everything once and had just been handed a new set of pieces to play with.
He looked his reflection dead in the eye.
"Alright," he murmured to the prince in the glass. "Let's see what kind of trouble we can get into."