Lugh died.
But he was alive.
He died again. And again. And again.
The collapse of a building crushed him beneath stone and steel. He felt his body rupture as he fell from impossible heights.
He drowned in the Roch River, lungs filling with cold water before darkness took him. He was impaled, burned, shattered, torn asunder.
Each death was distinct. Each pain was real. Yet none of it was final.
Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times—Lugh perished. As a soldier, as a child, as an old man.
As a beast, clawing and howling against the tide of fate. His mind fractured, stretched beyond comprehension, holding lifetimes that did not belong to him.
He remembered streets he had never walked, wars he had never fought, voices that had never called his name.
A version of him stood. Thirty thousand others lay broken in the ruins.
The will to live had long since fled him. He did not resist as the multitude of memories poured into him, reshaping his mind, twisting his being.
