Noise. Just noise.
It drifted in and out of the blackness like a radio tuning between stations. Dull thuds. The high-pitched whine of ringing ears. Distant, muffled explosions that vibrated through the floorboards of my mind.
And pain.
It wasn't localized. It was everything. It felt like my skull had been cracked open and filled with molten lead. My ribs felt like jagged shards of glass grinding against each other with every shallow breath. My shoulder, the one I landed on, throbbed with a sickening, hot pulse that eclipsed everything else. I tried to move, to curl up, but my body refused. I was just a vessel of agony floating in a sea of dark.
I faded out again.
Time passed. I didn't know how much.
When consciousness clawed its way back, the soundscape had changed.
The explosions were gone. The screaming had stopped. Instead, there was a rhythm.
Creak... clatter. Crunch... crunch.
It was the sound of wood straining against iron. The sound of wheels grinding over uneven dirt. The rhythmic, heavy tramp of hundreds of boots marching in unison.
I forced my eyes open.
It was a struggle. My left eye peeled open, greeting the dim light with a sting of tears. My right eye wouldn't open. It felt heavy, swollen shut, throbbing in time with my heartbeat. The right side of my face felt tight and hot, crusty with dried blood.
My vision was a smear of grey and black. I blinked rapidly with my good eye, trying to clear the haze.
I was moving. Or rather, I was being moved.
I was sitting on a hard, cold wooden floor. Around me, rising up on all four sides, were thick iron bars. Above me was a steel grate.
I was in a cage. A rusted, rattling steel cage mounted on the back of a wagon.
I tried to shift my weight, and a sharp, metallic clink echoed next to my hands. I looked down. Heavy iron shackles were clamped around my small wrists, the metal biting into my skin. A thick chain connected them to a bolt in the floor.
I wasn't alone.
To my right lay an older man. He was unconscious, his body slumping awkwardly with the motion of the cart. He had messy salt-and-pepper hair and a beard that was matted with dark, dried blood. His tunic was torn, revealing bruising that looked purple and angry in the low light.
In the back corner, curled up into a tight ball, was another man. He looked to be in his mid-forties, with thinning light brown hair. He had his knees pulled up to his chest, his forehead resting on them. He wasn't moving, just staring blankly at the wooden slats of the floor, rocking slightly with every bump in the road.
I didn't know them. They were just broken shapes sharing my prison.
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to sit up straighter, leaning my back against the cold bars on the left side. The movement sent a bolt of white-hot lightning down my spine, nearly making me vomit. I gasped, clutching my ribs.
I looked out through the bars.
We were flanking a column of soldiers.
There were two guards walking directly beside my cart, keeping pace with the wheels. They wore the same armor I had seen in the nightmare, the beige surcoats stained with soot, the conical helmets with the nasal guards hiding their faces. Their swords were sheathed now, but their hands rested on the hilts.
Behind us, flanking the rear of the cart, were two more.
I looked ahead. We were traveling down a dirt road through the open grasslands. It was still dark, the pre-dawn gloom turning the world into shades of charcoal and navy. Up ahead, I could see a massive mass of soldiers marching in formation, a snake of steel and beige winding through the tall grass.
I turned my head painfully to look behind us.
It was a convoy. There were more carts. I saw two other cages rolling behind ours, each guarded by pairs of soldiers. Inside them were dark shapes and more people huddled together.
But my eyes were drawn past the convoy. Way back into the distance.
Far, far away on the horizon, a pillar of smoke choked the stars. Beneath it, the landscape glowed with an angry, dying orange light. Occasional flashes of light bloomed in the smoke delayed explosions.
My village. Brent.
It was burning.
A tickle started in my throat, metallic and sharp. I tried to suppress it, but my lungs spasmed.
HACK.
I doubled over, coughing violently. It felt like someone was stabbing me in the chest with a knife. I clamped my hand over my mouth, my whole body shaking with the effort. When I pulled my hand away, my palm was slick with dark red blood.
I stared at it, breathless, tears streaming from my single open eye.
Then, the thoughts hit me. The adrenaline that had numbed my mind faded, leaving room for the horror.
Roxas. Sylvia. The twins.
"No..." I wheezed, the word bubbling up with blood. "Oh no."
I scrambled to the back of the cage, gripping the bars with my shackled hands. I pressed my face against the cold metal, squinting through my good eye, trying to see the cart directly behind us.
Please don't be there. Please have gotten away.
The cage behind us was about twenty feet back. Through the gloom and my blurred vision, I tried to count the figures.
One... two... three... five.
There were five people in that cage. They were huddled together, slumped against the bars.
I strained my eye, desperate to see a flash of chestnut hair. Desperate to see the broad shoulders of my father.
But more importantly... I was looking for bundles.
I scanned the laps of the prisoners. I looked for the white linen blankets. I looked for the tiny shapes of Sora and Iris.
I couldn't see them.
My vision was swimming, too blurry to make out faces, but I didn't see any babies.
A wave of nausea rolled over me.
Did they get away?
Roxas had run toward the fire. He had run straight into the bombardment. He was strong... he was so strong... but against magic like that? Against an army?
And Sylvia... she was in the house. If the soldiers reached the house...
No.
I slid down the bars, squeezing my eye shut.
They hid. They ran. They are safe.
But the image of the soldier executing the villager flashed in my mind. The casual cruelty of it.
I sat there in the silence of the cage, the only sound the rattling of the chains and the marching boots.
And then, the shivering started.
It wasn't just the cold. It was the memory of that sensation.
The soldier who had kicked me... he was just a man. He was brutal, yes, but he was just a thug in armor.
But the feeling that had hit me right before the explosion... that wasn't him.
I remembered the air turning to needles. I remembered the sensation of an invisible hand squeezing my heart until it stopped. It was vile. It was cruel. It felt like I was standing in the presence of something ancient and hungry, something that looked at human life the way I looked at dust.
The soldier was just the boot that knocked me out. But that presence... that was what had frozen my soul.
I wrapped my arms around my knees, burying my face in my bloodstained coat. My small body shook violently, the chains rattling against the floor.
I was six years old. I was alone. I was in chains.
And somewhere out there, something worse than an army was walking the earth.
The tears came without permission.
They weren't the loud, wailing sobs of a child who scraped his knee. They were silent, scalding streams that leaked from my eyes and carved paths through the dried blood and grime on my cheeks.
It felt like something inside me had shattered. Not a bone, but the very foundation of who I was. The pain in my shoulder was a dull roar, but the pain in my chest was sharp and agonizingly specific. It was the crushing weight of helplessness. I was a reincarnated soul. I was supposed to be special. I had magic. I had knowledge. I had a second chance.
And yet, here I was. Shackled. Beaten. Stuffed in a cage like livestock while everything I loved burned behind me.
I sniffled, the salt of my tears stinging the cut on my lip. I felt small. I felt pathetic. I felt the crushing, suffocating reality that this world didn't care about my potential. It only cared about strength, and I didn't have enough.
I wiped my face with my shoulder, wincing as the movement pulled at my injuries. I looked up.
Walking right next to the cart, keeping pace with the rhythmic creak of the wheels, was one of the guards.
I watched him. I studied him through the bars with my one good eye.
He was a wall of indifference. His posture was rigid, his back perfectly straight, his gauntleted hand resting casually on the pommel of his sword. He didn't look tired. He didn't look remorseful. He walked with the heavy, undeniable confidence of a predator that knows it has no natural enemies.
His helmet was the most terrifying part. That slab of steel covering his nose and cheeks stripped him of humanity. There was no face to plead with, no expression to read. Just a T-shaped slit of darkness where eyes should be. He was a golem of iron and beige cloth, marching forward with mechanical precision.
I swallowed the lump of blood in my throat. I had to know.
"Where..." My voice cracked, dry and brittle. "Where are you taking us?"
No response. The guard didn't even turn his head. He just kept walking, his boots crunching in the dirt.
I licked my dry lips and tried again, louder this time.
"Where are we going?"
The reaction was instantaneous.
The guard stopped dead in his tracks. The cart kept moving for a second before the driver halted the horses.
The guard turned his head slowly. The T-shaped slit fixed on me.
"Shut up, you little bastard, or I'll kill you."
The words weren't shouted. They were spoken with a calm, flat lethality that was infinitely scarier than a scream.
He shifted his stance, his hand tightening around the grip of his sword. I saw the leather of his glove creak. He stood there, staring me down. I couldn't see his eyes, but I could feel the weight of his gaze pressing against my skull. He was waiting. He was hoping I would say one more word so he would have an excuse to draw that blade.
I clamped my mouth shut instantly. I pressed my back against the bars, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
Satisfied, the guard turned back to the road and resumed his march. The cart lurched forward again.
I didn't make another sound. I just sat there, shivering, and watched the world pass by.
We moved through the grasslands for hours.
The landscape was vast and indifferent to our suffering. The tall grass, which had looked golden and beautiful during the festival, now looked like a sea of dead straw, undulating in the cold wind. It stretched out endlessly in every direction, broken only by the occasional skeletal tree standing alone against the horizon.
The sky began to change. The deep, bruising purple of the night slowly bled into a pale, sickly grey.
Dawn was breaking.
I watched the light creep up from the horizon on my left.
The sun rises in the East.
I looked at the road ahead. We were moving perpendicular to the sunrise. The convoy was stretching out in a long, dark line to my right.
We're heading South.
A knot of dread tightened in my stomach. Why South? Were they taking us to their country? Were we spoils of war? Slaves?
The march continued. The sun climbed higher, burning off the morning mist, exposing the brutality of the convoy. I could see the other prisoners now in the growing light huddled shapes in cages, broken and bloody.
Around noon, the terrain shifted. The endless grass gave way to a dense, looming forest.
The trees here were different from the ones in Brent. The bark was darker, almost black, and the leaves were needle-like and sharp. The canopy was thick, blocking out most of the midday sun and casting the road in perpetual twilight.
"Halt!" A voice shouted from the front of the column.
The convoy ground to a stop.
"Rest! Water the horses!"
The discipline of the march broke. The soldiers began to move off the road, finding spots under the trees to sit. I watched them. They removed their helmets, revealing sweaty, human faces. They drank from waterskins, laughed, and stretched their limbs.
They looked so normal. Just men taking a break from work. It made it worse.
I leaned my head back against the bars, closing my eye. I tried to drift away, to escape the pain in my body.