Chelast felt as though he had sunk into a bottomless sea of dreams, his consciousness drifting along the boundary between illusion and reality.
An unknown force tried to unearth his most vulnerable, most primal attachments and weave them into a tender trap powerful enough to make him surrender.
Under its influence, distant, hazy fragments of memories from before he joined the Legion, memories he had deliberately sealed away, slowly began to awaken beyond his control.
Boom!
Chelast jolted awake on a hard plank bed, his heart pounding like a war drum.
He instinctively drew a deep breath, but instead of the clean air supplied by his Power Armour's circulation system, he inhaled dry air tainted with dust and mildew.
He froze.
He looked down and saw not a massive body encased in thick ceramite and servo systems, but the frail, pale body of a boy, dressed in coarse linen.
He looked around. This was neither the cold compartment of a warship nor a space station turned into a hell of flesh and blood, but a low, dilapidated adobe house, bare of furnishings.
Sunlight streamed through a glassless window, casting mottled light and shadow across the cracked floor.
"How is this possible..." he murmured instinctively. His voice sounded dry and unfamiliar, nothing like the deep voice he had grown accustomed to after genetic enhancement.
"My dear Chelast, what's wrong? Did you have a nightmare?"
A gentle voice, full of concern, sounded beside him. Chelast snapped his head up as though struck by lightning and looked toward its source.
A figure stood beside the bed, her face blurred by the light behind her, but that silhouette, that tone...
It was his mother, who, in his memories, had been dead for over a hundred years!
"Mother...?" Chelast's voice trembled with disbelief.
He instinctively