Where am I? Why is it so dark? What is this? Why do I feel so light?
I tried to move, but there was nothing to move. No body. No hands. No feet. No eyes.
And yet, I could still see.
All I felt of my own form was a presence, and I was shaking. Vibrating. Getting worse by the second.
Hck! Ugh!
Everything was pitch black. Tiny white dots drifted away in every direction like dust in a void. Watching them go was the only thing I could do.
In the distance, two blue lights appeared.
They drifted toward me. Slow. Unhurried. They stopped a short distance away and lingered in the dark.
Who is there?
Anyone?
Please help me. I'm so scared of this place.
A voice resonated. I didn't just hear it; I felt it vibrate through whatever I was.
"Rise and shine, my dear."
It echoed again.
"Rise and shine. Not that I wish to imply you have been sleeping too long."
I would have frowned if I had a face.
Who is this? Why is he talking to me like we've met before?
"No one is more deserving of rest. And all that effort, every last bit of it, would have gone to waste until..."
"Well. Let us say your hour has come again."
What? What effort? What hour are you talking about?
Did my words even reach him?
The lights shifted. Slit pupils formed at their centers, glowing a piercing cyan. They were eyes.
Then, a second pair tore open in the dark right beside the first, looking somewhere else entirely. Then more. Opening one after another, multiplying outward in every direction, at impossible angles, before vanishing just as fast.
Only the original pair remained, glowing in front of me.
Behind them, shapes began to materialize. Floating in the abyss.
Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Impossible to count. Children, toddlers, infants, young men, elders. Every single one of them drifting limply in the dark.
I assumed they were dead.
Mostly because they were mangled. Torn apart. Missing limbs. A grotesque gallery of gore suspended in the void.
"I have kept my eyes on you longer than I should have allowed myself."
What the hell are you talking about?
A heavy pause.
"Ah... I think that's more than enough for now."
The moment he said that, my form began to violently tremble.
Hkkkkkk
"So wake up. And smell the ashes."
H-Huh?
I shook so badly I felt like I was going to burst.
Hckkkkk! Gahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
I felt myself tearing apart as a blinding whiteness swallowed the dark.
Heat. Unbearable, suffocating heat. Why is it so HOT?!
Hot hot hot hot it's hottttttt—
My eyes snapped open.
Moving orange light, way too close. Something primal inside me screamed move before I could even process what I was looking at.
I jerked backward, my ass hitting something cold and flat with a hard thud.
I blinked.
Fire. A hearth fire. Right in front of my face.
I sucked in the hot air through a nose that felt weirdly small and clogged.
What just—where—what.
I looked down.
And down.
At my hands.
They were tiny. Chubby. Round at the knuckles with deep, soft dimples.
I turned them over. Turned them back. Five fingers each.
But the scale was fundamentally, impossibly wrong.
Wha... Is this even real?
I looked up. Then looked around.
Stone walls. Heavy wooden furniture. Gray morning light filtering through a couple of small windows.
The air smelled of woodsmoke and whatever was cooking, mixed with the distant sound of birds outside.
Everything looked ancient but meticulously maintained.
And it was... actually kind of beautiful?
The way the light hit the uneven stone floor. The texture of the wood. It was all too vividly real.
But...
Where am I?
A sound caught my attention. I whipped my heavy head toward it.
A woman. Standing across the room, staring right at me.
Black hair, bright blue eyes. Young—maybe roughly my age. Pretty, but in a completely ordinary, grounded way.
She said something. The words were complete alien gibberish, sounds that had absolutely no anchor in my vocabulary.
"Xxxx xxxxx xxx?"
She repeated those strange sounds. I just sat there, staring blankly.
Who is she?
She murmured something else, pressing a hand over her mouth like she was worried.
"Xxxx, xxxx."
Man, this is awkward. I couldn't do anything but stare at her like an idiot.
She took a slow step toward me, and for whatever reason, I flinched.
(Obviously because I suck at normal interactions with women.)
My back thumped against the leg of a chair.
I sat there, my heart hammering absolutely insane rhythms inside a chest that felt way too small.
I could feel the cold stone floor through what appeared to be...
I looked down.
Is this a nappy...?
I'M WEARING A NAPPY?!
My legs... They're chubby and tiny too.
Look at my feet. They have fat little baby creases on them.
I tilted my head back up at the woman, my eyes wide with sheer panic.
Somewhere in the back of my adult brain, a complete, rational sentence formed: Excuse me, who are you, where exactly is this place, and what country are we in?
What actually emerged from my mouth was:
"Awa—bwah—depwah."
I slapped both hands over my mouth immediately.
The woman crossed the room in a flash, scooping me off the floor like I weighed nothing.
She pressed me against her chest before I even had time to process my own humiliating baby voice.
She took one of my tiny hands, turning it over and checking it gently.
"Xxx xxxx xxxx xxx—"
Her voice was soft, repeating something soothing in that completely unknown language.
This is getting weirder by the second...
I sat rigidly in her arms, staring blankly at the stone wall over her shoulder with a deep frown.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
OOooookAYYYY.
I took a deep breath. Think. What is the absolute last thing I remember?
Oh. I think I got it.
I was at home. In my room. Then the couch.
I reached for my lighter, and then—
Ow...
Really...?
I remembered screaming in agony, and then everything went completely black. But why?
Why did something that just happened feel like a distant, foggy memory from a lifetime ago?
...does that mean I have—
The thought surfaced with terrifying calmness.
I buried my tiny face in my hands and shook my head furiously.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NONO.
Dead people don't feel anything.
This is a dream.
Obviously a dream.
This is just my brain coping. A stress response.
The pain was just part of the dream too.
But even so...
This was an incredibly convincing hallucination.
It's fine. I just have to wait it out.
She shifted my weight to her other side, resting my head against her shoulder as she kept talking softly.
Wow... haha... heh. This is deeply embarrassing.
To be held this closely by a woman my age.
But what really caught my attention was that she smelled nice.
Familiar. In a way that made absolutely zero sense, considering I had never met this woman in my entire life.
She pulled back slightly, looking down at my face, and asked a question I couldn't understand.
She held me like she knew me. Like this was completely normal.
Like I was her—
Oh.
I caught myself smiling, practically laughing at my own absurdity.
My escapist brain has watched way too many isekai anime. It's officially given up on reality and cooked up its own.
I'm dreaming that I killed myself in a fire and reincarnated as a baby in a medieval fantasy world of swords and magic.
I looked around the rustic room again.
Wow... my brain really went all out on the budget for this one.
I stared at my little hands, squeezed my eyes shut, and slowly opened them again.
Hm... Still here.
At that exact moment, the heavy wooden door swung open.
I turned my wobbly head to look.
A silhouette stood in the doorway.
Dark against the gray morning light outside. Tall, broad at the shoulders, completely backlit so I couldn't make out any features except the sheer shape of him, and—
—Two eyes.
Blue. Catching the light from some unseen angle.
Something twisted in the back of my head.
A feeling with no name. Like a word stuck on the tip of your tongue, or a dream that dissolves the second you try to remember it.
It was like I knew those eyes. I was almost certain I knew those eyes.
BUT FROM WHERE?!
The towering shape stepped into the room.
The light shifted across his face, and the piercing blue faded into an ordinary green—just a trick of the light. The rest of him snapped into focus.
Young. Mid-twenties, maybe.
Dark brown hair, a sharp goatee. Fit, but in the rugged, calloused way of a guy who does brutal physical labor, not a gym rat.
He looked completely unbothered by existence, carrying the easy comfort of a man walking into his own home on an ordinary morning.
He crossed the room to the woman without a single word.
And kissed her.
ON THE LIPS.
My baby eyes widened to the size of saucers.
OoOoO, this is a spectacular dream.
I mean—
I wasn't scandalized, exactly. But where I was from, this wasn't standard morning behavior in front of company. Or anyone, really.
People usually kept that kind of thing private.
Apparently, this guy didn't give a damn about those conventions.
He pulled back, murmured something to her, she replied in the same easy tone, and then he turned his attention to me.
He plucked me out of her arms, and before my tiny brain could even process the transfer, I was pressed against his broad chest.
His face zoomed toward mine and—
Ow ow ow, stop it man!
Spiky beard. Everywhere. Scraping against both my cheeks in a rapid-fire assault of kisses that felt like being scrubbed with coarse sandpaper.
I shoved both my tiny hands against his face with every ounce of strength my baby arms possessed.
Goddamn you, GET OFF MY FACE!
He pulled back slightly, completely unfazed, and said something to the woman with a tone that was undeniably smug.
He kept me tucked against his chest, turned toward the wall, and stopped in front of a tall mirror.
I looked.
A baby looked back.
Green eyes. Dark brown hair. Round cheeks carrying that specific, untouched softness of a creature that had never experienced the harsh outdoors.
Probably not even a year old.
Is... is that me?
Ha... I look like a—like a little European kid.
I raised one hand slowly. The baby in the glass raised one hand.
I opened my mouth. The baby opened its mouth.
I moved my head side to side. The baby mirrored me perfectly.
The man rumbled something from above me, clearly finding my existential crisis hilarious.
"Xxxx, xxxx."
By the time he carried me back over, the woman had set plates on the wooden table.
He sat down, propping me effortlessly against his thick arm, while she sat across from us.
It didn't take long, just watching them exist in the same space, to understand the dynamic.
Aha... So that's how it is.
This guy is supposedly my father.
These two are a couple. Probably married.
The meal came and went. Whatever mush she had cooked was surprisingly delicious.
I was hungrier than I expected, and somewhere between the second and third spoonful, my brain just completely shut down.
By the end, I was full. Beyond full.
The crushing weight of a heavy meal sitting inside a tiny body that apparently ran entirely on two settings: food and sleep.
I'll figure this out after—bwah...—after a nap, of course.
Funny how I can feel sleepy in my own dream...
The man stood up, said something low, kissed the woman, and then pressed those sandpaper lips to my cheek one last time before heading out the door.
It only took a few moments before I heard it. A sound rumbling from beyond the walls. Growing louder by the second.
Heavy. Massive. The rhythmic thud of something enormous dragging serious weight across the dirt.
And underneath that thudding was a low, guttural vibration—the kind of sound that only comes from the throat of an apex predator.
I went completely, terrifyingly still.
The woman didn't even blink. She kept clearing the table with the unbothered efficiency of someone who had heard that exact nightmare every single morning of her adult life.
What the hell was that?!
She scooped me up, settled me against her chest, and started to rock me slowly.
Which, again—
—is profoundly awkward for someone my mental age.
But she kept rocking, humming, until my eyelids turned to lead.
Yeah.... ye...eah. I'll figure it out.
Bwah...
After the nap. I'll figure everything out after the—
My eyes slid shut, and I fell under.
When I opened my eyes again, it was dark. And deeply familiar.
I was on the—
THE COUCH.
My couch. My living room.
The muffled hum of the street outside. The stale smell of my own apartment.
The cigarette slipped from my lips as I jolted awake, and I snatched it out of the air just before it burned my shirt.
I sat there, chest heaving, breathing hard.
"...heh. So it was a dream after all."
I stared at the lighter in my trembling hand. I put the cigarette back between my lips.
Something felt profoundly wrong in the air.
But I flicked the lighter anyway.
Tick.
And the entire world tore apart.
Heat and blinding light exploded in every direction at once.
I was screaming, and the screaming had no end.
"MOM, DAD! SOMEONE HELP ME! HELPPP PLEASEEEE—GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Screaming uselessly as I felt every muscle in my body begin to melt.
Fire forcing its way down my throat, incinerating my lungs with every agonizing breath.
The transition happened in the blink of an eye.
One second, I was burning alive in absolute agony, and the next second, I wasn't.
But the phantom damage lingered. The trauma burned deep.
I was back in the complete, formless dark. No light, except for—
Two blue lights.
Staring right through me.
The voice echoed from the void.
"Rise and shine."
A heavy pause.
"Rise and... smell the ashes."
My eyes snapped open with a sharp, high-pitched scream of pure panic. A child's scream.
I was lying on something soft. I scrambled to sit up, my tiny chest heaving as I frantically looked around.
It was the same room. The same medieval architecture.
I looked down.
My hands were small. Chubby.
I slapped them against my face. No facial hair. Soft cheeks.
WHY AM I A BABY AGAIN!!????
The heavy wooden door burst open, revealing the same woman.
Her face was etched with raw panic. She sprinted across the room, snatching me up and rocking me desperately against her chest.
I looked over her shoulder. I looked at the walls. I looked at my own tiny hands.
Things were getting terrifyingly realistic, and infinitely worse by the second.
WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE?!