Chương 159: The Specter of the Past

The awakening was not gradual or merciful, it was more like slamming violently into the surface of icy water after falling from a great height. Dex gasped a deep, hoarse gasp of terror that tore through the room's stillness, as though his lungs had been starved of oxygen for centuries spent at the bottom of a dark ocean.

The bleak concrete images of Blackrock Prison dissolved, its suffocating walls and cold steel bars vanishing all at once, replaced by the warm, arching wooden chamber at the heart of the great World Tree in Falus Forest. But his panicked mind, still caught between the dimensions of time and multiple lives, had not yet processed this sudden transition.

His senses were at war: his eyes saw the soft, vital glow emanating from the wood grain surrounding him, while his nose still detected the smell of rust, blood, and pure earthly despair. His body was trembling with uncontrolled violence, harsh spasms striking his muscles, already shattered from his grinding battle with General Vargas. His cold, heavy sweat was saturating the organic bed made from smooth magical plant fibers and luminous moss.

His left hand was rigid, pressing with a savage force that nearly broke bone against his bare right shoulder, pressing specifically on the same spot where the blazing iron brand had seared him in his dream. Or rather, in his old reality and his previous life on the planet Earth. The phantom pain there was burning, throbbing, and real enough that he expected at any moment to see the sickening gray smoke rising from his skin and to smell his own flesh charring beneath the weight of the number: 4021.

"Dex?! Dex, listen to me. You are here. You are safe!" Lumia's sweet voice, full of anxiety, pierced through the thick fog of terror enveloping his mind like a beam of light cutting through the clouds of a black storm. She was sitting on a carved wooden seat grown from the tree's roots beside his bed. The faint dark circles beneath her eyes made it plainly clear that she had not closed her eyelids for hours, perhaps for days, watching over him ceaselessly and tending to the wounds that had nearly cost him his life.

Within seconds, and with her characteristic agility, she had knelt at his side on the low bed's edge. She did not hesitate for a moment before drawing close to his turbulent presence, and placed her two small, warm hands on his deathly pale cheeks, forcing him, with gentle firmness, to stop staring into empty space and to look directly into her eyes. Lumia's silver eyes gleamed with a faint, captivating magical light in the dimness of the room lit by the tree's natural radiance.

It was not the light of destructive power, it was a light radiating genuine human concern and pure fear for him. Her warm breath, carrying the fragrance of wild forest flowers and the nectar of the World Tree, struck his trembling face, and began gradually to break apart the phantom choking smell of burning flesh, rusty iron, and cold sweat that had still been suffocating his nose and holding him prisoner in the cell of the past. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Breathe, please, Dex, breathe slowly," Lumia whispered in a voice full of tenderness and pleading, gently drawing her thumb across his cheek to calm his terror, as though she were tending to an injured bird trembling between her hands.

"You were screaming in your sleep, screams that broke the heart. You were in terrible pain, as though someone were tearing your soul apart. Look at me, focus on my eyes. You are not there. Whatever that dark place was, whatever hell you were inside your mind, you are not there now. You are with me." Dex drew a long, trembling breath, his voice like the rattle of someone wrestling with death. He tried with every last remnant of will to focus on the features of her face close to his.

He focused on the silken strands of her silver hair falling softly to brush his brow, reflecting the room's light like threads of moonlight. He focused on the touch of her hands, the complete and total opposite of everything brutal he had lived through in his earthly nightmare. Not the rough hands of prison guards, not cold iron shackles, but the touch of life. The touch of someone who was afraid of losing him.

With agonizing slowness, the racing beats of his heart, which had been hammering like mad war drums in his chest, began to ease. The air began entering his lungs with more regularity, and his convulsing body gradually loosened against the magical bed that seemed to absorb his tension. Yet despite his steadying breath, his left hand remained clutched to his right shoulder, his fingers dug into his flesh as though trying to ward off an invisible pain, or perhaps to conceal an old shame he did not want anyone to see.

"Lumia..." he finally spoke her name, and his voice was rough, hoarse, and broken as dry branches snapping underfoot on a winter night. Speaking her name was an anchor thrown into a raging sea to tether him to present reality.

"I am here, I am beside you and I am not going anywhere," she answered at once, a pale and trembling smile of relief forcing its way with difficulty onto her lips as she saw the veil of terror lift and true awareness return to his eyes.

"We survived, Dex. You are in a safe place. We defeated Vargas, and we crushed the accursed Sixth Legion. There is no immediate danger now. You are our hero, Dex, you saved all of us from certain annihilation." The word "hero" fell on Dex's ears like drops of burning acid falling into an open wound. His features contracted, and he dropped his eyes quickly, fleeing from her gaze full of genuine admiration and appreciation. A hero? How could she call him by that noble title?

How could she see him as a hero and a savior if she knew the ugly truth of what he really was? Dark thoughts swirled in his mind like a storm. What if she knew that in his previous life he had been nothing more than a nobody? A shattered prisoner with no name and no dignity, bearing a number he was called by like a forgotten tool?

What if she knew that the savage power he had used to defeat Vargas, the furious darkness that had erupted from his depths to tear his enemies apart, was not born from the courage or nobility spoken of in the legends of Ekarthas, but from the dungeons of torture, humiliation, and absolute helplessness in a harsh human world empty of any magic or miracles? He saw himself as a monster, not a saving knight.