Foolish Soldier: Reborn With A Broken Limit.

The soul is the principal thing.

All the treasures of the earth cannot outweigh it. Proceeding out of it is an invisible energy. A Halo. It cannot be seen by the eye, only felt. Some souls emit a vast halo, others emit a quiet one, barely a stir in the air, easy to miss.

But the soul beneath is the same.

Doran's halo was weak. It had always been this way.

But the soul beneath it was his, and he had chosen what to do with it.

Not fire. Not lightning. A sphere of absolute darkness, darker than the night around it, streaking across the sky like a hole in the world. It struck the outer wall at the western gate, and the sound that followed was not an explosion. It was a swallow.

The wall that was supposed to be protected by The Great Aldric's seal, the wall that had stood for centuries, crumpled inward. Stone shattered. The shockwave hurled soldiers from the parapets like dolls. Dust and debris rained across the outer district, choking the air.

Farmers, carters and the likes. The ones who lived near the wall because they had no choice. They grabbed their children. Left their carts and ran with only the clothes on their backs. Some fell. Some were trampled. Most just kept moving, toward the inner gate, toward Wall Aldric.

He had been stationed at the eastern gate, the quiet one, the one no demon had ever reached. The western gate was supposed to be just as safe. The walls were blessed. Everyone knew that.

The walls were supposed to hold.

He ran.

His sword was in his hand before his mind caught up. Around him, soldiers scrambled—some toward the breach, some away from it, some simply standing in the mud staring at the massive hole in the stone as if their faith had been carved out along with the masonry. Their halos flickered in the dust.

Above the chaos, a single voice cut through.

"To the breach! Form ranks! Now!"

Commander Varris.

Doran pushed through the crowd. He found the commander standing on an overturned supply cart, his scarred face white with dust and something else, something Doran had never seen on Varris before.

Confusion.

Varris was not a man who got confused easily. He was the steady one, the calm one, the weak halo commander who had risen through the ranks by being smarter and harder and more unshakeable than anyone else. But now he was staring at the western gate—at the rubble, at the bodies, at the impossible absence where blessed stone had been and his eyes were full of a question he couldn't speak aloud.

How?

The wall was protected. Every soldier in Avalon had been raised on that promise. Varris had built his career on that promise.

And now there was a hole in it.

"Commander Varris!"

The commander snapped back. He saw Doran. Something flickered across his face—relief, maybe, or the closest thing to it a man could manage while the world was ending.

"Doran. Good." He stepped down from the cart. "We hold the breach until the inner gate can be reinforced. Nothing gets past us. Nothing reaches Wall Aldric."

Doran understood. He had always understood.

The darkness inside the breach shifted. The dust was still settling, but shapes were moving within it. Tall shapes. Wrong shapes. The night creatures that had been massing outside the wall for months, waiting, were now pouring through the gap.

And behind them, something larger was stirring.

Doran fell into formation beside Varris. His halo pulsed weakly against the air. Around him, soldiers did the same—confused, terrified, but drawing together into a line. Varris had that effect on people. He made you believe there was still a line worth holding.

The first wave hit them like a hammer.

Through it all, Varris was everywhere. Shouting orders. Plugging gaps. Pulling wounded soldiers back from the front. His halo was a steady energy in the chaos, a quiet force that reminded every soldier within reach that someone was still in command.

And then the darkness at the breach shifted differently.

It didn't move like the other creatures. It moved like a door opening. The smoke and dust gave way, and something stepped through that was unlike any demon they had encountered.

He stood just over eleven feet. His body was humanoid but wrong, limbs too long, skin the color of charred bone. A crown sat on his head, crude and black, and from its center a single horn protruded, curved and sharp. His mouth was stitched shut with silver thread, the knots pulled tight, lips puckering around each loop.

No halo came from him. No presence. He was a void where a halo should have been.

And yet somehow he spoke.

"Come."

The word didn't come from his mouth. It came from everywhere—the air, the mud, the bones in Doran's chest. 

Commander Varris went rigid. Then his body began to move. Not walking, gravitating. Dragged forward by some invisible current, his boots carving furrows in the mud. His face was twisted, fighting it, every muscle straining. It didn't matter. The demon's pull was absolute.

Something inside Doran ticked.

He couldn't describe it any other way. A click. A shift. A mechanism buried so deep in his soul that he had never known it existed. In that moment, he understood something: Varris cannot die here. Varris was the one who made weak-halo soldiers believe they could matter. If he fell, the idea of him fell with him. Every peasant boy with a weak halo who dreamed of being more would have one less reason to try.

He didn't decide. His body decided for him.

Doran lunged sideways and pulled at the commander, wrenching him out of the demon's path. Varris stumbled, breaking free of the current. For one second, his face was visible, shock, then horror, then a desperate reaching hand.

"Doran"

The demon's angry gaze fell on him.

And Doran gravitated.

His feet left the mud. He was weightless. The air pressed against him from all sides, a crushing, suffocating force. The demon's blade—he hadn't seen it before, but he saw it now, a sword of black iron longer than his arm pierced through his chest.

The pain was not like fire. It was like stillness. A spreading numbness that started in his ribs and leaked outward, turning his blood to silence. Life seeped out of him slowly.

The demon lifted his hand higher. Doran rose with it, impaled, his feet dangling above the mud. He could see the battlefield below him. The bodies. The fire. Varris on his knees, reaching, shouting something he couldn't hear.

Doran's halo thinned to almost nothing, barely there and fading.

The demon's stitched mouth twitched. The silver thread strained. The words came clearly, spoken directly into the dying space of his skull.

"Fool."

Then nothing.

Not sleep. Not dreams. An absence so complete it erased the concept of absence. 

And then

A voice.

Not the demon's voice. This one was familiar in a way that predated memory. It pulled at him the way the demon's will had pulled at his body, but gently. An invitation, not a command.

"The soul is the principal thing."

The words wrapped around him like a steady presence, gentle but insistent. Something stirred in the void.

His halo. Still there. Still refusing to fade.

"All the treasures of the earth cannot outweigh it."

The darkness began to thin. Force built, not the crushing weight of the demon's blade, but the soft, insistent push of a current carrying him somewhere. He was being pulled backward. Or forward. Direction meant nothing here. Only the voice mattered, and the voice kept speaking words he somehow knew, words older than Avalon, older than Aldric, older than the darkness itself.

He tried reaching out to it.

The voice was different now. Closer. A woman's voice, touched with exasperation and tenderness in equal measure.

"Soren, honestly. The eggs are getting cold."

His eyes opened.

A breakfast table stretched before him. His cheek had been resting on his folded arms. Sunlight poured through tall windows. There was no blood. No mud. No smoke.

A plate of poached eggs and smoked fish sat before him. The fish had gone cold. The eggs had developed a skin.

He stared at them without understanding. He lifted his hands, turned them over. Long fingers. Slim wrists. No calluses. No scars. These were not his hands.

"Soren." The woman's voice again. He turned his head—slowly, because his neck felt wrong, too light, too loose, and saw a tall woman in amber linen sweeping toward him. Dark hair. Elegant.

His mother.

She was not his mother.

He knew her. He knew her name. Maren. But he had never seen this woman before in his life, and he also knew she had sung him to sleep as a child. Two sets of memories crashed against each other inside his skull, Doran's battlefield, Soren's nursery, and for a long, sickening moment, he was both and neither.

"You were drooling," his mother said, and kissed the top of his head. "Bad dreams?"

Yes. No. I died. I watched the outer wall explode. I watched my commander almost die. A demon with a stitched mouth lifted me on his blade and called me a fool, and I agreed with him, and then I was here, in this room, in this body that is not mine and this life that is not my life.

"I don't remember," he said.

The lie tasted like mud.

But something stirred beneath it. A halo he didn't recognize. Small. New. Pressing outward from somewhere deeper than memory.

It faded before he could name it.