The black wax seal of the Council's letter still lingered in my thoughts long after I had set it aside. My fingers traced the edges of the parchment, committing every detail to memory—the weight of the paper, the slight imperfections in the wax, the precise stroke of the sigil. Every piece of information was a thread, and I was used to unraveling tangled webs.
A name. A name that should not exist.
Belisarius Drakhan.
I should have killed him years ago. No, I did kill him.
I remembered it.
Not in the way one recalls an event they lived through, but as something seen from the outside—fragmented memories, scattered like broken glass across my mind. It wasn't just recollection; it was observation, detached yet visceral, a thing I could not ignore.