The One Who Forgot The Beginning Chapter 3

[ … words ]

The silence in the dungeon became palpable. Only the quiet crackling of the wall torches disturbed the peace, casting dancing shadows on two identical, yet so different, faces.

Breathing heavily, Kael stared defiantly at the Commander, maintaining his combat stance. The projection of his memories slowly faded into the stagnant air.

“— Convinced, imposter? — the knight rasped. — I don’t know how you stole my face and my techniques. I don’t know what poisons or alchemy you’re using to fool everyone around. But I am the Supreme Commander of the Vanguard. And you will remove these enchantments from me at once.”

The man with the scar slowly lowered the ‘Eye of the First King’. His face, contorted by shock a second ago, froze again, turning into an icy mask. He was a man of impeccable logic, and logic now suggested only one reasonable explanation.

“— Brilliant, — the Commander said dryly. His voice was even, but beneath it vibrated a subtle tension, stretched to its limit. — Incredibly subtle work. To implant flawlessly fabricated memories into an Artifact of Truth… I didn’t know there were still mind mages of such a level left on the continent.”

“— Fabricated?! — Kael leaned forward, despite the blue sparks of mana hanging in the air. — Are you blind or just an idiot? This is MY life! The siege of the Dark Citadel lasted three agonizing months — we ate boiled leather straps until we finally broke through the northern blockade!”

“— The Dark Citadel was never besieged, — the Commander interrupted, approaching the interrogation table. — It’s a wealthy trade hub in the far south that hasn’t seen anything worse than a drunken tavern brawl in the last twenty years. Your illusion is astonishing in its detail, I’ll give you that. But it’s based on a history that never happened. The Artifact is either broken or corrupted by the foul magic you wield.”

With these words, the Commander pressed the cloudy-white sphere to his own forehead.

Kael smirked sarcastically, genuinely expecting the sphere to now expose how this shapeshifter had meticulously rehearsed someone else’s gait in front of a mirror.

The sphere flashed.

Space trembled again. But instead of blood-soaked battlefields, a spacious study materialized in the air, cluttered with tactical blueprints and ancient tomes. The same scarred man sat at a heavy oak table, deathly tired, with dark circles under his eyes. A faint, barely perceptible golden energy swirled around his hand. He made notes, scribbled, concentrated again, and this energy — mana — flared a little brighter as he forcefully bent it to his will.

The vision shifted: the Dark Citadel. But not ruined — rather, thriving. The Commander, in shining ceremonial armor, inspected a parade of the local city guard against a backdrop of bustling, sun-drenched market stalls.

The illusion dissipated.

The Commander stood motionless, staring at the sphere in his hand. The Artifact worked flawlessly. It showed the truth. His truth. And the truth of this strange woman. Two completely different realities, which had somehow become inexplicably intertwined.

For the first time in his life, the foundation of the Strongest Knight’s unwavering worldview cracked.

“— This is impossible, — he whispered, barely audible.”

“— Exactly! — Kael snapped. — It’s impossible! Because we reclaimed the Dark Citadel with our own blood! And you just showed me some staged performance!”

The Commander turned sharply, his grey eyes narrowing. He no longer looked like an inquisitor who had caught a spy. He looked like a scientist who had just seen a river flow backward.

He took a step back towards the prisoner and, without warning, pressed the sphere to her pale forehead again.

“— What are you doing?! — Kael demanded, as the Commander once again raised his hand, summoning suffocating frosty threads to completely immobilize his body.”

“— I’m looking for an anomaly, — the Commander replied coldly. — If these memories are not an illusion, then there must be a point of origin. An event that brought you here. Into this body.”

The air trembled again. With an experienced thought, the Commander made the artifact fast-forward through Kael’s years of life, flipping through memories like pages of a book. Battles, training, military reports. Faster and faster, until the chaotic images dissolved into a lush, oppressive green haze.

The Whispering Shadows Forest.

Both men froze, staring intently at the projection.

Here was Kael — in his true, male body — walking alone through the thicket. Here he stumbled upon an empty space. He pressed a heavy gauntlet against the void.

The Commander scrutinized the details with keen interest. An invisible barrier. A transparent Aura.

“— A barrier woven from pure, condensed energy, without a single trace of magical tint… — the Commander murmured, a shadow of involuntary, professional admiration creeping into his voice. — Monstrous control.”

Then the projection showed the catalyst. Unstable symbols, carved into the air. The crackle of a collapsing barrier. A gloomy cave. And the flickering projection of a woman in a horned diadem, screaming about summoning an ‘abyssal spawn’.

The Commander’s eyes darted from the spectral woman in the memory to the real woman standing before him. Realization struck him like a physical blow. It was her body.

In the projection, a dazzling flash of purple light erupted from a crystal.

And then the vision abruptly ended in darkness. The memories ended the very moment the purple light consumed him, for there was nothing more to record — his consciousness had been forcefully wrenched from its physical shell.

The Commander slowly lowered his hand, letting the sphere hang by his hip. Silence returned to the dungeon, heavy and suffocating, broken only by Kael’s ragged breathing.

“— The Whispering Shadows Forest, — the man with the scar uttered, looking at the prisoner with an entirely different gaze. The contempt for a spy had vanished, replaced entirely by the wariness of a soldier confronting a frightening unknown. — Either I face an inexplicable phenomenon that breaks the laws of the world… or ancient magic surpassing anything I’ve encountered. In any case, the Crown must make the decision. And that cave… the only physical lead in all this madness.”

“— You’re going there? — Kael sharply raised his head, his scarlet eyes flashing. — To the forest? Excellent. Remove these enchantments from me. Give me a sword. I’m coming with you. We’ll find that purple stone and figure out how, for hell’s sake, we can both exist.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The Commander silently walked to the table and began methodically fastening the steel gauntlets on his hands.

“— You’re not going anywhere, — he interrupted, tightening leather straps. — Your combat instincts and absolute mastery of my techniques make you too dangerous to set free. And your… origin threatens the fundamental security of the entire kingdom.”

He made a sharp gesture with his hand. The glowing mana chains once again wrapped around Kael with full force, making the knight clench his teeth in pain as the frosty magic constricted his muscles.

“— Hey! — Kael snarled, fighting the paralysis with pure demonic endurance. — We’re not finished!”

“— As for me, we are finished, — the Commander said, heading towards the stone staircase. — An exact double of the Supreme Commander, ancient soul transference, spatial anomalies in a border forest… This no longer falls under the jurisdiction of the Vanguard order.”

He paused on the first step, turning to cast a final, inscrutable glance at the bound woman.

“— Stay quiet, prisoner. I am going to the palace. Matters of this magnitude are reported personally to His Majesty.”

The vaulted ceiling of the small royal study pressed down with its somber grandeur. The King of Elderia, a man with deep wrinkles and a piercing gaze, silently listened to the report.

The Commander of the Vanguard stood alone before him. He spoke dryly, enunciating each word with military precision. He reported on the strange prisoner with the golden Aura, on the Artifact of Truth, on the foreign memories of a siege of a non-existent Dark Citadel, and on the invisible barrier in the Whispering Shadows Forest.

The King listened without interruption, merely stroking the hilt of his ceremonial sword out of habit.

“— Illusion magic is capable of much, — the monarch slowly uttered, when the Commander finished. — But to deceive an Artifact of Truth… Nothing of the sort has happened since the War of Schism. Bring her in.”

The Commander bowed briefly and exited. He returned accompanied by a convoy. Kael, bound by shimmering blue chains, walked heavily across the palace carpets, grimly looking at the ruler to whom he had once sworn allegiance.

The King descended one step, sizing up the dark-haired woman with a heavy gaze.

“— If you have lied or if this is a cunning trap by separatists, the gallows await you both, — the King stated firmly, shifting his gaze from the prisoner to his general. — If not… We are going to this forest.”

The squad was small but deadly: the King, the Commander, and five elite Vanguard guardsmen. Kael was led in the center, never out of their sight.

The tension could be cut with a knife. All the way to the Whispering Shadows Forest, the knights kept their hands on their hilts. The Commander didn’t trust the prisoner for a second, constantly casting cold, calculating glances her way. Kael responded with a grim squint. He walked into his own forest as a stranger.

When they reached the designated thicket, the Commander stopped.

Outwardly, there was nothing here but mossy trees and dense undergrowth. But the Commander, precisely following the memories extracted from Kael’s mind, stepped forward and raised his hand. His gauntleted fingers touched emptiness. The air trembled.

The King and the guardsmen froze. The barrier truly existed. This was the first irrefutable proof that the prisoner had not fabricated this insane story.

The Commander unerringly pressed the correct invisible symbols.

Click.

The transparent wall crumbled with a dull crack. The squad closed ranks and, with drawn weapons, stepped into the darkness of the cave.

It enveloped them instantly.

As soon as they crossed the invisible line, the air around them changed abruptly. It became heavy and stagnant. It felt as if life itself had been drained from it.

One of the guardsmen, who possessed basic sensory magic, exhaled raggedly and swayed, leaning on his sword.

“— I… I don’t feel a drop of mana, — he rasped, paling beneath his helmet.”

“— Impossible, — the Commander snarled, trying to summon a spark into his palm. Nothing happened.”

But the most frightening proof came from Kael’s chains. The ghostly blue glow that bound the knight suddenly faded. The energy threads froze, darkened, and with a heavy metallic clatter, fell to the ground, transforming into ordinary, crude steel links.

Kael stretched his stiff shoulders. There was no magic here. They had entered his world.

None of them could yet imagine that they had stepped into an entirely different world, but each felt a primal chill along their spine. The boundary of the impossible had been crossed.

They advanced deeper. The cave led them to a small clearing, hidden among the rocks. And there, in the tall, withered grass, they saw IT.

A decomposing body lay on the ground.

The air filled with the sweet, nauseating smell of decay. The Commander frowned and took a step forward. Carefully hooking the edge of the cloak with the toe of his boot, he rolled the corpse onto its back.

A dead silence fell upon the clearing.

The face was disfigured by decomposition and wild animals, but it was not difficult to recognize. The same distinct scar crossing the left eyebrow. The same facial features.

The dead man was clad in the once-shining golden armor of the Vanguard order. And his gnarled fingers clutched a heavy two-handed sword with a ruby in its pommel.

Kael stared at his own corpse and felt nothing. Only after several long seconds did an icy realization wash over him: it truly was HIM. His stomach twisted into a knot. Judging by the degree of decomposition, he had been in the Archdemon’s body for about a month already. For an entire month, his world had lived without the Strongest Knight.

No one uttered a word. The silence rang in their ears.

The King of Elderia, a man who had endured dozens of wars, stared at the corpse with an unblinking gaze. A thought, black and venomous as a snake, crept into his mind:

If the Commander of the Vanguard lies dead here… then who stands beside me right now?

“— …What is this? — the monarch rasped.”

The Commander silently knelt and took the sword from the dead man’s hands. The weapon was an exact replica of his own blade, heavier with age. He looked at the dead face. At his own face.

And then nerves snapped.

One of the guardsmen standing closest recoiled sharply, stumbling over a root. Steel clanged as he drew his sword, but he aimed it not at the darkness of the cave, but directly at the Commander, who had just risen to his feet.

“— Don’t come near us… — the experienced soldier’s voice trembled with primal terror.”

A second guardsman instinctively placed a hand on his hilt, looking warily at his commander. An incredible illusion? Unknown magic? A monster that had assumed their leader’s form and lured them into a trap?

“— Lower your weapons! — the King roared, his authoritative voice cutting through the panic like an executioner’s axe. — Stop this hysteria!”

The guardsmen reluctantly obeyed, but their discipline had cracked. The seed of distrust had already sprouted.

They quickly exited the cave, without uttering a word. No one exchanged even brief phrases anymore. Each watched the others from under lowered brows, keeping their hands close to their weapons.

As they walked through the forest, Kael silently marched in what were now ordinary iron chains.

After a couple of kilometers, the dense undergrowth parted, and an armed squad ran out to meet them. The emblem of the northern garrison adorned their shields. Noticing the travelers, the soldiers lowered their crossbows. Absolute shock was reflected on their faces, replaced by wild joy.

“— Your Majesty! — the squad commander gasped, dropping to one knee. — Commander! Praise the Light, you are alive!”

The soldiers from Kael’s world looked at their rulers as if they were returning gods. And then their gazes slid to the dark-haired woman, bound in chains.

“— This… a prisoner? — the squad commander swallowed, looking suspiciously at Kael. — You captured the daughter of the northern chieftain?”

The King opened his mouth, but the Commander stepped forward, instinctively shielding the monarch, and cut off the commander in an icy tone:

“— Ask no questions. Return to your posts.”

The squad commander hesitated, shifting a bewildered gaze from the living Commander to the bound woman.

“— Your Majesty… — he began uncertainly. — We’ve been scouring the forest for almost a month. After your disappearance, the army moved north… and never returned.”

The Supreme Commander’s body lay in the cave. The army had vanished. And the world itself seemed to be tearing at the seams.

The Commander was the first to break the hanging silence.

“— Your Majesty, — he said firmly, turning to the ruler. — If our main forces have indeed vanished… Every minute of delay works against us.”

The King nodded briefly, accepting his general’s argument.

“— Reform ranks! — the monarch commanded. — We move north. Immediately.”

The squad moved forward. The King of Elderia slowed his pace, drawing level with the Commander. The scarred man still clutched two absolutely identical two-handed swords in his hands.

The Commander nodded briefly. For the first time in many years, he was not even sure of himself.

The monarch did not look at his loyal general. He gazed straight ahead at the fog-shrouded northern roads, and his voice was softer than the rustle of leaves:

“— Until we understand what happened here… trust no one.”