Everyone is stupid.

I’m not sure why.

Everyone is so goddamn, unknowingly stupid and I don’t fucking know why. They do the stupidest shit, succeed against all reason, and then manage to claw their way out of the depths of where they’ve been cast off to to begin again.

They survive out of sheer determination, sheer power, sheer love.

I’ve never understood it.

But I do now.

I understand it as I tear myself from the iron, barbed mesh the fucking Quotiar thought they could trap me in, understand it as I rip my captors apart with my bare hands, understand it as I free my siblings from their cages.

I, Ewan Karthos, the ghost of the Skull, the most powerful assassin of the most powerful underworld organization, could never.

But I, Brance Locahain, know that I will do anything for my siblings. Ewan would never, ever sacrifice himself for anyone, never. But for the new me, who had just been pulled into this new world, a sick recreation of just another book, from just another author, just another story, I know that if Reedely and Kriste had a hair missing from their head when I pulled them from their cage, I would rip apart the person who did that to them.

And I did, as surely as I knew the speed the bodies we were running from were cooling, as surely as I knew that my siblings were terrified, as surely as I knew that the only ways we could survive this were a sudden, impossible knowledge of the area around us, a massive militia on our side, or… a sacrifice.

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And I knew that my siblings felt the same burning love in the pit of their stomachs as I did, so I knew that they would never leave me alone.

But I knew that two was better than one, so I told them I would take care of the people chasing us, and sent them off, promising that, whatever happened, I would at least be back by their coronation.

They knew that there was a chance I could survive, and they trusted that I would take that chance, as much as possible.

But I am betraying that trust. I will have to betray the first bond I’d ever made, and I’d have to do it in an explosive enough way these dirty, cruel Quotiar mutts would never fuck with my family ever again.

It seems that our pretty faces had covered our power for too long, if some half-assed black market mutts had attacked us. So I would show them what my family had; not the magic powers of the Firdex, not the trained knighthood of the Gallence, not the long lineage of black market leaders like the Quotiar.

What we had were our pretty faces, and our sheer will.

You can never stop a wrathful Locahain. And I am just that. Brance Locahain, eldest son of the Locahain family, formerly Ewan Karthos, the phantom of the Skull.

I am more than enough to warn the Quotiar, black haired bastards they are.

So, when the group caught up to me, I lept at the men with the fury of a cornered wolf, ripping them apart with as much prejudice as I could, snagging swords from them, using their trust in one another against one another, as the traitor had to drug me.

One man, then another, and another, and they all fell; a bloodthirsty smile was beginning to grow on my face.

And so another group came, and another, and the wounds began to pile up. I was moving slower, slower, slower still. But my smile grew, my confidence grew, and I gained smoother, more streamlined movements.

Just as it always happens in a war of attrition, one man cannot hold out forever, so I paid the price for slowing down when I took a sword to the chest.

No one can survive a sword to the chest, and I knew that. So when I’d killed the knight who’d stabbed me, and Nasar Quotiar emerged from the wood, and I knew there was no way I could kill him, and so my smile grew rueful.

I could not kill him.

But I could give him a warning.

So I dragged my weak body towards him, and when my legs buckled, I dragged myself the last few feet to come to a rest as close to him as I could get. From my position, I could see him looking at me.

His expression was strange.

My sight became clouded with a deadly black, the same as when I last died.

His hand moved towards my face.

I died for the second time.