Cold. Rot. A weight crushing his ribs.
Lucien's eyes flew open to suffocating blackness. Panic clawed up his throat—no, into his throat. Something was wrong with his throat. It didn't move when he swallowed. It didn't…
Breathe.
He lurched upright, nails scraping against wood. Coffin lid. He was in a coffin. His new body—Alden's body—slammed against it, shoulder-first, the impact reverberating through deadened muscle. The lid splintered. Grave dust rained into his mouth, chalky and stale.
Light stabbed his eyes. Faint, but enough to see the tomb: cracked marble floors, vaulted ceilings strung with cobwebs, and frescoes peeling off the walls. Heroes in gilded armor battling dragons. A man with Alden's face raising a sword to the heavens. Him.
Lucien staggered to his feet, bones popping like wet firewood. His skin—Alden's skin—hung mottled with decay. Grey patches bloomed across his hands, the fingertips blackened. Corpse. He was a walking corpse.
"Hell," he croaked. His voice was deeper, rougher. Familiar, almost. "Hell is real, and it's a goddamn HR department."
A glint caught his eye. At the foot of the coffin lay a sword, its blade rusted but the hilt etched with a looping insignia: a serpent swallowing its tail—the same sigil from the void. Alden's sword.
He grabbed it.
Memory struck like static.
—Alden, kneeling in the rubble of a broken temple, blood spewing from his lips. A shadow loomed over him, whispering, "The Everflame's fire dies tonight." The sword slipped from his grasp—
Lucien reeled, clutching his skull. The vision vanished, but the pain lingered, hot and metallic behind his eyes.
Across the tomb, a door crashed open.
"There!" Robed figures surged inside, their faces hidden beneath crow-beaked masks. One leveled a dagger dripping with black liquid. "The False Lightbearer lives! Finish him!"
***
The tomb erupted in motion.
Lucien scrambled backward, his new body moving like a puppet with half-cut strings. Alden's muscles—once honed for heroism—rebelled, joints locking mid-stride. He collided with a crumbling statue, its stone face smashing against the floor. The face was his face. Or Alden's. Or—
"False Lightbearer!" A cultist lunged, dagger aimed at Lucien's throat.
Instinct—Alden's instinct—flared. Lucien swung the rusted sword.
Metal screamed. The blade cleaved through the cultist's wrist. A severed hand thudded to the floor, still gripping the dagger. No blood. Only black smoke coiled from the stump.
The cultist didn't scream. Behind the crow mask, a wet laugh bubbled. "The corpse still dances. How pathetic."
Lucien retreated, his heel crunching over debris. The tomb's frescoes loomed above, their colors leeched by time. Half the murals were defaced: Alden's smile chiseled into a snarl, his triumphs painted over with ash. A single intact panel showed him kneeling before a throne of fire, head bowed as a radiant woman pressed a burning crown to his brow. The Everflame.
Another flash. Another Echo.
—The crown seared Alden's skull, flames licking his eyes. The radiant woman's voice: "Your past is ash. You belong to the Flame now."—
"Get out of my head!" Lucien snarled, swiping at the air like the memory was a wasp.
Two more cultists flanked him. Their blades glistened with the same oily blackness. One murmured a chant, "The unworthy dead shall not rise. The unworthy dead shall not—"
Lucien's fist met the cultist's mask. Bone crunched—his or theirs, he couldn't tell—but the satisfaction died as rotting skin split across his knuckles. No pain. Just the sickening tear of necrotic flesh peeling back to reveal greyish bone beneath.
"What the hell am I now?" he breathed.
"A mistake," hissed the remaining cultist. They lunged.
Lucien parried, but Alden's blade caught the attack at a brittle angle. The sword shattered.
Shards of metal sliced his cheek. Still no pain.
The cultist pressed closer, crow mask filled his vision. "Valeria walks in sunlight while you rot in the dark. You're not even a ghost—just a stain."
Lucien's fingers brushed a fallen fresco fragment—a shard of Alden's painted crown. He slammed it into the cultist's throat.
Black smoke poured from the wound. The body collapsed, robes deflating as the smoke dissipated.
Panting, Lucien stared at the wreckage. His hands shook. Alden's hands. Dead hands.
A low rumble shook the tomb. Dust rained from the ceiling as distant footsteps echoed—dozens, maybe hundreds.
The cultists weren't alone.
***
The tomb's corridors blurred as Lucien ran. Alden's body was a stranger—too tall, too broad, every muscle a half-second too slow to obey. His rotting heel caught a loose flagstone. He crashed into a mural of Alden raising a beacon over a grateful city, the painted crowd's adoring smiles cracking under his weight.
"Burn the heresy!" The cultists' voices echoed behind him, closer with every second.
Lucien careened into a crypt, its walls lined with skeletal statues gripping swords. One's blade gleamed—silver, untouched by rust. He snatched it, and the moment his dead fingers closed around the hilt—
Fire.
Golden light exploded from the sword, searing his palms. The blast tore through the crypt, incinerating a cultist mid-leap. Ash and embers rained down. Lucien stared at his hands. The skin sloughed off in patches, revealing charred bone beneath. Still no pain.
"What are you?" he hissed at the blade.
Another cultist rounded the corner. Lucien swung blindly. The light surged again, wilder this time—a whipcrack of energy that sheared through stone. The ceiling groaned.
Run.
He bolted as the crypt collapsed, swallowing the cultists' screams. Daylight stabbed his eyes as he stumbled into a graveyard. The real world. Or what was left of it.
The city sprawled below, its white spires crowned with golden banners bearing a new sigil: a solar hawk mid-strike. Valeria's symbol. But here, in the cemetery, Alden's legacy was rot. His statues lay decapitated. Offerings at his tomb were stomped into mud—rotted flowers, shattered candles, a child's drawing of the Lightbearer defaced with the word COWARD.
"...finally, a hero who won't abandon us," a voice sneered.
Lucien crouched behind a mausoleum. Two laborers walked past, kicking Alden's defiled shrine.
"Lightbearer? More like Light-fleer," the second laughed. "Valeria's already routed the Scourge in the south. Took her three days. Alden had years."
"I heard he begged at the end. The Everflame snuffed him out like a—gah!"
The laborer froze. Lucien's new reflexes had moved faster than thought—Alden's hand was clasped around the man's throat, necrotic fingers denting flesh.
Who's the coward? he wanted to snarl. Who's the fraud?
But the laborers' eyes bulged, not with fear—revulsion. Like he was a rabid dog.
"Y-You're dead," the man choked. "The Flame cursed you—"
Lucien recoiled. Let go.
He ran.
Up the hillside, through briars that tore his funeral shroud, until the city's noise faded. He collapsed in a ditch, silver sword clattering beside him. His hands smoked, the light still flickering in his bones like a dying lighter.
Then he saw them.
Glowing cracks split his wrists, snaking up his arms. Chains. Not the void's crystalline bonds, but scorched, broken things—floating half an inch above his skin, trembling as if straining to reform.
The sword's light dimmed. The chains faded.
A twig snapped.
Across the ditch, a hooded figure stood silhouetted by the setting sun. Their cloak bore the edge of a hawk emblem.
Valeria's hunter had found him.