Volume 2 – Inheritance of Fire
Chapter 1 – Echoes of Self
Part 1 - The General Lord
The first connection didn't come through sight or sound.
It came through pain.
Not mine—his.
A fracture in my chest. Brief. Sharp. Like steel on bone.
The staff hummed, its runes flashing once before fading. No coordinates. No reply. Just that flicker. Just enough to tell me someone wasn't dead.
Somewhere far from Hollowreach, the world bled sunlight over a scorched ridge and the battered wall of a settlement too broken to be called a fort.
Darius opened his eyes beneath a collapsed watchtower, dust thick in his lungs, armor half-crushed under a fallen beam. Smoke curled above him. The scent of blood, burning pine, and wet leather mixed in a way I recognized instantly.
A battlefield. How did i know this? How could I sense this? Through Darius?
He moved like a wounded bear. Every motion deliberate. Controlled.
The weight on his back wasn't tech. It wasn't a crafted VR skin. It was real iron, shaped and reforged a dozen times over. The sword still hummed from contact — not electrical, but residual mana burn.
He staggered to his feet, blinking smoke from his eyes, and looked around at the carnage. Bodies—some human, some not—littered the edge of the palisade. The northern sky stretched pale behind the mountain line, clouds split open as if the world had been screaming.
No HUD. No indicators. No system logs.
Just firelight and ruin.
Someone called his name.
Not his real one.
Not the one I knew.
"Marshal Kael!"
The voice cracked from a throat thick with ash. A boy, no older than fifteen, bleeding from a split above the brow. He stumbled toward Darius, sword dragging behind him like he didn't remember how to hold it.
"Marshal—we held them. They're gone. We did it."
Darius didn't answer.
His eyes drifted down to the gauntlets on his hands. Engraved with wolf-teeth patterns. Familiar. Foreign. He flexed his fingers, testing the grip.
Then he looked at the boy. Really looked at him.
And nodded once.
"Get the wounded inside."
The voice was deeper. Older. Worn down to steel and dust. But it came from his mouth like it had always belonged there.
He made his way to a makeshift command hall — a burned-out lodge with half a roof and a war map scrawled in soot across the floorboards.
That's when the first wave of memory hit him.
It wasn't a flash. Not cinematic. Just pressure behind the eyes.
The sound of my voice.
A name half-remembered.
A corridor that didn't exist here.
Code that no longer applied.
He pressed his palm against his forehead and braced against the wall until it passed.
But something inside him didn't let go.
At dawn, a courier arrived.
Not one of his men.
A girl dressed in traveling robes, hands stained with blue ink and wildflowers braided through her hair. She carried a sealed satchel and wouldn't say who sent her.
She handed him a rune-thread scroll. Just one word inscribed on it, glowing faintly.
"Darius."
His real name.
Our world's name.
I had sent it once I made contact.
He didn't react. Not out loud. But something in his stance shifted.
He dismissed the courier with half a nod, unrolled the scroll again, and stared at it for a long time.
He didn't remember how he knew the symbol that shimmered beneath the name.
But he did.
He traced it once with a gauntlet-clad thumb.
Then he whispered the name back.
Not out of recognition.
Out of faith.
Back in Hollowreach, the spell circle at my feet pulsed once—subtle and sure.
The link was open.
One of them was reaching back.