Muffled voices stirred in Lucas's ears, like faint echoes filtering through layers of deep water.
At first, they were barely a whisper—an unintelligible murmur tangled in the crushing silence around him.
Yet, as the moments stretched onward, he felt an undeniable tug, as though unseen hands were pulling him upward through the drowning depths.
Somewhere beyond the suffocating blackness, the world was calling to him.
The voices grew clearer by the minute, peeling away the thick, oppressive weight that pressed against his senses.
His body—numb and foreign—registered first the sensation of wetness clinging to his skin, the cold bite of unseen air brushing against his fingertips. His chest ached with the dull throb of returning breath.
Yet his eyes remained tightly shut, heavy as stone.
In the pitch darkness behind his eyelids, memories flickered to life—
a silent, haunting slideshow projected onto the inside of his mind.
The first images were sharp and piercing.
A small boy, barely more than a toddler, standing beside a pair of cold, unfeeling gravestones.
The faces of his parents blurred into a distant ache, their warmth now forever beyond his reach.
He saw himself as a child again, retreating into dusty textbooks and sterile classrooms,
drowning himself in routine, in study—anything to silence the void that gnawed at him.
His life unfolded before him like a fraying reel of film:
The countless evenings spent alone, illuminated only by the cold, pale light of a computer screen.
The stagnant hours melting into days, weeks, years—scrolling endlessly through the hollow echoes of the internet, absorbing everything and nothing.
No adventures.
No friends.
No warmth.
Just... existence.
An invisible hand seemed to flip through the film faster now, dragging him mercilessly through the catalogue of his life.
Lucas felt a hollow ache bloom in his chest—a sense of profound emptiness, of years spent treading water, waiting for a tide that never came.
Then...
the memories past his sixteenth birthday began to blur.
Thick, impenetrable fog smothered them, hiding their contents from view like a shroud.
No matter how desperately Lucas tried to focus, the mist refused to part.
The harder he strained, the more elusive the memories became, like something sacred kept just out of reach.
The reel should have stopped there.
But it didn't.
Instead, the images kept spinning—and something new began to seep into him.
The sensation was alien—like having foreign dreams forcibly stitched into the fabric of his mind.
New memories merged with his own, not violently, but with an eerie gentleness, weaving themselves into the gaps of his soul.
And strangely, it didn't hurt.
Instead, it felt... inevitable. As if the memories had always belonged to him, waiting patiently for the right moment to awaken.
Lucas saw another boy now—not himself, yet somehow intimately familiar.
A young child standing barefoot on the rich, sun-warmed earth of a humble village.
The sky overhead was impossibly blue, dotted with wisps of slow-moving clouds, and the scent of firewood and fresh loam hung thick in the air.
The village was small—little more than a scattering of crooked huts and winding dirt paths—but it pulsed with a quiet, resilient life.
Men and women worked the fields with calloused hands, children shrieked with laughter as they chased each other around garden patches.
But the boy…
He stood apart.
The villagers spared him only wary glances, suspicion tightening their mouths, yet the boy returned their disdain with gentle smiles and tireless kindness.
He helped carry heavy baskets. He mended broken tools.
Never once did he demand gratitude that would never come.
His home was a modest hut at the edge of the village, built from uneven logs and patched with fraying cloth.
Yet inside, it was warm.
A woman with tired eyes and soft hands welcomed him with open arms.
A stern man with a voice like thunder ruffled his hair when he thought no one was watching.
Despite the coldness of the world outside, the boy's home was a fortress of light.
Until it wasn't.
Lucas's heart seized as the memories turned savage and raw.
Night fell with unnatural suddenness.
The sky above the village burned, a furious red slashed through with smoke.
Men in gleaming armor—knights bearing banners of an unknown empire—descended upon the village like a pack of wolves.
Lucas could only watch, paralyzed, as the boy's mother was struck down with a merciless blow, her blood blooming across the earth like a dark flower.
His father's death came swiftly—his head severed by a single, practiced swing of a blade.
The boy had no time to scream.
Strong hands seized him, dragging him away from the carnage even as the world he knew crumbled into ashes.
Lucas's mind recoiled, yet the vision pressed onward, relentless.
The boy didn't cry.
He didn't even fully comprehend what had been ripped from him.
There was only a numb, hollow acceptance.
And then—
the fog returned, swallowing the memories before Lucas could see what became of the boy.
A long, shuddering breath escaped his lips.
The heavy silence returned—but now, it was punctuated by a new sound: a voice.
Lucas focused instinctively, reaching out with the raw, trembling strands of his awareness.
"Your fate lies in the Empire."
The voice was male—young, almost cheerful—but carried a gravity that spoke of hardship and long, weary miles.
A bittersweet warmth bled into Lucas's heart at the sound, a sense of closeness so real it was like a physical ache.
"I won't be able to accompany you any longer, Lucas."
Lucas's chest tightened sharply.
He didn't recognize the voice.
He had never heard it before in all his life.
And yet...
somehow, impossibly, he knew—
knew they had once walked side by side through endless fields, through storm and sun and sorrow.
He felt a bond deeper than memory, stronger than blood.
A solitary tear escaped the corner of his closed eye, carving a silent path down his cheek.
He tried to reach out, to grasp the source of that voice, but the darkness around him grew heavier, pulling him deeper once again.
It was a strange feeling, making his consciousness firmer.
'Wha… Where am I?' At this point, he was finally awoken a bit, but his eyes still refused to open.
The reel that was rotating started to blur slightly. Soon, there was nothing but darkness.
It was a strange sensation, as if his consciousness were growing heavier—becoming real, becoming solid.
'Wha… Where am I?'
The thought echoed weakly through Lucas's mind, trembling like a leaf caught in a gale.
Though awareness crept closer, his eyelids remained stubbornly sealed shut, weighed down as if by chains.
The spinning reel of memories that had carried him thus far began to fade, its images blurring and darkening, until finally there was nothing but an endless void.
'Where am I? What happened to me?'
Panic simmered just beneath the surface as his thoughts spiraled faster and faster, chasing themselves into a tight knot of confusion.
Realizing he was getting nowhere, Lucas forced himself to take a mental step back, to claw his way out of the maelstrom of questions dragging him down.
Then—
out of the suffocating dark, a voice sliced through.
It was an older woman's voice, coarse with anger and disbelief.
"Gods! What was this lad even doing on the frontlines?"
The words burst out like a slap, sharp and stinging.
Her voice held the particular edge of someone scolding a wayward child, furious because they cared too much to stay silent.
Before Lucas could process the strange accusation, another voice entered the fray—
this one lighter, younger, and tinged with a distinct note of uncertainty.
"How am I supposed to know that? Ask the kid, not me!"
The man's words came fast, defensive, and laced with a childish fear that made him sound more boy than man.
A heavy pause followed. Then, almost reluctantly, he asked, in a much smaller voice,
"Is it… that bad?"
"Bad?" the woman barked, her voice rising in incredulous outrage.
"The kid's entire body is covered in bandages, and you call this bad?! Idiot!"
The argument echoed like thunder in Lucas's mind, each word hammering home the terrifying realization:
He wasn't alone.
They were talking about him.
But oddly, he couldn't feel anything—no pain, no weight, not even the surface beneath him.
'Frontline? Covered in bandages? What the hell are they talking about?'
A cold sweat prickled at the nape of his neck as Lucas tried desperately to make sense of it all.
'No, this has to be a dream. It has to be.'
He seized the thought like a drowning man grabbing driftwood, desperate for something simple, something that could explain away the madness.
'Maybe... this is one of those lucid dreams? The ones people talk about?'
As if the world itself had been waiting for him to utter those words—
pain erupted through his body like wildfire.
It started in his thighs, his abdomen, his chest, his right hand, and his skull—all at once.
The agony was vicious, sharp as a thousand needles stabbing into his flesh, while his head felt as if a sledgehammer had caved it in.
"ARGHHH! DAMN—DAMMIT!!"
Lucas's scream tore itself from his throat before he even realized it, raw and desperate.
But the act of screaming only made it worse.
The pain surged higher, crashing over him in suffocating waves.
His back arched violently off the bed, every muscle seizing in rebellion. His body trembled uncontrollably, and before he knew it—
his eyes rolled back into his skull, and he slipped into a full-blown seizure.
Across the small, dim room, the woman and the man froze in horror, their eyes wide.
The woman was the first to move.
In a flash, she was at his side, seizing his shoulders in strong, calloused hands.
"Quick! Bring me the box!" she barked.
The man stumbled into motion, nearly tripping over himself as he snatched a small wooden box from a cluttered desk and thrust it toward her.
As she grabbed the box with one hand, he dropped down beside Lucas, struggling to pin his thrashing body against the bed. His face twisted in a grimace, the helplessness stark in his eyes.
"What's happening to him?!" he shouted over the chaos.
The woman didn't answer.
Instead, she yanked the lid off the box and rummaged inside with desperate urgency.
Inside were rows of tiny glass bottles, their contents catching the candlelight with strange glints, and folded paper sachets marked with symbols Lucas couldn't recognize.
Her fingers darted through the collection, finally pulling free a tiny bottle filled with a clear liquid and two sachets—
one glowing faintly crimson, the other a muted, almost sickly green.
She slammed the box back onto the table and moved with swift, practiced motions.
Uncorking the bottle with a loud pop, she ripped open both sachets and poured their fine powders into the bottle's neck.
The crimson and green powders swirled and dissolved, the clear liquid thickening and turning into a sickly, muddy brown.
"Hold him down properly," she snapped.
The man gritted his teeth and leaned all his weight onto Lucas's body, fighting the wild, jerking spasms.
The woman circled to the other side of the bed, knelt close, and pried open Lucas's convulsing mouth with firm fingers.
Without hesitation, she poured all the contents of the bottle into his throat.
Not a single drop spilled.
The strange liquid almost seemed alive, slithering down his gullet before he even had the chance to swallow.
For a moment, there was nothing but the frenzied pounding of Lucas's heart, the metallic tang of blood on his tongue, and the flickering candlelight dancing against the walls.
Then—
gradually—
the seizure ebbed.
Lucas's body slackened against the bed, the tremors fading into small, exhausted shudders.
Heat radiated off his battered frame in heavy, stifling waves.
Sweat clung to him like a second skin, soaking through the tattered remnants of his clothes.
Every breath rasped painfully in his throat, raw and shallow.
The woman let out a long, tense breath, her face grim as she wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her sleeve.
"He's stable... for now," she muttered.
The man slumped backward, gasping for air, his hands trembling slightly.
At the center of it all, Lucas lay unmoving, his battered body trapped somewhere between waking and nightmare.
The oppressive heat radiating from Lucas's body grew stronger with every passing second.
The man hovering at his bedside flinched slightly, pressing the back of his hand against Lucas's clammy forehead.
"He's burning up," he muttered, his voice tight with concern.
The woman, seated nearby, didn't so much as glance his way.
With a curt motion, she tossed the now-empty bottle onto a cluttered bed beside the table, its contents forgotten for now.
"He needs rest," she said briskly, her tone leaving no room for argument.
"The fever will pass eventually... if his body has the strength for it."
Her sharp voice softened almost imperceptibly as she turned her full attention back to Lucas.
Her gaze lingered on his pale, battered face—eyes shut tight, lips parted slightly as he fought for breath.
A glint of pity flickered in her eyes, quickly shadowed by a deeper, older sadness.
Lines of worry etched themselves into her weathered features as she leaned forward, hands clasped loosely in her lap.
The man lingered for a moment longer, his hands hovering uselessly at his sides. His brow furrowed, uncertainty gnawing at him.
"What now?" he asked finally, voice hesitant, almost pleading.
The woman's eyes never left Lucas as she answered, her words heavy with grim certainty.
"He's suffered grave wounds during the last tide," she said quietly.
"The visible ones—broken bones, torn flesh—I can mend those. I can numb his pain, stitch the pieces together."
Her gaze swept down Lucas's body, taking in the sheer volume of bandages, the way fresh ointments stained the linens, the raw pink of half-healed scars.
"But it's the inside that worries me."
Her fingers curled unconsciously, her knuckles whitening.
"Internal injuries," she added, her voice almost a whisper.
"Things I cannot see… nor fix."
The man's face hardened. His easygoing manner vanished, replaced by a grim seriousness that aged him by years.
"You're a doctor," he pressed, the words escaping in a low growl. "Isn't there anything else you can do?"
The woman finally looked up at him then, her expression a mix of weariness and steel.
"I am a doctor," she said, her voice cutting through the heavy air like a blade.
"But I am no miracle worker. No stitches, no poultices, no powders will heal the kind of wounds he carries inside."
Her gaze drifted back to Lucas, softer now, almost mournful.
"Only a healer—someone who wields true restorative magic—can mend what's broken deep within him."
She paused, letting the truth settle between them like dust.
"Without it..." she continued, her voice tightening around the words, "he may never walk properly again. He may be crippled... or worse."
She hesitated before adding, almost reluctantly, "If that happens... he'll have no place in the guild."
The words hung heavy in the humid air, pressing down on them both.
The man clenched his jaw, the muscles twitching along his cheek.
Frustration, helplessness, and something almost like guilt flickered in his eyes.
Without another word, he straightened, his hand balling into a tight fist.
"I'll speak to the boss," he muttered.
Without waiting for a response, he spun on his heel and strode out of the tent, the heavy canvas flap rustling violently in his wake.
Silence fell once more, broken only by the labored rasp of Lucas's breathing and the distant murmur of the camp outside.
The woman remained behind, unmoving for a long moment. Then, slowly, she drew her hands together near her chest, interlocking her fingers tightly.
She bowed her head, closing her eyes in solemn prayer.
In a voice barely louder than a whisper, she spoke—not to Lucas, nor to the empty tent, but to something far older.
"O Eternal Goddess," she murmured, her words trembling with earnest hope,
"grant this child your protection... and guide him through this merciless world."
The candlelight flickered as if stirred by her prayer, and for a fleeting instant, the shadows that loomed in the corners of the tent seemed to retreat, just a little.