Reaching Shenvora

I really liked spring. The flowers, the warm but not hot weather, the revitalization of life. There was something honest about a season that didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was. I was twelve years old, a bastard son with a body that had been failing me since birth, standing in a garden and watching white irises sway in a breeze I barely had the strength to feel. My sleeve was stained red. My vision was already going at the edges. I had made peace with it, more or less. Then I neared death. And remembered. Another life, another world, a man who had built something ordinary and watched it fall apart, who had retreated into a game because the real world had stopped being worth the effort. Not a hero. Not a genius. Just someone who had been quietly running out of reasons to keep going. When the two of us met in that white space between one heartbeat and the next, the first thing I felt was embarrassment. Both lives were failures, in their own specific ways. The second thing I felt was something I hadn't experienced in either life for a very long time. The desire to try again. Properly this time. I woke up in a body that was still broken, in a world I recognized, with a mind that finally had something worth doing with itself. The odds were not good. The circumstances were not favorable. The enemies were already moving and had been for years. None of that changed what I had decided in that white space. I was Ledion Topia.