Chapter 1: The Dying Prodigy
The wind slashed like a knife against Logan Ryan’s face, sharp and stinging.
He pulled his down jacket tighter around him. The scent of whiskey mingled with the bitter Arctic cold, filling his nostrils with every breath. Each step sank deep into snow that reached his knees.
The Arctic night was pitch-black, the cold gnawing at his bones. He had no destination. He only wandered aimlessly.
Logan halted, gasping. The white fog from his breath was torn apart at once by the savage wind. He pulled the last half-bottle of whiskey from his pocket, tilted his head back, and drank deeply. Fire seared his throat, yet deep in his chest, there was nothing but a frozen wasteland.
He flung the empty bottle aside. It vanished into the snow without a sound.
Just like him. Once the brightest rising star of English football, now faded into nothingness.
Logan had been a midfield prodigy, his passes precise as a surgeon’s scalpel. He burst onto the English scene at sixteen, hailed as the future heartbeat of the Three Lions. Flowers, praise, a golden future — all had felt within his grasp.
Then, at nineteen, the match-fixing scandal detonated like a carefully targeted bomb, shattering everything he owned.
The so-called evidence? A blurry clip, a few twisted bank records. The media screamed speculation, the public rushed to judge.
Worse still, during the investigation, he tore his anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and was forced off the pitch. The appeal process and his rehabilitation overlapped, crushing him until he could barely breathe.
The club distanced itself immediately. The termination letter was cold, utterly devoid of humanity.
What hurt him most was Samuel. Samuel Nolan — his childhood brother, his midfield partner, his other half on the pitch. Samuel had rushed to his apartment, grabbed him by the collar, and shouted: "I don’t believe it! Talk to me! We’ll get through this together!"
And what had Logan done? Drowned in rage and self-destructive despair, he had shoved that hand away and roared the words he would regret for the rest of his life:
"Get lost! This is none of your business! Stop pretending to care!"
The slam of the door still echoed in his head. After that, Samuel never came for him again.
His life spiraled downward. Drinking, drifting, wasting away. The feet that once wove magic on the grass now only carried him to bars. The world forgot him. He forgot himself.
Later, he bought a one-way ticket to Tromsø — the edge of the world.
He came to see the Northern Lights one last time, then to rest forever. To bury all his filth, regret, and failure in this pure, frozen land.
He lifted his gaze to the sky. Pitch black. He waited. Waited for the fabled Aurora, which legend says can carry lost souls to the beyond.
The wind grew wilder, as if sucking the last warmth from his bones. He curled inward. His consciousness began to fade.
And then — the sky exploded into light.
Not dawn. Countless streams of dazzling, flowing color tore through the black veil.
Green, purple, pink, white… weaving, coiling, rushing, streaming! The entire sky turned into a vast, dreamlike canvas.
The Aurora. The soul lights.
Logan froze. His hollow eyes, for the first time, beheld breathtaking colors — so beautiful he forgot to breathe.
Against this overwhelming beauty, his failures felt as tiny as a speck of dust.
He closed his eyes and lay back in the snow, waiting for the eternal cold to take him.
"Another broken soul…"
A voice echoed, not through his ears, but straight into his dimming mind — ethereal, otherworldly, resounding endlessly.
Logan’s eyes snapped open.
The swirling aurora gathered, twisted, and condensed before him… a translucent humanoid figure took shape, made of pure light, shimmering with stardust. It had no face, yet seemed to see everything.
An aurora spirit? A hallucination? His final moments?
"The chains on your soul weigh so heavy that even the Aurora Sea sighs." The voice came again, calm yet cutting straight to his very soul. "Tell me your three greatest regrets in life."
Logan’s lips were blue and trembling, unable to say.
But his heart roared. Images flooded his mind.
The frame-up that destroyed everything… the way he’d pushed Samuel away… and the golden trophy they’d once stared up at the stars and sworn to lift together.
"There is only one chance to turn back time," said the soul softly. "Not to change the past, but to repair the cracks in your soul."
"Gloria, you’re always too kind," another voice chimed in, also inside his head, but lighter and more mischievous.
A smaller, brighter wisp of pink-purple light split from the aurora and formed a second, tiny figure. She circled him playfully in the snow, the specks of light she scattered tinkling against the snow like ice crystals singing.
"Look, another mortal who turned his life into a tragedy. Regret, anger, self-destruction… the same old story." The little spirit flickered, as if rolling her eyes. "You’re going to give him another chance? I bet even if he goes back, he’ll still climb high and fall hard—maybe even worse. Human flaws are more stubborn than Arctic ice."
