“Just a little longer, Briar. You’re almost there-!”

A scream of pain jolted Everie out of her slumber. To her shock, she realized she had skin! And flesh, and bones... She tried to turn her head, and to open her eyes, but her body felt so... sluggish. It was such a stark contrast to the constant state of physical perfection Everie used to keep her old body in that the immediate dissonance felt jarring.

She stilled. Wait; that had been a woman’s scream - something she hadn’t heard in what felt like years. And the other voice as well; it sounded male - an otherwise soft baritone, undercut by a sharp accent. Everie strained her mind, trying to think of every language she had learned in her tenure with the cult, but she eventually found she’d never even heard of whatever language its bearer was speaking in.

She struggled. Her limbs, which felt oddly... small, twitched, then spasmed, a jolt of electric vigor running through her veins like circuits.

Had she been returned?

The very thought, for a brief second, stopped her flailing. The Crying Demon had cast her into what it had called the ‘Soul Confluence’. Everie knew enough about what a Soul was supposed to be from the least of the cult’s teachings she had absorbed, as well as the sermons she’d overheard while tracking targets among the clergy, to understand what that implied.

A strange force pulled on her; it was similar to a suction, but much more intense, and tight. Everie felt like her bones were being crushed into their sockets. Then she was sliding, sliding, sliding out of a tube, and there was light at the end of the tunnel...

“It’s a girl, my Lord!”

The sensation of fresh, spring air, cold, and so utterly foreign to Everie, caught her off guard. A startled yelp escaped her, the intense shivering almost electrocuting her mind. Her mouth opened wide, revealing... bare gums? Then a nascently guttural noise escaped her throat, and she was crying.

Crying?

“Shh, shh, child.”

An inexplicable warmth washed across her, which calmed her nerves slightly. Her mind, however, was already spinning; crying was not something that Everie did. The four Priests that had run the Grey Wastes branch of the Zabaniya had made sure of that. From birth to death, the Sisterhood was taught not to express emotion - because there should be nothing for them to express emotion for, aside from the glorious exultation of their lord.

She tried to restrain herself, but her muscles felt just so weak. Like they’d never been used before... which, now that she thought about it, was actually the case now.

Son of a bitch.

Belatedly, Everie cracked open her eyes - her new eyes - permitting her untested ocular nerves to absorb glorious, glorious light for the first time in this particular existence.

Whatever the Crying Demon had done to her had reincarnated her.

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Reincarnation was a strange concept for Everie. To her, death had always been just that - death.

Death was the only present she had given, and known. It was the end to a story; the fact that it could be a gateway to another felt paradoxical. It didn’t make sense.

Though, she mused, with all that’s happened over the past few... how long has it been? Nothing makes sense anymore.

She chuckled, though it came out more as a gurgle. Truth be told, Everie didn’t really know what to expect from any of this. She’d let herself be dragged into the cathedral that day, thinking that would be the end of it. Instead, Everie had been privy to more after her death than she ever had been before.

Hell - Hell was a thing. Souls were a thing. Gods - or at least, things close to it - were a thing. The memory of that white… thing still send shivers down her spine.

And they wanted her. Or at least, the thing that had been embedded in her soul. It was still there, only now lodged somewhere in her abdomen - the significance of that, she still didn’t really understand.

And the Crying-Demon. What had that been about? For what little she knew about demons, it had been uncharacteristically friendly to her. It had saved her from the throes of nonexistence, which was a great deal more generous than what most of the people she had met throughout her previous life had seen fit to grant her.

Everie sighed. That’s a question that I’ll probably have to wait to find the answers for. More importantly...

She stared at the face of the woman, who still cradled Everie in her arms. She was an eerily beautiful person; her aquiline features strangely complemented her soft, ghost-pale features well, although Everie suspected that was hardly natural. Dark circles framed her eyes, which pitch-black, accented with gold flecks.

Everie had thrashed around in an incredulous panic for a bit at first; unfortunately, the physical activity had proved too much for her newborn body, resulting in her now enervated, immobile state.

It seemed that for the immediate future, though, she was safe.

Everie blinked. Her eyes were discomfitingly difficult to open. Was this how all newborns felt, when they were first born? Everie didn’t understand how she’d managed to bear this torture the first time ‘round.

Her eyes widened. She strained her facial muscles, but looking at her... mother, triggered some unfamiliar reaction in her.

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No. No, this is demeaning. Stop-

She smiled, and gurgled. Everie would have faceplanted right then and there, had she possessed the requisite muscular mobility to do so.

To her surprise, her mother blinked. She hadn’t looked particularly comfortable holding her, Everie realized. Were all mothers like this?

Everie wouldn’t know. None among the Sisterhood had mothers.

Then, a small, weary smile crept across the woman’s lips. She leaned down to kiss her forehead, which Everie reluctantly acquiesced to.

The woman then withdrew, presumably to talk to the other people standing in the room. There was a man, who Everie assumed was her father, standing nearer to the corner of the room. Everie couldn’t see much of him from her vantage, but she nonetheless barely managed to construe that he was a tall man - probably well over six-feet, just from her rough analysis - of moderately slender features, although the way he carried himself belied a... heavier strength. He also had a crop of gentle purple hair, and from the looks of it, the same-colored eyes; only unlike her mother’s, these were flecked with violet sparks.

They sounded like they were arguing about something in that language Everie couldn’t understand. Everie scowl- pouted, frustrated. So she cast her gaze across the rest of the room.

The interior of the house was nothing short of decadent. The entire residence - or at least the part of it she had seen thus far - was built out of some black, lacquered wood, detailed on every inch with what looked like some sort of extremely expensive filigree. It was also a type of architecture Everie was entirely unfamiliar with; seldom in the cities nor the wastes did one see so much elegance.

There was that doctor, too; he was dressed in a suit and had graying hair. However, his sharp features and hawkish nose, complemented with a pair of spectacles, made him look more like a middle-aged man made of sterner stuff.

He had bowed to her father and mother, before packing up his medical equipment and striding straight out of the room. Two girls dressed in maid uniforms approached the side of her mother’s bed - the first holding a cup of tea, while the other quietly moved to dispose of a basin that had been placed on the side of the four-poster.

Maids? Everie frowned. I’ve been reborn into an obscenely wealthy family, haven’t I?

None of this resembled any part of the world she knew. And for some odd reason, Everie felt certain this was a... new world, if that even made sense. She didn’t see any clergy, nor demon-worshiping priests. She didn’t understand the language they were speaking. Besides, if this was still her old world, then she was likely screwed.

Everie sighed. There was so much she didn’t know, but like before, there was nothing much she could do about... any of this, aside from planning. It was interesting how, despite occupying a child’s brain, her consciousness appeared to show no signs of degradation; it was likely, then, that her new neurological makeup had completely replaced her original cognitive framework.

Then that gave her some advantage. Everie settled into her mother’s arms, and felt the woman press her closer to her chest. She felt contemplative: for the first time, she had time to spare. She had-

Everie yawned. It seemed having a developed brain, however, wasn’t going to stop her from feeling tired. Infants, Everie remembered, half delirious in fitful lethargy, slept more than her old schedule would have possibly allowed for her to.

She was half about to fight the wave of enervation, but Everie stopped herself before she could do anything… irrational. Whether she liked it or not, she was a child now. As much as she hated to admit it, satisfying the needs of her biology came first.

So, she slept.

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Two weeks later, and her life remained utterly monotonous. Everie didn’t have very many memories of being an infant, and none at all of her original parents, so she supposed all of this was technically a new experience. Her activities mainly consisted of: waking up, crying, eating - some sort of shapeless gruel - and thrashing around for a bit.

The biggest incident of note had been when her new mother had tried to suckle her. Everie had no idea what she was expected to do, so she had simply bitten as lightly as possible; and then when that didn’t work, she bit down harder, causing the woman to yelp and drop her.

Oddly enough, Everie still felt a degree of contrition for that. The woman hadn’t deserved such treatment, but it was the sort of thing Everie would have usually paid little heed to.

Her... father was nowhere to be seen, and had been so ever since his - what Everie guessed to be - argument with her mother. He had looked wealthy and of considerable import just from the way he dressed, so Everie supposed it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he was simply off carrying out business of some sort.

Everie frowned. There’s more to it than just that, isn’t there? She sighed, shifting under the velvet covers of her bassinet.

Everie paused.

I wonder how the Sisterhood is doing.

She lifted one stubby hand and put it on her forehead, exhaling.

The last thing Everie remembered of going on in the cathedral was it collapsing because of that rift. The soldiers and other faithful the priesthood had gathered for her execution were likely dead, but Everie knew there was at least one alternate, closer entrance that the Sisters could take into the building, that led directly to the outside.

It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that at least some of them had survived.

Everie clenched her fists. Well, their fate is out of my hands, now.

She lay there in silence, listening to the wind whistle outside her room. It was mostly bare, occupied by only a four-poster similar to that of her mothers and a bare desk. Amenities Everie guessed were for her to use in the future.

They were all luxuries the likes of which Everie had never known. So why did she still feel disgruntled?

Everie knew the answer. It’s because I’m bored.

Well. Perhaps boredom was an inadequate descriptor. A more accurate analysis would be that she felt... lost.

After all, everything she’d known - and what little she’d loved - had disappeared, at least based on how the flow of time had felt for her, in basically a scant few days. Now she was a child in some unfamiliar world with the knowledge that she was being hunted.

Everie hated that feeling. She knew it all too well, after all; that sensation of being trapped, knowing that one small move could destroy oneself. And she was still uneasy about her current physical weakness. Everie knew that it was no small boon that whatever the Crying-Demon had done to her had prevented any sort of mental infirmity upon her reincarnation, but that only meant she had retained her skills and knowledge. For so long, her body and intellect had been the two tools she had leveraged to climb up the ranks of the Sisterhood. They were the two pristine pillars that had allowed her to survive for so long.

And now, one of them is gone.

It’ll be back in time, Everie reminded herself. But it still felt wrong.

Still, she had been born with a great many advantages in this life. At least Everie hadn’t been reincarnated as a peasant, or, god- forbid, some puny insectoid, or maybe a gelatinous invertebrate. And there was that... fragment the Crying-Demon had given her. It still pulsated in her abdomen, though it felt slightly different from before. It almost felt more solid - as if something her body was absorbing was giving substance to it. There were secrets about this new life for Everie to unlock yet - though what exactly those secrets would entail she was still uncertain of.

Then her bedroom door opened with a creak, jolting Everie out of her reverie.