The texts that are in [ ] are texts that the protagonist does not yet understand.
****
"There is pain in every step taken towards the unknown,
as if the future were biting our heels.
But when recognition requires leaving behind
who was once the shelter of our hearts…
everything inside us crumbles into silence."
****
I felt my body being arranged from the void and armed from side to side. It was a brutal current, an invisible stream that carried me as if I were nothing more than a request for rotten wood.
I tried to open my eyes. Nothing. The effort sent a violent pang through the base of my skull, followed by spasms that shook my limbs. In the distance, the roar of a waterfall — a waterfall, perhaps — filled the acoustic horizon. I was in a river. Heavy. Ice cream. It was as if the gravity of the entire Earth had decided to focus only on my shoulders, pushing me to the bottom.
I forced the vision once again. The excruciating pain was replaced by a familiar void. An icy sensation that felt like it had nestled in the hole the shot left in my temple.
How long has it been? Seconds? Hours? The weather there was a bad joke.
But... what was I doing in that water? The last image I had was the decrepit cabin. The cold metal. The shot. I pulled the trigger, I felt the world go out. Shouldn't I be dead?
I tried to scream, but the headache was gone, giving way to a hollow silence. Darkness was now part of me, as if the shooting hadn't ended my life, but had just moved me. Would it be a rescue? Impossible. No one survives a bullet in the temple. There is no miracle for those who give up their own dignity.
I lost everything. Anna, Isolte, Elian... even my parents erased me from existence before the end. What good was the prestige in Ahnenerbe? That damned order... I allowed myself to be seduced by power and shelf mysticism, and I ended up being the architect of my own downfall. If the allied army caught me, the end would be the same: a rope or slow torture. My only real torment was thinking about my children's eyes before the shooting. Would they be cursing me in the afterlife?
I felt something hot run down my face. Tears? Or was it just the water of that strange river mixing with my despair?
My heart ached in a way that science doesn't explain. I didn't deserve redemption. If there was a God, I would only ask that I keep paradise for them — even for the Jews I helped persecute. May the sky be theirs, while I rotted here.
My body kept hitting rocks, but the impact was painless. It was as if that darkness nestled within me acted as a vacuum armor, absorbing the shocks.
What's happening to me? I thought, as my shoulder hit yet another invisible rock.
The sound of the cascade increased. In a reflex movement, water entered my mouth. The taste made me want to vomit, if I still had the stomach for it. It was neither salty, nor sweet. Did it taste like... vinegar? A metallic touch of cheap alcohol. It was a wrong flavor, unnatural.
Suddenly, the movement stopped. Dryly. Abrupt.
I stood motionless in a vacuum of indefinite time. The taste of vinegar on the palate, the silence of paralysis... if I had any doubts, they died there: I was not alive.
— Is anyone there?! — I tried to yell.
What I expected to be a roar of agony was just a muffled echo, trapped inside my own braincase. My voice had been stolen. Sound couldn't escape that thick, viscous water.
Panic, real panic, finally found me. Only then did I realize the most terrifying change in my body: I no longer felt the cold. It was submerged in that mixture of vinegar and alcohol, and it felt absolutely nothing. Neither heat, nor ice, nor the touch of the current.
I was a ghost groping for nothing.
What about the ice I felt when I "woke up"? Where did he end up?
Doubt barely had time to form before a brutal twinge ripped through the center of my chest. It was no ordinary pain; it was as if an incandescent blade passed me side by side, sewing my flesh to nothingness. It was something inhuman. A burning that didn't stop in the skin, but that seemed to tear the very structure of my soul, as if they were trying to separate my consciousness from my essence.
I screamed. Or I thought I screamed. I forced my throat until I felt my lungs would burst like blood balloons, but the silence remained there, absolute, sovereign.
I tried to put my hands to my chest. I wanted to pull out that agony, feel the wound, feel what was killing me. It was then that terror, cold and mute, set in: I couldn't feel my arms. It's not that they were dormant; they just didn't exist anymore. I was a log of consciousness floating in the void.
Suddenly, I felt a tug. I was torn from that river of vinegar with a violence that made me lose the north. I was being hoisted, dragged through the air. The wind... I felt the wind whipping what was left of my hair — short, coarse, the crew cut I carried like a uniform on my soul.
But what about the rest? Was I dressed? Was it naked? My body felt... distant. A broken tool that no longer responded to my command. An unnatural mass that I wasn't even sure was mine anymore. And that thought, that of no longer owning one's form, ate away at me more than the pain in my chest.
In the midst of this whirlwind of horrors, an agonizing clarity tore the horizon. It came up where I was dragged, a light that shouldn't have been there. Desperate, I tried to open my eyes. I forced my nerves, my skin, my muscle... and nothing.
But I saw. I saw that invading light perfectly.
Understanding struck me like a coup de grace, dry and definitive. I had no eyes anymore. My eyelids didn't exist. My eyeballs had fallen behind, or had never come with me.
Still, I wouldn't stop trying. It was a phantom impulse, a nervous tic of my dead biology: I tried to blink away the light that blinded me without eyes. The darkness, which for a moment had been my only refuge, was raped by that light. Despair rose like a tide, an internal cry that something much worse was about to awaken.
I wanted to feel something. Anything that would prove to me that I was still Conrad. But before I could grasp any shred of identity, I was thrown into the heart of that light. She had no warmth. She didn't burn. She just... devoured me, piece by piece, until consciousness was chewed by the absolute white.
And once again, everything went out.
— [Ma'am, we have to keep running, or your husband's men will catch up with us!]
What... what is this? What voice is this, so charged with pure, almost primitive dread? Where am I? Why is the world full of distant noises, muffled screams, and this panting stuck to me?
— [I know, Isabel, I know that!] — The other voice replied. It was shattered, a choked sound that seemed to come from someone who had already given up fighting death. That agony was familiar to me... it was the sound I made myself before pulling the trigger on the cabin.
But the language... what damn language was that? My historian's ears were searching for a root, a logic. It wasn't German. It was not the English of the allies, nor the Latin I studied in the grimoires of the Ahnenerbe. Would it be Portuguese? The Brazilian soldiers? I read reports about them in Italy, they said they fought like demons, but the sound of the vowels didn't beat. Nothing made sense.
— [Then please, ma'am, leave your son's body behind and let's run away! Remember you still have Emanuelle alive!]
— [How can I leave my son's body, Isabel?! Even though he was born dead, he is still my son!] — The scream came broken, an explosion of maternal pain that went through my chest.
Son? Dead?
I was still trying to understand the dialect when I felt the touch. Drops. Was it raining again? Had I returned to that ethereal field or, by some bizarre miracle, was I rescued and taken to an enemy base? No... they were women's voices. The Allied army didn't have women on the front lines, not like that.
Suddenly, I felt the heat. A tight, desperate hug. The contrast was a thermal shock to my soul; I had been frozen until a second ago, and now that human warmth enveloped me with outsized force. Cold... when did the cold return? In that emptiness of before, I was nothing, I felt nothing. Now, my nerves were screaming again.
The drops fell back on my face. But they weren't cold like the rain of 1944. They were hot. Salty. Why did it affect me so much? Why did my chest burn as if they were sewing my heart together in cold blood?
The woman holding me began to sob harder, a cry from someone who refuses to let go of what they have already lost. At that moment, an instinct I thought I had buried along with little Isolte awakened. I wanted to comfort that woman. I wanted to say that everything was fine.
I tried to open my eyes. The dread of feeling the blade of pain again paralyzed me for an instant, but I forced it. Nothing. My arms... I felt them again, but they weighed tons. It was as if the planet's gravity was concentrated on each of my fingers.
— Did I really lose my eyes? — the thought terrified me as I tried, for the fifth, sixth time, to lift my eyelids.
The hug loosened. A third voice, thin and childish, cut the air:
— [Mommy... what happened to my little brother? Is he not well?]
— [No, daughter... he's not well...] — The woman replied through sobs.
It wasn't rain. They were tears. Her tears were washing my face.
— [No, Miss Emanuelle, your brother is dead...] — The desperate woman's voice began to sentence.
They were talking about me. I knew. There was no logic, but I felt the truth vibrating in that strange air. I wasn't on an allied base. I wasn't in Germany. I was... somewhere where I was the "dead little brother."
Die? Not again.
With an effort that seemed to consume every ounce of energy left in my soul, I struggled with paralysis. I strained my facial muscles, ignored the unbearable weight, and before she finished the word "dead," the world lit up.
I did it. I opened my eyes.
I opened my eyes and the world was a blur of colors and pain. Above me, I saw a face. A woman. She had a long, completely disheveled red hair, as if she had just survived a disaster. But it was her eyes that caught me: a deep sky blue, identical to my Anna's. They were swollen, red with a cry that seemed to have no end.
His skin was pale, stained with dried blood and dirt. A small cut opened on the right side of her thin face, and her left lip spilled a trickle of fresh blood — she must have bitten her own mouth so as not to scream in pain. Despite her deplorable state, she wore large solid gold earrings that shone in the dim light. The burgundy dress, full of ruffles and embroidered roses, was in tatters.
When she realized I was staring at her, her eyes almost popped out of their sockets. The crying changed tone. It was no longer the agony of loss, but a relief so violent that it felt like pure happiness. She crushed me in a hug. I felt the heat of her tears, the smell of sweat, and... the moist contact of phlegm dripping from her nose as she sobbed over me. It was real. Too human.
I tried to raise my hand to touch that face, a stupid impulse of comfort. It was then that the ground fled from my feet: my arm was tiny. A fat, pink little hand appeared in my vision.
The punch of reality hit me: I had been reincarnated.
Why with me? The thought came charged with fury. Why couldn't I just stay dead? Wasn't I even good enough to cease to exist? All I wanted was a hug from Anna and my children in the afterlife, not this forced new beginning.
— [That... that can't be true!] — The other woman, the one with her, exclaimed. Her voice was a mixture of fright and incredulous joy.
I didn't understand a vivid word, but the emotion was universal. I looked at this second woman. She looked in her early thirties, with darker skin than a redhead and emerald green eyes that sparkled in the dim light. I wore a simple beige dress, without my "mother's" luxuries.
— [He's alive, Isabel! My baby is alive!] — The redhead screamed, and the sound of the word "baby" — or whatever it meant in that language — vibrated in my chest.
Male voices echoed from across the fetid alley where we stood. Heavy metal steps against stone. Isabel said something urgent, and panic reigned again. My new body, small and fragile, felt their adrenaline.
— [Carry Emanuelle, Isabel! I'll take little Kaelion!]
Kaelion. So that was my new name? We were snatched from there, running in the opposite direction to the men's screams. Before we turned the corner, I saw them: three soldiers wearing chain mail, swords drawn, running like hunting dogs after us.
My "mother" stopped abruptly at the exit of the alley. She didn't run away. Instead, he raised his right hand towards the soldiers. Her eyes closed and she began to murmur something — a prayer? A code? It was an even stranger, more rhythmic, ancestral language.
Suddenly, the physics of the world I knew went to waste.
A yellow-green light exploded from the palm of her hand. The earth at the soldiers' feet came to twist, to groan, as if it were an animal obeying a master. I was paralyzed. Her face now overflowed with exhaustion; yours wiped the blood from her cheek, and the red cables levitated, charged by a static electricity I felt on my skin.
I looked back one last time and saw the impossible: a wall of solid earth rising from the ground, making the alley three meters high.
Unbelief disappeared, to the place of an unhealthy fascination. Everything I, as Occultist of Ahnenerbe, spend your life hunting in ruins and moldy grimoires in Germany... was there, following the one before my eyes.
Magic. The damned magic was real.