The Legend of Asahiel: Book 03 - The Divine Talisman by Eldon Thompson

Silent ripples churned and gathered. A tingling, soft at first, grew steadily more acute, stealing his numbness. He felt a crack, and the darkness shattered.
    The light pierced him, and he lashed out against it. Then a burning within. He cried out, and was horrified by the sound. A stink assailed him. He snorted, but it was all around, penetrating, driving away the shards of retreating darkness. His cries became a desperate bellow as his world flew apart.
    Color and shape drew into focus. He was seeing. Before him, a face, wreathed in starlight. The face of a man.
    It spoke. “Welcome, brother, to the realm of flesh.”
    He bucked forward, straining with unfamiliar limbs. A force restrained him. He howled and gnashed his teeth, driven by a feral frenzy he did not understand but did not bother to deny. His senses, raw and biting, tormented him. The burning at his core. The stench clouding his thoughts. If only he could kill this man before him, it might all go away.
    And yet, already the sting was lessening, his horror softening, as realization lay claim. Lungs, nostrils, to go with limbs and teeth. The sensations they wrought no longer frightened him. A man himself. Seated within a forest, his back to a tree. Pinned there by another pair of men who gripped his arms, each to one side. He blinked, felt muscles relax. The pair to either side released him and stepped away.
    He turned back to the face before him, the one he would have ripped asunder. It grinned. “Who are you?”
    He considered. An ache tore at his stomach as he probed a mind not his own. Torin , it yielded. He recoiled, searching elsewhere. All at once, he knew the answer.
    “I am nameless,” he heard himself whisper.
    Torin had been the name of this body, but that was not who he was. He had yet to be defined. He was Illysp no longer, but Illychar, reborn into this mortal coil. His coil.
    He glanced at his companions, those who had restrained him during his birth throes, then glared at Vorric Haze—the one who had once been called Thaddreus. That much he remembered easily now, along with the rest ofhis Illysp past. The memories and experiences returned as if they had never been lost. The centuries of entrapment, caught between this world and his own. Their sudden and unexpected freedom. Kael-Magus, and the scheme concocted to ensure their freedom forever. Biding his time among so many others, waiting for the perfect vessel to make his own. The confrontation in the tunnel…Kael-Magus’s destruction…Torin’s fall…
    “Yes, brother,” Vorric Haze hissed. “You remember well, don’t you? But that is not what I wish of you. I already share your former memories. What I desire now are your new ones.”
    Again the brush with a mind that did not belong to him, and again he recoiled. He knew now what was being asked of him, but he was not yet ready.
    “Few come to know their host this soon, I realize,” Haze continued in a tone of false regret. “But our time here may be short. I need you to do so now.”
    Still he hesitated. Even as an Illysp, he had “seen” the process enough times to know the agony to which Haze meant to subject him.
    “Start small,” Haze encouraged. “For instance, we all know your former name to be Torin, son of Sorl. But tell me, who was the man who raised you?”
    He shifted focus from his own, innate awareness to the one that lay unexplored. Another fierce and sudden pang assaulted him as he tore free the name Haze sought.
    “Esaias,” he croaked.
    “Esaias. Good. Now tell me more. Tell me about the Sword.”
    The Sword of Asahiel. The divine talisman that had helped drive their kind back into the bowels of Thrak-Symbos and seal them away for millennia—unable to return to their own world; unable to fully claim this one. The one that Torin now wielded. Except that…
    Haze pulled back his cloak, revealing the gem-studded hilt belted at his waist. The Illychar grinned menacingly. “You did not expect to claim Torin’s