He was born to the sound of rain. In a large house of light stone, amidst the scent of wax and medicinal herbs.
From his very first days, he was strange. Too calm and serious for a child. He almost never cried, rarely laughed, and often stared into the void.
They said he had a "gaze too conscious for a child, like that of an adult."
Anastas often dreamed dreams that were not dreams.
He saw the sun over ancient, unusual temples, felt the weight of a crown upon a head he did not possess, and sometimes—blood on his hands and a sense of loss so acute that he woke up gasping, with a name on his lips he could not recall.
The name slipped away, but the feeling—never.
With age, this did not pass.
The third life proved harder for him.
Though it seemed it should have been the opposite: he had already gone through death, rebirth, and loss. But that was precisely the catch.
He remembered too much.
Again, a foggy childhood.
Now, memories of two lives were piling into an immature, childish head. They followed no order, possessed no logic: flashes, images, smells, sensations. The cold of stone floors under bare feet. The weight of a sword in a palm that did not yet know how to hold a spoon. Foreign blood on his hands—followed by the nanny's voice calling for dinner.
A new life. A new body. A new face in the mirror, which he initially examined with detached bewilderment, as if it were not him. A new name he did not answer to immediately. Again, the necessity to learn everything from scratch: walking, talking, remembering.
Full realization came slowly.
Likely, it was designed so as not to break the fragile child's psyche. Memory came in waves: first, he simply felt he was not like the others; then, that he knew and could do more than he should. And only later did he understand that he had already lived too much to be a child in the truest sense.
Memories tangled, overlapped, breaking cause-and-effect ties. Sometimes he could not understand the source of this knowledge: why he instinctively knew how to hold a sword before he learned to write; why the smell of metal and blood caused nausea and cold fear, though he had never—in this life—seen war.
Sometimes he was overwhelmed by sudden bouts of unexplained anguish. He could stand by the window, watching the rain or the fog over the fields, and suddenly his heart would clench as if he were losing someone right then and there. Sometimes in his sleep, he reached out into the void, feeling a warmth that was not there, and woke with a sense of bereavement.
Memories came in flashes.
And soon came another, far more frightening discovery.
He suddenly realized that he remembered less and less of his first life, of the times when he was Thirasak Siriporn, ruler of Arichayan. This realization struck unexpectedly. The memories were no longer vivid. They receded, lost their sharpness, blurred at the edges. To him, it began to feel like something distant, almost unreal—like one of the fairy tales the nanny read before bed. There were no dragons or monsters, but there were kings and princesses, knights, castles, and love. He no longer remembered many people from the royal court. Their names fell away first, then their faces. It was frightening and incredibly sad. As if someone were carving pieces of the past out of him.
Alas—human memory is not infinite.
New faces, knowledge, and memories come to replace others, displacing the old, even if the old were dear.
And yet, in a strange way, Athit did not disappear.
He did not always remember his face—sometimes it blurred, changed, tried on different features—but the feeling remained unchanged. The longing, the recognition, the internal tremble at the thought of him. The face might be forgotten, but the presence—never.
Sometimes he saw a garden. Bright daylight blinding his eyes. He is running. Heart pounding. A woman's hand in his palm—warm, trembling. He did not always immediately understand who she was, but the feeling was clearer than words. Jihua. Her name surfaced later, like a delayed pain.
Sometimes he recalled the sound of steel striking steel. A dull thud, grinding, short shouts. A stranger's back before him, shielding him from a blow. Houwei. He did not immediately remember his face, but he always remembered the sensation of reliability, as if a person stood nearby who had already decided to die just so you could live.
These scenes never reached the end.
Memory seemed to deliberately cut them off at the most painful point.
He remembered how Houwei screamed. Remembered the sword slipping from his hands and falling into the grass. Remembered the taste of blood in his mouth. Remembered how the world in an instant became too quiet.
And then—something else.
Knees on the cold ground. Wrists gripped to the point of pain. A foreign voice, mocking, confident. And the girl standing nearby. He rarely saw her face in these memories. More often—only a silhouette, the light fabric of her clothes, a stray lock of hair. But every time, he knew it was her. And every time, his heart clenched with such force that he suffocated. He did not always remember the moment of her death itself. Memory was mercifully cruel—it left only the sensation of absolute emptiness afterward. As if not only a person had been torn from the world, but the very meaning of moving forward.
Houwei went first. Jihua—followed. And he remained.
This realization came later: the second life was shorter than the first, but the wound from it was deeper. Perhaps because there, he already knew what loss was—and still walked into it consciously.
With time, he noticed another terrible thing. If memories of the first life faded slowly, like a weathering fresco, the second disappeared in jerks. Today he remembered Houwei's gaze before the battle, and tomorrow—no longer. Today he knew how Jihua's voice sounded, and in a month, only the sensation of warmth remained, without the sound.
This frightened him most of all.
He caught himself fearing to forget not the palaces or titles, but them. Fearing to wake up one day and not remember why this constant heaviness lives in his chest. Why his heart reacts to injustice so sharply. Why the thought of freedom is always colored by blood.
As a former warrior, he knew physical pain, wounds, broken bones. And now, looking back, he understood that he no longer remembered that pain; it is erased first. But he remembered the moment when something breaks inside forever; soul pain does not erase. It is alive as long as the memory of the cause is alive. Soul pain does not pass with time; it merely changes form. Sometimes it came as guilt—for surviving; sometimes—as anger at himself for the choice made; sometimes—as a quiet, exhausting longing for people he can never save again.
And yet, amidst all this, one thing remained unchanged.
He was ready to endure this again.
Ready to lose memories, get confused in lives, forget his own names.
For the sake of Athit. For the sake of Jihua.
For the sake of finding him again and again—be it in another body, in another era, with another destiny.
If memory ever leaves him only one feeling—let it be recognition.
It is worth it.
Even if the price is the tragedy of every life.