The air felt strange.
Warm, yet filled with the scent of damp earth and wet wood.
I could no longer feel the cold of asphalt, hear the roar of engines, or the screams of the biker gang that ended my life.
All I could hear now was... crying.
My own crying.
I, Naren Fael, was dead. I knew that.
The blood, the glow of the streetlights, the sound of my body hitting the asphalt... all of it was still vivid in my final memory.
But why was I crying like a baby...?
A woman's faint voice echoed nearby.
Soft in tone, yet her face was filled with fear.
She looked at me with eyes shattered by sorrow, the eyes of a mother who had lost everything, now facing something she herself feared.
"His eyes... red... like a demon's..."
"We cannot keep him! It's a bad omen!"
Another voice, a man's, replied, bitter and weak, as if denying his own heart.
"But he's still my child..."
His voice faded, swallowed by sobs.
And amid their weeping, I felt something pierce my tiny chest, a feeling I had never known, not even in my past life, to be rejected for simply existing.
Days passed. Time moved on.
I grew up on the outskirts of a small village called Falkenvar, a cold place in the northern reaches of the Arvath Empire.
The people there looked at me with the same eyes, fear, disgust, suspicion.
Even children my age threw stones whenever I passed by.
"Get out, demon child!"
"Those red eyes are a sign of disaster!"
I only stared back. Expressionless.
No anger, no tears.
Only emptiness, the kind that had lived within me since my previous world.
But within that emptiness, something faint began to stir... fragile, yet warm.
A small light behind the shadows.
Sometimes, in the dead of night, as I lay beneath the leaky roof of my broken hut, I would hear a whisper.
It echoed inside my mind, calm, deep, yet trembling with power.
"O heir of duality... light and shadow flow within your blood."
"Rise one day, when the world rejects you."
I did not understand what it meant.
But whenever I closed my eyes, I saw two figures, one bathed in gentle white light, the other shrouded in swirling black mist.
They faced each other... and both stared at me.
"One day, you shall be our bridge, Naren Fael..."
"No. From now on, your name is... Aresh Noctenveil."
At that moment, my body burned with heat.
It felt as though light and darkness danced within my very veins.
I screamed, but no sound came out, only a red glow blazing from my eyes, scorching the air around me.
When I awoke, morning had come.
And standing in front of my hut... was a little girl with silvery hair and eyes as blue as the frozen sky.
She looked at me with curiosity, not fear.
"Why are you here all alone?"
"I've always been alone."
"Then from now on, you won't be."
That was the first day I met Lyra, the poor girl from the lower village.
She was the first to look at me not as a curse, but as a person.
And somehow, that day... the sky seemed a little brighter.
Yet even behind that smile... the shadow of fate was already waiting at the end of the road.
A shadow that would lead me from the mud of poverty, toward the heights of power... and ruin.