"You suffered greatly."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, vast and unhurried, like wind moving through an empty cathedral.
The man said nothing. He had no words left. He wasn't even sure he had a body anymore. Just a weightless awareness drifting in a pale, colorless void.
"A slave from the moment you could walk. Fought wars that were never yours. Died on a battlefield you had no reason to be on."
It wasn't a question. It was a recitation. Calm and precise, like someone reading from a ledger.
"You never chose any of it."
The man closed his eyes, or whatever passed for eyes here. He didn't need the reminder. Every word landed exactly where it hurt.
"No," he said finally. His voice came out rough. Hoarse. The voice of someone who had spent a lifetime not being asked for his opinion. "I didn't."
A pause stretched between them, long and heavy.
"I pity you," the voice said simply.
Then the void shifted. Weight returned to him all at once, the familiar drag of a body he'd carried for years. He looked down. The same tattered clothes, worn through at the knees and elbows, stiff with old dirt and older blood. The iron cuffs were still around his wrists, the chain between them long gone but the rings remained, heavy and cold as they always had been.
A figure stood before him. White, formless almost, like light that had decided to take the shape of a person. It had no hard edges. No features he could fix his eyes on. Just a presence, quiet and immense, the way a mountain is quiet and immense.
The figure raised a hand.
The void folded. Gold rose from nothing, pillar by pillar, arch by arch, until a palace stood around them, vast and silent and warm with reflected light. The floors were smooth beneath his bare feet. The ceilings climbed higher than any building he had ever been dragged through.
He stood in the middle of it and said nothing.
He had never been inside a palace before. Only outside, on his knees in the mud, looking up at the walls.
The white figure regarded him from across the gleaming floor, unhurried, the way something eternal never needs to hurry.
"I am giving you another chance," it said. "A second life."
The man looked up slowly. He didn't feel gratitude yet. He wasn't sure he remembered how.
"But not freely," the figure continued. "There are conditions."
The word sat in the air between them. Conditions. He almost laughed. Of course there were. There were always conditions. His whole life had been nothing but other people's conditions.
He straightened anyway, the iron cuffs catching the gold light as he clasped his hands in front of him. Old habit.
"Tell me," he said.
"The first condition," it began, "is that you will carry a skill into your new life. Something shaped by what you endured. It will be yours alone. No one else will have it. No one else will understand it."
The man said nothing. He waited. Another old habit.
"The second condition is that you will be born of the Black Sun."
The figure did not elaborate. It let the words stand on their own, bare and unexplained, as if the weight of them would mean something eventually even if it meant nothing now.
The man didn't ask. He had learned long ago that asking questions of powerful things rarely got you honest answers.
"The third condition," the figure said, and something in its voice shifted, just slightly, softer than before, "is that you live the life you wanted."
The simplest of the three. The hardest of the three.
The man stared at the golden floor for a long moment. He had spent his entire life being told where to go, what to carry, who to fight. He had never once been asked what he wanted.
"That's all?" he said quietly.
"That is all."
The figure tilted its head, slow and deliberate.
"Do you have any questions?"
The man opened his mouth. Then closed it.
The instinct was so deeply buried he almost didn't recognize it at first. The faint movement of thought that he had learned, over decades, to stop before it became words. Questions got you beaten. Questions got you reminded of what you were. Questions were for people who had the right to ask them.
He stood in a golden palace before a god who had just offered him a second life and he could not think of a single thing to say.
"No," he said.
The figure was quiet for a moment, and if something without a face could look sad, it did.
"You were never allowed to ask them," it said. It wasn't an accusation. Just the truth, spoken plainly.
The man said nothing. His jaw tightened slightly, the only thing that moved.
"In your next life," the figure said, "you may ask whatever you wish. Of anyone."
He didn't respond to that either. But something in his chest shifted, small and uncomfortable, like a door that had been sealed shut for so long the hinges had forgotten how to move.
The figure looked at him for a long moment, the golden light of the palace humming quietly around them both.
"Good luck," it said.
Not a grand farewell. Not a proclamation or a blessing dressed in ceremony. Just two words, plain and honest, the kind a person says when they mean it and have nothing else to add.
The man looked up at the figure one last time. He thought about saying something. Thank you, maybe. Or asking what comes next, or what the Black Sun meant, or whether any of this was going to be worth it.
He said nothing.
The palace dissolved before he could change his mind. The gold, the columns, the endless warm light, all of it folded away like it had never existed. The white figure was the last thing to go, dimming slowly until it was just a faint glow in the nothing, and then not even that.
The void took him.
And then the void let him go.
The void was empty again. Quiet and vast and cold.
But not empty.
The white figure stood where the palace had been, and across from it, something else. Darker than the void itself, shaped wrong, horns curling upward from its head like something that had never needed to pretend to be human. It had no face either but its presence felt different. Heavier. Like pressure behind the eyes.
The two of them stood in the nothing together for a long moment, the way old things stand together when they have no need to fill silence.
"Do you think he will get far?" one of them asked.
The other considered it. There was no rush in the pause. Centuries could have passed inside it.
"I don't know."
A simple answer. An honest one. And from something that knew as much as they knew, that honesty meant everything.
The dark figure was quiet for a moment longer, its horns catching light that had no source.
"Then again," it said slowly, "no one expected him to survive in his past life either."
The white figure said nothing.
Because there was nothing to say to that. It was true. Every single time, it had been true. The world had pressed down on him with everything it had, and somehow, in the mud and the chains and the blood of a war that was never his, he had kept breathing.
Until he didn't.
And even that hadn't finished him.