The nights after Aren's return felt longer than any journey he had ever taken.
Sleep came in fragments—thin, uneasy stretches broken by memories that did not belong entirely to this life. Sometimes he woke with his chest tight, breath shallow, as if he had been running. Other times, he lay staring at the ceiling of his childhood room, listening to the quiet sounds of the house settling around him, wondering when exactly his heart had begun to ache again.
It always began the same way.
A darkness without shape. A stillness so complete it pressed against him like weight.
Then—sound.
Not music. Not yet.
Just the faintest vibration, like a string drawn too tight, trembling on the edge of breaking.
And with it came memories.
In his first life, childhood had not been gentle.
People liked to say he had been too young to understand, too young to remember, too young to feel the weight of abandonment. They were wrong. Children noticed more than adults ever gave them credit for. They felt absences keenly, even when they did not yet have words for them.
He remembered the day his parents left.
Not the exact words—those had blurred with time—but the silence afterward. The way the door had closed and not opened again. The way the house had felt suddenly too large, too empty, as if the walls themselves had drawn back in discomfort.
He had waited.
For hours at first. Then days. Then years.
Waiting had become a habit.
Hunger followed soon after. Not the sharp pain people romanticized, but a dull, gnawing presence that settled into the body and refused to leave. When hunger came, he endured. When loneliness settled in, he accepted it as part of life. Endurance became routine. Acceptance became survival.
School had been a struggle he refused to surrender.
Money was scarce—sometimes nonexistent—but he found a way to keep going. Odd jobs. Long walks. Sleepless nights bent over borrowed books beneath flickering lights. Education became the only thread tying him to the idea that his life could be something more than endurance.
Those years passed in a blur of silent classrooms and exhaustion. Teachers praised his discipline. Classmates kept their distance. He never learned how to belong among them.
He learned something else instead.
How to be alone without breaking.
Betrayals came later, when he was old enough to trust and foolish enough to believe that effort alone could earn loyalty. Friends who vanished when circumstances changed. Promises that dissolved the moment they became inconvenient. Each time, he retreated further inward, building walls not from anger, but from calculation.
Connections were liabilities.
That belief hardened his heart more efficiently than any cruelty ever could.
By the time illness crept into his body, he barely noticed at first. Fatigue was familiar. Pain was manageable. Weakness could be ignored.
Until it couldn't.
His body failed suddenly, without drama. One day he was walking. The next, he was falling. Hospitals blurred together in sterile whites and quiet beeping machines. Doctors spoke carefully, their words softened by pity. Time shortened.
On his final night, as darkness pressed close and breath came shallow and uneven, a sound drifted through the open window.
A guitar.
The melody was imperfect. A string buzzed. Another wavered. But there was warmth in it. Intention. A quiet defiance against silence itself.
He listened.
And for the first time in a long while, something loosened in his chest.
Aren woke with a sharp inhale, fingers curling into the sheets.
The dream faded slowly, like mist retreating under morning light, but the ache it left behind lingered. He lay still, staring at the wooden ceiling of his room, listening to the familiar rhythms of his home—the distant murmur of his parents moving downstairs, the faint creak of beams, the soft sigh of wind through the shutters.
This life was different.
He was not alone here.
That realization still startled him sometimes.
His mother's voice reached him from the kitchen, gentle and warm. His father's footsteps followed soon after, heavier, measured, grounded. These sounds anchored him more firmly than any vow ever could.
And yet.
The memories did not fade.
They never truly did.
Instead, they fueled something deeper.
Resolve.
Aren sat up slowly, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. His hands trembled faintly—not with fear, but with something closer to anticipation. He reached for the cloth-wrapped object resting beside his bed.
The relic.
His relic.
The broken guitar.
He unwrapped it carefully, as he always did, revealing the worn wood and snapped strings. Even now, months after the Awakening, the sight of it still drew strange looks from others. A relic was meant to sing at birth, meant to declare a path.
His had arrived already wounded. He rested it across his lap, fingers hovering just above the strings.
There was no sound.
No resonance.
Nothing that should have been there.
And yet…
Sometimes, late at night or in the space between dreams, he swore he felt something stir. A faint vibration. A whisper of response. So subtle he dismissed it as imagination every time. A breeze passed through the room. The broken strings quivered.
Aren froze.
The sensation vanished as quickly as it came, leaving only silence behind. His heart pounded as he searched the relic for any sign of movement, any explanation. There was none. He exhaled slowly, forcing himself to relax.
"There's no way," he murmured to himself. "A broken relic doesn't sing."
He had learned that much already.
Still, he wrapped the guitar again with care, as if it were fragile not because it was broken—but because it was waiting.
Later that day, Aren wandered beyond the village outskirts, following paths worn smooth by years of quiet footsteps. The land here was familiar—fields stretching beneath open sky, the distant river glinting under sunlight. He had walked these roads as a child and as something older than a child, carrying memories from another life within him.
The world moved on regardless.
Farmers worked the fields, their simple rhythm tools keeping time with labor. Merchants passed with carts and muted chimes woven into their harnesses. Life continued in sound and motion.
And Aren watched.
He listened.
He learned.
He thought of the old woman by the river.
The one who had seen his relic and not turned away.
The one who had spoken of broken songs as if they were not curses—but beginnings.
Her training had been unlike anything he expected. No grand techniques. No overwhelming power. Just patience. Listening. Understanding silence as much as sound.
She had tested his resolve more than his ability.
And when she finally accepted him, she had told him a tale—one remembered now only as a fairytale. A story of a broken instrument known as the Dirge of the First Silence, said to belong to an age before harmony ruled the world. A relic that could not dominate sound—but reshape it.
He had listened quietly then, unsure whether to believe.
Now, standing beneath the open sky, Aren wondered if the story had been less metaphor than warning.
That night, as he lay in bed once more, memories stirred again.
But this time, they did not crush him.
They steadied him.
He remembered the boy who endured hunger and loneliness. The man who refused to collapse beneath betrayal. The final moments when music had reached him through the darkness and offered something like peace.
Those memories did not chain him to the past. They pushed him forward.
"I won't waste this life," Aren whispered into the quiet. "Not this one."
The broken guitar rested nearby, silent and waiting.
Outside, the wind passed softly through the village.
And for just a heartbeat—A single string hummed.
Not loudly.
Not clearly.
But enough.
Enough to promise that even broken echoes could one day become a song.