He did not wake up screaming.
That was the first thing Amaron noticed — how quiet it was. He had expected something dramatic. A gasp, a bolt upright, the cold sweat and racing heart of a man pulled back from the edge of oblivion. Instead he simply opened his eyes, stared at a wooden ceiling he had not seen in over a decade, and lay completely still for a long moment while his mind sorted through the information arriving from his body.
Small hands. That was wrong.
He raised one of them and examined it in the pale morning light coming through a narrow window. The knuckles were unmarked. The fingers were slim and unhardened, the palm without callus. The hand of a boy who had never worked a dungeon shift, never gripped a mana rod for six hours straight, never broken the same two fingers twice on a cave wall in the dark.
He was fifteen.
He knew this the way he knew everything about this day — because he had lived it before. He had stood in this exact room, in this exact body, on this exact morning, and thought nothing of it. He had dressed, eaten a meal he couldn't remember, and walked to the Awakening Hall with the same quiet anonymity that would define the next twelve years of his life.
He sat up slowly.
— ◆ —
The room was small and clean in the way of deliberate poverty — nothing wasted, nothing decorative, every surface serving a purpose. A chest at the foot of the narrow bed. A small desk with a cracked leg propped on a folded cloth. A window facing east that caught the early sun well enough to make a candle unnecessary until evening. The boarding house of Caldren Street, Valdenmere's third district, where people of no particular importance lived their lives of no particular consequence.
He had grown up here. He had left here at sixteen for his first Guild contract. He had never come back.
Amaron sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his hands again. Then he looked at the window. Then at the chest. He was doing inventory — not of the room, but of himself, methodically working through the question of what, exactly, had happened to him.
He was dead. He was certain of that. The weight of the stone had been absolute.
He was also fifteen, in a body he had last occupied twenty-four years ago, on the morning of his Awakening Ceremony, in a city that would not see the Rift Sovereign attack for another twelve years.
He had been given something. He did not yet know what to call it.
— ◆ —
He stood, crossed to the window, and looked out at Valdenmere waking up. The third district stirred slowly — cart wheels on cobblestone, a woman hanging laundry from a second-floor sill, the distant bell of the morning market beginning its first hour. The city looked exactly as he remembered it from this precise vantage point, and the precision of it was unsettling in a way he chose not to dwell on.
Instead he thought about what he knew.
Today was the fourteenth of Ashmonth, in the three hundred and forty-second year of the Ardenmoor Calendar. Today was the day the Awakening Hall opened its doors to every sixteen-year-old in Valdenmere — and Amaron Volg, who had turned sixteen three weeks ago, was among them. By noon he would place both hands on a mana crystal and the world would be told, officially and permanently, what he was worth.
In his first life, the crystal had read F.
He had not understood then what he understood now: that the crystal was not wrong.
His natural mana capacity, the thing a person was born with and could not change, was genuinely F-rank. That was real. He had spent nine years confirming it through every piece of Hunter theory he could get his hands on. The body he had been born with was unremarkable in every measurable way.
What the crystal could not measure was everything else.
— ◆ —
He dressed. The clothes in the chest were exactly where he remembered them — folded with the careful precision of someone who owned few enough things that each one mattered. He ate the meal that was waiting downstairs: hard bread, soft cheese, a cup of something warm that was not quite tea. The woman who ran the boarding house, whose name he had forgotten in his first life and now remembered was Maren, said good morning without looking up from her ledger. He said good morning back.
She did not look at him. People never did.
He walked out into the morning.
The Awakening Hall was two districts north and roughly forty minutes on foot. He knew the route exactly. He also knew which streets were faster, which vendor near the fourth-district gate made the best case for stopping despite the time, and that the Hall's eastern entrance had a shorter queue than the main gate because most people didn't know about it. Details he had accumulated across a lifetime of navigating this city while everyone else navigated toward the things that mattered.
He took the eastern entrance.
The queue was short. A handful of other sixteen-year-olds, most of them accompanied by at least one parent, stood in loose clusters and vibrated with the particular nervous energy of people who believed today would define them. For most of them, it would. Amaron stood apart and watched them with the patience of a man who had already been defined and found the definition insufficient.
One boy near the front was performing confidence badly, his voice too loud, his laughter a half-second too quick. He would rank D, Amaron recalled. He would join a minor Guild, work mid-level dungeons for six years, and eventually settle into a comfortable career managing equipment for an A-rank team. A decent life. An invisible one.
Amaron did not pity him. He recognized him.
— ◆ —
The wait took just over an hour. He spent it in stillness, watching the other arrivals, cataloguing faces against the names he knew from his first life. Three of the people in this queue would become notable by the story's end. Two would die before it finished. One was standing near the back, already apart from the group, a girl with her arms crossed and her gaze fixed somewhere above the Hall's entrance like she was reading something written on the sky.
He did not know her name yet. In his first life he had never learned it. That, he thought, was exactly the kind of thing he needed to change.
But not today. Today had a specific purpose, and deviation carried risk. The plan — the long, careful, twelve-year plan he had already begun constructing in the forty minutes since opening his eyes — required that today go exactly as it had before. Exactly as unremarkably, exactly as forgettably, exactly as invisibly.
The door opened. The queue moved forward.
Amaron Volg walked into the Awakening Hall, and for the last time in his life, he did it as nobody.