Pure softness.
That was the first thing Rian registered.
’Perhaps my final good deed sent me to heaven.’
His fingers twitched against silk sheets, sinking into a mattress that felt like it cost more than his entire apartment. Sunlight filtered gold through gauzy curtains, dust motes drifting lazily in the beams like something out of a period drama.
Rian’s eyes cracked open.
"...Okay, what."
"I know I wasn’t especially religious, but I’m pretty sure this is not what heaven is."
He stared up at a ceiling carved with intricate molding, some kind of crest embossed dead center, a stylized wolf’s head wreathed in flame. The walls were paneled in dark wood, lined with portraits of stern-looking people in old-fashioned military coats.
"Okay. Okay okay okay." Rian sat up slowly.
He flexed his fingers. Patted down his chest. Everything worked. Everything felt wrong, actually, now that he thought about it. Too light. Too small. His hands looked different. Thinner. Younger.
"How am I alive?" he said out loud, mostly to see if his voice still worked. It did, except it came out a full octave higher than it should’ve.
The only conclusion Rian could currently settle on was that he was alive, everything felt too vivid to be a dream.
He swung his legs off the bed and caught his reflection in a full-length mirror across the room.
Silver-white hair, sharp jaw, sharper cheekbones, and striking golden eyes, the kind of face that belonged on a magazine cover instead of a twenty-two-year-old recluse. Couldn’t have been older than sixteen, seventeen at most.
"...huh."
There was a strange, distant pressure behind his eyes. Flashes flickered at the edge of his mind, not memories exactly, more like the ghost of feelings that weren’t his. Shame. A hot, ugly spike of resentment.
"Okay, this is either the world’s most elaborate fever dream," he muttered, pressing two fingers against his temple like that would somehow make sense of any of this, "or... I don’t even know."
A sudden noise jolted him from his thoughts.
Rian quickly swung his head around towards the sound and saw; a maid?
A woman in a maid’s uniform stepped in, carrying herself with an elegance that couldn’t be described in words. Her eyes landed on him without so much as a flicker breaking through her stoic, professional mask.
"Young Master," she mused.
The maid straightened.
Rian, still in a slight state of delirium, quietly said, "Good morning?"
A sharp, sudden sting bit into the side of his neck.
"Ah—?"
His hand flew up on reflex, fingers brushing something thin and cold already buried beneath his skin. A needle.
The pain came a half-second later, blooming outward in a slow, spreading burn, crawling up into his jaw, down into his shoulder. Rian’s whole body seized, muscles locking up mid-motion, his breath catching somewhere in his throat and refusing to come back out.
"Wh— what—"
He wanted to cry out.
He wanted to shove himself off the bed, put distance between himself and whatever had just happened. His body didn’t listen. His legs buckled first, folding out from under him like the strings holding him up had been cut clean through.
Rian moved his eyes down horrified at the sight of a needle buried deep within his neck causing droplets of blood to slowly pool beneath him.
Rian tried to force the words out, tried to force anything out, but his vision was already tunneling, the gold light from the window smearing into a thin, dying line.
The maid’s face swam in and out of focus above him, that same unreadable calm never once slipping.
Then the dark swallowed everything whole.
***
Rian awoke to terror.
The first thing he realized is that he couldn’t move.
Not wouldn’t but couldn’t.
His wrist were pinned flat above his head, cold metal biting into his skin every time he so much as twitched. His ankles were the same, locked down hard against some kind of raised, unforgiving surface, a platform of stone or metal, he couldn’t tell which, only that it pressed up against his spine with zero give.
His neck throbbed in dull, pulsing waves, the memory of the needle sinking in all over again.
’What... what the hell is this??’
Then Rian finally looked up.
Gold.
Two eyes, molten and unyielding bore down at him from above. The weight of that gaze alone was enough to pin him down harder than the chains ever could, pressing against his chest until his lungs started to struggle for air.
It was only past those eyes, past the suffocating pressure of them, that Rian became aware of anything else at all.
Rows upon rows of seats climbing up into shadow. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of finely dressed figures seated in silence, watching him with the same detached broken look as the golden eyes from before. Torchlight flickered against high stone walls, throwing long shadows across banners that hung from the rafters, banners bearing a crest.
A wolf’s head. Wreathed in flame.
The same crest carved into the ceiling of the bedroom.
Rian’s mind, still thick and sluggish from whatever had been in that needle, dragged itself toward the connection at a pace that would’ve embarrassed him on any other day. Golden eyes. The crest.
It should’ve clicked instantly, but his mind wasn’t exactly in the best condition.
I know this. I know this from—
And then it hit him all at once, a tidal wave crashing through his mind.
Verneuil.
The Verneuil Clan. One of the founding pillars of the Northern Bastion, older than the royal line itself, their bloodline marked by that exact shade of burning gold passed down through every direct descendant for generations. He’d read about them... no, he’d memorized them from his hundreds of runs through Flamecrest Legacy.
The realization didn’t come gently. It came with clarity and memories, not just clarity of his situation but clarity of who he was.
’Ahhh shit’
Youngest son. Third child. The clan’s failure.
I’m not just in Flamecrest Legacy.
I’m the useless scion of Clan Verneuil.
He was no longer Rian but rather,
Tristan Verneuil.