White.
Not the sterile, bleached glare of a high-tier healing ward, nor the bright, deafening blindness of waking up that scoured the retinas. This was the kind of soft, inviting white of morning light filtering through cabin curtains. It was warm. Kind. Sickening.
The transition didn't feel like I was stepping through a doorway. It instead felt like I was being violently reassembled by a blacksmith who had no regard for the original blueprint.
My lungs convulsed.
A sharp, violent gasp tore past my lips, accompanied by the immediate, metallic taste of fresh blood. The cold, smooth friction of glass vanished, replaced by an agonizing, jarring impact against something hard, uneven, and stubbornly real.
Dirt.
The scent hit me first—damp earth, crushed grass, and then the unmistakable, biting tang of ozone and old iron.
I coughed, a wet, rattling sound that rattled straight down into my chest cavity, sending a flare of raw pain radiating across my ribs.
My eyes squeezed shut against the lingering glare, tears leaking down my cheeks as my nervous system violently woke up from whatever nightmare had just held it hostage.
"He's up and moving."
The voice was rough, low, and laced with an exhaustion so deep it felt like a structural feature.
"Took the bastard long enough," a second voice muttered, this one sharper, carrying the familiar, irritable snap of someone who had been standing guard for far too many hours. "If he died in his sleep after all that grand speechifying yesterday, I was going to throw his corpse into the ravine myself. Or one of the scum up top could deal with it."
My fingers twitched.
I tried to push myself up, expecting the usual morning stiffness of a body that had pushed too hard the night before. Instead, my hands sank deep into loose soil. My muscles—dense, coiled, and burning with a familiar, terrifying volume of raw power—responded instantly to the command.
Too instantly.
The sheer kinetic force I threw into my arms sent me launching upward like a coiled spring, completely misjudging the weight of my own frame. My head cracked against a low-hanging oak branch with a sickening thud, and I dropped back onto the dirt with a groaning grunt, clutching my forehead.
"Careful, commander," a heavy, steel-plated hand reached down, grabbing my shoulder and anchoring me to the earth with practiced ease. "You hit your head hard after falling over during the practice push yesterday. Don't go shattering your skull before we even reach the gates."
The... practice push?
The words echoed in my head, dragging a massive, rusty anchor behind them.
I blinked hard, forcing my vision to clear past the white spots dancing in my peripheral. The blinding light of the maze had faded into the dull, overcast grey of a morning sky choked by distant smoke.
I was sitting in a makeshift trench carved into the roots of a massive, ancient tree. Around me, the camp was a hive of quiet, grim preparation. Men and women in dented, soot-blackened plate armour were sharpening blades, checking leather straps, and passing around canteens of tepid water with the silent, dead-eyed efficiency of soldiers who knew exactly what lay at the end of the road.
Just an army. Just a war.
And right in front of me, kneeling in the mud with a battered whetstone in one hand and a familiar, silver-veined broadsword in the other, was a man whose face I had known better than my own reflection.
He looked up, his dark eyes narrowing slightly at the dazed, hollow expression plastered across my face.
"Aren?" He tilted his head, the corner of his mouth twitching into a familiar, dry smirk. "Don't tell me you forgot the way to the Demon King's castle. Because if you need a map this late in the campaign, I'm billing you for the extra rations."
I stared at him.
My heart hammered against my ribs—not from fear, but from the sudden, jarring dislocation of reality. It hammered because as I reached down to my waist, my fingers wrapped securely around the heavy, familiar, leather-wrapped hilt of Astrum.
The blade hummed against my palm, a warm, resonant vibration that sang directly into my blood. It was the exact same confidence I had felt a lifetime ago—the unwavering, arrogant certainty of a man who believed he was the apex predator of the world.
And yet, deep down beneath that familiar weight, sitting squarely in the dark silence at the back of my skull, something felt terrifyingly wrong. A phantom itch. A blank space where a few crucial hours of the shadow maze—and a terrifying, empty chasm of time that refused to resolve into shape—should have been.
I had no memory of falling into the maze, nor of what I had seen in that blinding void.
There was only the march. The sky. And the castle waiting at the end of the horizon.
I gripped the hilt of my sword a fraction tighter, the leather biting into my palm, and slowly pushed myself to my feet.
"Right." I said, my voice cutting through the damp early morning air with a cold, absolute authority that brooked no argument.
Whatever dream I had just crawled out of, it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered now was finishing what we started.
I clenched and unclenched my fist a few times. It felt awkward. Like my hands were too big, or that they had grown unfamiliar.
Hmm.
Let me just—
I reached down to my waist, grabbing the hilt of Astrum and pulling it from its sheath.
"Woah, careful with that." The same rough voice muttered, a half-ironic statement.
I looked around, trying to find somewhere that wasn't riddled with people. After a moment of looking, I found a direction that only had two visible figures.
"Move." I didn't issue it as a request; it was a command. An objective command that said exactly what needed to be said, and then some.
They stepped to the side, not wanting to end up a cautionary tale.
And I swung my hand once, just trying to get a feel of Astrum.
There was a few seconds of absolute stillness where the air pressure dropped so sharply my eardrums popped. Then, a crescent blade of compressed wind tore forward, screaming with a high-pitched, tooth-rattling frequency that sucked every loose leaf, pebble, and twig into its wake.
It struck the edge of the ancient forest we had been using as a landmark for the last three days.
At first, nothing happened. The trees stood intact, frozen for a heartbeat against the grey early morning sky. Then, a shockwave caught up with the sound, delivering a deafening, thunderous crack that rattled the teeth in our skulls.
The front line of century-old oaks didn't exactly 'fall'. They simply ceased to exist as solid wood, unmade into a cloud of drifting debris.
The kinetic wave pulverized four-foot-thick trunks into a swirling blizzard of sawdust and floating splinters.
Where a dense, thriving woodland had stood a heartbeat ago, the landscape simply stopped. A mile-long wedge of absolute nothingness gaped open, punching a jagged hole straight through the horizon.
Looking straight ahead, the familiar claustrophobic feeling of the tree line was entirely gone, replaced by an unnerving, open-air vacuum.
The distant hills and lowlands, previously hidden behind endless layers of emerald canopy, were suddenly exposed in harsh, panoramic clarity, framed by towering walls of shattered timber that stretched away to the left and right until they dissolved into haze.
The earth itself had been stripped raw, scraped bare of underbrush, roots, and topsoil by the sheer violence of the displacement, leaving a scorched, smoking trough that sloped downward like the dry bed of an ancient river of fire.
Silence rushed back in—heavy, suffocating, and absolute—broken only by the soft, steady patter of sawdust drifting down from the sky like dirty snow, coating our shoulders, our armour, and the jagged stumps in a thick, choking blanket of pale yellow.
I stared straight ahead into the empty expanse, watching the dust settle over the ghost of a forest.
Huh.
I was going to have some explaining to do to the others.
Kaelis was bound to get... hyperactive after seeing that—and she wouldn't hold back, either. I sheathed my blade with a quiet click, already dreading the headache.
That wasn't going to be fun.
Still, I would cross that bridge when I got to it. For now, a more pressing issue demanded attention: where was the rest of my vanguard?
I looked around, trying to find anybody else in my group. Not the soldiers, but my actual group.
Nowhere to be seen.
That's... never a good sign.
I ducked my head instinctively as a right leg flew over my head where I'd just been.
"Look who's finally woken up. Thought you'd died." The voice was familiar, laced with a predatory malice.
Her hair was a messy, orange mane pulled back loosely with two twitching, triangular ears pinned flat against her skull to block out the early morning noise. A jagged, faded scar cut across the bridge of her nose—a souvenir from some forgotten skirmish where I'd probably done something equally reckless.
She stared at me, looking me up and down for a moment.
"You're... weird. Different, somehow. What's up?"
She stepped closer, closing the distance with the predatory, fluid grace that made half the army keep a wide berth whenever she was in a foul mood.
"Well?" Kaelis crossed her arms, the heavy steel bracers clinking against her leather armour. "Are you going to stand there looking like an idiot who forgot how gravity works, or are you going to tell me why you just carved a highway through the tree line?"
I let out a slow breath, my hand resting casually over the hilt of Astrum as I tried to calculate how much of the truth I could get away with before she decided to test my skull with her bare fists.
"I was testing the weight," I said flatly, keeping my voice level.
She raised an eyebrow, her tail flicking a sharp, irritated arc behind her. "Testing the weight? You didn't test a damn thing, Aren. You unmade a landmark. If you've got so much spare energy lying around, save it for the bastards waiting over the horizon."
She turned on her heel before I could answer, marching back toward the makeshift command tent without waiting for an invitation.
I watched her go, a familiar knot of tension tightening in my chest.
At least she was alive. At least the group was still here. But the phantom itch at the back of my mind—the missing pieces of a life that felt impossibly heavy and entirely unwritten—remained.
I adjusted the strap of my sword, stepped over a smoking root, and followed her into the dark.
The moment we entered the tent, another member of the group made their presence abundantly clear.
The tinkerer, as she liked to call herself. The mad-woman, as everybody else liked to call her.
Lo and behold, she was doing something, likely to explode, in the corner of the tent.
"Lis, stop flaring up your mana, it's making it hard to breathe in here."
"Stop calling me that and I'll consider it." She didn't look up from whatever she was working on.
She always did this. The name wasn't that big of a deal, and my tongue would go to war with me if I had to pronounce Lysandria every single time.
"No."
And the mana in the room immediately became more suffocating.
Really?
I decided not to say anything.
Firstly, who in their right mind would fight Lis when she was in one of those moods, and secondly, any fighting here would end up in more casualties than we're willing to take with our already depleted forces.
"Fine. Lysandria." I muttered, trying to project as much pure malice in my voice as humanly possible.
"Was that so hard." She chuckled.
My hands immediately drifted to my blade. Was it worth it? I genuinely considered it for a moment, before deciding it wouldn't be my best decision.
I turned around, and exited the tent.
I headed towards my living 'arrangement', which, in reality, was more just everything I thought I needed thrown in a pile carelessly.
We were going to be up in a few hours anyway, and god knows I needed the sleep.
The moment I laid down, my eyes were forced shut by a wave of tiredness.