Reset Button - One lifetime ends, another begins.

Leven slipped beyond the treeline, following the stream toward its source. Beneath the frozen surface, the water whispered with a voice he knew too well. Each step in the fresh snow cracked over fallen branches, sharp against the still air. Years had passed since he’d seen another soul that could answer back—though he had outlived countless lives. He savoured the silence, letting it stretch before him. But even silence had teeth; it broke sooner or later, and always left a scar.

His thoughts drifted to a past life, endless and chaotic, bound to his four brothers with no reprieve. He sighed and pushed them aside. There was work to be done — it was time to fish.

At the pond, footprints scarred the snow, fresh and unwelcome. The ice had already been broken. Anger flared; his solitude had ended. The pond healed itself each night, sealing its fractures — but now the wound was open, raw. He caught several trout and carried them back to his cabin in the clearing, each a reminder that his guest was near. The clearing around his cabin, hemmed in by pines and snow, felt suddenly watchful. Resin smoke from the fire clung to the air as he prepared the fish with potatoes from his garden. A knife and a rudimentary fork stood in the snow beside the plate. By sunrise the meal was gone — only brittle bones remained, cracked so clean they seemed carved, and sharp enough to cut his fingers when he touched them. I knew it, he thought.

Each day he left a meal; each morning it disappeared. A week passed, and his body weakened. Fever burned through him like a curse thought long buried: each night colder, each day thinner. He could barely keep food down. He knew what it meant. Ziek had found him.

When footsteps creaked outside and two heavy slams shook the door, Leven rose. Dressed, he stepped into the pale morning light. The fire pit waited, the makeshift stools dusted with snow. Ziek sat on the first, his presence sickly and oppressive, a metallic tang clung to him, sharp and sour on the air. Leven lowered himself onto the second stump.

“You shouldn’t have come, Ziek,” he said, voice tight. “You’ve no reason to be here.”

Ziek’s tongue flicked over cracked lips. His voice rattled with phlegm. “You’re all I have left, Leven…” His lips split as he dragged his tongue across them, leaving a smear of red. “You made sure of that. But—” he broke into a wet cough that shook his frame, “—the game wasn’t yours to end.” His lips twisted into a rotten smile. “You were next in the order. We played our part, and now it’s your turn.”

“I did — thousands of times. Each time more work than the last. No more.”

“Sterven forced our hands. We had to act. Or starve. So what if it made your work harder?”

“You, Sterven, and Oorlog were always fools. War doesn’t demand genocide, Ziek. Death needn’t outpace life and sickness…”

“Spare me the lecture, Leven,” Ziek barked, his words breaking into ragged bursts. “Oorlog panicked. And if we didn’t snatch from the table, Sterven would’ve taken it all. The glutton.”

“This isn’t a lecture. Can’t you see the truth? You brought it upon yourselves — just as you tried and failed to force your sickness onto me.” Heat stirred in Leven’s veins, vitality blooming where weakness had been festering.

“You pick the bones clean!” Ziek doubled forward with a cough, spattering the snow. “Feed until the world is hollow! Everything around you lives, Leven! I can taint it. Take it from you!”

“You can’t.”

“Ziek, lord of sickness and pestilence, making empty threats again.” Leven stood, stretching his arms, casting off the fever as if it had never been. The sickness had been allowed to take root, nothing more than proof of Ziek’s presence — and now it no longer served him. He shook free the weight of his brother’s anger and the sickness he carried. “You really are ignorant. Incapable of seeing that things have changed.”

“All I see is my fifth-born brother, countless lives behind him, and his siblings’ blood on his hands!” Ziek spat the words, then choked, a string of saliva clinging to his chin.

“I didn’t kill them.” His voice dropped, tired of repeating it, worn down by the truth. “I just outgrew you.”

Leven’s eyes locked onto his older brother’s with unwavering certainty. He remembered Oorlog’s laughter like distant war drums, Sterven’s greasy breath as he devoured while others starved, Ziek’s endless coughs that carried pestilence into every room. They had defined the cycle once. Leven’s mouth twisted, a smile without joy, heavy with old bitterness. “Not anymore.”

Ziek felt it then — the balance tipping. Leven wasn’t yielding.

“You’re just the life-bringer, a reset button. Always returning. What do you mean you outgrew us? Without us, you would have no—”

Leven cut him off, pointing toward the pond and laughing softly. “If I create a carnivorous fish for the trout to fight, do I not become war? If the trout die, do I not become death?”

Ziek leaned forward, voice low and venomous, a wheeze catching at the end of each word. “You were never meant to stand alone. We destroy. You rebuild. That’s the order. Four to your one.”

Leven smiled faintly. “Order breaks, brother. It always does.”

“There’s only ever been one, Ziek. One horseman, with game pieces no longer needed.” Leven’s certainty rang out; Ziek realized he had walked into a trap that had been closing around him since he arrived.

Ziek coughed once, the sound ragged and hollow. The trap that had been closing since his arrival finally snapped shut, and his strength bled out — drawn into Leven’s steadied frame — until only silence remained.

Leven gathered what remained of Ziek’s clothes and laid them on the fire. They smouldered, then turned to ash. The smoke stung his eyes, the same wind that had once carried his brother’s sickness now blowing the taste of it back into his throat.

He rose, the snow crunching underfoot like shattered bones. “It ends here, Ziek.” The pond beyond the trees was already closing in the cold, as it had every night, as it always would. “As you said, I’m just a reset button.” A thin smile tugged at his lips. “Funny thing about reset buttons — they’re the only thing that matters in the end.”

The wind whispered across the frozen stream, and beneath the ice the water whispered too, just as it always had, just as it always would.