first thing Jaden remembers is dying.
Not the moment his body broke, nor the cold that swallowed him afterward—but the feeling that someone was calling his name from a place he could not reach. A faint voice, familiar yet distant, like an echo trapped beneath centuries of ash.
He wakes on the edge of a world that does not welcome him.
The sky above him bleeds red-gold, split by cracks of white fire. The air hums with a pressure that should not exist inside anything mortal; reality shivers as if an unseen hand keeps rewriting it. Shadows twist across the ground, stretching toward him like they've been waiting.
Jaden breathes once. The world flinches.
He does not notice.
He only feels the phantom memory of warmth—soft fingers once brushing his cheek—before it dissolves into pain. His head throbs. His heartbeat stutters. The ground beneath him convulses, whispering in a voice that sounds horribly like his own:
Welcome back, Aeth—
The whisper cuts off. Something seals it away.
He does not know why the world calls him by a name that is not his.
He does not know why he carries a scar on his chest shaped like a broken flame.
He does not know why the shadows tremble when he stands.
All he knows is the truth that gnaws at him like an infection:
This is not the first time he has awakened here.
Far away—beyond storms, beyond broken timelines, beyond the ruined heavens—someone watches him. Someone who has shaped him. Someone who waits for him to break again.
And somewhere else, just as distant, just as bound to him, a girl whispers through the cracks of fate:
"Jaden… come back to me."
The world stirs.
The nightmare begins.