They did not blindfold him.
Aldir Frost noticed that first.
They led him through the capital streets of Asteria at dawn, chains biting into his wrists, iron collar cold against his throat, and yet no hood was drawn over his eyes. He was meant to see it. The city.
The people. The way windows opened like watching eyes and then shut again when his gaze brushed them.
Fear, he realized, was quieter than hatred.
The cobblestones were still wet from the night rain. Each step sent a dull ache up his bare feet, skin already split and raw from weeks in the dungeons. He walked anyway. He always had. Walking had never been optional in his life—only falling was.
The guards flanking him were armored too well for an early execution. Polished steel. Crests freshly etched. They smelled of oil and incense, not sweat or blood. Parade soldiers. Symbols.
I am a lesson, Aldir thought.
A mother pulled her child closer as he passed. The boy stared openly, eyes wide, curious rather than afraid. Aldir met the child's gaze for half a heartbeat before a guard shoved his head forward.
"Don't look at them," the guard muttered, not unkindly. "Makes it harder."
Harder for whom, Aldir wondered. The child? Or you?
The square loomed ahead.
Gallows rose like a skeletal finger accusing the sky, wood darkened from old rain and older deaths. The platform beneath it had been scrubbed clean, but Aldir could still smell iron soaked into grain—blood that no washing ever truly erased.
A crowd had gathered early.
Not cheering. Not chanting. Just… present. People leaned against one another, murmuring, exchanging rumors like currency.
The emperor was kind, they say. He was a mercenary. Of course it was him. They say he ripped the soul out. They say devils taught him.
Aldir listened without reacting. He had learned long ago that protest wasted breath. When his parents had thrown him into the street, he hadn't screamed. When hunger folded him double in alleys, he hadn't begged. When fists broke his ribs for existing in the wrong place, he hadn't cursed.
Silence had been his armor.
At the foot of the gallows, a robed priest waited. Gold-threaded vestments. A face carved into solemn pity. He held a scroll and a symbol of the Radiant God, its surface glowing faintly.
The glow made Aldir's skin crawl.
"Do you confess," the priest asked loudly, "to the assassination of His Divine Majesty, Emperor Valerius III of Asteria?"
Aldir lifted his head.
He searched the crowd—not for allies, but for truth. He saw none. Not even hatred. Just relief. Relief that it was not them standing there.
"I didn't kill him," Aldir said.
His voice was hoarse, unused. The words fell flat, swallowed by open air.
The priest sighed, as though disappointed. "Then may the gods judge you."
They already have, Aldir thought.
The noose was rough hemp. It smelled faintly of mold and old sweat. When it slipped around his neck, he flinched despite himself. His body remembered pain better than his mind wanted to.
They positioned him carefully. Precisely. Execution was a ritual, after all.
As the hood finally came down, darkness wrapped around him like a coffin lid.
Aldir's thoughts wandered—not to regret, but to memory.
A frozen night beneath a collapsed bridge. The sound of mercenaries laughing as coins changed hands above him. His mother's face, not cruel—just empty. His father's back, walking away.
He realized something strange then.
He wasn't afraid of dying.
He was afraid that dying would prove the world right.
The trapdoor dropped.
The rope snapped taut.
Pain exploded.
It was not clean. Not quick.
The force crushed his throat, vertebrae screaming as the rope burned into skin. His body convulsed violently, instincts firing in useless panic. His tongue swelled. Spots burst behind his eyes. Air vanished.
Time stretched into something obscene.
His legs kicked, scraping wood. Fingers clawed at nothing. The iron collar dug into his jaw as pressure mounted, crushing thought into noise.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
His lungs spasmed, demanding what no longer existed. Sound fled him—no scream, no cry. Just the wet, choking silence of a body realizing it had been betrayed by reality.
And then—
Something else.
Just as darkness began to close completely, something pulled.
Not upward.
Down.
Past pain. Past fear. Past the fragile boundary of flesh.
Aldir felt himself tear.
Death did not end him.
It opened him.
The world inverted.
He fell—not through air, but through memory. Every humiliation replayed at once. Every wound. Every night spent staring at a ceiling wondering if tomorrow was worth the effort. The sensations were too vivid, too sharp, as if something were feeding on them.
Then came the whispers.
Not voices. Concepts.
You endured. You were shaped. You belong.
A presence wrapped around his soul—cold, vast, patient. It did not comfort him. It did not threaten him.
It recognized him.
He understood, then, with terrifying clarity: his life had never been random. Poverty. Abandonment. Survival. All of it had been erosion, grinding him down until only the unbreakable core remained.
"You died unjustly," the presence conveyed. "Therefore, you are fit."
Fit for what?
The answer was agony.
His soul was branded. Not with fire, but absence. Something was removed—something fragile. Something hopeful.
When Aldir opened his eyes, he was screaming.
Sound tore from his throat, raw and animal, echoing through soil and wood and stone. His body convulsed violently, muscles seizing as lungs dragged in air that tasted of rot.
Dirt filled his mouth.
He was buried.
Hands—his hands—burst through earth, fingers snapping, nails tearing away. Soil collapsed as he clawed upward, lungs burning anew, panic returning in waves.
No—no—no—
The coffin shattered under unnatural strength. Aldir tore himself free, gasping, choking, vomiting mud and blackened blood as moonlight spilled over him.
He collapsed onto wet grass, body trembling uncontrollably.
He was alive.
No.
Not alive.
His heart did not pound. It thudded slowly, irregularly, like something remembering how. His breath misted the air though the night was not cold. His skin was pale—too pale—veins dark beneath it like ink.
And worst of all—
He could feel the dead.
Beneath him. Around him. Thousands of quiet presences humming softly, waiting. A graveyard breathing as one.
Aldir laughed.
The sound cracked, broken, hysterical. It bubbled up from somewhere deep and wrong, echoing into the night.
"They killed me," he whispered.
The words did not tremble.
"They were wrong."
Something stirred beneath the soil in response.
A finger twitched.
Then another.
Aldir pushed himself to his knees, staring in dawning horror and awe as the earth began to move—not randomly, but obediently.
Bone scraped against stone.
The dead were listening.
And Aldir Frost—once unwanted, once discarded—understood that the world had made a mistake far greater than killing him.
It had given him purpose.