That night I laid in the comfort of my own bed, face to the ceiling, counting the drift of woodsmoke on every exhale.
Aurelian, twelve years old, future of nothing in particular, and sole inheritor of a secret I didn't want.
My Mother and Father's voices had faded an hour ago, but I could still hear the emotions of their voices…
Hope, sharpened to a knife's edge by fear.
They wanted a quiet destiny for me. Safety. Survival. Maybe a nice girl from a noble household and a job that wouldn't kill me before forty.
But Alice d'Árcenne's words wouldn't budge.
The invitation sounded more than a threat than promise.
She must've saw something only 'those people' could see.
The way she'd looked at me, it was like I was a chemical equation she could balance if only she saw the right element combust.
The future forked in two, and in neither did I get to be what I pretended.
Though I couldn't help it, I could almost map out the pass where I'd wiped out those twenty-three men.
Only it wasn't them that haunted me now.
It was the moment before they vanished, the microsecond where Flux touched the bandit leader's skin.
There was something there. An energy I hadn't felt in five hundred years.
Demonic energy.
In my old life, we called it by a dozen names; malign, void, abyssal taint but the effect was always the same.
You could spot it in the way a man's shadow flickered faster than his body, or in the too-sharp angle of a smile, the way his aura chewed up the light around him.
Demonic energy wasn't like mana, which came from the world, or Flux, which came from within.
Demonic energy was transactional.
You gave something up whether it would be your pain, your rage, or even your sense of self.
In doing so a piece of the abyss gave you power in return. The more you fed it, the more it fed on you.
In the pass, as I'd cut that leader from the world, I'd felt a pulse of it.
Faint, but as distinctive as the smell of old blood. It should have been gone.
My final act, my suicide play at the heart of the Merger, had been to burn out every trace of the Abyssal King's lineage.
That was the deal. I died, and so did he, and everything crawling after him.
That was the promise the Saints had made to me, right before they lied to the world about what happened.
That was the part I couldn't explain, even to myself.
If the Abyss was really gone, then what the hell was left to contaminate a pack of idiots in a provincial ravine?
I turned it over and over, peeling back my memory and sense.
"Fuck, that can't be true."
The thought of daring myself to consider the possibility that my suicide run didn't work after all was genuinely absurd.
After all, it wasn't a martyr, it was a failed assassination attempt who missed the most important target in the world.
Because If the Abyss was still here, and if it was hiding itself in backwaters and bandit cells, it was going to get much, much worse before anyone noticed it.
And they wouldn't notice. Not until it was too late.
"Haah… I need to get my mind off these things."
Getting up I quickly put on my boots and leaped outside of the window.
It was a three-mile jog to the Shrouded Woods and I could have made it in half that if I wasn't so obsessed with not being seen by the night watch or the neighbor's dog.
The sky above was just clear enough that the stars hooked my attention, constellations I remembered from the old world but not the ones these people mapped to their own stories.
Funny how the world changed, but not the sky.
It was the only thing left that made me feel like my old self had ever really lived.
As I ran through the forest, the birch and black fir packed so tight they stifled the wind.
I'd barely passed the first ring of boulders when the air changed.
There was a pressure in the atmosphere, a subtle taste like old copper on the back of the tongue.
I slowed, letting my breathing settle, and tried to trace the arc of my memory.
The Sky-Severing Draw had been a disaster.
I'd lost control—no, I'd never had control to begin with.
The sword wasn't the problem. The problem was the feedback loop: five centuries of perfect technique trying to brute-force itself through the mismatched nerves and unfinished bones of a child.
It was like pouring molten steel into a wax mold, expecting it to survive the casting.
That was the reason I was here was not to become strong but to see if I could survive my own power for more than an instant.
You can say it was a systems check, nothing else.
The first thing to do was to find a target that wouldn't draw attention if it disappeared.
I stalked the edges of the first clearing for a while, letting my senses attune to the local ecosystem.
The woods had a hierarchy: nightbirds, rodents, the occasional fox or wolf, and, at the top, the aberrants.
I heard it before I saw it.
A dragging, wet sound, like someone pulling a rug of meat across the underbrush.
I crouched behind a fallen log and peered through the gaps.
Ten yards ahead, feeding on the half-gone corpse of a deer, was a Wraith-Troll.
I'd fought its kind before. They weren't native to this world; they were a post-War crossbreed of demon and blighted magic with their forms held together more by spite than muscle.
The thing was bigger than me by a factor of three.
Its body was a mashed-together geometry of arms and legs, with a chest like a bread oven and a head that looked more like a tumor than anything that should have eyes.
Its arms ended in spade-shaped claws. Its breath steamed, even in the summer night.
"GYAH, GYAH, GYAH!"
I circled out wide hoping they'd notice me, but the Wraith-Troll didn't care.
It was too busy shoveling meat into the throbbing void where a throat should have been.
So I picked my approach slow and careful.
I decided that if they weren't gonna look my way, I guess a single rock in the palm will be the one to get its attention.
BANG!
"…?!"
I flung the rock. It hit the thing's back with a sound like a mallet on wet clay.
The jaws stopped moving. In a motion too fast for its bulk, the troll reared up, eyes rolling white in the moonlight, then spun toward the noise.
"Over here dumbass."
It bellowed an awful, high-pitched sound that rattled my bones like a tuning fork.
Then it charged with its knees slamming up so high it looked like it wanted to trample the air itself before it got to me.
Hooh…Haah…
I waited until it closed the distance.
I let it get close enough to smell, close enough to see the red-black ooze caked around its teeth.
Then I moved.
The first time, I tried bare hands, nothing fancy.
I ducked under its swinging arm and planted my palm on the soft flesh beneath its ribs.
BAKK!
Even without any amplification, the shock of impact nearly dislocated my shoulder.
The troll howled and twisted, claws raking the ground where my head had just been.
"I guess this bodies still weak to fight without Flux…"
I let the next breath out slow.
And focused on the center of core.
SHK!!
Instead of letting Flux spread through my body, I funneled it into my arms only, wrists down. It felt like dipping my hands in boiling oil; the skin crawled with black energy, a pressure so intense I could see the veins under my skin turn to shadow.
Munitio Flux.
The art of funneling flux into an area of your body.
GYAKK!!
The troll came again, both arms together this time, a hammerblow meant to pulp my skull.
I met it, stepped into the strike, and let my left hand meet its right fist, palm out.
BAM!
I didn't even have to touch it.
The flux caught the air between us.
For a second, time snapped in half: a shockwave, silent and perfect, radiating from my palm to the troll's outstretched limb.
Everything in the wave's path—muscle, bone, cartilage—simply parted.
The troll's arm exploded at the elbow, black mist and shards of meat spraying the clearing.
The rest of its mass tumbled past me, the force of its own swing carrying it into the dirt.
I followed, ignoring the stink.
I pressed my right hand to the back of its neck, just above the spinal hump, and pushed.
"Ah… it's over."
There was no resistance. The entire upper spine collapsed under my fingers.