1 Chapter 01: The Beginning after the End
Kilian walked down the busy street as he always did at this hour.
It was raining, and the cold air made him shiver making him close his jacket tighter around his upper body.
It was late in the evening and he had left work after another day of overtime.
The sky was cloudy and the cars drove past him repeatedly. Some so fast that they would splash water up his legs.
He paid no attention to his surroundings, but kept his pace steady and in the same direction as always, trying to get back to his small apartment before getting too wet.
"Meow."
He ignored the sound that came up next to him.
"Meow… Meow."
A small tabby cat was out in the rain and had started to follow him on the sidewalk.
"Go away," he muttered, feeling a small sting in his chest from the guilt when seeing the small being almost clinging to his leg with its skinny body.
"Fine," he sighed, and bent down to pick up the shabby-looking cat, but in that instant, the cat darted away onto the street.
Kilian reactively moved forward to try and catch the cat, not noticing the bright light closing in on him as he did.
The impact was instant and everything went black.
The last he heard was a faint sound of a, "meow".
Kilian sat up with a groan, the sound barely escaping him before his body increased the pain he was feeling.
A sharp pain shot up through his legs when he moved, and a burning sensation was spreading through his feet.
Groggily he rubbed his head.
"What happened? it felt so real."
He looked around at a darkened unfamiliar room, wondering who had brought him there.
Seemed like he had been brought to a place that didn't look like a traditional hospital room.
'Did I not get hurt?' He thought.
He looked down noticing what he was seeing was not himself.
The view instead gave him a strange feeling of being disconnected from what his mind usually saw at this angle.
Something had changed he thought, closing his eyes in the already dark room, thinking back.
Had he died?. There was no way he would have survived that kind of impact from a car, but modern medicine had worked wonders before.
'Then where am I?'
The room was mostly dark, and the sheets were coarse against his skin.
A sharp pain shot through his mind as a set of memories that was not his own, started flooding in.
The memories were confusing and the memories of his own life were getting mixed with the new. They were flushing in relentlessly, overworking his mind to the point it could not keep up, giving him a splitting headache.
He felt as if he had suddenly lived two lives at once.
One set of memories was from his own life as Kilian in the modern world.
An adult, at the age of 26.
The other set of memories seemed to be of a young man whose name was also Kilian, but of a more strange and different place, growing up in a room just like…. This one.
His fingers darted up, gently touching his face, the cold fingertips studying the contours of the shape, feeling how the skin was smooth and young.
Had he died and become someone else? Or… Become this young Kilian, he was getting to know through the new memories?
As memories seemed to have settled, it was still to the point he now could not tell where one set began and the other ended.
It was as if he was now both. The Kilian from the modern world and the Kilian from this new world.
One was an adult that had possibly died, the other a young man having just reached the age of adulthood at 18.
The memories of the young Kilian seemed to match something more like a European aristocratic life, with nobles in a country ruled by a king.
'Is it just a dream?'
The feeling of his body in the bed and the pounding headache were telling him it couldn't be.
There were no other sounds nearby, and he was in a bed in an almost completely darkened room.
Big curtains were covering the windows, but traces of light made it through the cracks in the fabric, giving small sources of light to the room. The rays indicated that it was morning or sometime during the day.
He moved, attempting to throw the sheets off himself, to place his feet on the floor.
The feet touched the cold floor and he grimaced.
He was now the Kilian Heathgrave from the new memories. He was certain now, that he had somehow entered this body after his death.
'How?'
His mind got filled with more and more questions about the whole situation, and he had no idea what to do.
The memories of Killian Heathgrave were that of a miserable young man who had lost the ability to walk and was confined to a wheelchair.
Even if he seemed to be the son of a Count, his life had been nothing but misery until his 18th year.
Had the young Kilian finally died from the neglect?
A sudden memory of maids whipping the soles of his feet flashed up, and he bit hard down on his lip to endure the stinging pain. The memory finally passed, only leaving a pounding headache.
'How will I live like this, is this permanent?'
He asked the empty room, just adding even more questions to the whole situation that seemed morbid and strange.
He searched the new memories, trying to make out what kind of life the young Kilian had lived.
It seemed that the memories portrayed Kilian Heathgrave as a child who had been rendered unable to walk, due to heavy beatings and constant neglect from the maids of this mansion.
It had been to the point that it was too painful for the young man to walk, and he had been confined to a wheelchair.
This was most likely the reason the young Kilian had died at the early age of 18.
No one would be able to continue living in a hell like that, and it seemed the personality of the young man had been weak and timid, unable to fend for himself.
From what he had learned so far through the pieces of new memories, the world here was vastly different from the modern world he came from.
This world had magic, and its scientific development had been halted as magic had filled the necessities of the people in this world. There seemed to have been no reason to develop in the scientific field.
'Magic…'
Even in this state, the word magic allured Kilian. How great would it be to experience a phenomenon like that?
However, even Kilian Heathgrave had been deprived of magic.
He could tell from the memories that Kilian Heathgrave was a noble of this world and to the knowledge and regret that remained in the young Kilian's memories, it seemed he had been deemed unable to wield magic, unlike other noble sons and daughters.
In this world, the father of Kilian was a Count no less, and it had been expected of him just like his two older brothers, that he would learn magic at the age of 5. But nothing had happened.
He had remained less than ordinary and regarded as something defective.
So was that why the kid had been mistreated this much? Was it because he had been born without magic? The questions kept piling up and he sighed.
He thought it was disgusting that people would neglect a child this much in any world.
No matter what, he was now this very Kilian Heathgrave and he needed to figure out how to live, even if the situation was only for a day or week, or maybe… long term.
Something hard was next to the bed, and he reached out to pull himself over in an old crude-looking wheelchair.
'I need to see... me.'
The wheels rolled over the floor after a lot of effort to push them with his hands, lining up in front of a mirror.
'Shit, it is still too dark.'
He was unable to see much and eyed the curtains further away.
Would his strength even take him there?
No... He had to, his mind was still confused as to who he was, and he needed to see his face to force the issue.
The curtains offered a challenge, as the windows were tall, going up to a high ceiling.
He pulled.
"I need to see myself," he repeated this time out loud as he reached the curtains through determination and sore muscles.
"Clank." The curtains fell.
He ignored the heavy rod and fabric that had become tangled up on the floor, and instead welcomed the light into the room.
he looked down and saw what he had suspected.
The thought of accepting the fate of this body pissed him off.
He may now have to be this Kilian Heathgrave in order to survive, or maybe the grim reaper would come and collect his soul, but for now what he needed was to figure out how to survive in this world.
