Lucas lay in his crib, his tiny body wrapped in soft blankets, but the warmth around him felt like nothing more than an illusion. The candlelight flickered, casting soft shadows on the walls of the room, but inside, nothing stirred. He stared blankly at the ceiling, the soft hum of the night a distant buzz in his ears. The air was peaceful and calm, but his mind was far from at ease. It wandered endlessly, back to a time and place where the only sounds had been screams, the stench of blood, and the harshness of survival. A past life that felt like a distant nightmare, one he could never fully shake off.
In his past life, Lucas had been a child. He had been no older than five when his world was torn apart. Kidnapped from the safety of his home, taken by men whose faces he couldn't remember, but whose actions were forever branded into his mind. They didn't care about his age, his innocence, or his fear. They only cared about what he could become—a weapon, a tool for their wars. They took him, broke him down, and reshaped him into something cold, something unrecognizable. The boy he had been was lost to the cruelty of their training.
The Russians had made him their project. A project designed for one purpose: death. They taught him to kill, to follow orders, to wipe away any thought that didn't serve their objective. Pain? Fear? Nothing. His emotions became obsolete, irrelevant. His mind, his heart—they were nothing more than liabilities in the machine they had created.
As a child, he had tried to resist. He had begged, screamed, but no one came. They punished him, broke him, and taught him to be silent, to be cold. Slowly, he stopped crying. He stopped feeling. And the boy he had been, the child who had once dreamt of warmth and safety, faded away. In his place was a soldier, a weapon with no room for anything other than execution. Love was a foreign concept. Kindness didn't exist. There was only survival, and to survive, he had to become a monster.
Through endless training, through missions where death was routine, Lucas had learned to shut everything out. The man he became was a machine, and machines didn't feel. They followed orders, and they executed them with precision. There was no room for hesitation, for doubt. The boy who had once believed in good, in hope—he was gone.
It wasn't until his final mission that the full weight of his existence hit him. A group of rebels had defied his creators, and he was sent to end them. When the mission was over, when the last of them had fallen, something inside him snapped. All at once, emotions flooded his mind—rage, guilt, sorrow—things he had buried deep, things he had refused to face for so long. But he didn't know how to process them. He couldn't. He had been trained to suppress them, to ignore them. So, once again, he locked them away.
The mission had ended with the destruction of everything, and with it, his life. A fatal explosion—a final, violent rupture—took him from the world he had known. The last thing he remembered was the deafening sound of glass shattering, the heat of the flames, and then… nothing.
When he opened his eyes again, it wasn't to the cold walls of a training facility, but to the soft, warm embrace of a crib in a room that felt both familiar and entirely foreign. He was no longer the soldier. He was no longer the weapon. He was just a baby. His new name was Lucas. His new world, one filled with magic, creatures of myth, and powers beyond his understanding, was so different from everything he had known. And yet, despite the wonder of it, he couldn't feel any of it.
The magic in the air, the beauty of the elves and demi-humans, the power that thrummed through the world—it all meant nothing. He was still the same. His soul, so long scarred by a past full of suffering, remained untouched by the warmth of this new world. His mother, Lady Elara, held him close, speaking soft words meant to soothe him, but they were lost on him. The maids, always kind and attentive, flashed him warm smiles, but he only stared back with vacant eyes. His father, Lord Kael, would occasionally glance down at him, but there was no recognition in Lucas's eyes. No spark of connection. He was a child, yes, but a child broken and lost, unable to feel the love he was given. He could only exist in the silence that filled his heart.
He saw the concern in the eyes of those around him—the worried looks from his parents, the hushed whispers among the maids—but it didn't matter. They were just like everyone else. He was a tool, a weapon, and nothing more. He didn't belong in this world, a world that expected him to feel, to love. He didn't know how.
In a place full of magic, joy, and wonder, Lucas remained a prisoner of his past. A boy who had lived through too much to believe in anything good. He was still a man trapped in a child's body, a soul that could no longer connect, who could never truly love again. He simply existed, untouched by the world around him. No warmth, no light, just the hollow echo of a past life that would never truly let him go.