Chapter 1: Back to Age Sixteen

The last thing Lucien Vale remembered was the sound of his own sword breaking.

Above the Ancestral Hall, three hundred blades hung in the air like a frozen rain, every one of them pointed at his heart. His sworn brother stood at the top of the steps with his hand raised, and there was no hatred in his eyes at all — only pity, which was worse.

Then the rain fell.

He opened his eyes to birdsong and the smell of rain on warm earth. The ceiling above him was low, wooden, and familiar in a way that made his chest ache. A woman's voice called his name from the courtyard — his mother's voice, dead these forty years.

Lucien sat up slowly. The hands that rose in front of his face were small, smooth, and unscarred. Sixteen. He was sixteen again, in the village at the foot of the mountain, on the morning of the day everything had first gone wrong.

He laughed once, quietly, the way a man laughs when heaven hands him back a stolen thing. The sword intent of ninety years still slept in his chest like a banked coal. This time, he told the empty room, I will not waste a single day.