After a moment of silence, Grimsworth straightened his posture. "Alright," he said quietly. "If destiny allows it… we'll meet again." He bowed slightly — a small, careful gesture that carried more resignation than reverence — then turned and walked away without another word.
Axiros watched him go.
Only after Grimsworth's figure had fully disappeared into the distance did he finally let himself relax.
A low chuckle escaped him. Then another. It grew, quietly, into something that was almost laughter.
"Destiny…" he muttered to himself, shaking his head. "What a joke."
If destiny truly existed — if it had any real shape or intention — then why had it dragged him through an eternity of suffering in the first place? Why had it forced him to watch everyone he had ever cared about wither and die, again and again and again, until the grief stopped feeling like grief and just became another texture of existence? Destiny was a word mortals invented when they needed something to blame that wasn't themselves. A comfortable fiction. Nothing more.
The laughter faded slowly, leaving only a quiet, familiar bitterness in its place.
He turned and continued walking.
---
The journey was exhausting in a way he hadn't fully anticipated.
From the moment he left the battlefield behind, it felt as though the world itself had decided to make things difficult. There was no safe road. No quiet stretch of land where he could simply breathe and move without his guard up. Everywhere he walked, the war had already been.
Burnt trees stood like black skeletons along the road. Broken weapons lay half-buried in the dirt. Abandoned tents sagged and rotted where they had been left. And bodies — far too many of them — lay where they had fallen, untouched, unburied, already beginning to return to the earth.
The smell of blood and smoke never faded. It clung to his clothes, settled into each breath, followed him like a second shadow no matter how far he walked.
His body wasn't helping either. Every step sent a quiet ache through his muscles. Sometimes his vision blurred without warning, and he had to stop and press a hand against whatever was nearby — a tree, a broken wall, a collapsed cart — just to steady himself until it passed. His mind wasn't weak, his vessel was.
But he never thought about turning back. He simply kept moving. One step, then another.
The first attack came sooner than he expected.
A group of men burst out from behind a collapsed wagon — thin-faced, desperate-eyed, the kind of people a war leaves behind when it moves on and takes everything with it. They had clearly decided he was an easy target. A lone boy. Starving by the look of him. Small pouch at his side. Not worth much concern.
They were wrong.
One swung a sword at his head. Axiros tilted slightly to one side and the blade passed through empty air. Another came at his back with a short knife. He rotated just enough for the thrust to slide past his ribs without touching them. There was nothing flashy about it. No dramatic display. He simply moved — calmly, naturally, with the unhurried ease of someone who had already seen every version of this particular situation more times than he could count.
The shift in their energy was immediate.
Panic spread through the group like a crack running through old glass. Their attacks came faster, harder, more desperate — and sloppier for it. Whatever coordination they had started with dissolved within moments. One dropped his weapon entirely, stumbling backward. Another caught a sharp, precise strike to the side of his neck and went down hard. The rest took one look at each other and ran without exchanging a word.
Axiros didn't chase them.
He adjusted his collar and kept walking.
But they weren't the last.
On crumbling roads, scavengers tried to take him from behind. Near broken-down bridges, mercenaries stepped out to block his path with the practiced confidence of men who had done it many times before. At night, when he stopped to rest, thieves crept toward him in the dark — slow, careful, certain he was asleep. Again and again, people tried to end his life.
Again and again, they failed and walked away with nothing to show for it but bruises and wounded pride.
He disarmed some. Left others unconscious in the dirt. A few he simply looked at in a way that made them decide, quickly and unanimously, that they had somewhere else to be. He didn't kill any of them. Not out of mercy exactly — more out of indifference. They weren't worth the effort. They were insects, and you didn't waste energy swatting at insects.
Days passed.
---
By the time a settlement finally appeared on the horizon — a dark smudge of rooftops and walls against the pale sky — he was running on fumes.
Dust covered him from the road. Small cuts mapped his arms and hands from a dozen minor encounters. His hair had long since given up any pretense of order. His legs ached with a bone-deep heaviness that he had been ignoring for the better part of two days.
But his eyes were calm.
In the time it had taken him to cross that stretch of ruined land, his body had come close to giving out more than once. Muscles trembling past the point of warning. Lungs burning with each climb over rubble or fallen trees. Vision going soft at the edges in ways that told him the body was approaching its absolute limit.
His will kept him moving when his body would have stopped. He managed what little energy he had with the kind of ruthless efficiency that came from practice — wasting nothing, conserving what he could, pushing forward.
For three days he had lived on whatever he could find in abandoned camps and overturned supply carts. Stale bread that crumbled when he touched it.
Fruit that was most of the way to rot but still edible enough to matter. Water gathered from shallow streams hidden between rocks, or scraped from morning dew sitting on leaves in the quieter patches of land between the destruction.
It was enough. Barely. But enough.
During those days, he had also been quietly taking stock of the body he now inhabited.
It was not in good condition.
Weak. Underfed. Run into the ground long before he had arrived in it. The frame was lean in the way that spoke of chronic hunger rather than discipline. And the scars — there were so many of them.
Thin white lines from old cuts. Burn marks. Jagged, uneven traces left by something that hadn't been accidental. Some of the damage looked like the result of hard training pushed too far. Other marks had no explanation except cruelty.
Whatever life this boy had lived before, it hadn't been kind to him. Whoever he had been, comfort had never been a feature of his existence.
Axiros studied each scar quietly when he rested. Said nothing about them. Moved on.
Five days after leaving the battlefield, he reached the city's outskirts.
He was, by any honest measure, barely holding together. Each step felt like it was costing him more than he had. His stomach had moved past ordinary hunger into the hollow, numb ache that came after.
His limbs felt like they belonged to someone else. He was running on the last dregs of stubbornness, and even that had a bottom.
He needed food. Soon.
Rather than approach the main gate, he moved along the outer wall until he found a smaller entrance tucked away on the far side. The reasoning was simple — the main gate would want documentation.
Seals. Identification of some kind. He had none of those things, and showing up at the front door with nothing but a worn pouch and a face nobody recognized would invite exactly the kind of attention he didn't want.
The smaller entrance was nearly unguarded. A couple of watchtowers, worn-looking, likely understaffed — most of the city's fighting force had probably been pulled toward the front. He slipped through without trouble.
And stepped into a completely different world.
---
The narrow passage opened directly into a marketplace, and noise hit him like a physical thing.
Merchants shouted over one another from every direction. Wooden carts lined the streets, piled high with fruit, fabrics, tools, and odds and ends that didn't have an obvious category.
The smell was a layered, complicated thing — cooked meat and dust and unfamiliar spices and the particular warmth of a crowd pressed together in a small space. People moved in every direction at once, bargaining, arguing, laughing, pushing past each other without apology.
"Five oranges for one Rox! Best deal you'll find all day!" a vendor hollered, thrusting a handful of fruit toward anyone who made the mistake of making eye contact.
"Sharp, strong, and cheap! Best blades in the district!" came a shout from somewhere to the left, followed by the metallic ring of a sword being lifted for display.
Children wove between the stalls with wooden sticks held aloft, chasing each other in elaborate games that had very specific rules only they fully understood. Their laughter cut clean through the noise. Even in his first life, in the very beginning, childhood had not looked like that for him. He had never quite had access to that particular kind of light.
He stood at the edge of it all and just looked.
After so long spent in silence and emptiness and the specific suffocating dark of the void, the sheer density of life in front of him was almost too much to take in at once. Sound, movement, color, the messy and relentless texture of people simply existing — it crashed over him in waves. He stood there with his mouth barely open, half-afraid that if he moved too quickly it would dissolve. He wasn't shocked, his body was.
It had been a very long time since he had seen anything so alive.
But he had lived long enough to know better than to stop at the surface of things.
In the darker corners of the market, rough-looking men loitered near shops with the comfortable posture of people who owned a place they had no legal claim to. Some merchants handed coins over in silence without being asked, eyes down. Others argued and got shoved aside for it. Pickpockets drifted through the crowd like water, there and gone before the space they had occupied even registered.
Peace, he thought, was always a performance. It had a front and a back, and they never looked the same. No place stayed genuinely peaceful for long. Desire and greed and the endless human appetite for more would always find the cracks, and they would always widen them.
He had watched it happen in every world he had ever passed through.
This one was no different.
"Hah…" Axiros exhaled quietly and rubbed the back of his neck. "Time to find food and water. I'm still a mortal. This body has needs whether I like it or not."
He moved through the market slowly, stopping at stall after stall, asking prices and listening carefully before moving on. It felt strange. He sighed heavily. He was used to hunger, pain and weakness.
Pride was a luxury he couldn't currently afford, and he had long since learned not to carry things that didn't serve him.
He settled on the cheapest options available. A few loaves of bread, still faintly warm. Some fruit, edged with bruising but fine. A single bottle of clean water. He counted out the coins, felt the pouch go noticeably lighter, and tucked what remained away carefully.
He ate a small portion on the spot — just enough to stop the worst of it — and then began asking around for somewhere to sleep.
His instructions to everyone he asked were the same.
"Cheapest inn you know. Or a motel. Anything that won't empty my pocket in one night."
Every single person gave him the same answer.
"The Light Bloom Inn."
The first time, he noted it and moved on. The second time, something in the back of his mind stirred. By the fourth or fifth repetition, the unease had settled in properly. Too consistent. No variation, no alternatives offered, no one saying "well, there's also" — just the same name, every time, from everyone, without hesitation.
That wasn't how word of mouth worked. That was something else.
Still, he had no real options. No money for transportation. No map. No connections in this city. No way to navigate except on his own two feet and the directions of strangers who all happened to want him in the same place.
He stopped a passing stranger. "Excuse me. The Light Bloom Inn — which direction?"
"Few kilometers west," the man said, already moving on.
"Thanks." Axiros turned west and started walking.
As the noise of the market thinned behind him and the streets grew quieter, his expression settled into something harder.
Something wasn't right. It had been wrong from the moment the first person answered him. Nobody pointed a stranger, especially one who looked like he did — road-worn, cut up, obviously without resources — toward the same place that reliably. Either the inn had a reputation that genuinely preceded it to that degree, or someone had put the word out.
A trap. An ambush. A place that made a habit of parting outsiders from whatever little they had, by whatever means proved most efficient.
Axiros exhaled slowly through his nose.
If something was waiting on the road, he would handle it on the road. If the danger was inside the inn itself, he would find it there. He had crossed an entire landscape of war and desperation on a body that had been ready to collapse for two days. He had survived considerably worse than a setup in a city he'd walked into an hour ago.
If fate wanted another round, he thought with a quiet, humorless edge —
Then it was welcome to try.