Chapter 2: Silence

"My son! Oh, the heavens... the spirits have mercy! Darius, look at him! Look at his eyes!"

The patriarch, Darius, stepped up to the bedside, placing one calloused hand over his son’s head. ℯℯ𝑙.

The sheer physical presence of the man made the bedframes creak. His stern, stoic facade cracked for a split second, his jaw clenching as his eyes shone with thick, repressed tears.

"Son," the Duke rumbled, his voice shaking the floorboards like a low-frequency earthquake. "You’re home. You’re safe here. The healers... they were wrong. I knew you wouldn’t leave us over a cursed academy ruin."

The younger brother, no, the older brother, judging by the absurd breadth of his shoulders, leaned against the four-poster bed, crossing his arms and letting out a shaky, breathless laugh.

"You absolute idiot. Do you know how much paperwork I was going to have to sign if you died? I was going to have to inherit your stupid horse, too."

"Brother Caelan! Not now!" the girl snapped, punching her older brother in the ribs before lunging forward to grab the patient’s left hand. "He made a noise earlier! He sounded like a squashed frog! Talk to us, Brother!"

The young man in the bed looked at the weeping mother, the trembling titan of a father, the protective older brother, the manic younger sister, and the small army of domestic staff hovering in the doorway with bated breath.

He opened his mouth.

’Tell them there’s been a massive error’, he his brain suggested.

’Tell them you are an overworked software engineering graduate who died of cardiac arrest after a forty-eight-hour debugging marathon fueled entirely by cheap instant noodles and energy drinks.’

’Tell them you have never owned a horse in your entire life.’

He drew a breath. His vocal cords engaged.

"Ah... b-ba... guh."

That was it.

The nervous shock of whatever had killed this body, combined with the soul-transplantation process, had apparently rendered his motor speech centers entirely useless.

He sounded less like a dashing young noble returning from the brink of the grave and more like a toddler attempting to order a sandwich in ancient Sumerian.

"Out of the way! Make way for a check-up!" an elderly doctor with enormous, bushy mutton chops barked, shoving the guy called Caelan aside with the reckless bravery only an indispensable family physician could possess.

The two doctors descended upon him like vultures.

One immediately began shining a tiny, glowing yellow crystal directly into his retinas, blinding him instantly, while the other slapped a cold, metallic disc against his chest and began chanting in rhythmic, low murmuring.

A soothing, lukewarm wave of magic washed over his ribcage, tingling like carbonated soda water beneath his skin.

"Remarkable..." the chief physician murmured, stroking his whiskers while squinting at the glowing crystal. "The soul dissonance has stabilized. The spiritual fractures across his mana pathways have... well, they haven’t healed, precisely, but they have settled into a strange, dormant equilibrium. His cognitive faculties are overwhelmed by the trauma of the expedition’s collapse. Total sensory overload."

"Will he be able to walk? Will he speak again?" the Duke demanded, his voice dropping into a dangerous, protective growl.

"Your Grace, he has just crawled his way back from the threshold of the Netherworld," the doctor said dryly, adjusting his spectacles. "His mana core, well, what little there is of it, is completely drained. The nervous shock is mainly de facto. If you crowd him, shout at him, and weep upon his garments like this, you will simply induce an apoplexy. Right now, he requires absolute, uninterrupted silence. High-calorie broth, warm linens, and at least three days of unbothered sleep."

The Duchess sniffled, reluctantly pulling herself back from the bed and kissing her son’s forehead with lingering, desperate tenderness. "We will let you rest, my darling. Mama is right outside. No one will hurt you ever again."

"I’ll investiagte and execute the dungeon masters tomorrow," the Duke stated with chilling, bureaucratic casualness. "Rest well for now, Lucien."

"If you die while I’m out of the room, I’m never forgiving you," the sister whispered, squeezing his toes through the blanket before being firmly dragged out by the collar by her older brother.

The butler bowed with mechanical perfection, snuffing out three of the four crystalline sconces to plunge the room into a restful, twilight amber, before ushering the rest of the medical staff out into the corridor.

The heavy oak doors clicked shut with a soft, final latch.

Silence descended upon the room.

The young man lay completely still for a full two minutes, listening to the muffled, receding chaos in the hallway.

When he was certain that no one was about to burst back through the door with more glowing crystals or emotional declarations of familial love, he let out the longest, most exhausted exhale of his two lifetimes.

"...What," he whispered, his voice finally managing a dry, rasping hiss, "the absolute hell was that?"

He waited for the room to dissolve into pixels.

He waited for a doctor in scrubs to shake him awake under fluorescent hospital lighting and tell him that he had suffered a severe fever dream after passing out at his desk.

Nothing dissolved.

The air remained stubbornly fragranced with lavender. The soft ticking of a massive grandfather clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl echoed steadily from the corner. The plush sheets felt undeniably, infuriatingly real.

Slowly, testing each joint as if he were operating a crane with rusty hydraulics, he swung his legs over the edge of the mattress.

His bare feet touched the floor.

The polished hardwood was warm, heated from beneath by some sort of thermal rune.

He stood up, wobbling slightly like a newborn giraffe, and caught himself against the heavy mahogany bedpost.

Aside from a lingering, hollow ache in the center of his chest, the body functioned with terrifying perfection.

It felt young, supple, and free of the chronic lower back pain he had developed from sitting in ergonomic office chairs for sixteen hours a day.