Slippage by Lferion

Slippage

It was maddening, really, not to mention frustrating. To be treated on one hand like a legend, not a person, given awed looks and begged for tales of high deeds and wonders (and the tales they wanted bore scant resemblance to the actual things they purported to recount), and on the other (he wasn't thinking of hands. He was not) like — not as if he were an infant, precisely — but as some sort of fragile, incapable, unreliable or untrusted thing, a youth no older than the thirteen coronar he had been Returned, not someone who had lived near three thousand in that first life, managing any number of things now unthinkable hardship if not entirely unknown, by people who had not been alive at all when one died. Perhaps when this hroa was a hundred thirty years of the Sun, the nonsense might be forgotten, but it seemed depressingly unlikely at present, surrounded by persons little older than that, behaving as if they were 30 yeni instead. He would rather endure the Ice again, some days.

And none of it was helped by being wrapped around a core of aching, scoured, scorched, scalded emptiness where once one’s heart had been.