I am going to die.
The night air carried that truth gently — cool against my skin, quiet beneath the half-moon's pale light. Every instinct sharpened over a lifetime of killing whispered the same verdict without urgency, without panic. Simply as fact.
I shall die here.
I surveyed the garden without moving my head. Long practice had taught me that stillness was its own kind of invisibility.
The shrubs were sculpted into neat rows, their surfaces so uniformly trimmed they resembled bolts of dark wool unrolled across the earth. Several stone paths wound between them, pale and silent under the moonlight. They all led inward. None led out.
There was no path to life. There was only the smell of death threading through the hedgerows like smoke.
"Raon."
The voice landed on my shoulders like a stone.
I raised my head.
A middle-aged man emerged from the deeper shadows of the garden, his long silvery hair combed back with the precision of someone who understood that appearance was its own kind of weapon. He moved without sound despite his unhurried pace. The garden, which had been merely dark before, seemed to exhale something heavier the moment he stepped fully into view.
Derus Robert.
Head of House Robert.
The man who had owned me since before I could remember my own name.
"Yes."
I opened my mouth. My voice came out level. Years of indoctrination had at least given me that — the ability to sound like nothing at all.
"You have shown a competence that befits your title as leader of the Shadows." He clasped his hands behind his back as he spoke, his tone carrying the mild approval one might give a well-maintained tool. "The family has grown faster because of what you did in the dark."
"I merely did my job."
I did not pretend to feel pride. I bowed my head like a wooden doll that had learned the correct angles.
"But Raon…"
He began softly. That softness was the most dangerous register his voice had.
"Does a Shadow require freedom?"
He extended one hand toward me, almost gently. On the stone path behind him, his shadow stretched forward as well — longer than it should have been, reaching ahead of him like something eager.
"It is enough for a Shadow to follow its master's orders. Thoughts, emotions, feelings are unnecessary to the function."
"That is correct."
"Then why did you act on your own, knowing that?"
The softness left his voice. What replaced it was the cold of deep water.
"And why did you break your indoctrination?"
My spine went rigid. I bit down on my tongue before the surprise could reach my face.
What?
I had said nothing unusual. I had done nothing that deviated from expected behavior, not even in the small ways that might register as anomalous to a careful observer. I had no idea — none — how he had detected that the indoctrination no longer held.
"Speak. When, and how?"
He already knew. The question was merely a formality, the kind that precedes a conclusion already reached.
"How did you find out?" I let my head rise.
Indoctrination.
That was House Robert's leash. They collected children the way other people collected debts — through purchase, through abduction, through the quiet machinery of desperation — and then they hollowed those children out. What remained was a blade with a name. Something that could be pointed.
I had been pointed for as long as I could remember. And then, through a turn of events I still did not entirely understand, I had become aware of the pointing.
"Because you were preparing to leave the clan."
Derus continued with the unhurried ease of a man who had never needed to rush.
"I placed two leashes on every assassin in the Shadows. The first is indoctrination. The second…"
"—Ugh!"
The sound tore itself from my throat before I registered the pain. It was as though something had driven its fingers through my ribs and was slowly compressing my heart, not to stop it, but to remind it that stopping was possible.
"The Rage Worm," Derus said pleasantly. "It has been living inside you since the beginning. At my command, it is currently making itself known."
Rage Worm.
Black magic of the worst classification. It did not merely harm — it read. It sat inside its host and listened to the temperature of their feelings, reporting everything back to its master like a loyal and invisible secretary.
"You disgusting bastard." My voice came out quieter than I intended, which made it worse. "You wrap yourself in the appearance of justice and meanwhile you plant insects inside people's hearts."
"It is not disgusting. It is being thorough." His expression did not change. The warmth he displayed in public — that cultivated, public-facing warmth — remained on his face even now, in a garden where no audience existed. "There is a saying that every person wears a mask. Mine is simply thicker than most."
"Derus Robert."
I clenched my teeth. I pushed my body upright against the pain that was trying to fold me in half.
I could not die doing nothing.
I had been taken before I was old enough to hold the memory of it. I had been unmade and remade into something useful. I had lived without feeling for so long that feeling had begun to feel like something borrowed from someone else.
And then, against all probability, I had broken free. I had thought that was the door opening. I had not understood it was the beginning of the corridor that ended here.
Damn it.
Something rose from a place in me I had believed empty. It was red and formless and it burned.
"You can still stand?"
Derus' composure fractured, just slightly.
"I will not meet my end in disgrace."
I gripped the sword at my waist.
My instincts — the same ones that had been whispering you will die since I stepped into the garden — had not changed their verdict. They would not. They were rarely wrong.
But if I was going to die regardless…
At least leave a mark. At least make him remember that I existed.
"Aaaargh—!"
I drew the blade. Every fraction of aura I had left concentrated along the edge.
The sword snapped at the hilt.
The necklace around my neck fell to the ground with a small, clean sound.
The world tilted. Derus' cold eyes and the moon exchanged places.
Ah.
That was when I understood. My head had already left my shoulders.
But an assassin's sword is not only what is visible.
The aura I had hidden behind the breaking blade — the last of everything I had — launched itself toward Derus' face before the rest of me understood it was dead.
"How vulgar."
He raised his hand with the mild irritation of a man shooing away a moth. My final attack extinguished.
As expected.
Derus Robert was said to be the strongest warrior on the continent. I had known this. I had known what the outcome of this would be before I drew the sword.
He was strong. I was weak.
It cannot be helped.
Yes it—
The thought refused to finish itself cleanly.
The rage that had risen from somewhere I had believed hollow did not agree with acceptance. It boiled up through everything — through the cold I had been trained into, through the resignation that had seemed so reasonable a moment ago — and it was scalding.
It was unfair.
My entire life, shaped by his hand, pointed by his will, ended by his sword. And the Ring of Fire — that strange inheritance I had stumbled into by fate, the most powerful technique said to have existed a thousand years ago — would remain unmastered and unfinished.
I cannot die this way.
Whether it was God or the Devil that heard what came next, I cannot say.
The rage — the specific, clarifying desire to tear the mask from his face and make him bleed for what he had made of me — filled the world completely.
Then the world became red. And then it became nothing.
Derus Robert raised his right hand and examined it with a slight frown.
A small wound marked the back of it. A thread of blood ran from it — the first in years.
He had blocked the attack. He was certain of it. And yet.
He looked at the place where Raon had stood.
Ridiculous.
The man had broken his indoctrination through his own will. He had endured the Rage Worm's full activation and remained upright. And in dying, he had left a mark on the hand that killed him.
A hunting dog raised to be disposable had, at the end, behaved like something else entirely.
Disconcerting.
But it no longer mattered. Raon was dead. Whatever anomaly he had represented was concluded.
"Clean it up."
Soldiers materialized from the garden's shadows and moved toward what remained.
Derus turned away.
Behind him, sunk deep into a pool of dark red, the necklace that had fallen from Raon's throat pulsed once with a faint bluish light.
There was no one left to see it.
You have been chosen by
Your body has died.
Error…
Reincarnation.
Raon had never believed in it. He had been too busy surviving, and then too busy planning, to spend time on fantastical notions.
He had believed that death was the end.
He had been wrong.
"Sunshine, look here!"
A woman with soft golden hair and red eyes that seemed lit from within crouched in front of him, shaking a blue rattle with the focused enthusiasm of someone who considered this the most important task in the world.
"There is a red one too!"
She produced a second rattle with her left hand. The two of them clattered together.
Raon — who had once killed men in their sleep and moved through burning buildings without disturbing the flames — wrinkled his face at the noise.
Still can't get used to this.
Two small arms floated at the edges of his vision. Plump, pale, completely without definition. His arms. The arms of a baby who had been alive for one hundred days and spent most of them unconscious.
He reached slowly for the blue rattle.
"Yes! Come here!" Sylvia's smile widened and she stepped back, drawing him forward. He crawled after her with the laborious determination of someone who had once scaled fortress walls in the dark and was now finding the floor surprisingly challenging.
His head grew heavy. His body, ignoring all instructions, began to tip sideways.
"Oh!"
Sylvia moved faster than he expected — faster than her current display of domesticity suggested — and caught him before he could complete his fall, folding him into her arms in one clean motion.
Quick.
He noted it without emotion, the way he would have noted an opponent's reach. She had some martial foundation. It was not incidental speed.
"Were you surprised? You're all right. You're all right."
She patted his back rhythmically.
He shook his hand to indicate that he had not been surprised and was perfectly fine. The patting continued regardless.
This was his mother. He had spent approximately one hundred days adjusting to this fact. He had not entirely succeeded.
Outside the window that Sylvia drifted toward, still patting, morning light fell across a courtyard of some size. The room itself was generous — walls papered in deep blue, a ceiling fixture that produced light without flame, furniture that communicated expense through understatement.
A wealthy family. A prominent one.
In his previous life, such an environment would have told him something useful — who to watch, what to protect, which exits to memorize. In this life, it simply meant that his starting position was not a poor one.
I need to take revenge.
The memory of his neck and what had been done to it remained intact and vivid. He had thought that a lifetime of indoctrination had worn away his capacity for feeling. Apparently, dying with sufficient injustice restored some of it.
He felt the rage still. Quieter now, cooled into something with more patience in it.
But not yet.
The most important virtue for an assassin was the ability to wait. To move before the moment was right was to waste everything that had been prepared. He had been the best of the Shadows once. He could wait.
And beyond the revenge — there was the Ring of Fire. The technique he had been unable to finish. If he could master it completely in this life, it would not be Derus' shadow he needed to fear but the other way around.
His thoughts were growing soft at the edges.
Inconvenient.
A baby's body had its own scheduling. It slept when it wanted to sleep and no amount of former professional discipline could argue it out of the decision.
"Sleepy, Sunshine? Let's rest then."
Sylvia's patting slowed. Her voice dropped. The warmth of her arms was, he had to admit, not unpleasant.
His eyes were almost closed when the door swung open.
"Lady Sylvia!"
A maid. Breathless. She had forgotten to knock.
"The head of house — he is on his way!"
"My father?"
Father. Not his father. Her father. The head of house, then, was his grandfather.
The room became briefly chaotic. Sylvia and the maid moved in tight circles of agitation, speaking in overlapping fragments about preparation and time and the lack of both.
Then footsteps. Measured, unhurried, carrying more weight than their sound should have.
The door opened.
An old man entered.
Red eyes. Blonde hair swept back from a high forehead. A face that had settled into the particular stillness of someone who had not needed to perform authority in a very long time because the authority simply existed.
Sylvia's spine stiffened. The maid shrank.
Raon, still held in his mother's arms, looked up at the old man's face and felt something stop moving inside him.
Blonde. Red eyes. That stillness.
Glenn Zieghart.
The Destructive King of the North.
The apex family of the continent. Its patriarch. The man whose name alone was enough to alter the temperature of a room.
Was looking down at him.
"Is this the child?"
Sylvia held him out wordlessly.
Raon met the old man's gaze with his round, new eyes.
Ah.
A small, involuntary sound left his mouth.
So this is where I've been reborn.
The thought settled with the particular quality of information that changes everything downstream of it — calm on the surface, enormous underneath.
Not bad at all.