Greta guided me through the quiet corridors after dinner. The others were still crowded around the dining hall, eating, training, laughing in bursts that bounced off the stone. Their voices carried, but here the sound softened. The deeper we walked, the more the noise faded. It felt like the guild hall folded in on itself, leaving only the quiet and the low glow of the mage lights.

  Greta walked ahead of me with her usual long stride, though even she seemed quieter tonight. Her shoulders were tense. Her eyes were sharp. She was thinking hard about something. Maybe about what had just happen. I could feel it in the way her hand occasionally clenched and unclenched, a habit she only had when she was unsettled.

  She stopped at my door and opened it. “Inside, Runt.”

  “My name is Azolo,” I said.

  She nodded. “Inside, Azolo.”

  The room felt small tonight. The single bunk. The narrow table. The wooden chest at the foot of the bed. Everything seemed closer, tighter, almost holding its breath. I lay down. The blankets were rough against my skin, and the mattress dipped slightly under my weight. My heart beat so loudly I felt it in my teeth.

  Greta closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed. The way she sat was careful, measured. She looked at me the way a medic might look at a wounded soldier.

  “You did something incredible today,” she said quietly. “Most kids would have died. Half the adults in this Guild would have died.”

  Her voice stayed steady, but her jaw tightened. “You kept everyone alive. All of them. But you painted a target on yourself, and you do not understand who Duke Claremont is.”

  A cold shiver climbed my spine. “Am I in danger.”

  “Not today. Maybe not even tomorrow. But men like him hold grudges like oaths and you humiliated his son. Even if it was for his own good. Randall is right about one thing. Nothing will come of this for now. Not for him, not for you, but eventually.” She touched my shoulder gently, then firmly. “But if you get strong enough, none of it will matter. So, we start now. Do you have the core with you?”

  I reached into my pocket and took out the tin core. It pulsed faintly in my palm, like it was waiting. Greta extended her hand.

  “Please hand it to me, Azolo.” Her voice softened in a way I had never heard before.

  I placed the core in her palm.

  “You are a good man,” she said. “And I mean that even though you are in the body of a child. You did the right thing. You saved this whole guild hall, even if nobody will hear about what you did.”

  She took a breath. “Myrda knows. Meka knows. I know. Even Randall probably understands, even if he will never admit it.”

  I did not feel like a hero. I felt like a shaking old man lying on a thin mattress, who had harmed a child who didn’t understand what they were doing.

  “Lie still,” Greta said.

  I did. My pulse thudded against my ribs like it wanted to crawl out. The mattress felt too thin to hold me, and the faint lantern light above us flickered against the walls in a way that made the room seem smaller. My mouth tasted like copper already, as if my body understood what was coming before I did.

  She pressed the core to my chest. The core was cold, almost soothing for a fraction of a second. Then her thumb pushed down. I felt my skin bulge. Then split.

  My breath hitched. The sound was thin, more a rasp than a real inhale. Heat spread under my skin in a slow wave that made every hair on my arms stand upright. I felt the exact moment my body realized it was being breached. Muscles tensed on instinct, useless against what pressed through them.

  Flesh parted under the pressure. A burning line carved through me. The core slid inward. My lungs refused to expand.

  Then it stabbed into my heart.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  A violent shock erupted through my entire body. White. The world went white. My vision broke into shards of light like glass cracking from inside my skull. I tried to gasp but the pain stole every shred of breath.

  Greta kept pushing. Past my heart. Past the point where my life should have ended.

  Blood bubbled from my lips. Warm, metallic. The taste coated my tongue and teeth, thick and sticky, as familiar as it was unwelcome. Blood always tasted the same no matter how many centuries you lived. It carried fear in it. It carried memory. It carried the raw truth of being alive. My fingers scrabbled at the blanket. My legs kicked without direction.

  Greta uncorked a vial with one hand and poured healing potion into the wound. It flooded the torn flesh with burning cold. My body seized, back arching. The pain from the healing potion was worse than the wound it was healing.

  “That was the easy part,” she murmured.

  The potion sealed the outside, but the core kept moving through me. Like it was dragging a comet tail of fire behind it.

  “Now,” Greta said softly, “your body will need time to adjust to your new core. It will replace every cell in your body with better ones. You will feel like your blood is boiling and freezing at the same time. That is normal.”

  I choked as another wave ripped through me. My bones felt too small for what was happening inside them.

  “I have been told by other reincarnators that this is the worst pain they ever felt,” Greta continued quietly. “Worse than the worst sickness they ever experienced.”

  Her hand, calloused, steady, brushed sweat-soaked hair from my face. Her touch grounded me in a reality that kept slipping.

  “When I got my tin core,” she said, “it felt like my bones were turning to ice while acid ate them from the inside. My insides stretched like something was trying to inflate me from my ribs outward. It was horrible.”

  I forced a bloody smile. “I have felt worse.”

  Greta snorted. “Azolo, why are you smiling while dying.”

  Because I remember what my soul went through in the void between death and non-existence. Compared to that, this was a fierce, living pain. Pain that meant I still existed.

  She sat beside me; hands folded in her lap. “My mother sat with me the whole time when I went through this. Talking helped. So let me ask you some things, Azolo.”

  The pain sharpened again. A burning wire ran down my spine.

  “Why do you act so friendly with children when you have the mind of an adult? And how old were you when you passed, if you do not mind me asking.”

  “It is fine,” I whispered. “I was almost five hundred when I died. And children are honest. They are mirrors. If you do good to them, they usually do good to others. Not all of them, but most. In five hundred years you learn that children are the best of us.”

  Greta let out a low whistle. “Damn, Azolo. You were an ancient wizard.”

  I tried to explain the difference, that an archwizard was a master of every school of magic and took centuries of relentless study, while an ancient wizard was simply someone who had lived long enough to earn the title. It felt like something she deserved to understand. But the words refused to form, caught behind whatever wall had been built inside me.

  I felt them leave my mouth.

  But Greta heard nothing.

  Her expression did not move. Her eyes did not shift. She heard silence.

  Something inside me twisted. Not from the pain. But from understanding as the light turn on in my mind.

  It was part of the things stolen from me.

  Locked away. Hidden behind walls I could not break.

  My name. My titles. My legacy. They were sealed. I could reach for them, but the world refused to hear them. They did not belong to me anymore.

  The sickness crawled through my bones. It slithered into the cracks between joints and along tendons like it wanted to map the shape of me. Every inch of my skin prickled. I could feel the rhythm of my pulse not only in my chest but in my throat, my wrists, even my gums. It was the first time in this life that I felt aware of my entire body in a single overwhelming moment. Nothing about it felt mystical. It was the brutal, biological revolt of flesh being asked to rise above what it had been born to be. My muscles trembled. My skin prickled as if thousands of tiny mouths were biting through me.

  In that moment, I realized something strange. Something I had never questioned before.

  The name Azolo did not feel like my name from my last life. But at the same time, it did. It felt truer than any other name I could remember, even though no one in my past life had ever spoken it.

  My mother in this life told me it meant Breath of Fire. When I said Azolo, that meaning shaped the sound. But inside myself, I heard something different.

  I heard Azolo.

  Even when the sound leaving my mouth was not that at all.

  It confused me. Souls were mysterious, even in a world full of magic. Reincarnation was rare and poorly studied. You would think someone, somewhere, should have realized that souls had names separate from the bodies they lived in.

  Yet no one had ever told me about this.

  A quiet thought surfaced beneath the pain.

  Maybe my true name had been stolen.

  Maybe the false god of magic, the one wearing the legend of who I had once been, had taken more than my legacy.

  Maybe he had taken the true sound of my name itself.

  But maybe my soul remembered what the world had forgotten.

  Greta touched my hand gently. “You will survive this. It will pass. I promise you it will pass.”

  Her voice was steady enough to anchor me.

  I gritted my teeth as the core solidified behind my heartbeat. I felt it spreading tendrils of itself through me, threading into every vein, every muscle, every bone.

  For the first time in this life, I understood something deep and simple.

  I was becoming more.

  Not as a wizard.

  Not as the legend.

  As myself.

  And that was enough.