Dorian

The cold came before the pain. Dorian remembered it with surgical precision: the hero's sword piercing his side, the magic of the chosen closing in on him like a trap years in the making. There was no drama in his fall. Only the ground, and then nothing. He expected fire. He opened his eyes and found flowers. He sat up slowly, with the caution of someone who doesn't trust even his own body until he's checked it. Everything was working. No wounds, no blood, none of the armor he'd been wearing when he died. Just him and a field of wildflowers stretching in every direction under a sky he didn't recognize. Interesting. It wasn't hell. Or if it was, it had a considerably more optimistic aesthetic than he'd anticipated. He stood up, adjusted his posture, identified a dirt road cutting across the field toward the horizon, and headed in that direction without hesitation. Movement was the only sensible thing to do when you didn't have information. Walking was gathering it. The road led him to the market. He saw it from afar and it took him less than thirty seconds to read it: stalls with scarce merchandise, vendors with overly attentive eyes, buyers negotiating in whispers and glancing over their shoulders before closing any deal. One man was arguing with another about the price of bread that had visible mold on it. Three soldiers in battered armor were collecting something that wasn't an official tax from a merchant who paid without protest, his eyes fixed on the ground. No heroes, Dorian thought, pausing at the edge of the market. Absolutely none. His lips almost formed a smile.