Sen woke with the gradual awareness of a memory. He stared up into the sky, enjoying the afternoon warmth and staring at clouds as he relaxed under a tree. He looked out at the hills below, curving up and down in every direction. Trees popped up here and there.

  Sen’s body spasmed, and his head burst into pain.

  He wasn’t Sen, he was—

  He was Sen, but moments before, he hadn’t known it. Memories flooded into him, like the gasps of fresh air after nearly drowning. They soaked into him, and he struggled to hold them together. They whipped across his mind, memories of his old life, his family, his master, friends, and so much more.

  His new name, the name his new parents had given him, was Tane. It felt odd to consider that. He wasn’t a child. He was almost fully grown, and now he had a new life.

  An odd feeling of disembodiment followed, a separation from himself - or rather, a separation from him, his other self, and his body. Two minds fought for space, as if a sudden deluge of water appeared in a flask. Where did the extra go? Pain ripped through Sen, centered in his head but reverberating throughout his entire body.

  Memories forced their way into his mind, and he was forced to reflect on his life - the life this version of himself had lived, the life that Tane had lived so far. The pain diminished as he moved through each memory, reconciling them with himself. He found that each memory agreed with him. He felt no disconnect, no sense of difference between the person that was Tane, and the person that was Sen. The biggest differences were, of course, the world which he grew up in. His parents had been similar and yet wildly different from his - original - parents. He had no sister, and at that thought, a few tears crept into his eyes.

  Sen realized with a start that he had died.

  His death had come so fast, it felt more like falling asleep. That thought pressed on him more than anything else. It was not his death that weighed on him. It was the simple triviality of it. The end had come with as much wear on him as a night’s sleep. It clawed at him, gnawed at him. He felt it crawling along his legs, and the wind brushing against the hairs of his arm made him feel exposed in a way that made him want to crawl into the very earth, and perhaps even take the final rest.

  Why was he here? How was he here? Death had come for him, and instead of taking him, alongside Amery and Anelica, it had left him.

  It had left him, thrown him into a new version of himself, alone, in a world that was strange to him, and familiar to him, and Sen rejected both because he knew the fullness of two lives that lived in his head and —

  It was too much. He couldn’t…

  He took a breath. He tried to let the tears flow, but they wouldn’t come.

  He took another breath, and again he tried to let the tears flow. Another breath, and this time he realized his fists were clenched and he could feel his fingernails biting into his palms. His shoulders ached from tension, and his legs were cramped underneath him. The act of examining his body served better to help him take that breath than actually trying to breathe did, and as he worked his way through his body, his breathing flowed easier.

  It was too much to think about right now, he determined. Sen stuffed all of that into a box in his mind. He would deal with it later. When he was ready. He would confront - death, his own death, a gaping maw, the end in less than a blink, darkness—

  No, no, tamp it down, lock it up, throw it in the deepest recesses, handle it later.

  The tension had come back, and sweat broke out on his skin despite the coolness of the day. Sen began his work, moving through each part of his body, fighting against the primal fear that coiled its way through his muscles like a snake suffocating its prey.

  Finally, he took another breath. He wondered. He thought. A portion of him was missing, needed to be missing, but a portion of him was not all of him, and that was good enough for now.

  What had happened? Had he truly seen the end of the world? Had it only seemed like the end of the world, because his little world had ended? Had he been reborn, and only just now regained his memories?

  No, those questions were too close to a problem, and he needed to stay away from them. For now. Eventually, he resolved, I will deal with these questions. For now, though —

  He reflected on the wildly different world that appeared before him. Slowly, as he rifled his way through his own memories, reconciling them with the two aspects of himself now melded, Sen began to piece together an understanding. He wanted to laugh, and he wanted to cry.

  A single story stood out in the memories of his ‘new’ life. A story that everyone knew, a legend that had no room for doubt. A work of gods, a miracle by every possible name, a deliverance that allowed the continued existence of all life.

  A single story that Sen knew strayed too close to a dangerous memory, a dark and red sky, a coin, an end… It was close, but Sen thought he could handle it. It was only a small part, an explanation. It was a resolution that - he hoped - would help him start anew. It was a single shovel in a plot that needed—

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  The darker half of a story told to every child, a legend that told of the deliverance the gods wrought to allow all the sapient races to persist despite the inevitable death of their old world, Fiddia. The old world had started to die, and if the sapient races had stayed, everyone would have died with it.

  The gods intervened, led the sapient races across unimaginable distances, physical or aethereal, the story knew not. Nor did Sen, for he knew only what the story told to his new self remembered. They were led to Cerid, this world, abandoning the old, escaping before its final dying breath allowed the waste of all life to continue unabated.

  The story of the Crossing was a simple one, on the surface. It was the story of gods who invaded a world, and found other life there. That life needed to be gone for the sake of their own creations, and so that life was eradicated.

  Just like Se—

  Back in the box, imagine a key, lock it, keep it back there in the dark, don’t look at it, don’t think about it just keep going and the thunder in your heart might not burst all that you are into pieces—

  It had been a miracle beyond all miracles, all the gods coming together to save all sapient life on Fiddia by opening a crossing into Cerid. The peoples of Fiddia, now the peoples of Cerid, had thrived in the new world. The people thanked the gods for the blessings that the ancients of this world gave to them, ruins of ancient castles and crumbling libraries lost to the march of time, small blessings of knowledge and material and architecture that let all the new peoples of this world understand what awaited them in this new land, and conquer it without as much of the expected pain.

  Tears flowed down his face, and they felt like flames licking at him, tongues of guilt, because he liv—

  That had been about a century before this moment, where Sen realized he now had two names inextricably within himself. The thoughts were a good distraction. Something simpler, easier to deal with.

  Tane and Sen considered the idea of what name to go by. The tears on his face dried slowly as he thought, cold in the chill of the day. Finally they decided that, whatever others may expect to call him, his real name was Sen.

  It would be odd, perhaps, to attempt to change his name. He could still introduce himself as Tane, as needed, but in his mind, he considered himself Sen. Tane was merely an extension of that self.

  The two of them were, in reality, the same person, after all. They simply lived at different times, with different people. They grew according to different stimuli, and had different opportunities presented to them. For all that, Sen felt no disconnection with the decisions in Tane’s life - or at least, none that he wouldn’t have chosen under the same circumstances.

  Sen stared out at the world before him. Familiar, and yet completely alien. Sen was at a loss. Now what? He wondered.

  He was afraid to look at that dark corner of himself, afraid to see all the pieces laid out in stark contrast with the world that refused to agree with the horror that he knew lay inside him.

  What did he want?

  A rage bubbled up in him. It felt like creeping ice in his veins, a refreshing, invigorating sensation that sapped the fatigue from his stiff body.

  Revenge. Gods had killed his world, his master, his sister, his parents — himse— and more.

  He deflated. Impossible. Even entertaining the idea was a fever dream, an impossibility. It was hardly worth considering.

  What could he want?

  That was more approachable. His mind leapt to one dark place in particular, deep inside himself, but, no, that would be best dealt with another time. Not now.

  What else? Magic. He had loved magic. Loved the learning, loved the experimentation, loved the rote exercise that let him step forward each day, moving toward mastery. He had spent the majority of his final years - close, but not too close for the viper in his mind to work its way out of the locked box - working with Amery to learn magic.

  Nothing else came to mind. Everything else seemed trivial. Nothing seemed to light a fire in him like the idea of revenge, of the cold pleasure of plunging a blade deep into divinity. It wouldn’t matter. Divinities couldn’t bleed, and Sen had struggled against a horde of monsters just minutes ago—

  He was getting better at putting that away and keeping it away, but it would be a work in progress for a while.

  That was enough. Magic seemed good enough, and he found it interesting. It would have to do. Thinking too much would make holding it all back harder. Tane - the part of him that had been born after all of that - was the only part of him functioning. Sen felt like a ripped cloth trying to hold back a dam.

  Better to let it all be for a moment, the other part of him said. Better to come back when the challenge isn’t too much, isn’t too hard, when we’re not frayed into a thousand small fibers all wishing for the strength to hold up against—

  Death.

  It took him quite a bit longer to come back from that one, and Sen realized tears covered his face, and his eyes swelled and his nose ran and breathing came hard. A sudden and irrational rage burgeoned up within him at his own fragility, the inability to deal with his own thoughts. He wanted to put this all behind him, and yet he could feel it, lurking, deep inside him just waiting for another chance to strike at him.

  Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

  Simplify. What can be done now? Work toward bigger solutions later. A small part of him, just as deadly as the dark, locked chest in his mind, smiled at that. A dish best served cold, it tried to hint, is all the sweeter when it is insurmountable.

  Sen ignored the thought. There was a life to live in front of him, now, and he couldn’t waste it on thinking too much. On remembering too much. He could feel the viper trying to strike at him as memories of his master and his sister crept up on him. Sen physically jerked as he tried to push away the memories, to keep them out of reach, to prevent the locked box breaking open once again.

  He stood. He wiped his face on his shirt. His body ached, so he stretched. It was nice, he thought. He looked around, and realized he sat under a large tree in the shade on a small hill that overlooked a beautiful landscape.

  The beauty felt bitter in his mouth, but he swallowed the bitterness and tried to enjoy it. His face still felt like a mess, so he moved to a stream he knew was nearby and washed himself.

  That had helped more than anything else so far, but it didn’t really change anything. Change would be good. Something to allow him a new start in this new life.

  A mage lived in this town. Maybe he needed an apprentice.