Refragmentz: Souls of Memory

Chapter 1- The END

The last thing I remembered was her hand in mine.

The sky was burning. The mountains we used to watch from our window were falling into the sea, and the ground beneath our house had split open like a dry riverbed. There was no place left to run. So I stopped running, pulled my wife into my arms, and held her as the world ended.

"Chase," Selene whispered against my chest. "I am not afraid. Not when you are here."

"I am sorry," I said. My voice was breaking. "I could not protect you. I could not protect anything."

"You protected me every single day." She smiled, and even then, with tears in her eyes, her smile was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. "Promise me something. If there is a next life... find me."

I had prayed to the gods every morning since I was a child. I had never asked for anything for myself. But in that final moment, I closed my eyes and begged with everything I had left.

Please. Whatever comes after this... let us meet again.

Then the light swallowed everything…

Pain was the first thing that woke me.

It was a sharp, tearing pain across my chest, and it came with the sound of screaming. I opened my eyes to a gray sky choked with black smoke. Burning arrows crossed above me like flocks of fiery birds. The ground trembled under my back from the footsteps of hundreds of soldiers, and the air was filled with the clash of steel, the roars of demons, and the cries of the dying.

"This... is not the end of the world," I whispered. "It is a war."

Memories flooded into my head, and I gasped. They were not only the memories of the man who had died holding his wife. Laid over them was a second life, twenty years of it. I was Chase Ardent, a knight of the Radiant Order. The gods had even let me keep my name. I had been born again, raised, trained with a sword, and sent to fight the Demon Lord's army, and all of it had come rushing back in the very moment my new body was meant to die.

So the gods had heard me.

I tried to sit up, and the world spun. All around me lay my squad, eight knights of the Third Banner. We had been ordered to hold the eastern ridge, a remote pass far from the main army, where no reinforcements would ever come. The demons had swept through us in minutes. Captain Orrin lay beside me with his shield split in half. Young Tomas, who had joked that very morning about getting married after the war, stared up at the sky with unseeing eyes.

"Everyone..." My voice broke.

These men were strangers to the husband I had been, but the Chase of this life had eaten with them, trained with them, and laughed with them. Their deaths hurt more than I expected.

Below the ridge, the real battle raged on. The human line was crumbling under a wave of ogres in black iron. A mage in white robes called down a pillar of fire, and for a moment the demons screamed and scattered, but a flight of dark spears took him out of the sky. A knight with a broken banner shouted for the others to retreat to the lower camp. No one seemed to be listening.

"Chase!" A hoarse voice came from my left. Dorian, the last of my squad still alive, was crawling toward me with an arrow in his leg. "Chase, get up! Run!"

A shadow fell across us both.

"Quiet," said a woman's voice.

She did not even look at him. She simply flicked two fingers, and a crescent of black light cut through the air. Dorian stopped moving.

I turned my head, and my heart nearly stopped.

A woman stood over me with a thin black sword in her hand, its blade still dripping. Black horns curved from her silver hair, and a long crimson cloak trailed behind her over the bodies of my friends. Chase's memories whispered her name.

[Vexa, the Crimson Executioner. Commander of the Demon Lord's Left Wing.]

The one who had cut down my squad. The one who had struck me down.

But I was not looking at her sword. I was not looking at her horns or her red eyes.

I was looking at her face.

It was Selene's face. The same soft jawline, the same small mole beneath the left eye, the same way her eyebrows pulled together when she was concentrating. Everything was exactly the same, except for the cold, empty look in her eyes that Selene had never had.

"Still breathing?" Vexa said flatly. "A pity. Do not worry, human. I will finish it quickly."

She raised the black sword with both hands.

"Selene," I said, with the last of my voice.

She frowned. "Selene? Who is that? Your woman?" A cruel smile touched her lips. "Do not cry. She will follow you soon enough."

There was nothing in her eyes. No recognition, no hesitation, nothing. To her, I was just another knight on a ridge full of corpses.

But I had already lost her once. I would not lose her again, even if she did not know me.

The sword came down.

I still do not know where the strength came from. I rolled aside and felt the blade bite into the ground beside my ear. Then I threw myself forward with everything my broken body had left.

Vexa moved at the same moment, her free hand curled like a claw, aimed straight at my throat.

I did not block it.

I wrapped both arms around her and pulled her tightly against my chest.

"What are you doing?!" she shouted. "Let go of me, you filthy human!"

"I found you," I whispered. Tears were running down my face. "I finally found you..."

Then something awoke inside me.

It started in my chest, a warmth that spread through my wounds and closed them one by one. It rose through my arms like a river finding the sea, and the ground around us cracked. The ogres rushing up the ridge were thrown back as if by an invisible wave. Every demon soldier nearby dropped to one knee, gasping for air.

Vexa gasped too. She pushed against my shoulders and tried to leap away.

She could not.

Her feet did not move. Her wings, hidden under her cloak, flared and then folded again, as though something held them in place. She tried once more and failed again. Her red eyes widened.

"What did you do to me?!" Her voice shook with anger and something close to fear. "Why can't I... why can't I leave?"

I did not know the answer. I only knew that my power was pouring out of me, and every drop of it was flowing toward the woman in my arms.

"Commander Vexa?" one of her soldiers called in a shaking voice.

She did not answer. She only stared at me, trapped in the arms of a man she had meant to kill.

"I do not know you," she whispered. "So why won't my body listen to me?"