The sky above the Plain of Ash was not blue, but a bruised, suffocating gray, choked by the smoke of a thousand burning banners. In the center of this devastation stood Marianne Freil—the "Indomitable Lioness" of the Aethelgard Empire—a woman whose very name was a shield for her people and a nightmare for her foes.
She had spent her life as a living weapon, a patriot who bled for every inch of soil her kingdom claimed. But as the iron scent of blood filled her lungs, the greatest blow didn't come from the enemy's vanguard. It came from the shadow at her right hand.
Marianne felt the cold bite of steel before she heard the sound. It wasn't the chaotic clash of a battlefield, but the precise, sickening slide of a blade through her back, piercing the very heart she had offered up so freely.
She gasped, her knees hitting the mud. She turned her head slowly, looking up at Prince Alaric—the man she had sworn to protect, the man she had loved with a devotion that transcended duty. He didn't look away. His eyes were devoid of the warmth she thought she knew, replaced by a chilling, calculated ambition. He withdrew his sword, letting her lifeblood spill onto the dirt she had fought to defend.
"A martyr is more useful to the throne than a hero, Marianne," he whispered, his voice as sharp as his blade. "Sleep now. Your legend will build my empire."
As the world began to blur into a tunnel of gray, a frantic roar pierced the ringing in her ears. Through the haze, a figure crashed through the Aethelgard lines. It was Gerald, the Crown Prince of the opposing kingdom—Dwelfinth, the man she had called "enemy" for a decade.
He wasn't wielding his sword to strike. He was reaching out, his face twisted in a mask of genuine agony. He threw himself across the blood-soaked ground, his gauntleted hand straining to reach her, to stem the flow, to pull her from the abyss.
"Marianne!" he screamed, a sound of raw, unfiltered grief that Alaric had never once voiced. "Hold on! I have you!"
In that flickering moment, the veil lifted. She saw the truth in Gerald's desperate eyes—a respect and a hidden tenderness that her own prince had never possessed. She realized then that she had spent her life burning down the only house that would have actually kept her warm. She had fought for a monster while striking at the man who would have been her sanctuary.
Before Gerald's fingers could touch her skin, Alaric struck again. With a casual, cruel efficiency, the Aethelgard prince drove his sword through Gerald's shoulder and down into his chest.
The two "enemies" collapsed together in the mud, their blood mingling in a single, dark pool. Marianne watched as the light faded from Gerald's eyes, his final act being a failed attempt to save the woman he was supposed to hate.
The weight of her mistakes felt heavier than her armor. With one last, shuddering breath, the Great Warrior of the Empire realized she was dying in the arms of a stranger who loved her, murdered by the king who never did. The cold finally took her, and Marianne Freil was no more.
As Gerald's life force ebbed away, his shaking fingers did not reach for his sword, nor did they reach for his own wound. Instead, he fumbled into the breast of his tunic and pulled out a small, ancient leather-bound volume—the Book of Fate. Legend spoke of it as an artifact that could bridge the gap between lives, provided the price was paid in the soul's ink.
With a final, jagged breath, Gerald dipped his fingers into the pool of blood blooming from his chest and Marianne's. With a strength born of pure desperation, he smeared their names across the final page, binding them in a crimson script that glowed with a faint, ethereal light.
"In the next life," he choked out, his eyes finding hers one last time. "I will find you first."
Then, the world went black.
The transition from the roar of the battlefield to the silence of a damp room was violent. Marianne bolted upright, a scream caught in her throat. Her hand flew to her chest, searching for the hole Alaric's sword had left behind, but she found only the thin, tattered fabric of a linen tunic.
She wasn't on the Plain of Ash. She was on a pallet of rotting straw.
The air smelled of stale bread, damp earth, and the pungent tang of the Aethelgard slums. Through a crack in the wooden shutters, a sliver of gray morning light hit the floor.
"Mama... Marianne is having the bad dreams again."
Marianne froze. That voice—small, melodic, and full of a childish innocence she hadn't heard in a decade. She turned her head slowly. There, sitting on a rickety stool, was Maya. Her younger sister looked no older than seven, her face smudged with soot but her eyes bright and alive.
Marianne scrambled to her feet. Her body felt light—dangerously light. The heavy, corded muscle of a general was gone. Her calloused, scarred hands were once again soft and trembling. She stumbled toward a cracked shard of glass leaning against the wall.
The reflection staring back was a ghost.
Age: Sixteen.
Status: A "nobody" in the gutter of the Empire.
Condition: Fragile, malnourished, and hauntingly young.
She was back. She was back in the filth of her youth, years before she had picked up a sword, years before she had met the golden-haired Prince Alaric and mistaken his greed for glory.
The memory of the Book of Fate pulsed in the back of her mind like a heartbeat. She remembered the blood, the glow, and Gerald's final promise.
"Marianne?" Her mother entered the room, carrying a bucket of dirty water, her face lined with the exhaustion of a woman worked to the bone by a kingdom that didn't care if she lived or died. "You're white as a sheet, girl. If you're sick, we can't afford the medicine."
Marianne looked at her mother, then at Maya, and finally at her own thin, weak arms. A cold, iron fire began to kindle in her gut. She was no longer the patriot. She was no longer the "Lioness" of Aethelgard.
She was a woman who knew how the world ended, and she had no intention of letting it happen again.
The weight of the wooden bucket in Marianne's hand felt foreign—light, yet cumbersome. Her body remembered the balance of a heavy claymore, not the domestic rhythm of a water-bearer. As she stepped out of the leaning shack, the sights and sounds of the Aethelgard slums hit her like a physical blow.
"Morning, Marianne! Found any luck in the market yet?" Old Man Hobb called out, his toothless grin a relic of a past she had long since buried.
"Not yet, Hobb," she replied, her voice sounding thin and melodic to her own ears.
She walked with a strange, ghost-like grace through the village, nodding to the faces she had once watched burn in the fires of the Great War. Her mind was a whirlwind. At sixteen, her only goal should have been finding enough coin for Maya's next meal. Instead, her thoughts were stained with the tactical maps and betrayal of a future that had not yet happened.
The path to the river was overgrown with brambles that snagged at her thin dress. The water sparkled under the morning sun, a rare moment of beauty in a kingdom of soot. But as she reached the bank, the bucket slipped from her fingers, clattering against a stone.
There, tangled in the reeds and half-submerged in the silt, was a boy.
Marianne's breath hitched. She scrambled down the bank, her heart hammering against her ribs. She hauled the figure onto the dry grass, and as she wiped the mud from his face, her soul seemed to shiver.
It was Gerald.
He was younger—perhaps seventeen—his face devoid of the battle scars and the weary wisdom she had seen in his dying moments. But he was dying now, too. Deep gashes marred his torso, and his skin was a sickly, porcelain pale.
This didn't happen, she thought, her hands trembling. In my first life, I came to this river every day. There was never a boy. There was never blood in the water.
The "script" of her life had not just been reset; it had been rewritten.
Marianne looked down at him in confusion. This was the Crown Prince of the Dwelfinth Empire, a land of gold and marble. Yet, he was dressed in filthy, torn rags that smelled of salt and iron. There were no royal insignias, no hidden daggers of fine steel. He looked like any other refugee fleeing the border.
What were you doing here, Gerald? she wondered. Why were you in Aethelgard territory alone?
She didn't have her medic's kit from the vanguard, but she had the memories of her mother's quiet lessons. She looked toward the shade of the willow trees, spotting the serrated leaves of Kingsfoil and the soft, fuzzy stems of Woundwort.
With frantic efficiency, she gathered the herbs, crushing them between two flat stones until they formed a green, pungent paste. She pressed the poultice against the deepest gash in his side. Gerald groaned, his eyelids flickering, but he did not wake.
As she worked, she noticed something that made her blood run cold. On the inside of his wrist, faint but unmistakable, was a mark that looked like a fading burn—the shape of a script she couldn't quite read.
The Book of Fate.
The blood-binding he had performed as they died had not just sent her back; it had pulled him toward her, like a needle to a magnet. He was here because she was here.
"You're a fool, Prince Gerald," she whispered, her fingers lingering near his pulse. "You came to the heart of the enemy's den just to find me."