The matron’s cane cracked three inches from my ear. “Stop staring at nothing, boy!”

  At five winters old, I’d learned to see the colors other couldn’t. I could see souls and the shimmering orbs that clung to them like dew on spider silk. A decade later, I can still see them. They danced around the matron’s head now like drunken fireflies circling her greasy bun: [Magic Potential (White)], [Childrearing Incompetence (White)].

  Her wrinkled face swam into focus as I blinked away the vision, her yellowed teeth bared. “Well? The headmaster’s waiting.”

  I followed her down the drafty corridor, past rows of cots where hollow-cheeked children slept. By the First, I cannot wait to get out of here.

  Frost painted beautiful patterns on the windows, and I paused at my favorite spot. A warped floorboard near the pantry. I hid a rusty dagger and a half-eaten apple there.

  The matron yanked my arm, her nails gouging flesh. “No dawdling!”

  …

  “Headmaster Ravo,” the matron simpered, shoving me into a room that reeked of mildew and burnt sage. “The boy, as requested.”

  I had never been here before. Ravo stood by the cold hearth, examining a painting of the First Cabal, seven figures cloaked in shadow, their hands clasped around the sun. His robes were the gray of stormclouds threatening hail. He turned. The old man’s head was a storm of colors like always: [Magic Potential (Gold)], [Illusion (Purple), [Chronic Carelessness (White)], and a pulsing red orb labeled [??? (Locked)].

  “Leave us,” Ravo said, still facing the painting.

  The matron fled, slamming the door hard enough to dislodge a cobweb. Ravo gestured to a sagging armchair upholstered in velvet. “Sit, Roric.”

  I remained standing. The cushions bore stains darker than wine.

  “Stubbornness.” Ravo’s chuckle rasped like gravel in a tin pail. “Your mother refused chairs too. Preferred perching on windowsills like a feral songbird.”

  The system flared crimson in my vision: [Emotional Surge Detected]. I bit my tongue until copper flooded my mouth. Don’t ask. Don’t care.

  Ravo lifted a biscuit from the tea tray. It transformed mid-air, a gingerbread became a writhing scarab, then a lockpick, before settling as quill pen. “They died well, your parents. Swallowed whole by the Black Death, but not before carving their names into its teeth.”

  “Did they scream?” The words escaped before I could cage them.

  “All the best ones do.” Ravo snapped his fingers.

  The parlor walls peeled away as if made from wet paper. Suddenly we stood in a sunlit graveyard, headstones leaning like rotten teeth. Moss swallowed by boots as I stumbled toward two names swimming beneath the green:

  AGRUDI OF THE SHATTERED MOON

  NAHOM THE UNANSWERED

  “Touch it,” Ravo commanded.

  I knelt. The moment my fingers brushed stone, the system erupted:

  [Memory Imprint Avaliable – Steal?]

  Yes.

  A vision exploded. A woman with wildfire hair laughed as she hurled a bolt of lightning at a shadowy beast. A man beside her, eyes the color of tarnished copper, whispered a word that split the earth. Then screams. Only screams.

  I jerked back, my palm stinging. Ravo’s milky eye narrowed. “Ah. You felt it too.”

  “Felt what?” I wiped my hand on my threadbare trousers.

  “The lie.” Ravo gestured, and the graveyard dissolved back into the dusty parlor. He kicked Agrudi’s headstone, now a mundane footstool. “The Black Death doesn’t puke up its meals. You want to find them, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Then, you have to be swallowed. Though only the First Cabal ever returned.”

  “I don’t care. I will find them.” My voice cracked.

  Ravo smiled, teeth stained by bitterroot tea. “Become a mage first. Then—” A carriage clock chimed. He tossed Roric a scroll sealed with wax the color of dried blood. “Get into the Redring Academy of Magic. Become the best. And the opportunity will…” Something skittered across my shoulder. “…crawl to your feet.”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  My hand snapped out in a blur. A spider crunched between my fingers.

  “A sign from the Goddess of Death,” Ravo murmured. “Seems you’ve not much to live for.”

  Superstition, I thought, wiping my hand.

  “Redring starts in three dawns.” Ravo strode to the door, his robes scattering shadows. “Try not to drown in the trials, Wall-Gazer.”

  I blinked and found myself outside the door. Magic is pretty cool. Just annoying to have it used against you.

  Fifteen winters ago, I’d woken in this world screaming, tiny fists clutching at straw, the stench of lye soap and boiled cabbage seared into my lungs.

  A past life’s memories had followed: fluorescent lights humming over rows of cribs, a woman with a clipboard scolding me for smuggling candy to the toddlers. I died young, alone.

  And here I was, a squalling infant with a second chance. No burning stake, no mobs screaming “demon.” Just an orphanage matron who’d sooner sell my toes than sing me a lullaby.

  Magic hummed in this world like a buried river, or so the stories claimed. I’d seen Ravo turn breadcrumbs into snakes and watched the butcher’s wife soothe burns with a hymn. Yet every time I strained to sense it, all I got was an ache of empty lungs.

  “Emotions fuel it”, Ravo had said when I’d pestered him three winters past. He’d been peeling a rotten apple with a bone knife. “Joy. Rage. Grief. The soul’s a tinder, boy. But yours won’t spark ‘till your fifteenth winter.”

  “What if mine doesn't?” I’d asked, kicking the leg of his wobbling stool.

  The apple had transformed midair. A crow, then a shriek, then a hail of maggots raining onto my boots. “Then you’ll make excellent fertilizer.”

  But he never told me much about my parents before.

  My parents. The words felt foreign, ill-fitting, like boots meant for another’s feet. Yet whenever their names slithered into a conversation, my body betrayed me. Fists clenched. Breath quickened. Once, I’d driven my knuckles into the pantry door until the wood splintered, driven by a fury that wasn’t mine.

  Filial piety, the nuns in my past life would’ve called it. I called it inherited madness.

  To drown it, I trained.

  Meals were watery gruel and stolen moments: pocketing crusts from the kitchen, gnawing frost-softened carrots from the garden’s remains. My ribs still showed, but muscle now corded my arms.

  A feral kind of strength, honed by survival, not supper.

  Magic might be a mystery, but flesh? Flesh, I understood. Courtesy of hitting the gym a lot in my past life.

  The last sliver of sunlight bled into the horizon as I finished my drills. I’d timed my sprints between the ash tree and the wellhouse to the matron’s wheezing coughs from her attic room, three laps per fit. Push-ups counted in the cracks of the flagstones beneath my palms.

  Foolish, maybe, to risk frostbite days before the trials, but a twisted ankle now would hurt less than failure later.

  Darkness came hungry. It swallowed the sky whole by the time I slumped against the well, fingers numb and lungs raw. The matron’s lantern bobbed into view, its light catching the frost on her shawl.

  She snapped. “You're departing at dawn. And for the First’s sake, eat. You look like a plucked crow.”

  Dinner was the usual gruel, but I scraped my portion into the bowls of the littlest ones. Mara and the twins, their ribs pressed against their skin like ship ropes. They grinned, stew dripping down their chins.

  Later that night, I pried up the warped floorboard. The dagger’s hilt fit snug in my palm. I’d stolen it eight winters back, slipping it from a drunk blacksmith’s cart during a fair. That night, I’d carved my initials under the floorboard: R.C., for the name I’d buried. Reincarnated Chris. A joke only I understood.

  The apple…uh it was rotten, should've thought of that. I tucked the blade into my belt and got up.

  The dormitory creaked as I passed rows of cots. Pretend snores, rustling blankets.

  “You leavin’?”

  Mara’s voice, small as a mouse. She peeked from her blanket nest, her eyes wide as the moons.

  “Go to sleep, bug.”

  “Will the matron beat us more when you’re gone?”

  “Probably,” I crouched. “Remember the loose brick in the east wall? The one with the ladybug colony?”

  She nodded.

  “If she gets mean, you tell her there’s a black widow spider nesting there. Big as a copper coin. Venomous.”

  “But that’s a lie!”

  I grinned. “Exactly.”

  Mara giggled before burrowing back under her blanket.

  …

  The matron shook me awake, lantern in hand. “Up, boy. Dawn’s wasting.”

  She thrust a bundle of clothes at me. Thick woolen trousers, a tunic dyed the gray of prison fog, and a cloak lined with fox fur. “Charms sewn into the seams,” she muttered. “Keep you from freezing your toes off.”

  I dressed in silence. The fabric chafed, but warmth bloomed across my skin.

  “You’ll take the south road,” the matron barked, as if directing a stray dog. “Crows mark the way. Miss one, and you’ll wander till your bones bleach.”

  I slung my dagger into my boot and tucked Ravo’s scroll into my tunic. The matron hovered in the doorway, her cane tapping an uneven rhythm. For a heartbeat, her colors flickered. [Regret (Faded Blue)].

  “Matron?”

  “What?”

  For fifteen winters, she’d fed me grudging scraps and backhanded lessons. But she’d had also left a honey cake on the sill when I turned ten, its edges charred black as her reputation.

  “Thank you for everything.”

  Little kindness didn’t hurt.

  She snorted and chased me into the yard.

  …

  ..

  .

  The orphanage shrank behind me. Dawn hadn’t yet cracked the horizon, but crows were already singing.

  My parents, I reminded myself. Agrudi and Nahom. Swallowed by the Black Death. To find them, I must let it swallow me too.

  A laugh bubbled in my chest. Fifteen years in this skin, and still, my blood howled for a pair of ghosts. Reincarnation was supposed to be about dragons and glory, wasn’t it? Swordfights under diamond-bright stars, taverns roaring with songs about me, and maybe a scandalous romance with an elven queen or two with a bosom that could cradle all my sorrows.

  Instead, I am chasing shadows in a world where magic lurked just beyond my grasp.

  But I’d play the dutiful son. Let the Black Death grind my bones to gravel between its teeth. Let its acids strip me raw, muscle from tendon, scream from throat. I’d let it digest me, if that’s what it took.

  And when the thing spat me back out—when, not if, I’d rise from the muck not as a son, but as a reckoning. Mage. Monster. Whatever skin fit the wound.

  Skin, primed to be whatever it needed to. Be it blood, blade, or blasphemy.