Bzzz… Bzzz…
A figure in a white cloak stood at the entrance of a collapsing bridge, the air humming faintly around him. Across from him, a man in armour held a sword levelled at his chest.
"Are you really going to save these foolish humans?" the armoured man said, his voice carried only by the golden thread coiled around the white cloak's body — invisible to everyone else, audible to no one but him. "Their greed has no bounds."
Along the broken wall above — cracked, crumbling, held together more by habit than structure — a line of guards watched in silence. Among them stood a man wearing a crown.
Huff… Huff…
"I know it was a foolish decision," the armoured man said. "But I don't regret it. The life I lived before — it became my burden. Saving people is all I have left of it."
His face said the rest. He looked like a vase that had survived one too many close calls — still whole, still standing, but one careless touch away from coming apart entirely.
"I truly cannot understand you," the white cloak said. "You had everything in the upper realm. Why descend to this world?"
A moment passed.
The armoured man sighed — and then smiled, wide and unhurried.
"I was bored," he said.
Silence.
" Huh?!, you reincarnated yourself because you were bored?!"
The white cloak seethed quietly, muttering to himself. He believed it, too. Anyone who knew the armoured man across the upper realms would have. He was exactly that kind of person — someone who made catastrophic decisions with complete serenity, who charged into battle without a plan and somehow made it everyone else's problem. The answer fit perfectly.
But the armoured man was, for the first time in recent memory, joking. His poker face had never been better. Whatever the real reason was, it lived somewhere deeper — somewhere he wasn't ready to say out loud, and possibly never would be.
Clouds moved across the sky. The rain that fell was white and slow — the first snow of winter, settling over the world like a held breath.
One year later…
He sat against the side of a road, buried in thick layers of clothing, a scarf pulled up over his mouth, a blizzard moving through the city with the kind of indifference only weather can manage. It was the armoured man. He had known this was coming — had known, perhaps, from the beginning. The people he had saved had abandoned him, as people often do once the saving is done.
And yet he had saved them anyway.
Why?
His vision blurred at the edges. The cold pressed in. He felt himself slipping — the ground rising to meet him as his body finally gave in. Before the end, he whispered, "Did she survive?."
And then — movement. A parade was passing through the street. Through the noise and colour of it, a carriage rolled by, and at its window, a child's face peered out. A girl.
"I see," he said softly. He exhaled — slow, and final.
"In my next life… I just want to live quietly"
Tweet… Tweet…
Birdsong threaded through the air.
Erthel—
A voice drifted in from somewhere far off, rolling closer through the silence with each passing moment.
A man lay in the middle of a forest. Around him, the low sound of wind moving through leaves, the creak of branches, sunlight pressing down through the canopy in long pale shafts. White dust particles drifted through the light, turning slowly, going nowhere in particular.
His eyes opened. Pupils flaring wide. He pushed himself upright, pressed a hand to his head, and looked around — blinking at a world that offered no explanation for itself.
He felt as though he had just surfaced from a very long dream. He stood. He looked up at the sky.
His memories were gone. He knew this the way you know something is missing before you can name what it was — a hollow where something used to be. Yet he could still feel the shape of it, emotions without images, weight without form. The echo of a life he could no longer read.