Liam's first memory was of waking up twice.
Once to the burn of smoke in his lungs, the crackle of collapsing beams, and the crushing weight that never quite landed.
And once to the sound of someone crying.
The first ended in darkness.
The second began in light.
He floated in warmth, wrapped tight in
soft cloth that smelled faintly of hay and soap. A woman's voice trembled above
him, speaking a language he'd never heard before… and somehow understood.
"—beautiful. Caelen, look at them."
Liam blinked against the blur. A face
tilted over him, young and exhausted, cheeks damp with tears. Dark hair clung
to her temples, and her eyes—soft brown, ringed with red—shone with a love so
raw it hurt to look at.
Mom, his mind supplied automatically.
Not his first mother.
His second.
Another face leaned in beside her,
shadowed by stubble and worry. Broad shoulders, sun-browned skin, blue eyes
that searched Liam's like they were looking for the whole world.
"Our son," the man whispered. "Our
son, Yuna."
He'd heard those names shouted a dozen
times already in the last hour, though his new ears were still getting used to
sound.
Caelen. Yuna.
My parents, he thought, and the thought came with a cold, surreal clarity that did not belong to a newborn.
Because Liam Dureth had been born
before.
He didn't remember everything. Just flashes. A cramped apartment. A chipped mug. Laughter that ended with slammed
doors. A boy staring out a window, wondering when someone would stay.
The last flash was heat and fear and the knowledge that this was it.
And then… nothing.
Until now.
Yuna pressed her forehead to his.
"Liam," she whispered. "Little Liam."
He startled. Liam? That wasn't his old name. His old name had been—
The thought slid away, like a word on the tip of his tongue.
Liam.
He tried it on in the quiet of his mind. It felt strange, but not wrong.
A soft, indignant wail sounded beside
him.
Only then did he realize he wasn't the only one being held.
On the other side of the bed, Caelen
turned, lifting another bundle—a second child, red-faced and furious with life. The baby's cry was sharp and offended, like she'd been personally
inconvenienced by existence.
Yuna laughed weakly. "He's loud. She's
louder."
"Twins," Caelen said, awed. "Treece hasn't seen twins born to a lord in three generations."
He shifted the second child closer so
Yuna could see them both at once.
"Liam," Yuna said, looking down at him. "And you…"
Her eyes softened on Liam's sister—on
the girl who flailed tiny fists at the world, refusing to be ignored.
"Evelyn," Yuna decided. "My little light."
Liam's new heart stuttered.
Evelyn?
The name tugged at something deep in
him. A classroom. A girl three rows over, laughing at a joke he didn't hear. Acoworker with that name. A twitch of déjà vu—
The baby's cries cut through the fog. Evelyn. His twin.
His family.
You get another chance, the thought
came, clear and aching. Don't screw this one up.
He couldn't speak. He couldn't move
properly. But as Yuna nestled the twins together on her chest, Liam turned his
head just enough that his forehead bumped hers.
Her tiny fingers, by pure chance—or something more—curled around his.
And Evelyn, newborn and furious and
impossibly small, went suddenly quiet.
Time passed strangely in Treece.
The first years blurred into warmth
and repetition—milk and sleep and the rhythmic creak of wagon wheels somewhere
outside. The smell of earth after rain. Roosters crowing at dawn. Yuna's
humming. Caelen's laughter, loud and proud and always a little too big for
their small stone house.
Treece itself was hardly more than a
village with a title. A few dozen stone cottages. Fields of wheat that swayed
like golden seas. An old well at the center of the square. A worn banner bearing the sigil of a tree over a river, hanging lopsided over the modest wooden hall they called a keep.
For its people, this was the whole world.
For Liam, it was peace.
He learned to crawl on uneven wooden
floors, bumping into table legs and cursing internally when he hit his head. He learned to walk clinging to Caelen's fingers, tiny bare feet slapping against packed earth. He learned words in the local tongue—Kaerish—long before he was ready to start asking the questions that burned behind his teeth.
By the time he and Evelyn turned three, the fog in his mind had mostly cleared.
He knew this was not his first life.
He knew his name used to be something
else.
He knew he had been alone, before.
And he knew he wasn't now.
Evelyn ran circles around him—a small
whirlwind of dark hair and quick hands, always reaching for books, buttons, interesting rocks. She argued with chickens, negotiated with the neighbor's dog, and charmed half the village into giving her extra sweets.
She also watched him when she thought he wasn't looking.
Not with suspicion.
With recognition.
It happened on a dull, cloudy
afternoon, the kind that made the fields look tired.
They were in the tiny room they
shared, a narrow bed each and a single small window overlooking the dirt road.
Yuna had left them alone with a warning not to climb onto the roof again.
Liam lay on his stomach, pushing a
carved wooden knight through imaginary battles on the floor. Across from him, Evelyn sat cross-legged, a tattered picture-book open in her lap.
The book was one of the few Yuna had
brought from her family's knightdom. The illustrations—faded ink drawings of gods and monsters—had fascinated Evelyn from the moment she'd learned not to
chew on the pages.
"Liam?" she asked, not looking up.
"Mm?"
"Do you ever feel like…" She chewed
her lip, searching for the word. "…like this isn't your first time?"
Liam's hand froze on the wooden knight.
Every instinct screamed at him to play dumb. To laugh it off.
Instead, he forced a casual tone.
"What do you mean?"
She looked up then, eyes too sharp for
a three-year-old. Or for just a three-year-old.
"I mean…" She lowered her voice,
glancing at the door as if someone might be listening. "I remember… other stuff. Things not from here."
Cold slid down his spine.
"What kind of things?" he asked
carefully.
Evelyn tilted her head. "Big
buildings. No horses. Loud boxes that move without mana—" She stopped, frowning. "Mana. That's not… what did we call it? Electricity." The foreign word rolled off her tongue perfectly.
Liam stared.
"And there were… screens. With pictures that move. And this… thing." She mimed tapping with her fingers. "Phone. And school, but not like the priests talk about. With desks and… math." She made a face. "I didn't like math."
Liam swallowed.
He knew those things. Too well.
"Cooper," he said without thinking.
Evelyn blinked. "What?"
He sat up slowly. "My… other name.
Before this." The admission tasted dangerous and freeing at once. "Cooper
Reed."
Silence stretched.
Then Evelyn's eyes widened. "You…
remember that too."
"…Yeah."
She closed the book softly, fingers
trembling just a little.
"I was worried," she admitted. "That
if I said something, you'd think I was crazy. Or you'd… disappear. Like the other things in my head."
Liam snorted. "That would be a pretty
lame magic trick."
Her lips twitched. "You are really bad
at serious moments."
"It's a coping mechanism," he said,
then blinked. "Huh. I shouldn't know that phrase."
Evelyn giggled, the sound bright and a
little hysterical. Then she leaned toward him, eyes shining.
"So it's not just me," she whispered.
"We both… died?"
Liam's throat tightened. Images
flickered behind his eyes—smoke, shouting, the weight of being alone. He pushed them aside.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "But we're here now."
Evelyn considered that. "Do you
remember how?"
"Enough," he said. "Don't really want
to talk about it."
She nodded, accepting that without pushing, and he loved her a little more for it.
She hugged her knees to her chest. "I
had… brothers and sisters before. Friends. But it's all fuzzy. They feel like half-remembered dreams." Her voice went small. "What if I forget everything?"
He shrugged, forcing a grin. "Then you'll just have to make better memories this time."
It was a lame line. It still worked.
She smiled. Not her usual mischievous
grin—something softer, fragile around the edges.
"Okay," she whispered. "With you,
then."
The floor was hard, and the room smelled faintly of dust and old wood. Outside, someone shouted about a missing
chicken. A cart rattled past.
Liam reached out and squeezed her
hand.
"Deal."
From that day on, they had two languages.
Kaerish, for everyone else.
And the old language—from their other
world—for each other.
They practiced in secret, at first. Whispered phrases behind the barn. Counting in English while helping Yuna hang laundry. Trading memories in snatches, testing which pieces had survived with them.
"Do you remember cars?" Evelyn would
ask in Kaerish, then switch. "Remember when I almost got hit crossing the street because I was looking at my phone?"
"You were an idiot," Liam would reply
in English, tossing her a bundle of clothespins.
"You loved me anyway."
"Unfortunately."
Yuna would glance over at them, hear
the unfamiliar sounds, and smile faintly.
"Strange little games you two have,"
she'd say, shaking out a sheet. "Just remember to use proper Kaerish around the
priest, hm? He already thinks you're demons."
Caelen, on the other hand, laughed
when he heard them.
"Secret codes, is it?" he'd boom,
scooping them both up at once, one on each arm. "Good. A lord's children should
have ways to talk where enemies cannot listen."
"We're not lords yet," Liam protested,
though being jostled in the air made it hard to sound dignified.
"Not yet," Caelen agreed. His eyes,
though, were serious. "But Treece will pass to you one day, boy. And wherever
you go, Evelyn, you'll carry our name with you. Remember that."
Liam did remember.
But it was the "wherever you go" that
stuck in his mind.
Because even as he learned to run the
fields, to read Yuna's old storybooks, to help bring in the harvest and mend fences, another desire grew quietly in his chest.
He wanted more.
Not more power. Not more glory. Just…
more life than the first time. More chances to do things right. To protect what he'd never had before.
A real family.
Sword practice began because he asked.
It started one evening as Caelen leaned his favorite blade against the wall, the dusk light catching on the well-worn steel. Liam, now tall enough to reach the hilt if he stretched,
stared at it like it was the most important object in the world.
"Can I try?" he blurted.
Caelen turned, eyebrow raised. "You're
barely four."
"I'll be five," Liam argued. "Soon."
"Soon," Caelen repeated, amused. "And
you think five is old enough to swing steel?"
Liam swallowed. "If I'm going to
protect Treece someday… and Mom. And Evelyn. I should start early, right?"
That wiped the smile from Caelen's
face.
He knelt, studying Liam in that way he
had whenever the boy said something that sounded a little too old for his years.
"Why protect us?" Caelen asked softly.
"That's my job."
Liam met his eyes. "Because you won't
always be here."
The words left his mouth before he
could stop them.
Yuna, passing through the room with a
basket of laundry, paused.
Caelen's jaw tightened, but after a
moment, he nodded slowly. "No," he agreed. "I won't. That is the way of things."
He reached behind the door and pulled
out a wooden practice sword Liam hadn't seen before.
"But you won't touch steel until I say
you're ready. Understood?"
Liam's heart leapt. "Yes, Father."
Caelen's lips twitched at the title. He handed over the wooden sword, watching Liam grip it with both hands, the weight pulling his arms down.
"First lesson," Caelen said. "A sword
is not a toy. You do not swing it when you are tired, angry, or foolish."
"What about scared?" Liam asked.
"That," Caelen said, "is exactly when
you learn not to let it go."
Magic came to their household through
Yuna, and through her, to Evelyn.
Where Liam's nights filled with the
ache of muscle and the sting of bruises, Evelyn's filled with soft glows and the dry rasp of pages flipped by candlelight.
Yuna noticed it first—the way Evelyn
stared at the hearth for too long, how the flames seemed to bend toward her when she waved her hand. The way sparks leapt when she laughed.
"Caelen," Yuna murmured one night,
watching their daughter trace patterns in the air, embers dancing in time. "She has the gift."
Caelen watched in silence for a long
moment. Then he sighed.
"We'll need a teacher," he said.
"Properly trained. The Church won't like an untested caster in a border knightdom."
Yuna's lips pressed into a thin line.
"The Church doesn't like anything they do not control."
"And we," Caelen said gently, "live
under their banners."
A few weeks later, a letter went out.
And word came back from Eldermire, the capital.
Olyssia, a former professor from the
academy itself, would come to Treece. Just for a time.
Liam tried not to feel jealous.
He failed.
On the eve of their fifth birthday,
the village gathered.
Awakening Day.
Children born that year lined up at
the edge of the square, nervous and fidgeting. Parents murmured around them.
The priest stood by the central stone, the symbol of the gods carved deep into
its surface.
This was the day each child touched
the stone and discovered their path.
Augmenter, who strengthened body with
mana.
Caster, who shaped the world through
spellcraft.
Or, on rare occasions… nothing at all.
Liam's palms were slick. Not with fear
of failing—the gods knew, he'd already failed once at living and was doing his best with the second—but with the weight of everything that might follow.
If he was an augmenter, the sword made
sense.
If he was a caster…
He glanced at Evelyn, standing beside
him in a simple dress Yuna had let her choose. She'd picked one the color of
embers. Of course.
"What do you want to be?" she
whispered.
"Alive," he muttered.
She snorted. "That's cheating."
"Augmenter," he said, more seriously.
"If I have to choose."
She nodded. "Caster, for me. Fire, if possible. Water sounds boring."
"Water heals people," Liam pointed
out.
"Boring," she repeated, wrinkling her
nose.
He shook his head, smiling despite
himself.
One by one, the children stepped
forward.
Some left the stone with wide grins,
clutching their declared futures like prizes. Some walked away quietly, their parents' faces fading into complicated mixtures of relief and disappointment.
Then it was Evelyn's turn.
She placed her hand on the stone. For
a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then light flared.
Flames, faint but undeniable, danced
around her fingers. The gathered villagers gasped. The priest stumbled back, nearly dropping his blessed incense.
"Caster," he rasped. "Element… fire."
Evelyn's grin nearly split her face in
two.
Yuna clapped a hand to her mouth, eyes
shining. Caelen's shoulders sagged with a breath he hadn't realized he'd been
holding.
Liam grinned at her as she returned to
his side. "Boring, huh?"
"Not for me," she said smugly, waving
ember-fingers. "Your turn, mister 'I want to be alive'."
He rolled his eyes and stepped
forward.
The stone was cool beneath his palm.
For a moment, nothing.
Then—
Lightning.
Not huge, not dramatic. Just a sharp,
stinging jolt up his arm, like touching a metal handle after walking across a rug. Light flickered around his fingertips, faint arcs that danced between his knuckles.
"Augmenter," the priest declared,
recovering some composure. "Element… lightning, by the gods."
Murmurs swept through the crowd.
Lightning was rare.
Caelen looked like someone had just
handed him the sun.
Yuna wiped at her eyes openly now.
Evelyn bounced on her toes, crackling
embers around her own fingers. "We match," she whispered when he rejoined her.
"Fire and lightning. That sounds cool."
"Sounds dangerous," Yuna said,
overhearing, though her smile took the sting from the words. "Try not to burn
the house down."
"No promises," Evelyn said.
Liam laughed, and in that moment, with
his sister's hand in his and his parents' eyes on him and the villagers murmuring about the lord's gifted children, he dared to believe—
Maybe this life really could be
different.
He didn't know that far across the
sea, in a land now called Ostren, something stirred.
That in a blighted temple, beneath a
cracked golden mask, a hollow gaze turned toward the tiny knightdom of Treece.
For now, there was only a boy with
lightning in his veins, a girl with fire at her fingertips, and a village that still slept peacefully under a sky untouched by shadow.
For now.