--- FORA, THE YEAR 781, THE FOURTH LIFE ---
“She looks just like her!” Illila squealed, pushing forwards and grabbing my face. She stretched it in all sorts of uncomfortable ways before nodding, “Yes, definitely.” She glanced back at Hivren, then focused on me again, “How the sparks did this happen? Are you sure you’re not just her daughter or something?”
I managed to retrieve my face after a bit, rubbing my cheeks with a scowl, “Illila, I think I would know if I was actually only eight.”
“But I wouldn’t, and that’s arguably more important here.”
My answer was cut off by Hivren, “She appeared last night in the snow, I checked and it looks like her tracks just came out of nowhere. There’s a shape like she was laying in the snow before that, and Illila, we made the building smaller since the road needed to be expanded. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly the spot where she died.”
I shrugged, “I don’t know how it works.”
Illila frowned, “Alright, but what if this little cretin is playing us? We all saw the corpse.”
“A corpse that mysteriously disappeared after three days.”
I raised my hand, “That was my corpse, just saying.”
Hivren glanced back at me, “I admit her personality is quite different now from what I’ve seen, it’s a lot closer to Foralen than Eliax.”
Illila grabbed my face again and squinted at it, “Well, it’s not an illusion, if that was ever in question.”
I raised my hand again, “You know, I could have told you that part too.”
Illila glared at me, “But if you are Eliax, there’s no way I can trust you to tell us everything.”
I looked down, “Good point…”
Illila nodded as if it was all resolved and glanced back at Hivren, “Is she going to stay here? I know your wife has her hands full with those kids you guys are mentoring.”
“Kureia claims that she’s fine with it for now. Fora will be staying here at least until we get all the documentation done.”
I grinned, “If you kick me out, I could probably hollow out a random section of earth and make an underground lair only accessible by portals!”
Hivren gave me a concerned look, “She has some weird tendencies too that I never saw in either Eliax or the hero.”
“That’s just my youthful charm shining through. It’s probably normal.”
“We’re not going to be calling any of… this,” He gestured at me, “Normal.”
I shrugged and went back to signing documents, “I can be as boring as dirt.” I paused mid stroke, “Scratch that, dirt is super cool, did you know that professional mind mages can detect thousands of tiny little critters in even a cup of the stuff?”
“So Fora’s going to try and be as discreetly cool as dirt then.” Hivren decided.
I nodded. “I’ll be cool on the inside and boring on the outside, just like dirt.” I finished the page and picked up the next one, squinting at it.
“Does anyone know how to brew an ‘age faster’ potion or something?” Illila idly wondered.
I shook my head, amused, “I’m not going to let you guys try that until being a kid again every time I die gets boring.”
Hivren gestured at me, “Like I said, she’s got some weird tendencies.”
---
The city of Reiaran was just as beautiful from above as I’d pictured it; which is to say, it was sparking ugly.
The docks on one side of the city marred the whole thing with their desolate nature—very few tuvei were about to get on a boat after all and many traders went to the central market to sell their wares. Mostly there were humans over by the docks, probably a few pitten too but I’d always been bad at telling them apart from humans, and the little pieces of me that were still Eliax hadn’t really been any better.
One end of the palace bordered the docks. It wasn’t nearly as desolate as it had been ten years ago, but I was confident in my ability to find at least one squatter there if I really looked. The richer district was on the opposite side of the city as the docks, bordering the palace, and the poorer district was sandwiched between them at the center.
The whole city had long since grown past the walls, farmland sprawling towards roads like a reasle to water. The middle class lived out there, coming into town every day for work or taverns.
I grinned at the city below me and twisted in the air with a yell of excitement as I continued to fall from the sky. Somewhere below, Kureia was probably horrified at this stunt, but she was so far away that she probably couldn’t even see me clearly yet.
I bent the space around me, slowing down my fall to a halt as gravity thought I was meant to be going the other way for a few seconds. I bounced around for a bit, moving the little pieces of the world I could see into various impossible shapes that had me whirring about in just as impossible directions. I didn’t just use my hands to bend the space either, my feet were bare, allowing me to shape it however I wished based on the magic I could see.
Sparks, that book Eliax had read so long ago was completely right, dimensionalists could fly if they really tried!
I bound the air together with streams of magic, feeling my energy start to drain faster as it formed a force shield below my feet and finally allowed me to step onto something solid. I grinned down at the world like a fool.
Force spells weren’t supposed to hold people, let alone be the only barrier between a person and certain death, but Gium’s ideals were simply a suggestion as far as I was concerned. He would probably be spitting blood right about now if he had any of the stuff. It was a wonder that he hadn’t blocked off any of these abilities from mortals, because even now I could think of plenty of ways to destroy his orderly dreams with this.
After a bit of recovering energy—maintaining a force spell was sufficiently easy to leave me suspended there—I dismissed the platform and shrank the distance between myself and the ground, stepping lightly onto soft soil that squished beneath my feet.
--
Kureia—the woman in charge of making sure I didn’t do anything stupid—was as unyielding as a rock; the really hard kind that had been underground for thousands of years. “What if you ran out of mana and fell out of the sky?” She chided me, “What if by doing things like that, you finally annoy the nobles enough that they finally decide to come and deal with you?”
They were all excellent points, and I only had an argument for one of them. “I wasn’t going to run out of mana, I’ve only done that once in the last few months and that was the incident with the hand cream.”
“Which was a disaster.”
“It was a learning experience.”
Kureia and I glared at each other for several heartbeats.
“I used to try and treat you like an adult, you know? Give you a say in things and let you decide how your life is going to go.”
I shrugged and looked away, “I know. But then I blew that trust up rather spectacularly. I thought I could handle it too. I mean, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to. But for some reason I… can’t.”
Kureia nodded to herself. “That makes me feel a lot less bad about what comes next then.”
I winced. “And that is?”
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“You’re going to stop fighting everyone about getting put into those classes.”
I gaped at her, “But I’m going great in my dimensionalism lessons!”
“That’s definitely not the only thing that matters.”
I glared, “Sure it is, if I want to figure out why I came back to life in the first place, I’m going to need to be able to get to other realms.”
“Despite the fact that no one has been able to do that within recorded history?”
I barely refrained from pointing out again that Aymiae had seemed like she knew a guy. “You already know my response so what’s the point in arguing about it.”
Kureia raised an eyebrow, “Really? So you won’t argue then and I can finally sign you up for some decorum classes?”
I threw my arms in the air, “How is self defense in any way a ‘decorum’ class?!”
“All ladies of the court know how to break a guy's nose on their elbow. It’s a rite of passage and I sure as heck am not going to be the reason you can’t.”
“That’s not what lady Raia always said…”
“That was nearly fifty years ago, by your own admission. How can you not want to learn combat? What if you go out one day and decide to galavant off monster hunting?”
I shrugged and stared stubbornly at my feet, that did sound like something I might do on a whim, I didn’t want it to be something I would do, I kept telling people that I was going to do better. “It doesn’t matter, you’re going to make me do it anyway.”
Kureia folded her arms crossly, which just reminded me of Aymiae again. Kureia was so similar to my old friend… “If you don’t tell me, then I’ll be operating under false information. Which one of those is worse?”
I stiffened, remembering weeks in a library as Eliax, searching for answers, remembering how much I hated lying to myself. “You are absolutely unfair.”
“And you’re acting like a teenager. Last I checked you should either be far too old for that or too young for it.”
I grumbled, trying to put my thoughts into words, why could I never explain things? After a moment I spoke, “I don’t want to learn how to fight. If I have to hurt someone then I think maybe I’ve already failed.”
“And how many times has that killed you?”
I remembered the fight with Xien, the way I’d hopped around through her attacks and awkwardly jabbed with that sword, eventually falling to her claws even though I’d almost won. I remembered the assassin the night of the queen’s ball, how I hadn’t even seen them coming. I remembered the scent of smoke and the sting of burns as I tried so hard to simply stay alive… “You’re not going to make me answer that, are you?”
“I already know what it is. I just need you to think about what that answer means. I’m getting you a fighting instructor tomorrow. I know that you can see why you need them.”
She was right, which only made it more infuriating. I glared at her and finally cast an almost instinctual teleport spell. When my vision cleared I sat down roughly, staring out at the ocean and thinking. After a moment I took out my journal and started writing, that part of me that was still Eliax giving me peace with the motions of pencil on page. I only managed a sentence, but that was enough.
I suspected that there were lessons I would have to learn again and again. I was right.
I sat on the secluded beach, the poisonous spores were long dead—I had no idea why—but the memory of their existence tickled my lungs. The only odd part would have been that my lungs wouldn’t have reviled against the experience as I expected them to. But there was no sandfrost here, not anymore. I wondered what had happened.
It was calm with the sounds of ocean waves crashing against each other in the background. I didn’t glance up when a familiar figure walked into view, I remained sitting, looking out at that sea and wondering why I cared so much about some simple combat classes. He sat beside me and followed my gaze.
“So? Are you finally going to leave it all behind? Go out into the world and change it like you always wanted?”
I shrugged, “A couple of months isn’t enough to get back all the instincts I lost. I thought it would be, but it’s not.”
“I think everyone’s surprised you’ve been sticking around this long. They think that even if you’re not Foralen, you’re still a prodigy at everything they can think of to throw at you.”
“Do you think that’s why those people stopped coming to see if I was real?”
The necromancer paused for a moment in thought, “No, I think the world figured out you were real after it got enough evidence. They stopped coming because it wasn’t a novel thing to do anymore.”
I grunted and stared down at the sand, “I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while, and I finally decided that it’s good that Hivren told everyone who I was.”
Niun gave me a curious glance, “It is?”
I nodded, “It proves that even with people knowing, they’re still going to treat me like a child. Now I know that there’s not anything I can do about that fact.”
Niun nodded slowly, contemplatively. There was a long silence as we both let our minds wander, “On a different note, I made some progress on that research you asked me about.”
The part of me that was Eliax glanced at him in surprise, “Really?!” She looked away just as quickly though, it was… weird to look at the people I’d known in my last life. A big section of my mind would always see Niun as the barely adult necromancer who’d been kicked out of school. His current look couldn’t be any more different from that. He was confident in his step, but his gaze betrayed a knowing look that only the right people would understand. Every part of his image was carefully cultivated.
“Yeah, it’s weird though since what you said holds up, every time I find out more about that dragon, the entire memory gets erased. I’ve had to reset my soul to the point before that seven times and the soul itself is already getting resistant to the reset process.”
Eliax nodded, remembering her own tries before she’d realized it was a soul effect. “What’s your progress?”
“Well, I figured he wouldn’t have much information besides maybe his name in the legends about abyssal dragons, and it does seem like learning about their abilities in general doesn’t have the same problems. Hivren would probably be a better person to send for information like this, he has a lot of influence that I don’t, but you did make it clear that Hivren is the very last person you’re going to agree to tell anything to.”
Eliax scowled, “Well yeah, he told the whole world that I came back from the dead.”
Niun nodded, “I know, his judgment about who is—and isn’t—an acceptable person to tell things is kind of spotty. Anyways, what are your thoughts?”
“Abyssal dragons…” She mused, “That’s a bit I never thought about looking into. Let’s see what we find.”
--
I spun through the attack, evading another swipe from my teacher. “You have to hit me back, remember?” Erane chided, “You’ll lose if you just play defensive the whole time.”
I glared at her, “I’m only here because—”
“Yes I know, Kureia made you.” The dryad-like-creature swiped at me again, and she would have landed the hit too if I hadn’t lost control of my affinity again and phased through it. She stumbled slightly at the disorientation of a strike missing even though it hadn’t missed, and frowned at me, “That’s no excuse for poor instincts.”
I sighed, “Why are we even doing this…”
The wooden creature glared at me with her one good eye, it looked as if she’d been carved of wood by a master, who’d given up entirely on the second eye, leaving nothing but natural bark in its place. “Because. You need to be able to defend yourself, and I need some sparking money.”
I happily sat down at that sentence, remembering from the last five times how she was likely about to start complaining again about some guy. I’d listened before, but now it was just getting annoying.
“—And then he just left me here! He went insane and just left me here, that sparking idiot! Did I mention he’s the stupidest human I’ve ever met?”
I nodded absently, resting my tired legs. Erane had made me run around a field for ten minutes before this, as was her habit for each lesson. I was a dimensionalist though, why in the world did I need to be able to sprint a whole mile at a moment's notice? “Yup.” I absently responded to something she was complaining about.
Erane nodded curtly and then whacked me in the face with her stick that vaguely resembled a sword.
I reeled backward, blinking up at her as I put a hand to my cheek and immediately started casting healing spells on the stinging sensation, “What was that for?!”
“You weren’t listening to what I was saying again. I’m surprised I managed to actually hit you.”
I scowled at her, belatedly standing up again.
“I’ve decided that I’m getting a nullification bubble.”
I scowled harder, “that’s…”
“Do you not want to know what to do if someone nullifies your ‘oh so powerful’ abilities?”
“Well yeah but…”
“Then you have to suck it up and figure out how to be a capable person without them.”
I was becoming more and more certain that that had been Kureia’s idea. It sounded exactly like the type of torture she might invent.
--
I couldn’t find Niun again, I hadn’t been able to find him for two months straight at this point, but he had said he was going to the capital to look into something he’d stumbled across, so I figured he was probably fine.
Something in the back of my mind didn’t like that thought, a piece of me I hadn’t looked at for months. Curious, I turned the thought over, frowning at the contents.
You said You would be different this time. That carelessness, that unthinking self deception. Is that really you? Didn’t you grow past that? Her stride became a bit straighter as she thought about it again, her eyes straying toward the library as her steps drew to a halt. I needed goals, didn’t I? She liked goals. So why was it so hard to think about more than just this moment right here? Why was it so hard to think about the implications her actions had on the world?
She was almost ten years old at this point, that should have been enough time to get back into who she was.
But it wasn’t.
It wasn’t nearly enough.
The moment faded and I shuddered slightly—hopefully—back to being myself after the momentary lapse. Eliax was still in there somewhere, peeking out whenever she got the chance. I shoved her back into the metaphorical box and kept walking.
I could hear a storyteller farther along down the street, her voice rising and falling with the beats of a tale. It was one of those legends from a far off place that no one had ever really heard of. I walked onward, my mind still reeling from my failures, dwelling on the thought that Eliax had drudged up.
And then I heard the word ‘realm,’ the storyteller paused momentarily in theatrics, glancing at me and then at the gathered crowd. And then she continued, “A tale from as far away as the realms of Prosperity and Sacrifice, Arendi and Arithren.”