The room was silent. The only sound came from the footsteps of servants coming and going. The air smelled like dried leaves and the bitter medicine I drank earlier. But I wasn't thinking about that. I wasn't thinking about how stiff my body felt.
The room felt familiar and strange at the same time. It was the room I had lived in my whole life, yet it felt like a place I had just moved into. But I couldn't focus on that. A much bigger problem had caught my attention.
My memories... my memories as Lucian Oakheart... they were gone. I could only recall a few things. But since I remembered my name, maybe the rest were slowly coming back to me. My guess is it was due to the dream I just saw. That place it wasn't something that exist in this world. Those memories it was like they were from another world. I guess it was too much for my brain to handle.
"Hmm..... That must be the reason of my missing memories."
As I was thinking about all these my eyes started to wander around the room in order to recall more of my memories until they stopped at a point, on someone.
It was Selene.
She hadn't moved from the bedside since I had fully regained my senses. She was still watching. Still worrying. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, the knuckles pale, betraying the composure she tried so hard to maintain.
To a stranger, she might have looked merely like a concerned sibling, a young noblewoman fretting over a sickly brother. But beneath that calm lay something fiercer.
She was not a delicate flower. I could feel it in the way she held herself: a quiet strength, steel beneath the silk. There was a rigidity in her spine that spoke of stubbornness, a refusal to bow even to the reaper that had nearly claimed me.
The more I watched her, the more my memories began to come back, flowing not like a river, but like puzzle pieces snapping violently into place. This was my sister.
I remembered the way the sunlight used to catch in her hair when we ran through the estate gardens. I remembered her scolding me, hands on her hips, for trying to sneak out in the rain. I remembered her laughter and all the moment I spent with her.
And yet... A part of me didn't know her at all.
It was a disorienting sensation, like hearing a familiar melody with new notes added to it. The "me" that had lived in a world of concrete and electricity looked at this woman and saw a stranger in a pretty dress. But the "me" that was Lucian felt a deep, chest-tightening ache of affection. The two perspectives clashed and swirled, making me dizzy.
I wanted to bridge that gap. I wanted to tell her that I was here, truly here. I opened my mouth to speak to say her name, to break the heavy silence but the heavy oak door creaked open before I could say anything.
The noise shattered the silence in the room.Footsteps echoed off the marbel floor. They were heavy, deliberate steps. Clack. Clack. Clack. There was no hesitation in those steps. A figure entered the room with calm, bringing with him the scent of the outdoorscrisp air and damp earth.
It was....Julian.
My older brother.
He loomed in the doorway before stepping into the light. Tall, broad-shouldered, and dressed in a dark high-collared coat that seemed to swallow the dim light, Julian Oakheart carried himself like a commander, even here, in a quiet bedroom.
His presence changed the air pressure in the room. If Selene was the steel hidden in silk, Julian was the iron drawn from the forge. His jaw was set, his silver hair swept back, and his gaze was sharp yet warm, cutting through the shadows of the sickroom with a clarity that made it hard to look away.
As a child the memories started to resurface immediately. I had followed him like a shadow. I had idolized his strength, his certainty, the way he could quiet a room with a single word. He was everything I wasn't: robust, powerful, the heir who could shoulder the weight of the Oakheart legacy without flinching.
He moved past Selene, who offered him a small, tired nod, and came toward my bed. He knelt down, bringing his face level with mine. The sternness in his eyes melted the moment our gazes locked.
One hand, calloused from sword drills and reins, reached out, briefly resting on my shoulder. The weight of it was grounding.
"You're awake," he said, his voice low but steady. It wasn't a question; it was an affirmation, as if his stating it made it true.
"Thank the stars."
There was a tremor in his voice, microscopic but present. For the first time, I realized that the mighty Julian Oakheart had been afraid. He had been afraid of losing me. The realization sent a sharp pain of guilt through my chest.
I opened my mouth to reply, to apologize for the worry I caused, but the doorway darkened again.
Before I could respond, two more figures appeared behind him filling the doorway and blocking out the light from the corridor.
They were....
Althea Oakheart, our mother.
She glided into the room, and the atmosphere shifted from military stillness to courtly tension. Dressed in flowing green silk embroidered with silver thread that caught the candlelight, her posture was regal. She moved as if she were walking into a throne room, not a sickbay.
Her expression was a careful balance between worry and composure. This was a woman who had navigated the treacherous waters of high society for decades. She had a presence that could calm storms or summon them, depending on her mood.
I watched her hands as she clasped them before her waist. Though soft and slender, manicured to perfection,those were the hands that have done everything they could for the betterment of its people.Even now, I saw that sharpness behind her eyes, scanning the room, checking the medicine bottles, assessing Selene's fatigue.
Yet, when her gaze fell on me, all the sharpness faded. The politician vanished. All that was left was a mother looking at her youngest child. Her eyes softened, replaced by something warm and tender, a raw vulnerability that she would never show to the world outside these walls.
And then came Marcus Oakheart, our father.
He stood taller than them all, a monolith of a man. He lingered in the doorway for a moment, as if he needed to gather the strength to enter. He was broad-chested and stern-faced, his presence commanding absolute respect. His silver hair was tied back severely, and a long dark cloak billowed behind him, still carrying the dust of the road.
He was a man who wore the mantle of leadership not as a burden, but as a calling. Noble, just, patient... and utterly exhausted.
The lines around his eyes were deeper than I remembered. His shoulders, usually squared against the world, slumped ever so slightly. He looked at me with eyes that were warm but rimmed with red, betraying sleepless nights. He was the pillar of House Oakheart, the immovable object, yet the sight of his youngest son bedridden once again had chipped away at his stone facade.
He approached without words. The silence he carried was heavy, but not oppressive. It was the silence of deep, abiding emotion that had no language.
Julian moved aside, allowing Father to reach the bedside. The great Lord Oakheart reached out, his hand trembling slightly just once before steadying.
He brushed his palm lightly against my forehead.The gesture was so simple, so human. His hand was rough, warm, and impossibly large. It was a touch that remembered cooling my fevers when I was a toddler; a touch that had guided my first steps. It calmed me more than any speech could have. It told me I was safe. It told me I was home.
I wanted to say something. Anything. I wanted to tell them about the confusing dreams, the flashing lights, the strange mechanical beasts I had seen in my mind. I wanted to ask them why the world felt so small and yet so vast.
But my throat felt tight, constricted by a swell of emotion that belonged to both the boy I was and the man I had been.
All I could manage was a small nod.
The tension in the room broke. Shoulders dropped. Breaths were released.
We were all here now. The Oakhearts.
My family.
Minee.
The word echoed in my mind, possessive and desperate. The man in the memories had never felt such a sense of protection. But here, surrounded by the smell of velvet, leather, and old wood, I felt anchored.
Even if half my soul still drifted in a world of glowing screens, engines, and towers of steel. Even if the ghost of a skyscraper still overlaid the vision of the wooden rafters.
The family began to speak amongst themselves in hushed tones Mother asking Selene about the doctor's report, Julian briefing Father on the estate matters he had handled in the interim but their voices washed over me like a gentle tide.
As I lay back against the pillows, letting the warmth of their presence seep into my bones, my thoughts turned inward.
Who had I been?
A man of a different time. A man of science, of cynicism,of medicine,of noise.
Who was I now?
Lucian Oakheart. A frail noble in a world of steam.
I didn't have all the answers not yet. The memories were still a tangled mess, a gordian knot of two lives fused violently together.
But I knew this much:
I had died. The screech of tires, the wall of red,that was the end.
And I was born again. The gasp of air in this bed,that was the beginning.
And this time... I wasn't just Lucian Oakheart, the sick boy who watched the world from his window. And I wasn't just a stranger from the future.
I was someone new. Someone forged in the collision of the two.
I was something between two worlds. A bridge between the ancient magic of this world and the cold logic of the world I had just seen.
My gaze moved from Julian's proud stance to Mother's gentle hands, to Father's weary stoicism, and finally to Selene's watchful eyes. They saw Lucian. They saw the boy they loved.
They didn't see the other one.
And though my body was weak, my mind my soul was awake. It was sharper than it had ever been.
And watching.