Morning broke with the slow cruelty of routine. Three days had passed since the moment I awoke — no, since I was reborn, though even now the term felt foreign, theatrical, like something from a cheap myth.
I should have known then that clarity was the one thing power couldn't offer. The question, always the same, circled back: Should I flee? The port lay open like a wound, the mountains crouched behind veils of mist, whispering of paths less patrolled. The land itself seemed indifferent to my torment, as if it, too, had tired of my indecision.
My body betrayed the change — the exercises now passed like thoughts, fleeting and almost pleasurable. It moved as if it no longer belonged to me. This improvement, this vitality, instead of granting relief, exposed me.
They noticed. The guards watched with dead eyes. The townspeople, whose lives had long ago dried into gossip and suspicion, watched too. I had become a mirror in which they saw grotesque possibility of difference. Their stares were more accurate than their speech and I understood their language better in silence.
Still, I performed my duties. One foot in front of the other, uniform tight at the seams, the day rolled forward like a stone pushed by no one in particular. My fellow soldiers, those cowards of camaraderie, no longer greeted me. I did not greet them. There was a rhythm to our mutual avoidance, as if we all knew the melody and were too afraid to hear the lyrics.
Curiosity. That ancient flame. I used the system. Illegally, of course, or at least uncomfortably. I told myself I needed to know them, but in truth, I wanted to see if anyone had ever really seen me. The readings gave me nothing. Shades of human, weak colors. Then I saw him. The chief. And beside him — the leader.
For a moment, the world became silent. The system registered it. The reading. "Common human." That was all. I stared, and in that mechanical label was born a fracture. How could he, the preacher of my humiliation, the very mouthpiece of hatred for the Awakened — how could he be like me? Or not like me?
I think I stared too long. My eyes had already betrayed me, turned red, those treacherous flares of identity. The leader's face contorted — surprise first, then horror. There was something almost comical in how quick the transformation occurred, as though he were an actor realizing mid-play that the audience could see his real skin beneath the mask.
His finger rose — that gesture. The call to execution, to exposure. I saw mouths move, soldiers shift, and weapons tremble into readiness. The noise arrived late, as if my ears had been underwater. My fear rose earlier. That old companion, familiar as a fever.
It crushed me.
I was no longer the Awakened. I was no longer strong. I was the boy again — the boy who had read too much, questioned too often, and found in knowledge not freedom but exile. I heard voices that were not there, judgments long passed but never forgotten. I felt the thousand fingers again, those silent accusations, the way a community ostracizes without needing words.
And above all else — I felt the loneliness. That unbearable, back-heavy weight. The silence after the drunk foreigner stopped talking. The walks taken with no destination, the meals taken with no conversation. The knowledge that no one had ever said your name without disdain. The fear that no one ever would.
I stood there, surrounded, as if the play had begun without me knowing my lines — and I realized I had always been the fool in someone else's tragedy.
I held my sword. A clumsy grip at first — my hands were shaking. I stumbled back. One step. That was all it took for them to close the gap. Their eyes gleamed with something that resembled duty but stank of fear disguised as righteousness.
I recognized them — faces I once trusted in the dead hours of the barracks. I had shared bread with these men. I had lied to protect them. I had taught some how to stand properly, how to swing with intention rather than panic.
They didn't hesitate. There was no trial. No command beyond the bark of that pig-faced preacher of hate. His voice cracked through the air like a snapped bone: "Kill him! He's an Awakened!"
That was enough.
Not one of them stopped to ask, How does he know? No flicker of doubt passed their expressions. The logic of the mob requires no questions — only the comfort of shared guilt. They charged, and I stood alone. Sword in hand. Fear still in my throat, but beneath it… A pulse. A roar.
I told myself I was awakened. I had to believe it, repeat it like a prayer. "I am powerful. I am not what they think. I am more."
The words worked. My mind sharpened like a blade taken to the whetstone. Not clean. Not calm. But focused. Perhaps, had I been wiser, I would have turned and ran. My body could've managed it. But what's the use of speed when the weight in your chest wanted to stand and scream?
I chose. With all the bitterness of someone who had lived too long in silence, I chose to fight.
The first spear came like a question that required no answer — a blunt, stupid, murderous thing. I stepped back. Just enough. I told myself not to think. Not too much.
Let the body move. Let the years of discipline and buried rage come forward. The heat in my blood was not fire but memory made flesh — all the humiliations, the forced silences, the laughter behind backs. It boiled in my veins now, and it demanded release.
I moved. Nothing elegant. Just what I knew. What they had taught me. What I had taught others. The first dodge. The second parry. My feet found the ground like they belonged there. The rhythm took me, a strange melody written in steel and breath and instinct. I felt the music of it.
I knew where the spear would go. I felt where the sword would swing. Every opening, every step, as if I had lived this battle a thousand times in forgotten dreams. Their fear made them predictable. Mine made me precise.
I danced. Not in the way as bards would describe it, but as a man might dance when every step was the difference between being and not being. I was in the song, the one they played in the smoky taverns, when tales of war were just tunes, not truths.
The first clash — metal to leather, leather to flesh — came with an eerie smoothness, like cutting into wet paper. There was resistance, yes, but not enough to stop the blade. And then the red like a smudge of paint on a weapon that now belonged more to fate than to me. I saw it, and I knew. No turning back. Not anymore.
Then something struck the back of my head. Or so I thought. I turned sharply, instinct flaring. No one was behind me. Yet the sensation remained, like fingers brushing too close to thought. I saw it.
A flicker. A warped image, like heat rising off stone. It wasn't real, but it was true. My fear. But not only mine — theirs. The crowd. Their terror hung in the air like smoke. It was thick, nearly visible, almost textured. And it gripped me with the same hand that had once gripped them.
I understood my fear — the judgment, the exile, the long silences after too many questions. That was familiar. But their fear, it was different. And for one second too long, I tried to understand it. That was enough.
The gasp tore from my chest before I could stop it. And in that blink of hesitation, a blade caught me near the elbow. It was sharp, cruel, but not deep. A glancing strike, but it howled through my nerves like lightning. Heat shot up my arm.
My movements stumbled. I staggered back, evaded clumsily. Some attacks I avoided by luck, others I didn't. I tasted iron, smelled blood, and felt bruises forming like ghosts beneath my skin.
My mind split — one half in the present, frantic and burning, the other watching a slow, cold procession of images from a life that had never been mine, but somehow lived within me. Like an old tale whispered too many times, it unfolded without my permission.
They didn't fear me. They feared what I represented. The deviation, the rupture in their orderly world. Their fear wasn't of the Awakened. It was of the unknown. The unpredictable. The interruption to their supper conversations and tired tavern laughter. They clung to routine like a drunk to his last coin, and they had been told since childhood that Ars was the abyss and that we, the Awakened, were its crawling things.
They didn't need to know if it was true. They didn't want to. Knowing would require a reckoning. And that reckoning was more frightening than any sword I could raise. So they did what all frightened people do: they obeyed. They accepted. It let them sleep at night. It let them laugh. Because to refuse meant opening the door to a silence too deep to name.
But in their fear, I found a well of strength that dwarfed anything I had known. Their terror became my fuel. My limbs stopped aching. My vision blurred in a mirror of red and white. I couldn't tell scream from prayer, nor laughter from weeping.
In all that, I moved. My body numbed, as if sensation had become irrelevant. But the anger — my anger — did not leave. It boiled, thick and black, as if my blood had been replaced with molten stone. I was a furnace. A forgotten forge suddenly lit by divine accident. Their fear was the bellows, and every swing of my blade was a hymn to something they had never dared to worship — the truth of difference.