The air inside the hut was thick with lies and despair.
The thief was not some cunning rogue. It was a father from the neighboring village whose eyes betrayed everything long before he collapsed to his knees. He had stolen the sheep because his child’s bones were already showing through the skin.
Amanda returned the animal. But her justice did not end there.
“This does not touch the root of the problem,” her voice cut through the heavy silence of the gathering—cold, even, merciless. Then she tore into the elders. Not a hysterical outburst, but a devastating, surgical dissection of their blindness that forced gray-bearded men to lower their gazes. And then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she issued an order to establish a support system for the poor. Not a suggestion. An order.
The villagers stared at her with reverent terror. They whispered behind her back: “A daughter blessed by the gods” and “She lost her mind after the fever.” They did not understand what they were truly seeing. Not divine favor. Not madness. Will. Steel that would not bend.
Her mother, Elena, watched her daughter with boundless pride and a chill that sank into the marrow.
(What have you become?)
But this was not the time for fears. This was the time to survive.
Amanda walked along a barely visible trail that led deep into the thicket the locals called, in fearful whispers, the Forest of Whispering Trunks. Her battered shoes sank soundlessly into the carpet of needles.
The air grew dense, almost tangible. The scent of pine struck like a fist. Damp moss. The sweet, intoxicating, and deadly perfume of Silver Flowers.
Shafts of light pierced between colossal cedars three arm-spans thick, spears of gold in a dance of emerald glimmers and violet shadows that painted the world in hues of madness.
(Paradise? No. A trap. Primal, serene, and deceptively peaceful.)
The trees suddenly parted, as though drawing back a curtain for the main act.
And there, framed by ancient giants, lay the Lake of Eternal Reflection.
The water was not merely clear. It was absence. Absolute void, mirroring the sky with photographic, terrifying precision. One felt the world had flipped upside-down, and that a single misstep would send you plummeting into that crystalline abyss.
The realization struck her sharp and sudden.
(I stand here, a solitary grain of sand, between two infinities. Which one is real—the sky beneath my feet or the one above my head?)
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With abrupt, almost violent motion, she kicked off her shoes. She plunged her feet into the water. An icy burn jolted through her body—the only thing that felt real.
Leaning back against the deceptively soft moss, she lifted her gaze. Ruby pupils locked onto the endless blue.
Silence. A deep, resonant quiet in which even her own heartbeat thundered like rolling drums.
“Six months…”
The words formed in her mind with bitter, crystalline clarity—impossible amid the chaos of daily life.
“One hundred and eighty days since Yamada Light ceased to exist. And one hundred and eighty days since I began living in this body.”
The first weeks had been hell. She had not cried. She had suffocated. Her body convulsed in silent seizures, weeping for a life that was not hers, in a bed that was not hers. She remembered everything: the smell of her mother’s stew, her little brother Yuki’s clinging hands, Mikasa’s promise—“We’ll always be together.”
Grief had been a living creature—claws and fangs tearing her apart from the inside. Her hands had reached of their own accord to rip this delicate skin, if only to feel pain that was truly hers. But even that would have been a betrayal of Elena. Her love was the only anchor in that storm of madness.
“Time heals? A lie,” Amanda pressed her lips together. “Nothing heals. It merely covers the wound in ash. One wrong step, and you’re back in hell, bleeding just as brightly as the first day.”
Slowly, she raised her hand, shielding the sky with her palm.
(This body… it has become mine. It has grown strong. Yet in the silence, when I no longer need to pretend, I feel it—like wearing someone else’s skin that fits perfectly.)
And still, she had not broken.
(Light, you’d be proud of me, damn it.)
Everything that had defined him—analytical mind, prosecutorial instinct—was now her weapon and shield.
“So,” clouds drifted overhead, arranging themselves into maps and schemes inside her head. “Situation report.”
“Location: village of Erdenhart.”
“Region: Western Fringe.”
“Continent…”
She faltered. The word had slipped from a traveling merchant’s tongue.
“…Aendora.”
The name struck her memory like lightning. Not her memory. Light’s memory.
(Ah… that book.)
A battered volume with a garish cover. Chronicles of the Shattered Spire. Not a fairy tale. Not a novel. An encyclopedia of the coming apocalypse.
Memories crashed over her like a flood:
(The map. The Great Houses—Eagle’s Talon, Ash and Phoenix, the Forgotten Oath. The northern wastelands ruled not by the dead, but by something far worse: the Twisted.)
And the most terrifying piece clicked into place.
Their village, Erdenhart, sat here—in the Faded Lands. A backwater, a strip of no-man’s-land abandoned by the Empire centuries ago.
Bitter, iron-cold irony closed around her throat.
(I wasn’t thrown into a random world. I was hurled into the darkest saga I ever knew. Not onto the stage of great battles. But into a footnote. A margin note soon to be swept from the board.)
She knew. Right now, a prince of House Eagle’s Talon was plotting his brother’s murder. An archmage in the Tower of Blood was tearing the fabric of reality. At the continent’s heart, the world was already cracking, soon to unleash the Twisted.
And here in Erdenhart, the elders argued over a stolen sheep.
No armies would come. No aid would be sent. When true madness began, this village would vanish without earning so much as a line in the chronicles.
(I know everything… and I can change nothing.)
She clenched her fists. Nails dug into her palms, leaving crimson crescents.
Powerlessness? Yes. But from its black depths rose something else. Sharp. Burning. Familiar.
(It’s…)
The corner of her mouth twitched into something almost like a smile.
A challenge.