Lisa Smedman - The Gilded Rune

It was indeed.

As the god lowered him to the forge, the soul that had been Torrin was bathed in sustaining warmth. Then the hand closed, and he saw only a dim red glow through the cracks between Moradin’s closed fingers. The pounding of the hammer on metal dulled to a muffled thud, thud, thud of a heartbeat heard through sustaining blood and cushioning water. Torrin felt himself squeezed, compressed, crystallized down to his soul’s essence. Then he felt the closed fist rise to the god’s mouth, and heard the rush of Moradin’s exhaled breath. The gust of warm air pushed him tight against the god’s clenched fingers.

What will I look like, this time? he wondered.

The breath at last forced the fingers open. He was carried along with it in a rush of sensation and sound.

Wet, shivering-yet cradled in loving hands-he opened his eyes on a new lifetime.

Kier, a grown man, peered over the midwife’s shoulder at the newborn babe the midwife had just placed in his mother’s arms. “Look at that red hair,” he observed. “And he’s a stout one, too. Just look-he’s not even crying.”

For just a moment, the soul that had been Torrin remembered its last life. There had been a woman he’d loved as a shield sister, a boy he’d loved as a son, a family who’d taken him in when all others had ridiculed him…

As the midwife wiped the bloody afterbirth from his face, the sharpness of those memories dulled, then fled.

The newborn babe nuzzled against his mother’s breasts, found the milk he’d been searching for, and suckled, content at last.