When I was in that dark place, it felt as if I was only there for a moment, she was someone with whom I couldn't tell how much time I had spent. Coming back from dead is like you are resurfacing from under the ocean, and more you come to the surface, more burden you leave behind.

  Waking up after being presumed dead is an experience of its own, as at first even i didn't know that I was dead, but it was something… something that drained me, the more i kept living on after resurrection the more emptier I got.

  The void drowned him.

  Water rushed in from every direction, black and depthless, swallowing the bed, the nothingness, and the last trace of the pale woman’s touch. He tried to reach upward, but there was no up—only the crushing, rising flood. It filled his lungs before he could even decide to fight it. Limbs thrashed on instinct, uselessly. The cold buried him.

  Then everything reversed.

  It felt like being dragged upward by the spine. His heart hammered in his chest like it wanted out. Air—he needed air—but his lungs still remembered drowning. His body fought against nothing, clawing toward a surface that refused to appear.

  Clang.

  The sound hit first. Metal on stone. Close.

  Clang.

  His eyes snapped open with a violent gasp that never fully came. He choked on earth and stale air instead.

  He was lying in a narrow pit. Damp soil pressed against his back and sides. Above him, the sky was a jagged rectangle cut by silhouettes leaning over the grave. The smell of wet dirt and rot filled his nose. His fingers dug into loose soil; it crumbled under his nails.

  Another clang.

  A shovel struck the gravestone beside the pit, sending vibrations through the ground and the bones inside it. Men were talking—low, rough voices, threaded with greed rather than reverence. The patter of heavy rain masked most of their words, but the intent was clear.

  Graves were being opened.

  He dragged in a breath—sharp, ragged, laced with the copper of old blood still clinging to his tongue. His vision adjusted to the dark. He saw other pits being worked nearby. The outlines of gravestones. The pale flash of bone when a shovel bit too deep. The glint of steel.

  There were ten of them.

  They moved like men used to hard work and harder choices—boots sinking into the mud, shoulders hunched against the downpour. Each carried a revolver at their hip or in hand, the dull metal catching momentary flashes of lightning. Grave robbers, not soldiers. But the weapons were real. The hunger in their motions was real.

  The storm overhead was in full rage—thick, black clouds swallowing the moon, thunder rolling so close it shook the teeth. Rain poured down in relentless sheets, turning the graveyard into a slurry of mud and bones and runoff spilling from freshly torn earth.

  Lucius lay in a dug-up grave in the middle of it.

  The soil around him was loose, recently disturbed. They had already been working this plot—his plot. He could see chunks of stone edging the pit where they’d broken through. They weren’t here for him. Not specifically. They were here for whatever the dead had left behind.

  They just hadn’t expected one of the dead to be breathing.

  Above him, one of the men leaned on his shovel, wiping rain from his brow with the back of a dirty hand. The others laughed at something—shrill and sharp in the storm. One spat onto a coffin lid in another pit. Another joked about teeth and rings and how “the fresh ones pay better.”

  Ten grave robbers.

  Night sky smothered in cloud.

  Rain hammering the earth.

  And Lucius, awake in his own grave, with nowhere to go but up.

  Lucius lay motionless in the grave, his mind reassembling itself piece by piece.

  He was not dead. That much was certain now. The blade had found him, yes, but something had intervened. The void. The woman with the blue eyes. The drowning and the resurrection. It was all fragments of something that defied explanation, but the result was undeniable: he breathed. His heart beat. He existed in the world once more.

  But the stab wound—he remembered it clearly. The children's hands trembling. The dull blade finding its mark. They must have believed him dead. Perhaps he had appeared dead. Perhaps in that moment between consciousness and oblivion, he had crossed some threshold that the living were not meant to cross.

  They had begun to bury him.

  His eyes tracked the weapons at the men's hips. Not swords. Not blades. Something else entirely. The question remained unanswered.

  For a moment, Lucius considered remaining still. Playing dead in earnest. Waiting for them to finish their grim work and depart. It was logical. It was safe. It was—

  The water rose.

  The grave was filling with rainwater, pooling around his body, beginning its slow drowning in earnest. The storm showed no mercy. The sky poured without cessation, and the earth, already saturated, could absorb no more. The water level crept upward—past his ankles, toward his knees.

  Patience was a luxury he no longer possessed.

  Lucius found himself at a crossroads once again. The same choice that had faced him in the sunflower field. The same binary equation that defined his entire existence: surrender to what gods remained, or do what must be done and claw his way back into the world.

  Make peace with death.

  Or embrace the violence that kept him breathing.

  He took a deep breath.

  Then he cursed the world—a single, bitter word spoken into the mud and rain, heard by no one but the earth itself.

  He began to rise.

  Slowly.

  No sudden movements. No thrashing or gasping or any of the desperate motions that would draw attention. He simply pressed his palms against the grave's edge and began to lift himself upward with methodical, measured deliberation. His shoulders cleared the lip of the pit. Rain struck his face immediately, cold and shocking, but he did not flinch.

  The grave robbers continued their work.

  They had not noticed him yet. Their attention was on the other pits, on the bones and artifacts they were unearthing. The storm provided cover—its noise masking any small sounds he made, its darkness obscuring his slow emergence from the earth.

  One hand gripped the edge of the gravestone. Then the other.

  Lucius pulled himself fully from the pit, his body moving with the deliberate grace of a predator that understood that one false movement meant discovery. Water dripped from his naked form. Mud caked his skin. His body was unarmed—no sword at his hip, no weapon within reach. Only the knowledge he carried and the decades of training etched into muscle and bone.

  Ten men stood in the graveyard, armed with weapons he only partially understood.

  He was one, naked and wet and rising from a grave that should have been his final resting place.

  But he was no longer the man who had hesitated in the sunflower field. He was something that had died and returned. Something that had seen the void and survived it. Something that carried the weight of promises spoken over graves and the blood of comrades spilled on execution platforms.

  The rain continued to fall.

  And Lucius, rising from his own grave, began to move toward the nearest man—slowly, carefully, a shadow among shadows in the storm-darkened graveyard. He did not know what those weapons could do. But he knew what his hands could do. He knew the vulnerable points of a human body. He knew the mathematics of leverage and bone.

  And he knew that ten armed men, no matter their weapons, were still only ten men.

  Lucius rose into a crouch, his naked body tensing as he assessed the graveyard's geography. Every exit was covered. The grave robbers had positioned themselves with deliberate care—not soldiers, but men who understood that interrupted grave robbing meant violence. They stood at the perimeter, smoking cigarettes that glowed like small red eyes in the darkness, their revolvers visible and ready.

  There was no escape.

  Only forward. Only through.

  His eyes swept across the disturbed graves nearby, and then he saw it—a sword lying half-buried in mud beside an open coffin. Rusted. Weathered. Abandoned. He moved toward it with silent, economical steps, his hand closing around the hilt.

  As he lifted it, his gaze fell on the gravestone.

  The name carved into stone seemed to stop his heart: Sable.

  His brother. His First. The man whose final words had burned like a brand into his consciousness. Buried here. Placed in the earth like any other corpse. Lucius turned toward the coffin, toward the skeleton that lay within—bones that had once held flesh, once moved with purpose and grace, once made decisions that shaped the lives of those around him.

  How long had he been dead?

  The question bloomed in Lucius's mind with sudden, terrible clarity. Time had become abstract since the execution square. Days? Weeks? Months? How much of the world had changed while he slept or dreamed or existed in that void with the pale woman?

  But there was no time for answers.

  No time for reminiscence or grief or the weight of standing over his brother's remains.

  Lucius gripped the sword he had retrieved. It was rusted—corroded by years of exposure and neglect. The blade had barely an edge left, worn smooth by time and weather. It was fragile, unreliable, the kind of weapon that might shatter under real stress.

  That was likely why the grave robbers had left it behind.

  But it was steel. It was a blade. It was something.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Lucius straightened, the rusted sword hanging at his side. Around him, the grave robbers continued their work, unaware that a ghost had risen from their own excavations. The rain fell. The storm raged. And in a graveyard where the dead lay exposed, a man who should have been among them began to move.

  Not toward escape.

  Toward the nearest grave robber.

  Lucius's hands began to tremble.

  Not from the cold. Not from shock or fear or the natural response of a body that had just crawled from its own grave. This trembling was something else entirely—the same sensation he had felt in the sunflower field, that terrible pressure building beneath his skin, begging for release. He held steel in his hand, and these muscles—trained, honed, capable—could transform this graveyard into a slaughterhouse.

  The rain fell harder, as if the sky itself was weeping.

  It triggered something. A memory. A sensation. PTSD—the ghost of battles past, of violence witnessed and inflicted. His body remembered what his mind tried to forget. The trembling intensified.

  Lucius was a warrior. In all his years, in all his battles, he had never attacked a man from behind. Never struck at an unaware opponent. Never used surprise as a weapon. It was pride—ancient and absolute—that demanded fairness in combat, that required the enemy know they were being faced. Honor, in a world that had long since abandoned such concepts.

  The odds were impossible. Fifteen men total. Ten diggers. Five lookouts positioned at the perimeter. The mathematics of survival suggested deception, stealth, ambush.

  But pride was all he had left.

  He approached them openly.

  The longsword hung at his side, and though it was a blade meant to be wielded with two hands, Lucius grasped it with a single hand—a katana's grip applied to a longsword, as if his body refused to acknowledge the difference between weapons. The blade had become serrated along both edges, worn ragged by time and neglect, but still deadly. Still capable.

  As he stepped into the circle of firelight cast by their cigarettes, the grave robbers noticed him.

  Their laughter died first. Then the shovels stopped moving. Then slowly, confusion spread across their faces as they took in the sight: a naked man, mud-caked and dripping, emerging from the darkness with a rusted blade held with absolute certainty.

  One of them—the raid captain with the scarred face—began to laugh. A harsh, cruel sound that echoed across the graveyard.

  "Whatchu gonna do with that relic, dead man?" he called out, his accent thick and brutal. "You're fucking naked and look like you just woke from a grave. So how about I put you back there?"

  He raised his revolver.

  Pointed it directly at Lucius's head.

  Lucius did not know the mechanics of the weapon. Did not understand the force it could generate, the speed at which projectiles traveled, the distance from which it could kill. But he understood hierarchy. He understood that these men held them as superior to his blade. He understood that their confidence stemmed from something he had not yet learned to counter.

  "This is your choice?" Lucius asked quietly.

  The man's face twisted into something between a smile and a sneer. He cocked the chamber—a deliberate, theatrical motion designed to intimidate.

  Then he pulled the trigger.

  Lucius moved.

  His hand rose in a blur and brought the hilt of his sword down in a precise arc that intercepted the man's wrist. The revolver bucked, fired, but the shot went wild—a crack of sound and light that split the graveyard in half.

  And suddenly, everything erupted.

  Fifteen revolvers rose as one. Fifteen fingers found triggers. The night filled with chaos and noise and the sound of violence given voice. The grave robbers had not understood Lucius when he was quiet, but they understood now. He was a threat. He needed to be eliminated.

  Lucius was trapped in a circle.

  Surrounded. Outnumbered. Armed with a blade that could not answer the speed of bullets. But something shifted in him. The trembling that had built to a crescendo began to fade. It transformed into something else—not rage this time, but perfect, crystalline calm. Rational thought. Clear assessment. The mind of a strategist observing the battlefield and understanding, with absolute certainty, what needed to be done.

  The actions that followed were not rational.

  They were pure instinct. Pure muscle memory. Pure warrior.

  He thrusted his sword forward into the man directly ahead of him—the blade finding space between ribs, finding heart, finding finality. The man's body convulsed as his finger tightened reflexively on the trigger, and suddenly the graveyard became a cacophony of gunfire.

  Bullets flew.

  Some found grave robbers caught in the crossfire. A man to Lucius's left screamed as a round meant for Lucius tore through his abdomen instead. Another fell, his shoulder shattered by friendly fire. But they kept shooting, kept firing, their panic overriding any sense of coordination.

  Three bullets found Lucius.

  One buried itself in his shoulder, tearing through muscle and bone. Two more struck his legs—his left thigh and his right calf—punching through flesh with brutal force. The impacts staggered him, but they did not stop him. The pain was information, nothing more. Data to be processed and filed away.

  He jerked the thrust sword toward his right in a wide, violent arc.

  Four grave robbers fell. The blade caught them in sequence—throat, chest, abdomen, groin—a harvest of steel and blood that painted the graveyard in shades of red. They fell like dominoes, their revolvers clattering to the mud.

  Then he heard it: the distinctive click of a chamber being cocked.

  To his left. Close. Immediate threat.

  Lucius ducked and grabbed his sword with his right hand. In one fluid motion that seemed to contain no transition between positions, he thrust left—a movement so fast that it existed almost outside of time. The blade travelled the distance between him and the grave robber who had just fired, and it found him completely.

  The thrust split him in half—a vertical bisection from crotch to shoulder, separating him into two parts that fell to opposite sides of the graveyard. The motion was so fast, so precise, that Lucius had already dodged the bullet by the time the gun fired. He had moved through the space where it would have traveled, arriving at his destination before death could follow.

  The graveyard fell silent.

  Bodies lay scattered across disturbed graves. Blood mixed with rainwater and mud. The night continued to rage overhead, but on the ground, only the sound of Lucius's breathing remained—heavy, laboured, but alive.

  Two figures emerged from the darkness.

  They came too late to save their comrades, arriving only in time to witness the aftermath—a graveyard transformed into an abattoir. Bodies lay scattered like broken dolls. Blood painted the earth. And in the centre of it all stood a naked man, dripping with rain and crimson, breathing with mechanical precision.

  One of them fired immediately.

  No words. No hesitation. Just the sight of an unknown figure among corpses and the instinctive response of a frightened man: pull the trigger.

  The bullet found Lucius in the gut.

  It punched through his abdomen and kept traveling, leaving a trajectory of devastation in its wake. But Lucius did not fall. Did not falter. Did not even acknowledge the impact with more than a slight adjustment of his stance.

  He moved like he had in the sunflower field.

  Like something no longer bound by the laws of human limitation.

  His sword rose and fell in a motion that was both elegant and terrible. The man who had fired was bisected—left lower rib to right shoulder blade—a clean diagonal separation that left him in two distinct pieces on the rain-soaked earth. The blade continued its arc, nicking the second man across the arm, drawing blood but not delivering death.

  The second man froze.

  Terror crystallized his features into a mask of pure animal fear. He stood motionless, watching as the figure—this thing that had crawled from a grave—turned toward him with eyes that held absolutely nothing.

  With every body Lucius made, he felt something leave.

  Not energy. Not strength. But something far more essential. Emotions drained away like water from a broken vessel. Rage faded. Compassion evaporated. Mercy—that final, terrible mercy that had always lived somewhere in his chest—began to calcify into something harder and colder and utterly void.

  He was becoming empty.

  A shell. An instrument. A blade given flesh but no longer inhabited by anything recognizable as human.

  Lucius looked at the last man—the sole survivor among fifteen grave robbers who had thought themselves hunters.

  In that look lived a terrible realization: he could not go back. The graveyard, the graves, the bodies of his brothers—none of it was a place he could rest. The world would not allow it. The world would keep hunting him, keep forcing him to survive, keep demanding that he become more and more like the void inside him.

  There was only one exit left.

  Lucius grabbed the man's wrist—the hand that held the revolver. With strength born not from muscle but from something far darker, he forced the barrel toward his own chest. Pressed it against the space where his heart beat in that half-rhythm that defied death.

  "Shoot," Lucius whispered. His voice was hollow. "Put me to rest."

  The man was horrified. His arm trembled. His mouth opened and closed without sound. But desperation to live—primal, absolute—overrode everything else. If this creature would not kill him, if he could not escape, then perhaps this would be the price of survival. Perhaps this was the only way forward.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The revolver's calibre was higher than Lucius's body could sustain. The round tore through his chest with devastating force, passing completely through and exiting in a spray of tissue and bone. His heart—that thing which had survived execution platforms and void-drowning and grave resurrection—was half obliterated. Only half remained, and it continued to pump regardless, continuing its impossible rhythm as if the bullet was merely an inconvenience.

  Blood sprayed across the graveyard like a fountain.

  Lucius fell to his back.

  His mouth filled with blood, yet his lips moved with something that might have been gratitude. "Thank you," he whispered, the words barely audible beneath the rain and the sound of his own heart still beating, still pumping blood that had nowhere to go.

  The man did not wait to see what happened next.

  He ran.

  Ran from the graveyard, ran from the bodies, ran from the impossible thing that lay bleeding but still breathing on the rain-soaked earth. His footsteps faded into the storm, leaving only silence and the relentless drumming of a heart that refused to die.

  Lucius lay on his back, staring up at the rain falling from a sky that seemed to contain nothing but void and sorrow. His chest continued its impossible work. His half-heart pumped blood that spilled into the mud and mixed with rainwater and the remains of fifteen men.

  He had wanted rest.

  In the darkness of the graveyard, surrounded by the graves of the fallen and the corpses of the desperate, Lucius closed his eyes and accepted his fate.

  The sky continued to pour.

  Rain fell like tears from a god who had forgotten how to stop weeping. Lucius lay on his back, staring upward, and felt the familiar sensation beginning to overtake him—the same fading that had come when the children's blade found his heart. Consciousness slipping. The boundary between existence and void beginning to blur.

  He started to fade.

  But this time, there was no bed waiting for him. No dark void suspended in nothingness. There was only an endless falling through spaces that had no name, no dimension, no anchor to the world of the living.

  He was levitating in absolute darkness.

  Naked. Weightless. Adrift in something that was neither death nor life but the terrible space between them.

  Then a voice came.

  Familiar. Ethereal. Carrying with it the weight of something far older than empires or kingdoms or the petty wars of mortal men.

  "Do you miss me this much?"

  A touch came to his forehead.

  The same ethereal beauty. The same cold yet soothing touch that seemed to contain both the comfort of oblivion and the pain of continued existence. Those blue eyes—void of emotion yet somehow containing infinities of feeling—looked down at him with an expression he could not quite name.

  The woman. The pale one. The thing that existed between worlds.

  Lucius reached out his hand toward her, his fingers stretching as if they could bridge the distance between what he was and what she represented. His arm extended into the darkness, seeking something he could not quite grasp, something that seemed always just beyond the reach of mortal fingers.

  His eyes opened.

  Sunlight.

  Morning had come to the graveyard. The storm had passed, leaving behind only the aftermath of violence and the pale gold of a sun rising indifferent to the bodies that lay scattered across sacred ground. Lucius lay on the wet earth, as if the night's impossible violence had never occurred.

  His right arm remained suspended in the air.

  Reaching upward. Toward the sun. Toward something that existed only in the space between dreams and waking. His hand hung there, fingers extended, still grasping for the touch of something that had existed only in the void and the darkness between life and death.

  Around him, the graveyard lay silent.

  The grave robbers' bodies had begun to settle into the earth, surrendering to gravity and decay. The rain had washed away much of the blood, though traces remained—dark stains on stone, on grass, on the edges of open graves. The sun climbed higher, indifferent to the desecration, indifferent to the fact that a man lay among his comrades' bones, half-alive and reaching toward a vision that could not be held.

  Slowly, his arm fell back to his side.

  And Lucius, having survived the unsurvivable once again, began the long process of rising from the ground.

  That was the first time I came to know about my immortality, at first i was overjoyed like any man in my place would've been but it faded as soon as i realised what had happened to me, at first I thought now i can exact my revenge on gazer, on primus without any fear as I am immortal, but then it came to me, the skeleton i had seen that night meant sable would've been dead for at least a century and that's what made me realize how out of place I was, I was in a world which had moved on without me, the new weapons the everything, I was like a shadow that had been somehow brought in light where it would fade eventually, but in my case I wasn't going to fade because i was immortal.

  For me alone it seemed laws of nature were bent,

  For it wasn't a boon for me, I was just condemned.