Prologue
Prologue
Amelia had spent so long being forgotten that, in the beginning, she mistook invisibility for a fact of life.
As a child, she learned to stand a little closer when people gathered, to speak a little louder when she could find the courage, to smile first so others might remember her face. It never lasted. Children ran past her as if she were only part of the background. Teachers skipped her hand in the classroom and called on someone else. Relatives greeted her mother with warm familiarity and then blinked in confusion when Amelia was introduced, as though her name had appeared out of nowhere.
At family gatherings, she became used to the subtle pauses.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were here.”
“I thought someone else brought you.”
“Did we already say happy birthday?”
Sometimes the forgetfulness was careless. Sometimes it was cruel. Often it was simply ordinary, which somehow hurt more than either of the others.
Even the world itself seemed to agree with people’s opinions of her. Strangers brushed past her on crowded sidewalks and never noticed when their shoulders struck hers. Clerks asked the person behind her what they needed. Friends meant to invite her and forgot. Family promised to call and never did. She learned, young and unwilling, what it meant to build a life in the quiet spaces no one else bothered to look at.
And still, she kept being kind.
That was the strange thing about Amelia. She could have become bitter. She could have become cold, or sharp, or cruel in the way lonely people sometimes are when the world teaches them to expect nothing. But she did not. She remembered birthdays. She listened to stories people told more than once. She offered help without being asked. She noticed who was sitting alone. She held doors open. She made room for others in a world that rarely made room for her.
Perhaps that was why, despite everything, she never fully disappeared.
Once, in the middle of her youth, a woman she barely knew thanked her for remembering her son’s hospital appointment and bringing soup when their family was overwhelmed. Another time, a frightened little boy who had gotten separated from his mother clung to Amelia’s hand and said she felt safe. Small moments. Brief moments. But they mattered. They were proof that even a life lived in the shadows could still cast light.
Then she met him.
He was not loud. He was not dazzling. He did not sweep her off her feet with grand declarations or impossible promises. He simply saw her.
He remembered what she liked to drink without asking twice. He noticed when she was tired. He listened when she spoke, and when she fell quiet he did not assume she had nothing to say. He remembered the little things she had long since stopped expecting anyone to notice: the way she folded her hands when she was nervous, how she looked out the window when she was thinking, how her expression changed when she was trying not to cry.
At first, Amelia distrusted it.
People did not remember her this way. Not for long. Not sincerely. So she waited for the day he would forget, the day his attention would drift, the day she would once again be standing in the middle of a room and somehow feel entirely alone.
But that day never came.
He loved her with a quiet constancy that undid her more deeply than any dramatic gesture could have. He remembered every birthday. He made her laugh when she had forgotten how to do so freely. He reached for her hand in crowds so she would not feel lost. He spoke to her as if her thoughts mattered, because they did. He made a home with her, and in that home she was never invisible again.
They married. She cried the entire ceremony.
They had children.
Four of them.
Two boys. Two girls.
And in those children, Amelia found a joy so fierce it sometimes left her breathless. They called for her when they woke in the night. They ran to her with scraped knees and broken toys and secrets too soft to share with anyone else. They fought over who got to sit beside her, who got to hold her hand, who got to be the one she tucked in first. They remembered her without effort, without prompting, without apology.
Her name filled the house.
Mama.
Mom.
Amelia.
She loved every version of it.
The years passed. The children grew. Their voices changed, their hands lengthened, and one by one they built lives of their own. Then came grandchildren, and the house that had once been filled with running feet and laughter became quieter, though never empty. Her children visited. Her grandchildren climbed into her lap. Her great-grandchildren, bright-eyed and curious, begged for stories she had told a hundred times before.
And she told them anyway.
Because she understood, better than anyone, that to be remembered is to be loved in a way that outlives the body.
She and her husband grew old together, side by side in a life that had once seemed impossible to her. His hair turned white. Her hands became thin and wrinkled. He still looked at her as though she were the answer to a question he had spent his whole life trying to solve.
On the last night they shared together, he held her hand and smiled at her with that same unwavering tenderness.
“You’re here,” he whispered, as if he still could not believe it.
Amelia smiled through her tears. “I’m here.”
And she was.
She stayed through the warmth of their family, through the long and gentle fading of the years, through the final winter of her life. When she died, it was not in fear, and it was not in loneliness. She died old, beloved, surrounded by the legacy she had built with steady hands and a kind heart.
For a long moment after death, there was only silence.
Then came Fate.
It did not arrive as a man or woman, nor as any shape Amelia could have understood. It was vast and immeasurable, older than nations and softer than a prayer. And Fate looked upon the soul that had lived so long in being overlooked, and saw how she had never once chosen cruelty in return.
It saw the kindness she had given freely. It saw the love she had nurtured. It saw the lives she had touched, even when the world refused to notice.
And Fate, for the first time in a very long time, took pity.
“You will not be forgotten again,” Fate said.
It wrapped her soul in a blessing older than memory and promised her a new life in a new world, a life where she would be seen. A life of power. A life of magic.
A life where she would be impossible to ignore.
But even Fate is not immune to error.
As Amelia’s soul crossed from one world to the next, something flickered.
Just for a split second.
A fault. A stutter. A break in the weaving of what should have been.
And in that moment, the blessing twisted.
Amelia did not simply arrive in the new world as she was meant to. Her memory remained intact, her soul untouched by the usual forgetting of reincarnation, and the body she entered was not the one Fate had intended.
She was reborn as a boy.
A boy named Avoren Leyfren.
A boy who would grow with all of Amelia’s memories still burning bright within him.
A boy who would one day discover magic. A boy who would carry too much mana for his own body to understand. A boy who would awaken ancient things that had slept for thousands of years.
And somewhere beyond the veil of worlds, Fate would not yet know that its blessing had become something far greater, and far more dangerous, than it had ever intended.
A/N:
Hi everyone!!! I hope you enjoyed the beginning of The Phoenix King. Amelia/Avoren is going to have one hell of an adventure in this new life.
I hope you will follow along for the chaos, love, danger, and all the things. :)
This is also only one of a few books I am currently writing, I am uploading/updating only this one at the moment, and soon I will also upload/update the other's I am working on.
Enjoooyyyy!!!
J.R.W.
