Morning sunlight streamed through the dorm window like broken glass.
Aurelius Kael sat unmoving on his bed, still in yesterday's clothes, staring at the same page he had read a hundred times. The words blurred, rearranging themselves into sigils when he blinked too long.
He hadn't slept.
He couldn't.
Every time his eyes closed, he was somewhere else — in that burning city, surrounded by kneeling figures who whispered his name like a prayer and a curse all at once.
By sunrise, his hands were shaking.
He looked at his arm again. The faint blue sigils had faded overnight, but the skin still tingled where they had glowed. He pressed a hand to his pulse and felt it flutter like static.
"What are you?" he muttered under his breath, not sure if he was talking to himself or to something inside him.
---
Jace found him half an hour later, bleary-eyed and holding two cups of cheap instant coffee.
"Morning, sunshine," Jace said, setting one cup on the desk. "You look like you fought God and lost."
Aurelius managed a faint smirk. "Feels about right."
Jace plopped down beside him. "You didn't sleep again, did you?"
Aurelius didn't answer.
Jace sighed. "Man, you've gotta stop doing this. You're burning out. I swear you're one hallucination away from starring in your own horror movie."
"Maybe I already am," Aurelius muttered.
Jace frowned. "You said that last night. Right before—" He stopped himself, biting back whatever memory was clawing at his tongue.
Aurelius turned to face him. "Before what?"
Jace hesitated. "Before the lights went out. You don't remember?"
Aurelius shook his head slowly.
Jace rubbed the back of his neck. "You were standing by the window, talking to yourself. Except… your voice didn't sound like you. It was deeper. Sharper. And then every light in the room flickered blue for like five seconds. I thought we were gonna blow a fuse."
Aurelius went still. "You're sure?"
"Positive. You said something in another language. Then you just collapsed."
Another language.
That word hit him harder than it should have. Because sometimes, when the dreams came, he woke with phrases still echoing in his head — words he didn't know but somehow understood.
He glanced at his notebook again.
Find me, my emperor.
Jace followed his gaze. "You're not writing that again, are you?"
"It's not me," Aurelius said softly.
---
By midday, classes felt impossible. His concentration was shredded by the weight of exhaustion. During a history lecture, the professor's voice dissolved into background noise while Aurelius's eyes lingered on the university crest stamped on the projector slide.
It was nothing special — a shield flanked by laurels, a torch in the center — but as he stared, the torch flickered. For just a heartbeat, it looked like a burning crown.
He blinked. Gone.
His hand was trembling again.
He packed his bag before the lecture ended and slipped out the back door.
The university's west wing was quieter, older — fewer students, more dust. The walls smelled of paper and time. That's where the Archives Department sat, tucked behind the humanities library.
Jace had once joked that nobody went down there unless they were hunting ghosts.
Maybe that was exactly what Aurelius was doing.
---
The Archive lobby was dimly lit, lined with glass cases and old portraits of professors who looked like they'd been dead for a century. The air was cold enough to sting.
Aurelius approached the desk, where an elderly clerk peered over her reading glasses.
"Student records?" she asked automatically.
"Not exactly," Aurelius said. "I'm looking for… uh, ancient language documentation. Symbolic texts, maybe?"
She raised an eyebrow. "For a class project?"
"Yeah," he lied. "Comparative linguistics."
She typed something slowly, nails clacking against the keyboard. "Basement level. Room 32B. Ask for Dr. Havel. He's the only one who still digs through that junk."
"Thank you," Aurelius said, trying to sound normal.
As he descended the narrow staircase, the hum of fluorescent lights faded, replaced by the distant hiss of old ventilation shafts.
Room 32B looked abandoned — shelves of unlabelled boxes, parchment under glass, fragments of text scanned into fading digital files. In the center sat a man hunched over a holographic display, muttering to himself.
"Dr. Havel?" Aurelius asked.
The man looked up — thin, gray-haired, with ink stains on his fingers. "Students rarely come down here voluntarily. What brings you, Mr…?"
"Kael," Aurelius said. "Aurelius Kael."
The name made Havel pause for a fraction of a second, almost imperceptibly.
"Interesting name," he said finally. "Latin roots. Means 'golden' or 'heavenly,' depending on translation."
Aurelius forced a small smile. "Yeah. My parents had big expectations."
Havel gestured toward a stack of old images. "You're lucky, actually. I've just finished digitizing some old fragments from pre-Collapse archives — proto-symbolic sequences that appeared in multiple cultures before the Great Reset. No known origin, no linguistic family."
He turned the display toward Aurelius.
The images appeared in shimmering blue — runes, sigils, ancient carvings from forgotten ruins.
Aurelius's heart stopped.
They were identical to the marks on his arm.
He swallowed hard. "Where did you find these?"
Havel shrugged. "Fragments came from multiple sources. Old vaults beneath New Seraphis, excavation sites in the Arctic, even one from ruins off the Mediterranean coast. Nobody's ever translated them — but their patterns suggest ritual design. Power symbols. Myths of kings, rebirth, and fire."
Aurelius's hands were trembling now. "Fire," he whispered.
Havel gave him a curious look. "You've seen them before, haven't you?"
Aurelius hesitated, unsure how much to reveal. "Something like that."
The professor leaned back in his chair. "You know, most cultures that recorded these symbols believed they belonged to a vanished empire — one said to have ruled both earth and heaven. The myths call it The Dominion of Ash. The legends say its ruler defied death itself."
Aurelius felt the air leave his lungs. "Defied death…"
"Yes," Havel continued. "Some even claimed he was reborn again and again, across ages. A curse of eternity. His name changes in every language, but it always means the same thing — the king who burns and rises."
Aurelius didn't hear the rest. His mind was spinning. Images from his dreams — burning towers, armies kneeling, the throne of obsidian — all of it fit too perfectly.
He stood abruptly. "Thank you, professor. I have to—"
But before he could finish, the room flickered.
For a heartbeat, the air shimmered like heatwaves. The blue holographic display warped, showing a brief image not of text, but of a city — black towers beneath a crimson sky.
Then everything snapped back.
Havel blinked, confused. "Power fluctuation?"
Aurelius backed toward the door. "Yeah… maybe."
He left before the old man could stop him.
---
Outside, the world felt sharper, louder. Every sound echoed inside his skull. The sigils under his skin were burning faintly now, pulsing with each heartbeat.
He stumbled out into the courtyard, desperate for air. Rain had started to fall — thin, silver droplets glinting under the gray light.
Students hurried past, laughing, holding umbrellas. To them, it was just another day.
But to Aurelius, the city was whispering. Every passing drone left trails of static, every neon reflection shimmered like ghost fire.
He walked aimlessly until he reached the edge of campus — a small garden near the memorial fountain. He sat on the cold stone bench, drenched, staring at his reflection in the rippling water.
For a long moment, it was just his face.
Then, slowly, another reflection appeared beside it — the man in black armor, eyes glowing faintly through the rain.
Aurelius didn't move.
"Why are you haunting me?" he whispered.
The reflection smiled faintly, though the armored lips never moved. And then, from somewhere inside his own skull, a voice answered — calm, ancient, certain.
> "Because you are not what you pretend to be."
Aurelius's breath caught. "Who are you?"
> "You already know."
The rain fell harder, blurring the reflection. The voice grew quieter, fading into static.
> "They will come for you soon. Remember before they make you forget again."
Aurelius jerked back, the world spinning. The fountain's water rippled violently, though no wind touched it. When he looked again, only his own reflection remained.
---
By the time he got back to the dorm, Jace was pacing.
"Where the hell have you been, man? I called you like five times!"
Aurelius shut the door, dripping onto the floor. "Library," he said hoarsely.
"You look like you ran through a storm."
"I did."
Jace stared at him, frustrated and scared. "I don't know what's going on with you, Kael, but it's not normal. I can't keep pretending you're fine. You talk in your sleep, you vanish for hours, you wake up glowing, and now—"
"I found something," Aurelius interrupted.
Jace froze. "Found what?"
Aurelius reached into his bag and pulled out a printed copy of the sigils. "These symbols — they're ancient. Thousands of years old. They match… me."
Jace looked at the page, then at him. "You're saying you've got ancient runes under your skin? That's insane."
"I know how it sounds," Aurelius said, voice cracking. "But I saw them. The same patterns. The same words from my dreams. 'The king who burns and rises.' It's all connected."
Jace stepped back. "Connected to what? Some myth? Kael, this is getting out of hand."
Aurelius met his eyes, desperation raw in his voice. "What if it's not a myth? What if I've lived this before?"
Jace stared at him for a long time, caught between disbelief and pity. "You need help, man."
"Maybe," Aurelius said quietly. "But not the kind any doctor can give."
He turned away, gazing out the window. The city lights flickered in the rain — each one pulsing faintly blue, like the glow beneath his skin.
And somewhere deep in his mind, he felt it again — the pull, the memory, the throne waiting in fire and shadow.
He whispered to himself, almost inaudible, "The ashes remember."
Behind him, Jace muttered, "What?"
But Aurelius didn't answer. His eyes had caught something in the reflection — not his own this time, but a faint silhouette of a woman standing in the rain, watching the window.
She disappeared when he blinked.