The goblin's spear still quivered in the woman's chest when my eyes—still too young to grasp the vastness of the world—noticed the subtle swelling of her belly. Pregnant. And her blood—thick, dark, warm—slipped between my fingers, too small to hold any meaning. I was Liran, but I didn't know what that meant. In that moment, identity was a prison, and a name, a sentence. We trembled—she, I, perhaps the fetus—as if reality itself swayed under the weight of something we could not name. The stench of human flesh in combustion mixed with the village's screams of agony, and for the first time, a new feeling bloomed beneath the carapace of hatred that held me together: guilt. Not because I knew her. Not because I loved her. But because, in her final moment, she mistook my face for someone worthy of being called 'son.'
—Liran…
The sound was a whisper, like a memory dying.
The goblins laughed. Laughed with lungs blackened by smoke and eyes starved. Laughed with teeth that were not just weapons, but allegories of a world without mercy. They ran through the flames as if they were born of the fire. And I... I killed them. Not out of bravery. Not for justice. But by instinct. By an ancestral violence that existed before language. It burned in me like an inherited echo. I picked up stones, branches, still-warm bones. I tore flesh with my nails. I crushed skulls with the desperation of someone afraid of disappearing. When the last of them fell, and the village no longer screamed, I collapsed too. My muscles, still forming, burned. My heart pounded against my ribs as if it knew it was trapped in a body it didn't deserve.
And then, she appeared.
Tall. Ethereal. A figure that seemed made of frozen smoke. The rags she wore didn't cover her body—they floated like unspoken ideas, like memories refusing to fade. Her eyes were dead moons. Her feet, untouched by the ground. She walked over the ashes, and the fire recoiled, as if even the flames feared to be seen by her.
—You smell like death —she murmured, bending down until her presence consumed my entire field of existence.— And like lies.
I tried to pull away, like a thought that refuses to be remembered, but she seized my chin. Her fingers were marble and winter. Her touch, a verdict.
—Who… what are you? —my voice came out shaky, as if it hadn't been made for questions.
—Wrong. —What lingered on her face was something that preceded a smile, a gesture of disdain only gods understand.— The right question is: how many times will you let them do this to you?
She let go. Pointed to the sky. And there, between smoke and guilt, something moved. A colossal shadow. Wings tearing through the firmament like pages of a sacred book being defiled. It was the Demiurge—the same one who watched me from the cliff—now magnified, transfigured by hunger.
—He follows your scent —she whispered.— You are a beacon for what should remain forgotten. And they... they will use you until not even the echo of your soul remains.
—They? —I whispered, dreading the answer.
—The ones who pretend to be gods. The ones who wrote your name into the void, as if existence were a game without consequence. —She raised her hand, and the air between us split. I saw Kael, my first body, devoured by shapeless darkness. Then, the man with silver hair, smiling with the eyes of someone who knows everything is a lie—including himself.— You are a fracture. A crack between souls. A parasite that inhabits bodies like a virus searching for identity. And every time you die, you leave something behind. You unravel, Liran, as if you were never whole.
I trembled. But not from fear. I trembled at the realization of the void. At the suspicion that my emotions, my memories, my hatred... might not even be mine. Whoever named "1.618" is long gone. Whoever taught me to hate may have just been another voice in the choir of madness.
—Why are you telling me this?
—To laugh. —Her laughter had no sound, but it hurt all the same.— To see how long before you finally shatter. But… —She hesitated.— Perhaps there is a way to reverse the flow.
She extended her hand. In her palm, a symbol pulsed: an eye encircled by serpents biting their own tails—a cycle, a prison.
—What is that?
—A pact. A trick. A curse. Depends on how you choose to suffer. Give me a fragment of your soul, and I'll give you the tools to steal.
—Steal what?
—Everything. —Her fingers closed.— The memories of the bodies you inhabit. Their skills. Their names. Imagine… death no longer as loss, but as gain. You would no longer be the passenger. You'd be the thief.
I hesitated. The pact was poison, but the world had already condemned me. There was no escape, only direction.
I touched the mark.
The pain was absolute. Not physical. Metaphysical. As if a concept within me had been torn apart. As if something essential—perhaps my childhood, perhaps my faith—had been ripped out and devoured.
She smiled. A smile not seeking compassion, but destruction.
And then she blew into my face.
The world collapsed.
The pact didn't hurt the flesh. It hurt something deeper—what remained of the idea of who I was. Because when I touched that mark, I realized I may never have been someone at all. I was a mass of echoes, of inherited wills, of memories that weren't born in me. And when that thing took a fragment of my soul, I didn't feel loss. I felt revelation. The emptiness it left showed me that what I called 'me' was just a name drifting between corpses. The pain was realizing that maybe… I never truly existed.