Light.
Not the fractured, crimson light of a dying sun filtering through smoke-choked skies. Not the sickly glow of mana dissipating from a fatal wound.
White.
Sterile.
Wrong.
Consciousness returned not as a flood but as a needle—sharp, precise, and deeply unwelcome. It pricked at the edges of my awareness, demanding acknowledgment. Demanding presence.
I refused it.
For a single, precious moment, I clung to the darkness. To the silence. To the absolute certainty of ending.
But the light pressed against my eyelids. A dull ache throbbed behind my temples. And beneath that, something worse: the slow, rhythmic beeping of machines.
Machines.
Human machines.
My eyes opened.
The ceiling was white. Painted concrete with subtle water stains near the corner. Fluorescent panels hummed overhead, casting the kind of flat, unforgiving light that only human architecture could produce. I knew this ceiling. Not this specific one, but its kind. I had seen them in the cities I'd razed, through the eyes of my generals, in the memories of conquered souls.
I was in a human medical facility.
Impossible.
I tried to move.
Nothing.
Panic—genuine, unfamiliar panic—scrabbled at the edges of my composure. I commanded again, reaching for the well of power that had answered my will for over three thousand years. The authority that had bent lesser demons to my whim. The mana that had carved mountains and boiled seas.
The well was empty.
Not drained. Not weakened.
Empty.
A sound escaped my throat. It was meant to be a roar, a declaration, a denial of this impossible reality. What emerged was a strangled gasp, thin and reedy, barely loud enough to disturb the stale air.
My voice.
This was not my voice.
The door opened.
A woman entered. Human, middle-aged, wearing pale blue garments that marked her as medical staff. Her hair was pulled back in a practical knot, and dark circles ringed her eyes—the universal sign of someone who had been working too hard for too long. She carried a clipboard and the weary efficiency of someone who had long ago stopped being surprised by anything.
Until she saw me awake.
"Oh," she said. Then, with more warmth: "Oh, you're up. Easy now, easy—"
She crossed to the bed in quick strides, and I felt her hands on my chest, pressing me back down. The touch was light, clinical, utterly without threat. And yet the contact—the skin of a human touching the skin of—
I looked down.
The arm that should have been mine, corded with obsidian muscle and marked with the royal sigils of my bloodline, was pale. Slender. Covered in the fine, ridiculous hairs that humans grew across their bodies.
Five fingers.
Not claws.
Human fingers.
The machines beeped faster. I realized, distantly, that it was my heartbeat they were tracking.
"You're disoriented," the woman said, and her voice had shifted into something practiced and soothing. "That's completely normal. You've been through a traumatic event. Can you tell me your name?"
My name.
I opened my mouth to speak it. To let the syllables of Azrathor, Sovereign of the Abyssal Legions, Bane of the Eastern Continents, King of the Twelve Hells tear through this fragile human throat and remind this insignificant creature exactly what manner of being lay before her.
"What—" I began.
The voice that emerged was not mine. It was lighter. Younger. Human. And it cracked on the single syllable.
The nurse's expression shifted from professional concern to something like relief. "That's alright. Take your time. You're at Forward Operating Base Lancet, in the recovery wing. You were brought in three days ago after the portal incident in the Meridian district."
Portal incident.
Three days.
I stared at her, my mind racing to assemble meaning from chaos. Portal incident. That meant the rifts had already begun. That meant the invasion—my invasion—was underway. But I had died. I had felt the Commander's blade sever the last thread of my existence. I had watched my body fall.
How was I here?
"Your vitals look stable," the nurse continued, oblivious to the existential horror consuming me. "You took a pretty severe mana shock, but there's no permanent damage. Frankly, you're lucky to be alive. The medics said if you'd been any closer to the rift when it collapsed—" She shook her head, leaving the thought unfinished.
Collapsed rift. Mana shock.
She thought I was a victim. A survivor.
She thought I was human.
"I need to check your cognitive responses," she said, pulling a small light from her pocket. "Follow this with your eyes."
The light moved. My eyes—these eyes, whatever they were—followed. The nurse made a note on her clipboard.
"Good. Now, squeeze my fingers."
Her hand extended. I looked at it. Soft. Unarmored. The hand of a creature that had never known true combat.
I could kill her.
The thought arrived with crystalline clarity. My body was weak, pathetic, but she was close enough. A strike to the throat. A thumb through the eye socket. Even a human could accomplish that with the right targeting. And if I took her clothing, her identification, I could move through this facility. Gather intelligence. Find a way to contact my generals—
"Aurelion?"
The name hit me like a physical blow.
I blinked. The nurse was frowning now, her hand still extended.
"I said, squeeze my fingers. Aurelion? Can you hear me?"
Aurelion.
I knew that name.
Everyone knew that name.
It was the name of the Commander. The human who had studied my tactics, predicted my spells, countered my authority. The human who had stood over my dying body and said, with such absolute conviction: "You were never meant to exist."
My hand moved.
Not to strike.
Not to kill.
My fingers—these pale, slender, disgustingly human fingers—wrapped around the nurse's hand and squeezed.
"Good," she said, making another note. "Motor function seems intact. You're doing great, Aurelion. Just a few more questions."
I released her hand.
My hand fell back to the bed.
The machines continued their relentless beeping.
"Can you tell me where you are?"
I knew. Forward Operating Base Lancet. Human military installation. Early invasion era, based on the nurse's uniform and the lack of advanced cybernetics I'd seen in later years.
"Medical facility," I said. The words felt foreign in my mouth, shaped by a tongue that wasn't mine.
"Very good. And do you know why you're here?"
Portal incident. Meridian district. Mana shock.
"Portal."
The nurse smiled encouragingly. "That's right. You were helping with the evacuation when the secondary rift opened. Took a direct hit from the shockwave. The medics said you were unconscious before you hit the ground."
Helping with evacuation.
This body had been helping humans.
The revulsion must have shown on my face, because the nurse's expression shifted to concern.
"Aurelion? Are you in pain?"
"No."
It was the first honest thing I'd said.
The nurse studied me for a long moment, then made another note. "I'm going to get the doctor. She'll want to run a few more tests, but honestly? You're recovering faster than anyone expected. The Vanguard's already asking when you'll be cleared for light duty."
The Vanguard.
Humanity's elite strike force. In this era, they would be newly formed, still finding their footing. Still learning how to fight the demons that poured through the rifts. Still ignorant of the fact that their greatest enemy now lay in one of their hospital beds, wearing the face of their future Commander.
"Tell me," I said, and the question cost me more than the nurse could ever understand. "My name. You called me—"
"Aurelion Kade," she said, and the name fell from her lips like a prayer. "You really don't remember?"
I closed my eyes.
Aurelion Kade.
The Commander.
My executioner.
The human who had studied me so thoroughly that our final battle felt like a dance he'd choreographed years in advance. The human who had looked at me—me, a king, a sovereign, a being who had crushed civilizations beneath his heel—and seen nothing but something to be erased.
And now I was him.
"You're in shock," the nurse said gently. "That's completely normal. The memories will come back. They always do."
No. They wouldn't.
Because the memories of Aurelion Kade—whatever they were, whoever he had been before he became humanity's strongest weapon—were not mine. They were locked in a mind I did not possess, shaped by experiences I had not lived.
I was Azrathor, Demon King.
And I was trapped in the body of my murderer.
The nurse left to find the doctor. The door clicked shut behind her, and I was alone with the beeping machines and the sterile light and the terrible, impossible reality of my existence.
I looked at my hands again.
Turned them over.
Examined the palms, the fingers, the faint scars that spoke of a life I didn't know. One scar, thin and white, ran across the base of the thumb. An old wound. Training accident, perhaps. Or something more meaningful.
His history. His body.
Mine now.
I curled the fingers into a fist. The movement was awkward, the muscles responding sluggishly to commands they'd never received before. But they responded. This body was weak, but it was mine now, for better or worse.
The question was: what did I do with it?
Kill the nurse when she returned? Escape this facility? Find a rift and return to the demon realm, where I could reclaim my throne and—
And what?
My generals would not recognize me in this form. My subjects would see only a human, weak and soft and wrong. They would kill me before I could speak a single word of explanation.
Assuming I could even reach a rift. Assuming this body, at perhaps half a percent of my former power, could survive the journey through demon-infested territory.
Assuming I wanted to return to a realm that had apparently been fleeing something when they opened the first portals to this world.
The thought surfaced unbidden, dragged from the depths of my final memories. In the last moments of our battle, the Commander had said something. Not just his final words over my dying body, but something else. Something I'd dismissed in the heat of combat but that now, in the silence of this human hospital, demanded examination.
"You were never meant to exist."
What did that mean?
I had existed for over three thousand years. I had built an empire, commanded legions, crushed countless rebellions. I was the Demon King. My existence was undeniable.
Unless—
Unless he knew something I didn't. Unless the invasion, the war, the entire conflict between our species was built on a foundation I had never questioned.
The demons were fleeing something worse.
The thought crystallized with uncomfortable precision. I had no evidence, no memory to support it, but it fit. It explained why the invasion had been so chaotic, so desperate. It explained why my generals had pushed for total conquest with an urgency that bordered on panic.
It explained why, in our final battle, the Commander had looked at me not with hatred, but with something almost like pity.
No.
I rejected it.
I was Azrathor. I was the Demon King. I had led my people to this world because it was ours for the taking, because humans were weak and divided and ripe for subjugation. Not because we were running. Not because something else lurked in the darkness behind us.
The door opened.
The nurse returned, accompanied by an older woman in a white coat—the doctor, presumably. They approached the bed with the careful confidence of professionals who had done this a thousand times before.
"Aurelion," the doctor said, her voice warm but clinical. "I'm Dr. Chen. How are you feeling?"
Trapped. Enraged. Terrified in ways I had never imagined possible.
"Disoriented," I said, because it was true and because it was what they expected.
"Perfectly normal." She picked up a chart, scanned it, made a note. "Your readings are remarkable, actually. Mana integration levels are already stabilizing, and your neural activity suggests significant adaptation. Whatever happened in that blast, your body seems to be handling it well."
My body.
His body.
"Can you tell me what you remember?" Dr. Chen asked. "About the incident, I mean. About before."
I remembered a blade sliding between my ribs. I remembered the Commander's face, cold and satisfied, as my knees hit the ground. I remembered three thousand years of conquest and rule, of building something eternal, of watching it crumble in a single moment of defeat.
"I don't remember," I said.
The lie came easily. I had lied to subordinates, to enemies, to allies I intended to betray. Lying to humans was nothing.
Dr. Chen nodded, unsurprised. "Trauma-induced amnesia is common in mana shock cases. The good news is that it's usually temporary. Your memories should return gradually over the next few weeks."
Weeks.
I would be trapped here for weeks, playing the role of a human, surrounded by humans, wearing the skin of the human who had killed me.
The rage must have flickered across my face, because the nurse placed a gentle hand on my shoulder.
"It's alright to be frustrated," she said. "But you need to rest. Your body's been through a lot."
Her hand.
On my shoulder.
Touching me like I was something fragile, something that needed comfort.
I wanted to kill her. I wanted to tear out her throat and watch the light fade from her eyes. I wanted to remind this insignificant creature exactly what manner of being she was touching.
Instead, I nodded.
Because I was Aurelion Kade now. Because Aurelion Kade was a hero, a rescuer, a human who helped with evacuations. Because if I wanted to survive—if I wanted to understand what had happened, why I was here, what the Commander's final words truly meant—I needed to play this role.
Dr. Chen made another note. "We'll keep you overnight for observation, but if your readings stay stable, you should be cleared for discharge tomorrow. Sergeant Mather from the Vanguard has already requested to see you."
Sergeant Mather.
Another name I didn't know. Another thread in the web of Aurelion Kade's life that I would need to navigate.
"Rest now," the doctor said. "You've earned it."
They left.
The door closed.
The machines beeped.
I stared at the ceiling and felt the weight of three thousand years pressing down on a body that had existed for barely two decades.
Tomorrow, I would meet Sergeant Mather. Tomorrow, I would begin the impossible task of pretending to be someone I was not.
Tomorrow, I would walk among humans as one of them.
But tonight—
Tonight, I lay in the darkness and remembered the feeling of my own blood filling my lungs. The shock of the Commander's blade. The impossible, infuriating certainty in his eyes as he delivered his final judgment.
"You were never meant to exist."
I closed my eyes.
And for the first time in three thousand years, I prayed.
Not to the dark gods of my people, who had long ago fallen silent.
Not to the ancestors, whose spirits had guided my hand in countless battles.
I prayed to something I had never believed in.
I prayed that this was a dream. A hallucination. A final, cruel trick of a dying mind.
I prayed that when I opened my eyes, I would be back in my own body, back in my own realm, back in a world that made sense.
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling was still white.
The machines still beeped.
And I was still human.