The woman's voice was a melody in a minor key—low, musical, and utterly incomprehensible.
"Veir'shan, lo'kaen valis?" The sounds rolled from her tongue like water over stones, liquid and foreign. They carried weight, intention, but to Noah, they were noise. Beautiful, terrifying noise.
I don't understand.
The realization sank deeper than any horror he'd yet faced. This wasn't just a new body or a new house. This was a new world, and he was deaf to its most basic code. The woman's words weren't just unfamiliar—they were wrong, constructed from phonemes his human ear had never been meant to parse. They scraped against his mind like a key that didn't fit a lock.
She lifted him from the crib, and her hands were gentle but practiced, supporting his head with a care that suggested she'd done this many times before. Up close, her features were a contradiction. She appeared to be in her late forties or early fifties, with silver threads weaving through her black hair like spider silk through obsidian. But her skin was smooth, her jawline sharp, and her brown eyes—framed by lashes so dark they looked painted—held a vitality that defied age. She was handsome, severe, the kind of woman who could command a room with a glance.
She spoke again, her voice softer now, almost cooing. Still, the words were gibberish. Still, Noah's infant throat tightened with frustration.
I can't speak. I can't move. I can't even understand. I'm a ghost haunting a doll.
He tried to force his mouth to shape the words he'd known his entire life—Japanese, he remembered suddenly, the word floating up from the depths of his shredded identity—but his tongue was a foreign object, thick and clumsy. All that emerged was a frustrated gurgle.
The old woman—his grandmother? His captor?—smiled at the sound, mistaking it for contentment. She cradled him against her shoulder, where he could smell lavender soap and, beneath it, the same copper-sweet scent that had haunted the throne room. Her breath stirred his hair as she murmured what could only be a lullaby, but the tune was discordant, built on quarter-tones that made his teeth ache.
The door opened again.
The man entered first, and the air in the room seemed to compress. He was in his mid-thirties, tall and built like a blade—lean, sharp, with an economy of movement that spoke of martial training. His hair was pure black, cut short and severe, and his eyes were the same deep brown as the old woman's, but harder. They swept the room like a predator's, even as his expression remained neutral. He wore a high-collared tunic of dark gray wool, fastened with silver clasps that bore a sigil Noah recognized: the spiral eye from the ceiling mural.
Behind him came the woman.
Noah's breath—this new body's breath—caught.
She was beautiful in a way that defied physics. Her black hair fell to her waist in silken waves, but it seemed to catch light that wasn't there, shimmering with an inner luminescence like moonlight on water. Her features were delicate, perfect, carved by a sculptor who had studied angels and decided to improve upon them. But it was her eyes that stunned him: deep violet, luminous, with pupils that seemed to hold galaxies.
Purple eyes.
The same shade as the sigil on his palm. The same shade as the throne room man's gaze.
She wore a dress of deep crimson velvet, cinched at the waist with a black leather corset. Around her neck hung a silver pendant—another spiral eye, but this one held a gemstone that pulsed with a faint, sickly light.
They spoke, and their conversation was a tapestry of sound. The man's voice was baritone, clipped, authoritative. The purple-eyed woman's was silk over steel, soft but edged with command. The old woman responded in kind, cradling Noah as she gestured with her free hand toward the crib, then toward the window, where the light was fading.
Noah strained, desperate. He listened not for meaning but for pattern, for any anchor in this storm of syllables. And slowly, like a man recognizing his own name whispered in a crowd, he began to parse them.
Not the language itself. But names.
They stood out like stones in a river, somehow heavier than the other words.
"...Varyan..." The purple-eyed woman said it, and Noah's infant spine stiffened.
The same name from the battlefield memory. The man in the throne room had been called Varyan.
"...Sovereign..." The old woman uttered it with reverence and fear, her eyes flicking down to Noah's face.
"...Duskveil..." The man's lips curled around the word like a curse.
Varyan. Sovereign. Duskveil.
The pieces clicked together with a horror that made his new heart stutter. This wasn't just any world. This was that world. The world of the throne room, the massacre, the man with purple eyes who could erase existence with a thought.
And he was in it. As a baby. Possibly as—
Noah's mind rebelled against the thought, but it formed anyway: As his child?
The purple-eyed woman glanced at him then, her violet gaze sweeping over him like a scanner. For a moment, he was certain she could see him. Not the baby, but him. The boy from Tokyo who'd died on a crosswalk. The witness.
Her expression didn't change. She turned back to the conversation.
The old woman shifted Noah to her other arm, and he caught a glimpse of the man's hand resting on the hilt of a dagger at his belt. The weapon was black iron, its pommel carved into that same spiral eye.
They were armed. They were guarded. They were waiting for something.
The conversation concluded with a nod. The purple-eyed woman gestured toward the door. The man followed her, his hand never leaving his weapon.
The old woman placed Noah back in the crib. Her touch was gentle, but her eyes were distant, troubled. She murmured something that sounded like a prayer—or a ward.
"Sleep, Ko'vallis," she whispered.
And somehow, impossibly, Noah understood that last word.
Ko'vallis.
Little Sovereign.
The door closed behind them, leaving him in the dimming light. The phonograph's brass horn seemed to lean closer. The globe's screaming faces rotated slowly, as if turning to watch him.
Noah lay in his crib, a stranger in a stranger's skin, in a world where his death had been only the beginning.
And the name Varyan Duskveil echoed in his mind like a death sentence.
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