Ezra came awake all at once, the way you do when you fall in a dream, except the falling didn't stop when his eyes opened.
He was on his back. There was cloth over his face. Something sweet in the air, flowers and sweat and under it a smell like old pennies.
He couldn't breathe.
He tried to sit up and something in his chest ground against something else and the pain was so big and so sudden that his whole body locked.
He couldn't even scream. He lay there with his mouth open, making a small dry clicking sound, while his ribs tried to fold in on themselves.
Broken, he thought, very calmly, from somewhere far away. Multiple. That's what that is.
His left arm didn't work. His right one did, barely, and he got it up and dragged the cloth off his face and stared at a bed canopy made of green silk with gold thread running through it.
This is not a hospital.
He turned his head and looked around. His neck felt like it belonged to somebody else.
It's a room, big, warm from a fire that had burned most of the way down. Just a few meters away he could see a standing mirror.
A wardrobe with a carved front. A chair with a dress thrown over it. Wine glass on a side table with a red half-inch left in the bottom.
This is a rich person's bedroom.
And then his eyes went down to his own body, because he'd finally noticed what he was lying in.
He was naked. He was covered in bruises, layers of them, some yellow and old and some black and new.
There was a boot-shaped mark across his ribs. There were finger marks on his hips.
There was a wooden thing locked around him below the waist with a small brass padlock on it, and Ezra looked at that for a long moment and could not make his brain produce a single word.
His hand wasn't his hand. It was narrower than his. Longer in the fingers...younger.
Is this what I think it as
Around the wrist was a band of black metal with no clasp and no seam, and under it, burned into the skin, were three lines and a circle.
They were grey. Dead grey, like an ember somebody had poured water on.
"Okay," Ezra said.
His voice came out wrong. Lighter, rougher, and completely unfamiliar.
"Okay," he said again, because it hadn't helped the first time.
And then the pain came back, all of it at once, and this time he did scream, and the scream cut off halfway because his lungs weren't full enough to finish it.
Something warm moved through him.
It started at the base of his spine and went up and out, and it wasn't gentle. His ribs shifted.
He felt them shift back in place, felt the ends of them find each other and knit, and it hurt more than the breaking had.
The dead weight in his left arm caught fire and then stopped being dead, the nerves firing wildly as it begun to heal.
The bruises went hot, then cold, then nothing. His throat unlocked. The split in his lip closed while he was still bleeding out of it.
Ezra rolled onto his side and threw up bile onto a very expensive rug.
When he was done, he lay there panting, and realised he was panting, which meant he was breathing, which meant nothing on him was broken anymore.
He looked at his hip. The finger marks were gone. The skin was clean and unmarked, and slightly too pale, like it hadn't seen the sun in years.
"What," he said, "the hell?!"
Then the memories arrived.
It wasn't gradual. It was like somebody upended a bucket into his skull. Four years came in sideways and all at once, out of order, overlapping.
A kitchen. A cellar. A woman's laugh. A cold stone floor with a drain in the middle of it. Learning to hold still. Learning to hold still while she did that.
Learning the exact number of seconds you could look at her face before it became a problem.
Soren...Soren...Soren.
Ezra grabbed his own head with both hands and made a sound like an animal. It went on for what felt like an hour but was probably just a few seconds.
When it stopped, he was curled up on his side on the rug with his forehead against the floor, shaking, and he knew things.
He knew he was in the an estate, in the Solvane Ascendancy, on the continent of Karthval.
He knew the woman who had just left this room was Lady Vesper Callowmere, that she was twenty-two, that she was an Adept Mage and insufferable about it, and that she had spent three years using the boy whose body he was currently lying in.
He knew the boy's name was Soren, and that Soren had no family name, because slaves didn't get one.
And he knew, with a certainty that came from a place he hadn't earned, that Soren had died about four minutes ago on that bed, and that he had not wanted to.
"I'm...sorry," Ezra said out loud, to nobody. His voice had cracked and was hoarse.
The flood of memories for the life this body had lived were more than enough to shake the once normal person Ezra.
Obviously he wasn't the reason the previous Soren went through everything he had, but those were the only words he could think of to say.
His throat retched but there was nothing to come out, he could only solemly press his hand to his beating heart and sobbed softly, be it in grief or in sympathy.
"Man...I'm...I'm so sorry."
That was when the light came.
It unfolded across his vision, pale gold interface, hanging in the air a foot in front of his face and also somehow inside his eyes at the same time.
It was not in the room. It was in him.
Ezra stopped breathing again, for entirely different reasons.
He knew what this was. Everybody his age knew what this was.
He had read fourty so-so thousand chapters of this on his cracked phone in a stockroom that smelled like cardboard, at two in the morning, on his break, and now here it was, sitting in front of him with a loading bar.
<<UNCLAIMED SOUL DETECTED.>>
<<VESSEL VACANT. CONDITIONS: FAVOURABLE.>>
<<CLAIMING HOST.>>
<<INITIALISING: GRAND LOTTERY SYSTEM>>
<<████░░░░░░░░ 9%>>
"No way," Ezra whispered.
<<████░░░░░░░░ 14%>>
"No way..." He couldn't help but whisper again, a flicker of excitement and hope bleeding out of his heart
<<CALIBRATING TICKET ISSUANCE TO HOST FORTUNE INDEX.>>
<<HOST FORTUNE INDEX: 0.0000003>>
<<...>>
"Is that good or bad?"
<<...RECHECKING.>>
<<HOST FORTUNE INDEX:...still 0.0000003>>
That didn't look good. Ezra could only lightly gulp at the words, his throat dry from the non-existent saliva
<<UNDERSTOOD. THIS IS GOING TO BE A JOURNEY.>>
"Hey," Ezra called out in confusion. "What does that mean?"
The bar kept climbing and did not answer him.