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There’s a stranger in his body.
The stranger moves through his house as if he’d lived there his whole life— as if he’d lived there even longer than Zorian himself has. It’s disquieting, the natural way he navigates conversations with his mother, how he knows his habits or the way he arranges his bedroom so as to know if it has been tampered with.
The stranger talks and plays with Kirielle with affection Zorian doesn’t remember ever expressing. There’s open fondness in his expression, a softness to his eyes when he looks at Zorian’s naive little sister. She smiles back at the imposter, fooled by his act, and Zorian can feel nothing but dread.
The stranger is powerful. More powerful than anyone Zorian has ever met before. He makes copies of himself silently and efficiently— crafts complex artifacts and spell formula, implying a level of knowledge which should be completely out of place in Zorian. He even fights with a mastery of combat spells Zorian has never before witnessed in his life. He’s fifteen years old, but the stranger moves his body and makes it cast spells as if he were an archmage.
The stranger had ripped Zorian out of his own body, soul forcibly pushed out of its rightful place. The stranger does not belong in that body.
The stranger grins with Zorian’s face. It is wrong.
And yet, why does he seem to know Zorian’s family so well? Why does he bother to act like him? To pretend to be him? Why did the stranger choose Zorian’s body, out of all possible ones? Why him?
It makes no sense.
Zorian isn’t special. Zorian isn’t an archmage. Zorian wouldn’t offer to take Kirielle to Cyoria unprompted, wouldn’t skip classes, wouldn’t be so friendly with Zach Noveda. Wouldn’t give Akoja a stupid thumbs up.
It’s all wrong. Does no one see this? Does no one not recognize that this stranger is not Zorian? That Zorian is not the one in that body?
Or do they just prefer him?
Even his mother had acted more pleased with the stranger than she ever had with her real son.
It’s unfair. Zorian has spent his whole life waiting to graduate from the academy and truly start living, only for this stranger to usurp everything when he was so, so close to his goals. Only a couple more years, and he would have been free to move away from his family and achieve everything he’s always strived for.
Zorian might not have been a very kind person, but even he’d had dreams. And he’d been so close.
Fury burns through what is left of him. A bitter anger long-since rooted in his being, finally blooming in postmortem.
If souls could scream —if they could cry and rampage, if they could trash about and brawl with usurpers— his outrage would be felt all throughout Eldemar.
Souls can’t, however. As such, no one notices Zorian is gone. No one acknowledges the unfairness, the wrongness of the stranger.
What was the point of his life, of everything he’d done, if it was always going to end this way?
Soul filled with both resentment and resignation, Zorian lets go of the last thread tethering him to the world.
He can only hope afterlife won’t be as cruel.