Chapter 1: The Seventh Morning (1)

The cold woke him, as it always did. Lien Carvel opened his eyes to the familiar sight of frost-covered rafters and knew, with the weary certainty of a man who had died too many times, that he was nine years old again.

His body shivered. Small hands. Short legs. The bone-deep exhaustion of seven lifetimes compressed into a frame that barely reached four feet tall. Around him, one thousand children cried in the darkness of the Black Cradle's barracks, their breath fogging in the pre-dawn air. The sound scraped against his ears like rusted metal—predictable, pathetic, useless.

Lien sat up on the wooden sleeping platform, his joints protesting the movement. Muscle memory flickered through neural pathways, a ghost of competence trapped in inadequate flesh. He flexed his fingers, testing. The dexterity was there, encoded so deeply that even temporal reset couldn't erase it. Seven lifetimes of blade work, throat cutting, poison mixing—all of it preserved in the meat and sinew of a child's hands.

Good enough.

He cataloged the room with clinical precision. Wooden bunks stacked three high. A single iron stove in the center, its fire reduced to glowing coals. Ice crystals spreading across the walls like cancer. The northern wind howling through gaps in the construction, carrying the promise of frostbite and slow death.

One thousand orphans. By nightfall, eight hundred and forty-seven would remain. He'd watched this particular massacre six times before.

Lien's gaze swept across familiar faces. There, huddled in the southwest corner, clutching her thin blanket like it could save her: Elara. Nine years old. Brown hair, too-large eyes, fingers already showing the chemical burns that marked her talent for alchemy. In Loop 2, she'd bled out in his arms, choking on her own blood after a training accident that wasn't an accident. In Loop 4, she'd died of pneumonia because he'd decided sentiment was a luxury he couldn't afford.

She'd died four other ways in four other loops. He remembered each one with the clarity of fresh wounds.

Lien felt nothing. This was progress.

Near the central fire pit, a boy with shoulders too broad for his age shoved a smaller child off a bench. Vrix. Ten years old. Natural prodigy. Born with the killing instinct most assassins spent decades cultivating. In Loop 5, Vrix had risen to General and personally led the hunting party that cornered Lien in the Thornwood. In Loop 3, Lien had recruited him as an ally and watched him die taking a blade meant for Lien's back.

The pattern repeated. Allies became enemies. Enemies became corpses. The variables shifted, but the Empire endured, and at its center, the Emperor sat on his throne, laughing.

Lien's jaw tightened. His last memory before waking here: the execution chamber in Aethelgard. The Emperor's voice, bored and clinical: "You've become obsolete, Shadow Thirteen." The blade falling. The sound of his own neck breaking.

Then darkness. Then the Void—that space between death and rebirth where time had no meaning and the Emperor's laughter echoed like a god mocking an insect.

Then this. Again.

A small figure caught his attention, pressed against the frost-covered window on the eastern wall. Sia. Eight years old. Rail-thin, lips already blue from cold. She'd died in the first week of every previous loop, a footnote in the casualty reports. Lien had stepped over her frozen corpse so many times he'd stopped registering her as human.

But this time, something nagged at him. A detail out of place, like a dissonant note in a familiar song.

He filed it away for later analysis.

The barracks door slammed open. Lien's body tensed before his conscious mind registered the movement—muscle memory from lifetimes of ambush training. He forced himself still. Nine-year-olds didn't react to doors opening with combat readiness. Nine-year-olds flinched and cried.

He let his shoulders hunch. Let his breathing quicken, shallow and afraid.

Head Instructor Kael entered, his scarred face unchanged across seven iterations. Forty-five years old. Former Shadow operative. Retired to train the next generation of Imperial weapons. In previous loops, Kael had been mentor, executioner, and obstacle in varying combinations.

Now, watching the man stride to the center of the barracks, Lien simply waited.

"Stand," Kael commanded.

One thousand children scrambled upright. Lien rose with them, positioning himself in the middle of the crowd. Not too eager, not too slow. Perfectly, invisibly average.

"You are here because the Empire has no use for your families," Kael began. His voice carried across the barracks like a blade sliding from its sheath. "You are orphans. Refuse. The discarded scraps of a civilization that has transcended sentiment."