The cold reached him before the pain did.
It seeped through torn cloth and split skin, through muscle that had long since stopped obeying him, until even the heat of battle felt like a memory someone had described to him once.
Aethan's knees dug into churned earth. Mud clung to him as if it had decided he belonged here now, another thing left behind on a battlefield that had run out of names.
The world around him was enormous. Fires burned in the distance, smearing smoke across a broken sky. Steel rang somewhere far off, shouting followed, and then nothing but the dull roar of a war that no longer needed his permission to continue.
Yet in front of him, the battlefield might as well have been empty.
Because the only thing that mattered stood a few steps away.
A man, human in shape, human in stance,held his sword as if the weapon weighed nothing at all. No tremor. No ragged breath. No sign that he'd been carving through armies for hours.
The worst part wasn't that he looked calm.
It was that he looked bored.
Aethan's fingers twitched, reaching for a blade that wasn't there anymore. He didn't remember letting it go. One moment it had been part of him, the edge that answered his thoughts, the next it was somewhere in the mud, useless.
He was famous. He'd heard the title people gave him whispered from taverns to court halls alike. He'd watched recruits straighten their backs the moment he entered a training yard. He'd seen commanders relax, convinced the battle would tilt simply because he existed on their side.
None of that mattered now.
Fame didn't sharpen a sword.
Fame didn't close distance.
Fame didn't bridge an overwhelming gap in strength.
He had spent his entire life becoming fast enough to make people question what they'd seen. Technical enough to turn a single step into five options. Adaptive enough to read an opponent's breathing and predict the next strike before the thought formed.
He had prided himself on that. Quietly. Not because he enjoyed praise, but because it was proof. Proof that he hadn't wasted his life chasing something intangible.
And still, this man had walked through him.
Aethan's vision swam. He blinked, and the world dimmed at the edges.
Cold. That was what remained. Cold and a bitterness that sat behind his ribs like a lodged shard of steel.
He remembered fragments, as if his own life had been cut into pieces.
A home with stone walls warmed by late sunlight.
A narrow street that smelled faintly of spice and rain.
Hands on his shoulders, small hands, perhaps, pulling him down to listen.
A laugh.
He couldn't see faces. Couldn't grasp names. But the feelings were there, stubborn and sharp.
Family.
That was the word his mind offered, and the moment it did, something inside him tightened.
If he fell here… what happened to them?
Aethan tried to push himself up. His arm shook violently. His shoulder screamed. His body refused, collapsing back into the mud like a puppet with its strings cut.
The man before him didn't move.
He simply watched.
Not with hatred. Not with triumph.
Just with the detached stillness of someone who had already decided the result.
Aethan forced air into his lungs. It came out as a wet cough. Blood painted the ground in front of him, bright for a heartbeat before the cold stole even that colour.
So, this was it.
He'd imagined death before. Every swordsman did, no matter how confident they acted. But he'd always assumed his end would have some kind of meaning attached to it. A final clarity. A realisation. A moment where his life made sense.
Instead, what he felt most was frustration.
Not because he feared dying.
Because he hated losing.
"I had sharpened my blade my entire life," he thought, the sentence forming without effort, as if it had lived inside him for years, waiting. "Only to find it still wasn't enough."
The man raised his sword.
Aethan didn't beg. That wasn't his way. Not in front of an enemy. Not in front of himself.
He only stared up, cold settling into his bones, and accepted one quiet truth.
He had reached the end… still wanting more.
The blade came down.
There was a flash of pain so sharp it almost felt clean.
Then the cold swallowed everything.
And the world went away.
There was no gentle fade into an afterlife.
No voice. No presence. No hand reaching through the dark to guide him.
Only emptiness, stretched so wide it made even time feel pointless.
If he had thoughts, they drifted without direction. If he had feelings, they dulled into something distant.
Aethan didn't float. He didn't fall.
He simply wasn't.
And then,
Pressure.
Sound.
Light.
A violent breath dragged into lungs that didn't feel like lungs at all.
Something squeezed him from every angle. His chest compressed. His limbs flailed, small and weak, refusing to obey his mind.
His mouth opened and a loud, thin cry ripped out of him.
The noise startled him so badly he almost stopped breathing.
The irony hit a second later, dull but undeniable.
He couldn't even die properly… and now he couldn't even be quiet.
Warm hands held him. A rough cloth brushed his skin. The air smelled of damp wood, sweat, and something faintly sweet, like boiled grain.
He tried to open his eyes.
The world was a blur of shapes and light. A face hovered above him, pale and drawn, blonde hair stuck to her forehead. Her eyes, striking blue, looked like they belonged to someone who had once been healthy, once been well, fed, once been allowed to sleep.
Now they were rimmed with exhaustion.
And still, they were beautiful.
"He's… he's here," she whispered, voice breaking. "He's breathing."
Another figure leaned in from the side, blocking part of the light. A man. Lean, muscular in the way of someone who worked and fought and had never been allowed to grow soft. Dark skin. Long black hair tied back messily. Scars traced his arms and neck like old stories no one wanted to tell.
His left sleeve was pinned and folded, empty.
Aethan stared, stared as much as a newborn could, trying to process it.
The man's one hand trembled as it touched Aethan's head, oddly gentle for someone who looked like he'd broken bones with that same palm.
"Quiet," he muttered, though his voice shook. "He's loud. That's good. Means he's strong."
Aethan tried to scoff.
What strength?
He couldn't even control his own fingers. He was trapped in a body that felt like it might snap if someone held him wrong.
But the mother laughed weakly, tears sliding down her cheeks, and the sound did something unexpected to him.
It softened the edges of the cold.
He didn't know where he was.
He didn't know what kind of world this was.
But he knew, with a strange certainty, that he had been reborn.
Not as himself.
Not with his blade in his hand.
As a helpless child in a wooden hut on the outskirts of a poor farming village.
Aethan let his eyes drift closed again, not because he wanted to sleep, but because the world was too bright, too loud, too alive.
And alive was the problem.
In death, there had been nothing to feel.
In life, everything demanded something from him.
Even now, this body cried as if it was owed comfort.
He hated that.
And yet… when the mother held him closer, warmth against his skin, his screaming eased without his permission.
So much for control.
Time didn't pass the way it used to.
Days blended into each other. He learned the rhythm of hunger, of sleep, of being carried. His mind stayed sharp, but his body crawled forward at its own pace, ignoring every impatient thought he threw at it.
He learned names slowly, as if the world didn't trust him with them right away.
His mother was called Elara.
His father was called Dain.
The hut creaked when the wind was strong. Rain found its way through the roof if Dain didn't patch it quickly enough. The village smelled of wet soil and livestock, of smoke from cooking fires and the faint rot of old wood.
They were poor.
Not the dramatic kind of poor people told stories about, the kind where tragedy arrived with music behind it.
Just real poor.
Thin meals. Worn clothes. Quiet choices made with tired eyes.
Elara grew paler some days, coughing into cloth when she thought Aethan wasn't watching. Dain's shoulders stiffened every time it happened, his jaw tightening in a way that made it clear he'd rather fight a battlefield again than watch illness steal someone in slow motion.
Aethan watched it all from the floor, from Dain's hip, from Elara's arms.
And, annoyingly, he cared.
Not immediately. At first, he told himself it was observation. Strategy. Understanding his environment.
But then Elara smiled at him one morning, smiled like he was the only good thing in the world, and something in his chest shifted.
He didn't like that shift.
Attachment was a weakness. In his old life, he'd learned that the hard way.
Still… when Dain came home with bruised knuckles from chopping wood too long with one arm, Aethan found himself crawling toward him without thinking, placing a small hand on his father's boot as if that could do something.
Dain stared down at him, then laughed under his breath.
"You're strange," he murmured. "Three years old and you look at me like you understand."
Aethan wanted to correct him.
He understood more than Dain could imagine.
But the words didn't exist in his mouth yet, and even if they had, a toddler speaking like a grown man was the fastest way to get branded cursed.
So he only blinked up at him, letting the mask of childhood remain.
It wasn't hard.
Children were allowed to be silent.
The first time he felt mana, it happened by accident.
He was sitting outside the hut, watching dust dance in the sun. The village was quiet, fields stretching out in the distance. Dain was mending a fence nearby, movements efficient even with one arm. Elara was inside, humming softly as she cleaned.
Aethan had been thinking, thinking about swords, about footwork, about how it felt to hold steel. The memory was clean enough to ache.
And then warmth spread through him.
Not heat. Not fever.
Warmth like a current beneath the skin, flowing in slow lines, as if his body had hidden a river inside itself.
He froze.
The sensation didn't match anything from his past life. It wasn't adrenaline. It wasn't the sharpened awareness of combat. It was… alive. Responsive. Waiting.
Aethan focused on it instinctively, the way he would have focused on a blade's edge.
The warmth pulsed.
And somewhere nearby, a loose blade of grass trembled.
His eyes narrowed.
So this world had more than swords.
Good.
That meant there was something new to learn.
It also meant his old mastery wasn't enough here either.
His pride prickled at the thought, but he kept his face blank, forcing his breathing steady.
This body was small. Fragile. Built for stumbling and scraped knees, not battlefields.
But the current inside him felt like potential.
Dain glanced over, pausing midmotion. His gaze sharpened, as if he'd felt something without knowing why.
For a moment, father and son simply looked at each other.
Dain's mouth twitched.
"Don't look at me like that," he said. "It's unsettling."
Aethan blinked slowly.
Then, because he was three and allowed to be petty, he kept looking.
Dain sighed, shaking his head, but there was amusement in his eyes.
"Yeah," he muttered, returning to the fence. "Definitely strange."
That night, Aethan sat in the doorway of the hut, watching the village settle into darkness.
Lantern light flickered behind windows. Quiet voices drifted across the fields. Somewhere, a dog barked once, then fell silent.
The world felt small here.
Safe, in the way fragile things pretended to be safe.
Aethan stared out at the dirt road leading away from the village, disappearing into the black.
He didn't know what waited beyond it.
He didn't know what kind of powers existed in this world, or how far his sword skill would really take him.
He only knew one thing with absolute certainty.
He had lost once.
And he wasn't happy about it.
But there was nothing he could do about the past.
So he watched the village quietly, letting the night air cool his skin, and listened to the steady breathing of the two people inside the hut who had started to matter more than he wanted to admit.
Somewhere beyond the fields, beyond the road, beyond the darkness,
His new life was waiting.
And whether he liked it or not…
He intended to meet it on his own terms.