They burned my corpse at dawn, and by twilight, I was alive again.
Not in the grand halls of the gods, not in some peaceful afterlife filled with light and music—but in a muddy cradle of reeds beneath a weeping willow, slick with dew and amniotic memory.
I opened my eyes to a sky of three moons. One red, one blue, one cracked like old porcelain. Birds I couldn't name screamed in the trees. My skin—this new skin—was pale gold, with unfamiliar scars etched across my arms in patterns that pulsed faintly, like living ink.
"Ah," said a voice, soft and amused, from somewhere behind my thoughts. "So you're the one who drew the short straw."
I didn't respond. I was too busy realizing I couldn't remember my name.
Or maybe—I could remember too many.
My last life had ended with a sword in the gut and betrayal in the air. The one before that? I think I was eaten. And the one before that... actually, no, that one might've been worse.
This time, I'd been reborn into a world that smelled like wild magic and old blood.
Lucky people come back as heroes. Chosen ones. Prophets.
Me?
I came back with a bounty on my head and no idea why.
Great choice.
I wasn't always this unlucky.
Once—maybe three lives ago—I was a scholar. Lived in a quiet village by a river, spent my days translating ancient scrolls and arguing philosophy with an old cat that may or may not have been a spirit. I died peacefully in my sleep, a rare thing.
I should have stopped there.
But fate, the bastard, loves a gambler.
Somewhere along the line, I drew the attention of something older than the gods. A trickster spirit, maybe. Or a bored deity looking for a chew toy. Each life since has been shorter, bloodier, and stranger than the last. I've been a thief, a prisoner, a knight who was executed before being knighted, and once, briefly, a tree.
This time, though... something's different.
The runes on my arms weren't scars—they were sigils. And they hummed softly, responding to the world around me.
That meant magic.
Real magic.
In this world, Essence was everything. It flowed through the land like invisible rivers, pooled in ancient stones, shimmered beneath the skin of dragons and seers. Those born with the Gift could shape it into spells, wards, even living constructs.
But the Gift came in kinds—and costs.
There were Conduits, who drew Essence from the earth, bending nature to their will.
Binders, who used blood and sacrifice to weave forbidden spells.
And the rarest of all—Echoes—souls who retained fragments of past lives and could channel ancient power.
Guess what the marks on my arms meant?
I was an Echo.
And in the Kingdom of Serelith, where kings feared Echoes and the Church burned them alive, that made me very dangerous… and very hunted