Lord of the Foresaken-Chapter 193: THE SHADOW OF THE PAST

The Soul Forge had done its job.

The Goblin Legion lived again—if you could call it that.

But no one had prepared for what came after.

They marched through the barracks like ghosts returned from a forgotten war. Armor reassembled from memory, expressions half-formed, battle reflexes sharp but not always connected to present reality. For all their tactical discipline and unwavering loyalty, the resurrected goblins moved like they were stuck between centuries—because they were.

The Goblin Integration Crisis was no longer hypothetical.

Grax Ironjaw stood before a transparent wall, gazing into a fracture of space where three timelines folded into one. "This world makes no sense," he muttered. "We fought for clarity. Simplicity. You told us what was real and what wasn’t. Now I can’t even tell what day it is."

Shia Brightblade moved beside him, arms crossed, emerald hair pulsing with slow, thoughtful motion. "You’re not wrong. This world doesn’t have a day-night cycle. Not since the Chronoquake ruptured the celestial frame."

Grax looked sideways at her. "And we’re supposed to fight for this?"

"You’re not fighting for this," she said quietly. "You’re fighting to survive within it."

He didn’t argue. But he didn’t nod either.

Shia had become more than a commander to her people. She was The Bridge Between Eras, the only being who had one foot in the ancient past and the other in this fractured present. She translated temporal anomalies into old goblin metaphors. She reframed post-Transformation reality through legends they still remembered.

"Time’s not broken," she explained to a confused artillery specialist. "It’s just walking in spirals now. So we learn to walk sideways."

They listened. They trusted her.

But trust couldn’t erase the cracks.

Reed watched them train—watched his people return to formation, practice combat patterns they hadn’t used in over five hundred years. The sight should’ve made him weep with joy.

Instead, it made him ache.

Every face brought with it a wave of guilt. Not just because he’d failed to save them the first time, but because he’d dragged them back into a reality that had no place for them.

Mizrak had called him "Commander" with such reverence that it nearly broke him. He hadn’t had that kind of respect in years. Not from anyone.

But with that reverence came weight. Expectation. As if his sheer presence was enough to stabilize their fragile reconstruction.

It wasn’t.

The cracks became undeniable when The Memory Gaps began to show.

Velda Bitterthorn forgot her own call-sign.

Korrick Flameshade couldn’t recall the name of the apprentice he’d died protecting.

Even Grax, the most stable of them all, had moments where his speech slurred or his voice dropped mid-sentence as if searching for words that no longer existed.

"They’re not flaws," Kessa had insisted. "They’re incomplete recovery points. Soul pattern fragmentation is inevitable when reconstructing a personality that’s been dead for half a millennium."

But Reed didn’t care about technical explanations.

He cared that they weren’t whole.

Lyralei watched from the edge of the Forge chamber, arms folded, her violet eyes narrowed. She didn’t say much at first. She didn’t need to. Her expression was enough: sharp concern over Reed’s choices, over his need to bring back what was already gone.

"You’re trying to rebuild the past," she said one evening, catching him alone beside the Forge.

"I’m trying to fix what I broke," he replied.

"No," she said. "You’re trying to pretend that if you patch it together well enough, it’ll be like nothing ever shattered."

Reed didn’t respond. Because deep down, he couldn’t deny it.

Lyralei stepped closer. "You don’t resurrect legends to heal. You resurrect them to hide. From the now. From yourself."

Her words struck deeper than any blade.

That night, the first Phantom Battalion appeared.

They weren’t real—not by any physical standard. But neither were they hallucinations.

Echoes of unreconstructed goblins walked the halls. Transparent, flickering. Some stood beside their resurrected comrades, mirroring movements. Others walked aimlessly, incomplete memories trying to manifest.

Mizrak stared at one, hand shaking. "That’s... Vorra. She was my second. We died together."

The echo flickered, then collapsed into strands of light.

Shia studied the disturbance with narrowed eyes. "They’re bleed-throughs. The Forge is generating resonance fields strong enough to draw unanchored identities into semi-coherence."

"In English?" Grax growled.

"We’re pulling the wrong ghosts back too."

The biggest fracture wasn’t external.

It was internal.

An Identity Crisis began to bloom in the hearts of the resurrected.

"Are we really us?" Velda asked one night, voice barely audible as she stood beside the memory wall.

Reed turned slowly. "What do you mean?"

"We have our names. Our skills. But what if we’re just... simulations? Copies grown from your memories?"

"That’s not how the Forge works," Reed said quickly. "It rebuilds from the original soul-code. It’s you."

"But is it?" she whispered. "What if I’m just the version of me you remember best?"

That question didn’t go away. It spread—quietly, like a virus in the cracks of consciousness.

Shia called a closed meeting.

Only the oldest, most stable of the resurrected goblins were present—those who remembered enough to ask dangerous questions.

"You want the truth?" Shia said, her voice like fire pressed into words. "Fine. The truth is: I don’t know if you’re ’real.’"

Gasps. Shifts. Outrage.

"But here’s what I do know," she continued. "You think. You feel. You fight. And you choose. Those are the things that make a person. Not what timeline you came from. Not how intact your memory is."

She looked at Grax.

"You chose to follow Reed again, didn’t you?"

He nodded.

"Then you’re you. That’s enough for me."

Still, the questions lingered.

And as Reed lay awake in the observation deck, watching echoes walk the Forge floor below, he began to wonder:

Had he really brought them back?

Or had he just built a tomb with moving parts?

Then the Forge pulsed.

Once.

Twice.

Then a whisper.

Not a voice.

Not a command.

A presence.

And Reed felt it, deep in the root of his mind: something watching the resurrections. Not The Dark. Not the Watch. Something older.

And it was interested.

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