The silence was the first thing he noticed.
It wasn't the peaceful silence of a library or the tranquil hush of a sleeping city. This was a hollow, profound silence that had seeped into the very walls of his small apartment, a silence that had become a physical presence, thick and heavy as water. It was the sound of a life winding down, of connections frayed to their final, fragile thread.
His name, in the world he was about to leave, was Leo. And he was tired.
Not the good, honest tiredness that follows a day of hard work, but a soul-deep exhaustion that had become the very fabric of his being. It was a weariness that sleep could not touch, a weight that pressed him into his worn-out mattress like a specimen pinned to a board.
The clinical term was treatment-resistant depression. For Leo, it was simply the weather of his soul—a perpetual, overcast gray, where the sun was a forgotten myth.
His room was a map of his internal state. Books on history, thick and dense with the dust of forgotten empires, were stacked in teetering pillars on the floor. They were his escape, not into fantasy, but into grander, more solid times. In the pages detailing the fall of Rome or the lost philosophies of the Han Dynasty, he could almost feel the weight of something real, something that mattered. It was a nostalgia for eras he had never known, a longing that was sharper and more vivid than anything he felt for his own life.
He lay in the semi-darkness, the glow of his phone casting long shadows across his face. The screen showed a digital rendering of a mythical city, Aethel, a place of soaring spires and libraries that touched the clouds. It was a artist's interpretation of a civilization lost to his world's history, a footnote in a obscure text he'd devoted his thesis to. He traced the lines of a floating palace on the screen, his breath a faint mist in the chill room. He felt a familiar, aching pull, a homesickness for a home that had never been his.
What would it have been like, he wondered, not for the first time, to walk those streets? To breathe that air? To have a purpose woven into the very stones of your world?
The thought was a dull throb against the vast, numb landscape of his apathy.
His phone screen flickered and went black. The room plunged into a deeper darkness. He didn't move to charge it. The effort of reaching for the charger on his nightstand felt Herculean, an impossible task across a continent of despair.
He closed his eyes. The darkness behind his eyelids was a welcome respite from the dim gray of the room. He focused on the image of Aethel, holding it in his mind, building its streets detail by detail, trying to lose himself in the memory of a dream.
He didn't want to die. The concept was too active, too violent. He simply… didn't want to continue. He was a book left on a shelf, its story half-told and forgotten, the pages slowly succumbing to the gentle, inevitable decay of time.
His breathing slowed. The hollow silence of the room seemed to swell, to press in from all sides, absorbing the last of the city's ghostly spires from his mind. The weight on his chest grew heavier, a comfortable, final anchor.
His last thought was not of fear, nor of regret for a life unlived. It was a quiet, simple wish, sent out into the indifferent universe like a paper boat on a still pond.
I just want… a reason.
The wish was not spoken. It was a final, silent exhalation.
And then, there was nothing.
No light. No tunnel. No chorus of angels or demons.
There was only a sensation of falling, not through space, but through something else. Through layers of reality, through the gauzy veils of what is and what could be. It was a silent, soundless plummet into a deeper, warmer, all-encompassing darkness.
And then, a new sound began to pierce the void.
It was a frantic, rhythmic drumming. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
It was loud, impossibly so, echoing in the confined space that now held him. It was the sound of a heart. His heart. But it was too strong, too new, beating with a ferocious, untamed vitality that was utterly alien.
And then came the other sounds, muffled and distorted as if he were listening from deep underwater.
A woman's voice, strained with effort and laced with a terror he could feel in his very bones. "I can't... I see him! Just a little more, my love! Just a little more!"
A deeper, anxious voice, tight with a fear he was trying to master. "You are the strongest woman I know, Kaelia. You can do this. Breathe."
The sensations were a violent assault. A crushing pressure, then a sudden, shocking release into a world of blinding, painful light. Cold air hit his damp skin, and he tried to gasp, but his lungs were new, sticky, and uncooperative. A sharp, stinging slap landed on his backside, and on pure, animal instinct, he drew in his first, searing breath.
The cry that tore from his throat was thin and reedy, the sound of a creature impossibly small and fragile.
His vision was a blur of smeared colors and shapes. He was being moved, wrapped in something soft. And then he was placed into someone's arms.
He was lifted, and a face swam into his blurry view. A woman, her face pale and beaded with sweat, her hair plastered to her forehead. Her eyes, the color of a summer sky, were wide with exhaustion, but they shone with a raw, primal love so intense it was almost painful to behold.
"There you are," she whispered, her voice cracking with emotion. She touched his cheek with a trembling finger, and the touch sent a jolt through his tiny form. It was the first real, loving touch he could remember feeling in a lifetime. "My son. My beautiful, beautiful son."
A larger presence loomed over them. A man with a strong, stern jaw and eyes like chips of granite, now soft with a wonder that seemed to humble him. He reached out a single, calloused finger, and the newborn's tiny, perfectly formed hand reflexively curled around it, gripping with a surprising strength.
The man—the Duke—let out a breath that was half laugh, half sob. "He has a strong grip," he said, his voice thick. "He is an Eldoria, through and through."
But the being inside the infant's body was not just an Eldoria. He was Leo. And in that moment, trapped in a body that was not his own, surrounded by a love that was meant for someone else, the full, terrifying, impossible truth crashed down upon his nascent consciousness.
He had gotten his wish. He had been given a reason. A new world. A new life.
And as he looked up into the faces of his new parents, their expressions filled with a hope he felt utterly unworthy of, only one thought echoed in the vast, silent chambers of his ancient soul, a soul now housed in a vessel of helpless flesh.
What have I done?
To be continued...