Chapter 1: I Died Sitting Down (And Honestly, That Tracks)

Chapter 1

I Died Sitting Down (And Honestly, That Tracks)

The Archmage of the Crimson Tower, Pillar of the Five Kingdoms, Sealer of the Demon Gate, Unbroken Shield of Aethermere, died in a chair.

Not a throne, not a battlefield. Not even a particularly good chair.

It was a wooden thing with one short leg that he’d been meaning to fix for about forty years. It sat in the northeast corner of his study, angled toward the window so he could watch the sun come up over the mountains, which he hadn’t actually done in at least a half a decade because his neck didn’t turn that far without pain anymore.

He was three hundred and forty-two years old.

He was alone.

And his last thought, as the light behind his eyes finally guttered out like a candle reaching the end of its wick, was: I really should have bought a better chair.

• • •

Then he woke up.

This was, to be clear, extremely inconvenient.

Roen Ashveil opened his eyes to a ceiling he hadn’t seen in over three centuries. Wooden beams, darkened with age, crisscrossing above a narrow bed in a narrow room in the small house where he’d grown up. The blanket over his chest smelled like dust, soap and something faintly floral that punched through three hundred years of memory like an arrow.

Lavender.

His hands were on top of the blanket. He stared at them. They were smooth and unscarred, with knuckles that didn’t ache. His fingers bent without that grinding click that had been his constant companion since the Second War. They were the hands of a young man who had never held a staff, never channelled enough Aether to melt stone, never pulled a dying soldier out of a collapsing rift while his own skin burned.

He flexed them. Open. Closed. Open.

What.

He sat up. His back didn’t hurt.

What.

He swung his legs off the bed and stood, and, surprisingly to him, his knees didn’t pop, nor did his hips creak. His spine straightened like it remembered what “straight” meant after years of pretending the word didn’t exist. He was tall. He’d forgotten he used to be tall. The last thirty years, he’d been a hunched thing shuffling between bookshelves. Before that, a slightly less hunched thing shuffling between battlefields.

He crossed the room in three steps. There was a mirror on the wall—small, bronze, spotted with age, that used to belong to his mother.

He looked.

A nineteen-year-old boy stared back. A jaw sharper than a knife’s edge, dark hair that hadn’t yet started its long campaign of retreat and blue-ish grey eyes that, in the mirror at least, still held something dangerously close to hope.

“No.” He gripped the edge of the dresser. “No, no, no, no.”

He checked the room, then the house. He opened the front door and stared at the village outside…Ashfen, a nothing-town in the northern foothills of the Vaelthorne Empire. Population three hundred and change, and famous for absolutely nothing. The farmers were hauling carts through the mud, and an old woman, whose name he couldn’t remember, was beating a rug on her porch with a violence that suggested the rug owed her money.

He knew this day. He knew this exact day.

Because tomorrow, a man in crimson robes would arrive in Ashfen looking for magically gifted youth. Tomorrow, that man would test everyone under 20 in the village and find only one with enough talent to bother with. Tomorrow, a nineteen-year-old Roen Ashveil would leave this house, this village, and this life forever, walking into a future that included three continental wars, the near-extinction of two kingdoms, a decade trapped in a collapsing pocket dimension, and a truly unreasonable amount of paperwork.

He closed the door slowly, and his forehead slammed against the wood.

Then Roen Ashveil, the most powerful mage in the history of Aethermere, said:

“No.”

Just that. Quiet and final. Absolutely not.

He pushed off the door. Walked back to his room, dragging his feet, threw himself on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

In his three hundred years, he served in three wars, survived seventeen assassination attempts, four of them by allies, closed a Demon Gate that had taken eleven of the strongest mages in the world to seal, with only him walking away. And all that, followed by a century of slowly decaying in a tower, watching everyone he’d ever cared about grow old and die while he kept going, kept going, kept going.

Because the world needed the Archmage, and because every time he thought about stopping, there was another crisis. Another desperate messenger at his door saying please, you’re the only one who can…

He closed his eyes and set his mind:

Not this time.

He didn’t know why he was here, didn’t know what force, god, or cosmic accident had dragged him backwards through three centuries and frankly, he didn’t care. Because Roen Ashveil had a dream. A plan you might say.

It was a simple dream…plan, dream-plan.

It was simply this: Don’t.

Don’t go to the Crimson Tower. Don’t answer the call. Don’t become the Archmage. Don’t fight the wars. Don’t seal the Gate. Don’t hold the world together.

Just… don’t.

Someone else could do it. Probably. Maybe. The details weren’t his problem anymore.

I want a quiet life. A life where the most exciting thing that happens on any given day is that the bread came out well.

He opened his eyes. I want an inn.

The thought arrived fully formed, as if it had been waiting in the back of his mind for three centuries. An inn. Rooms for travellers. Food and drink and a warm fire. A place where people came, stayed a while, and left. No wars. No prophecies. No desperate messengers at dawn. Just guests, meals, and the sound of rain on a roof that was his.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Roen smiled. It felt strange on this young face. The muscles remembered even if the soul behind them had forgotten.

“Alright,” he said to the empty room. “An inn it is.”

• • •

He left Ashfen at dawn the next morning, three hours before the recruiter from the Crimson Tower arrived.

He took nothing but a travelling pack, a change of clothes, and a small leather pouch containing his mother’s ring. Everything else he left behind. The future that was supposed to be his.

He walked south.

It was, he had to admit, an extraordinarily strange experience. His body was young and strong and full of an energy he’d forgotten existed. His legs didn’t ache after an hour of walking, and his lungs didn’t burn on the hills. At one point he broke into a jog just to see if he could, and when his knees didn’t immediately file a formal complaint, he almost laughed.

I have functioning joints. This is the greatest power-up I’ve ever received.

His reserves, on the other hand, were pathetic. He could feel them…a thin, shallow well, barely enough to light a campfire without effort. In his previous life at this age, he’d been the same. The difference was that back then, he’d known twelve spells and understood none of them. Now he had three centuries of magical theory crammed into a brain attached to a body that could produce almost nothing.

It was like being a master swordsman trapped in the body of a kitten.