Nepal, 2023
The bridge groaned like a wounded beast.
Luca Moretti crouched in the shadow of its steel skeleton, his calloused fingers tracing a hairline fracture in the concrete pillar. Monsoon rains had turned the river below into a frothing serpent, its roar drowning out the shouts of his crew. He’d warned them. A month ago, when the first cracks appeared in the eastern span, he’d begged the NGO to evacuate the downstream villages. “Another week,” they’d said. “The budget—”
A pebble skittered down the scaffolding.
Then the world split.
The fracture yawned open with a sound like bones snapping, swallowing the cries of workers. Luca lunged for a support beam, his boots slipping on rain-slick metal. Below, the river churned with debris—shattered planks, a dented hardhat, a hand breaching the surface before the current dragged it under. His fault. Always his fault.
“Move!” he screamed, but the bridge was already folding in on itself, steel tendons screaming. The last thing he saw was the village elder’s face—wrinkled, trusting—as the collapse swallowed them both.
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Valenor, Duchy of Valois
He woke choking on incense and regret.
Cold stone pressed against his back. Firelight flickered across a vaulted ceiling, its beams blackened by centuries of smoke. A voice, sharp as a whetstone: “—miraculous. The fever broke.”
Fever? His lungs burned. Not the damp ache of Kathmandu smog, but a deeper, older fire—like breathing through a rusted grate. He coughed, and the taste of blood bloomed on his tongue.
“Aldric?” A woman’s face swam into view, her wimple framing eyes like flint. Sister Marguerite, his fragmented memories supplied. The castle’s infirmarian. “Praise the Light. You’ve returned to us.”
Aldric. Not Luca.
He struggled upright, linen sheets pooling at his waist. His hands—pale, slender, foreign—trembled as they gripped the bedframe. Across the room, a leaded glass window threw splinters of moonlight onto a tapestry: a knight slaying a dragon, the Valois wyvern emblem snarling beneath its claws.
Medieval. Fantasy. Reincarnation.
The words clicked together like bad scaffolding. He’d binged enough anime during grad school to recognize the tropes, but the smell—tallow candles and chamber pots—was horrifically real.
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“My lord?” A squire hovered at the door, barely twelve, his tabard swimming on bony shoulders. “Your father demands your presence. The harvest tithe…”
“Later,” Sister Marguerite snapped. “Can’t you see he’s—”
“No.” Aldric’s voice surprised him—a reedy tenor, nothing like Luca’s baritone. “I’ll go.”
Better to meet this nightmare head-on.
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The Great Hall
Duke Reynaud de Valois sat like a gargoyle on his throne, his doublet straining over a barrel chest. Aldric’s “father.” To his left stood Guillaume, firstborn son, all bullnecked arrogance and a scar earned, rumor claimed, by bedding a blacksmith’s wife.
“Look who’s risen from the grave,” Guillaume drawled. “Careful, brother. The peasants might think you’re a saint. Or a witch.”
Aldric ignored him. His gaze snagged on the hall itself—crumbling mortar, rotted timbers. Earthquake death trap. A tremor here would reduce Valois Keep to rubble.
“The southern fields yield half their usual grain,” the duke growled, flinging a scroll at Aldric’s feet. “You’ll take a company of men to Belvoir. Squeeze the serfs until they bleed silver.”
Serfs. The word curdled in Aldric’s gut. He’d seen those fields from the infirmary window—stunted wheat, topsoil eroded to dust. Squeezing peasants wouldn’t fix famine. But arguing could get him exiled. Or worse.
“And if I find the cause of the blight?” Aldric said quietly.
Guillaume snorted. “Play farmer if you like. Just remember—” He stepped closer, breath reeking of sour wine. “You’re alive because Mother begged Father to spare the runt. Don’t make her regret it.”
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The Blight
Aldric rode south at dawn, his escort a dozen surly men-at-arms. Sister Marguerite had slipped him a vial of poppy milk for the coughing fits. “The lung rot took your mother,” she’d said. “It’ll take you too, if you don’t rest.”
But rest was a luxury for men with time.
Belvoir village huddled beneath the keep like a scab. Serfs scrambled from mud-and-wattle huts as Aldric dismounted, their faces hollowed by hunger. A child stared at him, one eye milky with cataracts.
“My lord!” The bailiff scurried forward, a weasel in wool. “The tithes, I swear, we’ll have them by—”
“Show me the fields.”
The man blinked. “But… the rain…”
“Now.”
They trudged past fallow plots, the soil crusted and gray. Aldric knelt, sifting dirt through his fingers. No earthworms. No life. At the field’s edge, a withered oak clawed at the sky, its bark streaked with black veins.
“Blight,” the bailiff whispered. “The Church says it’s punishment. For Lord Guillaume’s… indiscretions.”
Aldric’s chest tightened. Not from lung rot this time—recognition. The blackened roots, the metallic tang in the air. He’d seen this in Nepal, downstream from a collapsed mine.
Heavy metal poisoning.
But how? No factories here. No…
A glint caught his eye. Half-buried in the soil lay a shard of jagged crystal, pulsing faintly crimson.
“Don’t touch that!” A serf lunged forward, yanking Aldric back. “It’s cursed! The Church’s men, they buried those stones after the last harvest. Said they’d bless the land.”
Aldric’s mind raced. The Holy See’s “Divine Engines”—machines that harnessed Aether. If they’d been dumping waste here…
“Gather every crystal you find,” he ordered. “Bury them deep, away from water sources. And bring me salt. As much as you can spare.”
Salt to neutralize toxins. A stopgap, but it might buy time.
The bailiff gaped. “But the tithes—”
“Do you want to eat next winter?” Aldric snapped. “Then do as I say.”
As the serfs scattered, he pocketed the crystal. Its pulse throbbed against his thigh, a heartbeat out of sync with his own.
Progress required risks. But this? This was a prayer.