The last thing Baltair remembered was the strike of lightning, the sharp pain, and the muffled noises of battle around him. His little brother, Seoras, dead on the water, before his own body hit the tides and everything became hollow. The cold water became an eerie hell—Afhaera, the hell monks and priestesses talked about. The Goddess Lyka, her land of the dead. Darkness swallowed him, and even the memory of his mother’s voice seemed a distant echo.

Then, abruptly, there was nothing—and slowly, a faint pulse of sensation returned. Eyes snapped open. Moonlight filtered through the dense canopy above. He was lying on a bed of damp leaves, the scent of pine and earth heavy in the air. Heart Oak Forest. Bellmere. Next to the towering silhouette of Thorngate Castle. Every detail of the forest was painfully familiar, as though he had wandered here a hundred times before.

A surge of life coursed through him, unnatural and electric, and he flinched as he flexed his hands. No sword, no shield, no battle in sight. Just his own pulse and the oppressive silence that stretched between the gnarled roots and swaying branches. It was a ritual, he realized, a summoning or perhaps a reclamation of the soul. He sat up slowly, muscles stiff, senses sharpened, as if expecting an ambush or a duel at any moment. Nothing. Only the quiet forest and the whisper of leaves in the wind.

*His chest rose and fell, the first breath of his new—or perhaps second—life. A bitter, ironic laugh escaped him. *

“Alive,” he muttered, voice low but steady, edged with the arrogance of a man who had defied fate itself. “How...”