The fire crackled low.
Rael sat beside it, cross-legged, staring into the embers like they held the shape of the world. Jade leaned against the hollowed-out tree wall, eyes half-lidded. The Vale slept around them—no guards, no alarms. Just quiet.
For once.
Rael stirred the fire with a stick. "Hey, ghost-boy," he said, not looking over. "Ever think... maybe this isn't your first world?"
Jade blinked, barely moving. His fingers idly traced runes in the dust—runeless now, forgotten.
Rael smiled crooked. "What if, when you die, you just... wake up somewhere else? Like the soul can't sit still. It just walks and walks until it finds another skin to wear."
He threw a dry twig into the fire. Sparks leapt like tiny spirits.
"Maybe this is my third life. Or fifth. Or maybe I died once under a different sky, and now I'm here, still messing things up."
He turned to Jade, gaze softer than usual.
"You ever feel like... you knew how to do something before you ever learned it? Like your hands remembered before your mind did?"
Jade looked down. He had felt that. When he paused time. When he read old glyphs no child should read. When he fought without ever being taught.
But he just shrugged. Dismissive. Quiet.
Rael chuckled, leaning back. "Yeah, yeah. You're too cool to believe in stuff like that."
Jade shot him a look. Not angry. Not cold. Just... distant.
"Fine," Rael said, arms behind his head. "Just saying... if I die and end up in another world, I hope I remember your weird face. Wouldn't mind meeting you again."
Jade didn't respond.
But later, long after Rael had dozed off by the fire, Jade traced a symbol into the dirt.
Yūma.
He stared at it for a long time, then smudged it away.
Far across the continent...
The Crown Prince received news of the failed ambush.
He did not scream. He did not frown.
He simply turned to his advisor and said:
"Put a bounty on the Ash-Ghost too. Five hundred thousand. Dead or alive."
And beneath the palace, in the dark chambers where truth was sculpted into weapons, a machine awakened—its gears echoing with the screams of those who remembered other lives.