“Tel’am, you won’t believe it!” Liliana rushed inside the house, carrying her baby excitedly.

“What happened, Lilin? Is Edrie alright?” Tel’am asked, confusing his wife’s excitation with preoccupation. He quickly rose from the sofa and approach her with worry.

“He talked, Tel’am!” Liliana grabbed Edrie in her arms and raised him to Tel’am’s face. “He talked to me!”

“Lilin, I know it can be exciting to be mother, but Edrie is a week old. Babies only talk after months at minimum, normally years.” Tel’am explained calmly with a short sigh, his worry wasted. “Maybe you heard him babbling nonsense.”

“No, no. He talked.” Lilin looked at her son. “Come on, Edrie. Talk to daddy like you did before.” She shook Edrie from side to side happily.

“Lilin, I told you are-“

Edrie interrupted Tel’am. “-El’anaaaah.” He repeated exactly like in the market.

“…” Tel’am stood still for a couple of seconds processing. “For the High Arcanist, Edrie talked!”

“I know!” Lilin said as excited as her husband, doing little hops on the spot as if she was the child in the room. “Our little boy is a genius!”

“We could have an arcanist in our family, darling!” Tel’am was rejoiced, his calm expression had worn off and had been replaced by a warm one.

“I know, I know!” Lilin said while playing with little Edrie.

“El’anah!” Edrie replied as excited as them, though the child’s eyes betrayed a glint of exasperation.

I was between the sword and a hard place; I did something that I shouldn’t have done and instantaneously regretted it. In a moment of weakness, I had spoken in order to cease my boredom. A week I had survived without screwing something up. It was truly pathetic; I had convinced my mother to buy me the book so I could withstand the boredom of being a newborn without firstly thinking of the consequences.

I was ashamed of myself.

My mother was incredibly excited, and she rose me in the air before my father. There were two options, playing dumb and ignoring the situation, or descend into the rabbit hole. The most sensible option was the former, yet I couldn’t hold myself to talk before my father. Though the resulting situation was comical in nature, that wasn’t my intention.

After the stroll on the market, I was overwhelmed by the culture around me, I wanted to learn. Yet I didn’t even know the language yet. And I was also incredibly bored. I decided to blame my stay on the river for my lack of patience —as it had eroded all of it— instead of my lack of willpower.

After the couple calmed down, we had lunch. Well, they had lunch, I was breastfed. Their food looked appetizing, but not enough that I wanted to jump to the table and eat it. It was a kind of salad. Nothing extraordinary, yet it looked so good. I could recognize the bedding as lettuce, and some cherries spaced around, but everything else was beyond me.

While they were finishing their lunch, I took a nap. Baby stamina was horrific. Every action drained my force viciously. And the stroll was long enough that after being fed I was left out of combat.

When I woke up, I remembered the scene from before. They were really happy that I talked so soon, yet they wanted me to crawl from day one. Is elven physiology this different from my unknown standard? Maybe their bodies develop faster than their brains, though that’s the opposite idea I would have from your average elf.

Mother noticed I was awoke and she let me out of the magical baby crib. Now that I think about it, the only magical things I saw were the crib and elves, nothing more. And elves could theoretically be explained by genetics. Well, blue and violet skin should be possible, right? What I want to say is that I want more magic.

I was taken to the mountain of pillows that were at the corner of my room. There, mom sat with me and took out the book. Really, mother? Isn’t this a bit too soon? I won’t refuse a book, but I am a ‘baby’ that just woke up. Surely this is too much for a baby to handle, don’t you think? The “useless” parents theory was growing stronger by the second.

I discarded the fact once again for ‘elven culture’ or something along those lines. If she didn’t have a problem and neither did I, then what was the problem?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Edrie, rem’il fun ter nit.” She said as she presented the book in front of me. The only thing I could recognize from the phrase was my own name and nothing else. I felt like a pet being called by its owner, which to be honest, isn’t that far from the truth.

I put my palms on the book. It wasn’t to prevent the book from slipping, just an act to appear cute. Got to maintain my façade.

The simplest image from the children’s book was a tree. This wasn’t a common green leaves, brown trunk; but one like the market. Pink leaves, ashen trunk. Hmm… I seemed to gain a bit of insight from what was typical were I lived. I should investigate if there are these type of trees in this world in the future. Maybe I’m from this world and I can’t recall neither the colored elf nor magic from my memory for some reason.

Good job, Edrie. Keep adding useless theories to your endless pile of questions.

Huh, I’m actually thinking to myself with my name. This counts as progress, right? I don’t know what progress that would be, but progress is progress, I guess.

A problem arose as I looked at the word written below the ashen tree drawing. It wasn’t something I could recognize exactly. I supposed that elven writing was alphabetic, from what I heard from my parents’ conversation.

No. It may be alphabetic now that I think about it. It’s just that the characters are a bit complicated. A mash between runic and Aramaic, mayhap? What is Aramaic by the way? The flowery writing was complex, not something an infant would be able to understand. Even then, I could clearly notice instinctively that the book had greatly simplified the writing.

I signaled the tree, trying to get the pronunciation from mother.

“Fir tol’ni terven, Edrie.” I looked at her with a confused face. “Terven, Edrie. Terven.” Mom pointed at the tree as I did. Huh, I almost understood the whole sentence without knowing the language. Man, context is really a lifesaver.

Terven, though. Now I had a question. Was elven language phonetically constant? By that I meant if the letters coincided with the pronunciation, or maybe some specific syllables created new sounds. That would mark my difference between learning the language in months or years.

“So’ni tor felni.” Now she pointed at a flower. It wasn’t one I recognized, though the colors weren’t as alien as the trees. With an aquamarine stem and purple petals, it was both strange, yet familiar.

Felni… These words are a tad bit difficult for a baby. I looked at more as a way for asking for more. She replied with a next word.

“So’ni tor eflol.” She circled her finger around the picture of a river. Hey, at least the water was blue. That wasn’t really news as I had already seen them in the plentiful canals across the city.

I let her continue without interruption.

“It so’ni fir…” She paused for a moment. It seems she was looking for an easier word. “Ah!” She exclaimed as she found one. “So’ni tor apal, Edrie. Apal.” She repeated as her finger tapped a wooden boat.

Apal, huh. This word was easy enough. Appropriate. “Aah-pal” I said. I also recognize the word chain “so’ni” that she had used for the last sentences. Extrapolating from context alone, I suppose it means “it is” or along those lines.

I heard an extremely high-pitch scream come from her. The one someone would make when scarred or a squeaky mouse. Not going to lie, I was scared by it. She did shout aloud behind me, after all.

“Fir en tir’tel pot as, Edrie?” Mother asked if I could repeat it once more. Or it felt like that.

“Aapal” I corrected my pronunciation a bit now. It was surprisingly difficult to control how much air I was expelling with my mouth when talking.

She squeaked once more. Yes mother, I understand your happiness. Could you not break my ears now? Mother didn’t seem to care as she grabbed my tiny fat hands and moved them back and forth. I should stop doing such un-baby things for the moment. Though now that I had half my body deep in mud, I couldn’t just not talk from here on out.

I cooed with her and she continued our little dance a while more. Or more correctly, she pulled my arms up and down in frenetic yet slow movements. It felt oddly familiar.

We didn’t stop there. I wanted to read more. I was bored, yes. But that wasn’t bad. I had stayed a long time floating in the River of the Damned. This was a cakewalk. The problem was that missing conversations infuriated me a lot. Yup, I was bored by the thing I made this whole ordeal about to not be bored. Call me a hypocrite, but damn, this was a slow process.

I wanted to understand. I may have forgotten my previous life, so I must equilibrate the balance by doing the most I can in this new one. Haste would be greatly appreciated to lighten the process.

Stupidly enough, we finished the twenty-page long book in a few hours. There weren’t many easy words to pronounce for a newborn. An infant? Sure. Newborn? Certainly not.

“Fir ten funen del man’ti fol, Edrie?” Mom asked me.

I couldn’t make sense of the phrase. But I think, using context, it was along the lines of “did you like it?” or “do you want another one?”. This was the greatest stretch I had made by far when trying to understand the elven language. I could affirm that the sentence was a question some things were just universal.

Either of those hypothetical question’s answer was yes. But the latter interested me more. I did want more and more books. I could’ve known the meaning of the question if the book itself contained the word book. Quite ironical eh, the learning book doesn’t contain the word book in it.

In retrospective, mother probably said ‘book’ before when we started reading, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the memory. Whoever said babies had good memory, lied.

What was left of the afternoon was spent playing with my mother. I took some giggles out of it, but I wasn’t really rejoiced by it. I didn’t like being treated like a child, but I didn’t have much of an option. The least I could do was to make this time as light as I could and take some good memories out of it. I wouldn’t like recalling myself when I’m older as a sad baby that wasn’t happy and was bored all the time.

As night approached, I was left to levitate in my magical cradle. The book was left on the desk, at my sight, yet unreachable thanks to the crib’s magical light walls. My mother may not know it, but she really did spread salt on the injury.