Chapter 129: Grim Reality

He was lying in a bed. A narrow bed with rough wool blankets. The ceiling above him was made of wooden beams with visible gaps he could clearly see through. Sunlight streamed through a small window by the side, illuminating the dust motes that danced in the air.

Where am I?

He sat up quickly, and immediately, his head spun as he remembered what had happened and why he was here. A dissonance immediately followed. His mind struggled with the sudden change from a larger adult form, to this small, weaker one…

Finn looked down at his hands, at how much smaller they were even for a child… or a teenager? He didn’t know.

Then suddenly, as if that thought was the trigger, memories flooded in.

Someone else’s memories.

Memories of this room. Of the family downstairs. Of the village beyond the window. Of a life that wasn’t his but felt increasingly real with each passing second.

He remembered his name was Arros. He was fifteen years old. He lived in the village of Millhaven with his mother and father. His father was a scholar. His mother was a medicine healer. And he…

He was sick. Had been sick for weeks with a fever that wouldn’t break. With a weakness that kept him bedridden while his parents worried and the other village healer tried remedy after remedy.

But yesterday something had changed.

Yesterday he’d felt a surge of energy unlike anything before. A pressure building in his head that wanted to be released. And when he’d reached for the water cup on his bedside table without getting up…

The cup had moved. Away from him. Skittering across the table like it was trying to escape. Like the act of reaching for it had pushed it rather than pulled it.

Awakening…

These memories settled into Finn’s consciousness like they’d always been there. And as they did, a grim, foreboding realization creeped into his mind.

This is not a vision at all. Not a memory either…. This is very real!

It wasn’t like the memory of Brambleton at all. That had also felt real too. But this was different. For one, Finn could still think as Finn — as himself. Arros’ consciousness was somewhat overwhelming at the moment, but Finn’s sense of self hadn’t faded.

In fact, he could say it was Arros’ sense of self that was fading. Receding to a point of deadness. Like a literal and actual transmigration. Like this was Finn, taking over this body as his own.

Panic began to creep into Finn’s mind. Was this what was meant to happen? Wasn’t he supposed to experience Arros’ life? How could he do that now when there was no Arros to experience. When it was literally only him — Finn Slade. Originally from earth. Now an Ossuarist — that existed at the fore, with only Arros’ memories of his frankly uneventful first fifteen years to serve as context for this old era.

“Arros?” A woman’s voice called from downstairs in a gentle, concerned tone. “Are you awake, dear? I heard movement.”

His mother. Arros’s mother. A woman he’d never met but whose face he could picture perfectly. Whose voice he recognized despite never having heard it before.

“I’m awake,” he called back, and cringed at the weirdness of his voice. It was too high-pitched. Too young. But the words came out naturally in Arros’ accent, with Arros’ inflections.

“Stay in bed! I’m bringing breakfast up.”

He heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Heard the creak of the third step that always groaned louder than the others. Heard the swish of a skirt as his mother appeared in the doorway with a tray.

She was exactly as Arros’ memories showed. She had dark black hair streaked with gray strands, kind eyes, and the posture of someone who’d spent years hunched over patients. She smiled when she saw him sitting up.

“You have color in your cheeks today. That’s good.” She set the tray on the bedside table, carefully avoiding the spot where the cup had skittered yesterday. She’d noticed. Of course she’d noticed. “How do you feel?”

“Strange,” Finn heard himself truthfully say out of instinct after he blanked out in a moment of hyper-awareness and hyper-fixation on doing the correct thing, saying

the correct thing not to draw suspicion from Arros’ mother.

The instinctive statement jarred him back to clarity. Arros’ subconscious that didn’t like to lie to his mother had answered truthfully, to an extent.

But Finn couldn’t let those instincts lead. He took over right after the instinctive response and guided it consciously as he referred to the natural context Arros should know.

“…Different. Like something inside me shifted.”

His mother’s smile became more knowing. “The Awakening, yes. Your father and I thought it might be that. The fever, the weakness… those are common symptoms when magic first manifests.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and placed her cool hand against his forehead, feeling his temperature.

“You’re going to be fine, Arros. Many children go through this. Very few become proper Arcanists. While most just have a touch of magic that fades as they grow. Either way, you’ll survive it.”

Huh? I’ve never heard of magic fading away before…

Finn filed that information away while maintaining his normal expression on his face.

“Rest today,” his mother continued, standing. “Tomorrow, if you’re feeling better, we’ll take you to see Master Elwes. He can test your aptitude, see if you have the makings of an Arcanist.”

She left the tray and descended the stairs with fading footsteps.

Finn sat frozen in the bed, staring at hands that weren’t his, in a body that wasn’t his, in a time that wasn’t his.

I’m stuck. Completely stuck. In the past. As a fifteen-year-old boy. As Arros.

The tether Madoc mentioned, where is it? How does it work?

Finn could feel nothing of it. Despite trying over and over, thinking of his real time, of his identity, of his parents, the things he cared about. What made him, him. He found nothing. Reaching deep into himself just opened up Arros’ earlier memories — shallow memories of an uneventful childhood that barely filled fifteen years.

He felt none of his soul masses. Felt nothing of his fragment either. All he felt was mana.

And oh, there was so much of it.

Finn could feel it now. After a lifetime of being unable to sense mana at all, the sudden awareness of it was almost overwhelming. It saturated everything. The air was thick with it, dense to the point where he wondered how normal humans didn’t choke on the sheer concentration.

Without ever previously ever feeling mana, and without needing to be told, even in his hazy state of frantic desperation to return to his own world — to his own time, at the back of his mind he could still catalogue the fact that there was no way mana was this dense in his own time.

The realization came with grim understanding as the relevant statistic surfaced in his mind. This was why so many children awakened in this era. The ambient mana was so thick that even those with mediocre soul densities — those that would never have been anything more than human in Finn’s time — could breach the threshold. Could touch magic, if only briefly.

Most fell back, like his mother had said. The magic eventually faded because their souls couldn’t maintain the elevated density once the initial surge passed. They’d touch the edge of being Arcanists, then slip back down to humans — very healthy humans. Unable to ever reach that threshold again.

But some — like Arros, apparently — who were naturally way past the threshold, went even further because of this higher elevation.

Finn picked at the breakfast his mother had left. A simple porridge with dried fruit. He ate mechanically, barely tasting it as his mind reverted to thoughts of his current predicament.

This changes everything…

If there was no Arros consciousness to observe, no original bearer to learn from, what then was the point? What defining moments could he possibly chase when he would be making all the decisions? When he was writing this history himself?

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A/N: I’m doing a mass release today. I hope you can show your support by dropping reviews. Getting past 10 reviews helps to give my book an actual rating. Right now it isn’t rated at all and I hope we can change that… 🥺

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