He died screaming.
Not from pain.
From hope.
From the sound of his little brother calling his name in the fire, and the impossible hope that maybe—just maybe—he had thrown him far enough.
"Big bro—!"
The flames took his lungs before he could answer.
They melted his lips. Boiled his eyes. Peeled his skin from bone. But he didn't cry for help. Didn't call to the gods.
He only whispered his brother's name until his throat burned into silence.
Then darkness came.
And it stayed for a long, long time.
Until something tore it open.
A scream—not human.
The sky, red and wrong. The world, shattered.
And Ren—reborn.
He awoke buried in corpses.
Naked. Starving. Fingers twitching like he had never used them before. The smell of rot filled his lungs before breath did. A low wind howled through broken towers. The sun above was cracked like a bloodshot eye.
"Where… am I…?"
He sat up—and saw the battlefield.
Not of humans.
But gods.
Their corpses were mountains. Their blood etched rivers of light into the scorched earth. Halos floated broken in the air like drifting crowns. Weapons the size of fortresses were half-buried in the dirt, buzzing with cursed echoes.
A demon knelt beside him, watching.
She was small. Pale. Red eyes like wine spilled on snow. No horns. No wings. Just sorrow.
"You're alive," she said, voice trembling. "You came back."
Ren tried to speak. His voice was ash.
"I'm not supposed to be here," he rasped.
The girl only nodded. "None of us are."
They called the land Virelith.
It was a graveyard of fallen heavens. A prison world sealed away after the Divine War. No gods. No prayers. No fate.
Just those left behind.
Demons.
Outcasts.
Creatures unfit for paradise, but too human to die.
Ren lived in their village, hidden in the bones of a dead archangel. They nursed him. Fed him. Taught him their tongue. And for a time, he forgot the fire.
He chopped wood. Learned to hunt. He held the hands of demon children who called him "sir" with toothy smiles.
But sometimes—when the fire cracked too loud—he still woke up screaming.
"Ren," the demon girl would whisper, touching his shoulder, "you're safe now."
He believed her.
Until the sky bled again.
The priests came from the surface world—holy men wielding divine relics and righteous fury. They called the demons "abominations," "fragments of sin," "remnants of the Fall." They came with blades of light and wings of fire.
They burned the village.
Just like before.
Ren saw the children he'd taught to fish split open by sanctified swords. Mothers nailed to trees with words like "REPENT" carved into their flesh. The demon girl—his first friend in this second life—was dragged by her hair and lit like a torch.
He found her body hours later.
Still smoldering.
Fingers outstretched.
As if reaching for him.
Ren stood in the center of the ruins, body shaking, hands coated in ash and blood.
Something inside him—that part that once forgave—died.
And something else opened its eyes.
"Do you know what the gods fear?"
The high priest screamed as Ren dragged him through the wreckage.
Ren's hair was soaked in gore. His skin had split to reveal veins of black fire. Horns curled from his skull—unwanted, but natural. In his hand: a weapon forged from broken halos and screaming steel.
He looked the priest in the eye.
And smiled.
"Memory."
Then he shoved the blade through his skull.
That night, the stars blinked out.
The demons crowned him king.
Not because he wanted it.
Because he was all they had left.
And somewhere, in the deepest cavern of that ruined world, a vision bloomed—etched into the walls by ancient time:
"When the world forgets the flame,
The boy with fire in his lungs shall return.
And his blood will give birth to the Hero."
Ren stared at the wall, numb.
Because carved in the stone beneath it…
…was a crude drawing.
Two stick figures.
One tall.
One small.
Labeled in an ancient tongue, but unmistakable.
"Big Bro."
"Me."