‘What a strange dream.’ She thought as she drifted through the darkness.
She felt herself slowly forming a body.
Her heart began to beat.
Her head, arms, and legs formed, and remained tightly curled into her still-forming body.
Her brain started growing.
She felt her organs growing and differentiating.
It felt like it took years before she was fully formed.
Her body became thicker and larger.
Bones and muscles formed and filled the frame of her body.
She could feel the warmth of her mother and the energy flowing into her womb to keep her healthy and growing strong.
Love.
She felt her mother’s love so strongly.
As she grew, she could feel her mother’s hands caressing her through her belly.
The dream seemed to last forever.
Time stretched on as she grew.
She felt her scalp itching as her hair began to grow.
Her body thickened and grew fat.
She could feel the fat forming around her legs, feet, arms, hands, and belly.
Her mother caressed her through her belly while her body slowly became too large for her womb.
She felt the barrier of her body press against her mother’s womb.
Her body curled tightly as she continued to grow.
She felt her growth begin to slow.
Her body now stretched the womb to full capacity.
She felt comforted by it.
The warmth and love keeping her safe and protected.
As time grew on, her body became restless.
More and more she felt the need to stretch out.
She kicked against her confinement.
Her body cycled into periods of restlessness and sleep.
Finally, she could feel her mother’s body beginning to tremble.
The space around her became tight as the muscles of her mother’s abdomen contracted and relaxed.
She felt herself being pushed by the muscles into an even smaller space.
Suddenly the contractions became violent.
She felt the muscles undulate and quake as her head was pushed against a much-too-small space.
After spending so long forming, it felt as if time had suddenly sped up.
It was all happening so fast.
The muscles contracted around her and squeezed.
She felt her head being squeezed tightly.
The muscles around her contracted even more violently.
The space around her head became even tighter.
She felt coolness on the top of her head.
She didn’t like it.
The trembling muscles surrounding her became even more violent as the space around her became tighter and tighter.
She felt herself being squeezed on every side.
Finally, the space around her was squeezed so tightly that her head was pushed through the much-too-small space.
Her head was suddenly free.
The rest of her body followed quickly after.
Her body stirred as it felt cool air for the first time.
Something thumped against her and she felt her lungs contract.
She was suddenly aware of her need to breathe.
She coughed and sputtered as the liquid that filled her lungs emptied itself through her mouth and nose.
She took her first breaths.
Air entered her lungs for the first time as she began to awaken to her own consciousness.
What was happening?
Her eyes opened and light poured into her vision for the first time.
She could barely see.
All around her was fuzzy and discolored.
‘This is a strange dream.’ She thought to herself.
She felt her body being pushed against her mother’s warm body.
The warmth comforted her against the cool air.
She became increasingly aware of her own body.
The physical touch awakened her senses and she noticed that she could hear and smell.
‘Strange dream.’ She thought again.
Arms wrapped tightly around her and for the first time, she felt hunger.
Sudden awareness of the need for nutrients and the emptiness of her own stomach filled her with waves of distress.
She was keenly aware of the sensitivity of her body as it suddenly felt so many new things for the first time.
She felt her mother’s nipple tickling the edge of her lips and could smell the thick nourishing milk within.
She was suddenly aware of her own desire to drink.
All the while, she felt herself awakening more and more to her own consciousness.
She noticed that she could consciously control her body.
She became aware of the unused muscles of her fingers and toes.
She latched on to her mother’s breast and felt the sudden spurt of warm milk filling her mouth as her body demanded more.
She suckled hungrily from her mother and all her memories poured and as her consciousness clarified.
She suddenly remembered her past life with complete clarity.
She remembered what happened.
The strange child.
The selection process.
Growing in the womb.
Her birth.
All of it became a clear and certain reality as she became keenly aware of herself.
Her bleary vision remained out of focus as she attempted to blink away the haze.
She was fully aware of the physical contractions of her eyelids and the small strains of moving her limbs.
She kicked her legs out experimentally.
She could definitely feel that.
She stretched out arms and felt them drop.
She was keenly aware of the pull of gravity preventing her from floating.
She should feel the suppleness of her mother’s breast and taste all the subtle undertones of her mother’s milk.
She distinctly heard voices and speech.
She could not hear well.
She became increasingly aware of her physical limitations.
‘This can’t be real.’ She thought to herself.
Her mind searched for answers as her stomach filled with fluid and she felt her mother’s warm hands caressing her.
She looked up at her mother through bleary vision.
She could not see much.
She reached up at her mother to feel her face and her mother leaned into her touch.
She could feel that her mother was beautiful.
Too beautiful.
Her face seemed almost perfect.
There was not a single blemish or bump on her skin.
Her face was dainty with prominent cheekbones.
Every aspect of her face seemed perfectly symmetrical.
Symmetrical to an inhuman degree.
Her ears were long and pointed.
She hesitated.
She checked again to make sure.
She reached toward her own ears.
Her unused muscles protested her command for movement.
Her mother cooed at her and began brushing her fingers over her ears.
She could feel her mother’s hands tracing the shape of her ears.
She could hear the vibration as the added stimuli sent an awareness of the shape of her own ears to her brain.
She had pointed ears.
Her ears were long and pointed.
She could hear them.
She felt delicate muscles around her ears pushing and straining as her mother’s gentle touch coaxed her body into further awareness.
She became aware of other smells and sounds.
Her vision began to crystallize as her mother wiped the thick fluid of her womb off her face and the muscles began to work.
She could see.
She could see colors and define distinct shapes.
Her vision came into focus as her eyes continued to grow used to the outside world.
Her eyes not only worked well, they worked better than they had before.
She could see with absolute clarity.
She could see the space around her and her mother’s face.
She could see the love and warmth of her mother's gaze.
She could also see that her eyes were a deep shade of red, something like burgundy.
She noticed she could see more colors than before.
Her eyes could see distinctions between the various shades of dark red that made her mother’s eyes so beautiful.
As she stared into them, she saw that they were in fact a fabulous swirl of incredible complexities.
She could see hundreds of different distinctions of red within a spectrum that her human eyes would have seen as perhaps two or three different shades.
Her mother had dark brown skin.
It was a rich, incredible shade of brown.
Not a symphony of color like her eyes.
It was a single, perfectly consistent shade of brown that seemed to be perfectly balanced.
Her human eyes might have called it dark golden-brown but there was no word in her current lexicon to describe the specific color.
It shone with inhuman beauty.
Her mother’s hair was a fabulous and bright array of colors within the spectrum that she once might have called violet, it shone like spun jewels.
Thousands of different colors, shades, and tones within the space of what she might before have seen as a single spectrum.
Her eyes could distinguish each individual strand of hair.
Her mother began to sing to her, as she sang, she became increasingly aware of the fluid in her ears beginning to flow out.
Her ears unclogged and her hearing suddenly sharpened into incredible clarity.
She could hear the shape of the room around her, she could even hear the shapes of the various objects in the room.
Her brain built an audiographic picture of the room purely from the the sounds of her mother’s voice bounced against them.
Echolocation.
She could also hear what the shapes around her were made of..
Her mother’s voice bounced off every object in the room, providing her with a clear picture of the people in the room as well.
They all seemed to be women.
There were five of them in the room.
They were all naked.
Her neck muscles were still too frail for her to turn her head to see any of them but she got the distinct sense they were all related.
There was one woman in the room who seemed like she might be older, the information she received from her ears gave her the distinct impression of having wrinkles around her face.
They surrounded her mother with what sounded like looks of love and caring.
They seemed to look at her with pride.
Even something that might have been hope.
‘This does not feel like a dream but also it can’t possibly be real.’ She thought to herself.
Then she remembered a very important lesson from her previous life:
‘Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left must be the truth.’
She had to test whether or not she was dreaming.
She had already confirmed that everything she was experiencing certainly felt real.
It felt more real than anything she had ever experienced before.
Her eyes saw with a clarity she never would have dreamed of, and her ears delivered a level of pitch and sound perfection she might have only hoped to ever experience.
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She could sense touch clearly and hear her mother sing, she could feel the warmth of her body and all of its subtle curves and muscles.
Under normal circumstances, she would conclude she must have been experiencing objective reality.
This time there were several obstacles to reaching such a conclusion.
Firstly, she was apparently a newborn elf girl.
Second, everyone around her was also apparently an elf.
She did not have a problem with either of these potential realities per se, the problem was that they were the sorts of things one would normally experience in a dream.
She had no issues with the concept of reincarnation and the idea that there were other worlds with other life forms beyond what she had experienced seemed fantastic but also perfectly plausible.
It was just very unlikely to be a thing that happened to her.
There were certain things she knew she could do in a dream to verify whether or not she was dreaming.
The first test might be to try and hit someone.
She had found it was nearly impossible to strike someone while dreaming with any force.
As an infant, she would not be able to strike with any force to begin with, so the test was non-viable.
The second test would normally be to jump.
If this was the dream she would either wake up or float.
This test met the same problem as the first.
She was a newborn.
Jumping was impossible.
She could also try falling but her mother was holding her tightly and she did not want to risk injuring her frail body in the case it were real.
She tried inspecting herself for dreamlike inconsistencies.
She held up her hands in front of her face and inspected them as well as she could given her infantile strength.
She could hear the women around her laying down in the bed with them.
They were speaking to each other though she did not know what they were saying.
Nothing she was experiencing could not be disproven through her senses.
‘The mind is a complex thing.’ She thought to herself.
‘If my mind is capable of perceiving all of this, it means my mind is also capable of imagining all of this.’
‘Or perhaps I’m experiencing an alternate potential reality within a dream state.’
‘The brain is essentially an organic quantum computer.’
‘It would not be strange for such a device to be capable of transceiving information from separate worlds or universes via quantum entanglement.’
‘In which case, the results are inconclusive.’ She decided.
‘I won’t be able to discern whether this is real, a dream, or some measure of both until I’ve collected more evidence.’
‘I need more data.’ She thought to herself.
‘The obvious option is to play along and wait it out.’
‘If this is a dream, eventually I’ll have to wake up.’
‘I also need to see if my experience of time is consistent.’
‘Inconsistency of space-time is one of the prevailing hallmarks of the dream world.’
‘If I can test whether space and time are working in a consistent manner, I can determine whether or not I'm dreaming.’ She concludes.
Her mother continues to play with her hair and ears and she finds her eyes growing increasingly heavy.
‘It seems this body is preparing to sleep.’ She thinks to herself.
‘I doubt I’ll be able to sleep in a dream, so I’m probably going to wake up now.’ Her body drifts into unconsciousness while her family crowds around her, still wrapped in her mother’s loving arms.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Her dreams are filled with the memories of her past life.
In her dream, someone is screaming at her, trying to get her attention.
Things that never happened.
Disjointed and perplexing.
Not pleasant dreams.
She awakens to find herself still an infant, naked and nestled between her mother, and what appears to be an elf man who she assumes is probably her father.
The next thing she notices is that she is once again quite hungry.
She attempts to move her body into a better position to feed, but she can still not lift her head.
The small movement is enough to draw her mother’s attention, and she immediately sits up and lifts her into the proper feeding position.
She immediately latches on, consumed by her body's need for nourishment.
Thick, rich, sweet milk flows into her mouth.
It does not smell at all like the milk of a human woman.
Or like that of any other mammal, as far as she knew.
It smelled like a mixture of lilac, jasmine, honey, and something like oatmilk.
It was thick and rich, there were also fruity notes and undertones of something that might have been cinnamon.
It tasted more a dessert made from various plants than like the milk of a mammal.
There was also a strange luminosity to it.
As if it were filled with manifest energy.
She noticed as she drank, that her hunger itself was more than physical.
As if she needed some type of pure energy.
She felt this urge coming from what felt like a network of hot wires inside her body.
Like an electric grid that was trying to power itself up but desperately needed fuel.
The milk from her mother was loaded with this energy.
As she drank, she could feel the energy cords inside of her r expanding with excitement.
She drank more deeply than before.
Her body was now entirely reliant on the milk from her mother rather than the energy and nutrients transferred through her umbilical cord.
The more she drank, the hungrier she became.
She emptied out one of her mother’s breasts and had to be switched to the next one.
She heard her mother laughing and speaking to the elf man she assumed was her father.
She drank as deeply as she could, until her stomach felt ready to burst.
She wondered if she would empty both of her mother’s breasts before she felt full.
‘I wonder if they have extra milk prepared.’ She wondered, hoping hunger would not be part of this experience.
‘I get the impression this society isn’t industrialized, so they likely won’t have refrigerators.’
‘Then again, they appear to be elves. They may have some other means of preserving lactation.’ She hoped so.
Her concern was unnecessary, she drank as her stomach could hold.
She fell asleep almost immediately, her head fell into her mother’s breasts, she enjoyed the remaining scent of her milk and nestled into her for warmth.
This cycle continued for quite some time.
She was unsure how long she slept, there were no visible clocks, making it difficult to keep track of time.
She could still differentiate between night and day.
She fed on a normal schedule.
Assuming this world had a day and night cycle similar to that of Earth, she surmised that she needed to feed around every nine hours.
She spent most of that time asleep, which made it difficult to confirm her calculation.
By counting the days and nights in her moments of wakefulness, she determined that this cycle lasted about nine months before she could do anything else besides sleep and pass out.
Her mother was very patient with her. Waking up at all hours of the night from her slightest stirring to feed her.
She woke up sometimes and her presumptive father would be there as well.
Whenever he was not, one of the women who had been with her at birth was.
In all her moments of waking, there was always someone else laying with them, and they were always naked.
She assumed group nudity was a cultural practice.
After one meal during the night, instead of immediately falling asleep, she discovered she had enough energy to remain awake.
She could still hardly move.
Her presumptive father was laying with them.
She looked up at her mother who looked down at her and said something.
“Tea’i.” Her mother said, looking down at her.
Then she leaned down and kissed her forehead.
She attempted to make the same sound with her own mouth, but her face muscles had only ever been used for drinking and swallowing.
“Tea’i.” She heard the man that she assumed was her father say.
Her mother turned her to face the elf man.
The elf man pointed to her mother.
“Mother.” He said.
She attempted to make the same sound but she could only gurgle.
He pointed to himself.
“Father.” He said.
She gurgled again.
Her father nodded at that, apparently satisfied that she knew what these words meant.
They kept teaching her simple words until she once again fell asleep.
This pattern continued for nearly a week.
She would wake up, feed, and then spend the rest of her time learning words.
Each time she would wake up and feed, she was able to stay awake just a bit longer than she had the previous time.
They started with repeating basic words while indicating what it was.
As she learned these words, her mother would lay her down and stretch out her legs and arms to strengthen them.
She started taking daily baths, getting into a small-but-deep wooden tub with her mother while someone else looked on from the outside.
She could move in the water as her fat body was naturally buoyant.
She spent much of her time in this tub, floating around and learning basic words.
After a month had passed she was able to stay awake for several hours at a time and her body grew strong enough to move everything around outside of water. She still could not lift her head.
She spent longer periods of time in the bath, and she graduated from learning basic words, to grammar and sentence structure.
Her memory was sharp.
The rest of her development went slowly.
She could still only gurgle but she picked up the language quickly.
She could comprehend what the adults around her were saying and was able to add new words to her lexicon after hearing them once.
She had an amazing memory.
She wondered if this was a typical elven trait.
Her family seemed to expect it.
It had initially worried her when it took nine months to manage anything other than eating and sleeping.
It made sense if the trade off for taking so long to reach basic mobility was increased neural development.
Once she could sit up by herself\, they stopped spending so much time in the water, they still took daily baths.
She could stay awake for around five hours at a time and no longer needed to feed as soon as she woke.
The previously hot coils in her body had cooled and she could no longer feel them.
One day her mother tucked her inside a sling and took her to a spinning wheel.
Then showed her something incredible.
Her mother set the began spinning the wheel and light poured from her mother’s hands.
“This is called threadspinning, Tea’i.” Her mother explained as she worked.
Tea’i’s eyes widened in amazement.
What she was looking at seemed impossible.
Some sort of incredible light force was springing from her mother and into the fibers.
As she spun the wheel, the light moved around it, and flowed out to baskets of fibers sitting around it.
“As threadspinners, we connect ourselves to the fibers, we become the loom that spins the thread and we birth these threads through our fingers and into the world.”
“This is the ancient art of our people, passed down and perfected for two-hundred thousand years.” Her mother said.
She continued to spin the fibers into thread, power poured out of her as her hands worked deftly at the wheel.
“Aetheria is the cosmic power that energizes all life, Tea’i.
“There are threads of aetheria weaving through all lifeforms that define who we are, what we can do, and when we will die.”.
“The threads of the planet are called ley lines and the same threads are also in you.
“By studying these threads, we have learned to work this principle of cosmic power into our weaves, by doing so, we craft living cloth.” Her mother continued as she finished spinning.
She grabbed the spool of thread she had spun and showed it to Tea’i.
‘Woah.’ Tea’i thought silently.
‘The thread is woven so tightly it looks like hasn’t been woven at all.’ Some kind of force seemed to radiate from the thread.
Her mother placed the thread into her hands and slowly ran it through her closed fingers.
“All aetheric patterns have their own meaning, which determines the character of the thread.” Her mother explained.
She held the thread in her hands and Tea’i watched in amazement as her mother’s aetheric force wove itself around the thread in her hand,
“We weave the fibers to define the thread.” Her mother explained as he worked
The fibers seemed to pull themselves over and around themselves in a pattern of incredible intricacy.
“We weave the thread, to define the cloth.” She said as she finished.
In her hand was now a single piece of cloth.
Her elven eyes could discern dozens of colors woven into every stitch.
It was remarkable.
“This is the language of threadspinning.” Her mother explained.
“Each fiber is a sound, each thread is a word, each weave is a sentence, and each cloth is a story.”
Tea’i could only look at the cloth skeptically.
Her mother laughed.
“Here, Tea’i. I will show you.”
Her mother moved to grab three baskets of fiber.
“This one is called nightbell, it is calming yet mysterious, and is very soft.” She said, showing her the basket full of thread, an assortment of colors she might once have called lilac.
“This is called roaringdome.” Her mother said, indicating a basket of thread full of dozens of brilliant colors she might once have just called yellow.
“It grants confidence and protection, it is sturdy but hard and not easy to work with.
“This one is treebeard.” She says as she shows Tea’i a final basket full of a thread which she might have called greenish grey if her eyes were human.
“It grants forbearance and wisdom but is brittle.”
“Each of these fibers is from a living plant.
“Since the fibers are alive, they have their own aetheric threads inside of them.
Each one has an aetheric thread like the threads of the plant it comes from.” She explains as she sets the baskets down in front of the loom.
“When we weave our threads…” She says as she begins preparing the loom.
“We do not just bind the threads themselves.” She say as the loom begin to spin
“We bind the aetheric threads within the fibers to each other.” She explains as her aetheric force once again works its way through the loom and into the basket of fibers.
The spool spins faster, as more of the fibers flow into it and her mother's aetheric force grows so powerful that wind begins to flow toward them.
“Then we reweave these eatheric fibers into a single aetheric pattern, combining the qualities of each fiber to create something completely new.
“Creating s a single living thread.” She says as she finishes the spool.
She grabs the spool and gives it to Tea’i to inspect.
“This thread is called verdant heart.” She explains as she shows her the thread.
‘Even my enhanced vision can’t detect any separation.’ Tea’i notices with astoundment.
‘The idea that they could have been literally fused together doesn’t seem possible.’ She thinks to herself.
“It is supple and strong, fortifies strength, and enhances mood.” Her mother explains to her.
“The language of threadspinning takes a lifetime to learn, there are more than ten thousand known fibers and hundreds of thousands of combinations.” She says while gathering several baskets full of thread.
“For as many possible fibers and threads as there are, there are an infinite number of possible patterns of cloth.
“The thread defines the word, the weave pattern defines the concept, and in one cloth which holds many weaves, there is a story.
“The more knowledge you gain, the more deeply you will be able to perceive the subtlety of this art.
“I am going to teach you the basics.” Her mother said.
And so her education began.
Every day, no matter what time of night or day, at the moment she woke, her education continued.
She was still too weak to lift her head without help, so her mother carried her in a sling.
Her mouth could not yet pronounce words, so she was only expected to listen.
And she did.
Day after day.
Every day she learned the names, meanings, qualities, and classifications of at least a hundred different fibers.
It took her just over three months to learn ten thousand.
Once she had, she continued to learn and memorize the same number of fibers, and she was taught the various types of threads as well.
After another nine months, she began to learn the patterns and their meanings.
One year later, she began to learn the reading of cloth.
She was nearly certain that this was not a dream by now.
She still thought she may have been trapped in some kind of coma.
One thing she was now certain of, was that she neither urinated or defecated.
At first she had merely thought she did it when she was sleeping.
She was now certain it did not happen at all.
No matter how much of her mother’s milk she drank, nothing ever came out.
She had questions about this, but her physical development was slow, and their elven language was very difficult to pronounce.
She estimated herself to be about three years old, but she was still very much a baby.
The only thing that worked properly was her brain.
Which was phenomenal.
She was able to memorize all the information from her lessons fairly easily.
She sat quietly and absorbed all the information her mother fed her.
She wondered how long she was expected to breastfeed for.
Several months later, she got her answer.
Her mother began to wean her from breastmilk to some kind of flowery juice.
She preferred breast milk.
The flower juice had nowhere near the level of power contained in the breast milk.
The flower juice was still very thick and did give her energy.
She knew she could not breastfeed forever.
She knew that she would have to be weaned eventually, but she wanted the breast milk for as long as she could.
Her mother was patient with her, but when she was around four years old, the battle was lost completely.
This coincided with learning how to walk.
It was a struggle, but her fathrt helped her through every stage.
She still could not speak very well, so she mostly just listened to her lessons and focused on improving her physical ability.
The lessons were endless.
They still lasted from the time she woke up until the moment she fell asleep.
It was an unconscionable amount of information to expect a child to process.
Except that she could process it.
She felt she could handle even more information, but chose to keep the remaining processing power of her brain available for figuring out this world.
Being reincarnated into a fantasy world with all the memories of one’s previous life was something that happened in fiction, it did not actually happen.
Yet there she was.
A female Thorrellian Elf.
Just like the screen had said.
She spent the next two years on nonstop lessons.
She learned the names of every known fiber as well as every known thread.
She also learned how to read patterns and cloth.
She preferred these lessons since it required more than just knowledge.
Interpreting the meaning of a pattern required knowledge, but it also required the ability to reason and think through what was actually being said.
Discerning the meaning of a cloth was far more complex and interesting.
She spent hundreds of days learning the various ways the nearly infinite number of patterns could be interpreted based on how they connected to each other.
It was an incredibly complex system.
Tea’i found she enjoyed learning it.
She was also learning to speak, finally.
The complex linguistics of the Thorrellian language was difficult to get a handle on, but she was nearly seven years old at this point.
She seemed to age at about half the speed of a human child.
At nearly seven, she looked more like a three year old.
In this time she learned some more interesting things about herself.
One thing she learned was that her hair was an array of purple.
Her father’s hair was blue, and her mother’s hair was lilac.
She had expected her hair would be indigo.
Her grandmother’s hair was purple.
She was curious if elven genetics worked in the same way as humans.
‘I wonder how many chromosomes I have.’ She thought idly to herself after her hair had finally grown long enough for her to see it.
Her family did not have any mirrors.
She also learned that she was the only child in her household.
Her grandmother, an aging elf woman, seemed to be the head of the household.
Her great-aunt, her grandmother’s younger sister, also lived with them, and appeared to be the second highest ranking member of the family.
Her grandfather, an elf-man who appeared to be significantly older than either of the older elf women, seemed to be the third highest ranking member of their family.
Her great-aunt’s husband also lived with them and seemed to be the fourth highest ranking.
Her grandparents had seven children, two women and five men.
Her great aunt and uncle had five children, three women and two men.
Of those twelve, only the women lived with them.
Her mother had an older brother but was the oldest of all the daughters.
She was curious as to how inheritance law worked in this society.
It seemed to be matrilineal.
Her uncles were all travelling, plying their trade as threadspinners in hopes of returning with more resources.
All of her aunts had remained home to continue developing their craft.
She was not told anything about how inheritances worked, or why all of her uncles had left while none of her aunts had.
The only thing she was expected to learn was thread spinning.
Her mother seemed to be the ranking member of the next generation, all of her aunts deferred to her.
She was curious if being born a girl made her more important.
It certainly seemed to.
Her mother was given everything she asked for and had to do very little for herself outside of raising her.
All of her flower juice was prepared by someone else and brought by someone else, all of the fibers they used were prepared outside of the house and brought in by someone else.
None of her aunts were married.
She wondered if this society practiced arranged marriages.
Given everything she had seen, she suspected they did.
Assuming their household was that of a typical Thorrellian elven family, it seemed to be similar to a traditional Japanese clan.
Except with gender roles reversed.
The fact that women stayed and all the men who lived in their home were married, caused her to suspect that perhaps women were the only ones allowed to inherit anything.
Which would explain why they stayed home while males were sent off to bring back resources.
She had the impression they were an important family somehow.
They lived in a fairly large compound and their family had five servants who were all women.
These women were usually the ones who prepared her flower juice and brought her mother supplies.
They also did all the household chores and made sure supplies were stocked, prepared the bath water, chopped firewood, and anything else that needed to be done, she assumed.
These five servants had their own hierarchy that seemed to be based on age.
The head servant was the only one who showed clear signs of age was more of a stewart as she never did any of the actual work herself.
Her job seemed to be making sure all the work that needed to be done was done properly.
Everyone in her actual family had only one task.
They were threadspinners.
All of them.
Whenever they weren’t actively spinning thread, they were usually checking someone else’s work.
People often visited the house, with articles of clothing and fabric, asking for it to be looked over by some member of the family.
There were other visitors as well..
Her family seemed to be well respected.
In particular, her grandmother seemed to be well-respected.
When servants or visitors addressed her, they bowed.
Even her father bowed to her grandmother.
Visitors also bowed to her mother and all of her aunts and both her great uncles.
Her father was also bowed to, although these bows were much higher, more of a head tilt.
She was curious how rank differentiated in this society.
Even more curious was that, despite seeming to be an important family, living in a large family home, with servants and people of all manner paying them great respect, they did not seem to be rich.
In fact, they seemed to be poor.
Quite poor.
There were never enough supplies.
The spinning wheels had to be maintained constantly.
Despite being threadspinners with the capacity to weave incredibly intricate designs, the clothes they wore were fairly simple.
Well made, of course, since they were the ones made them.
But the materials used were of lower quality than what she might have expected.
She could identify almost all the threads used in the clothing and they were mostly created from common fibers.
Her family and even her family servants were all better dressed than most of their visitors, who seemed to be wearing their best clothing when they came to visit.
She had the distinct impression that it wasn’t just her family that was poor.
They were all poor.
Based on the rather gaunt expressions and feeling of hopelessness that seemed to radiate from many of them, she felt they might be even poorer than she thought.
She was eager to learn to talk so she could start asking questions.
She practiced every day.
Trying out different words and exploring their sounds.
Her mother had little patience for this and wanted her to focus solely on her studies.
In her mother’s mind, anything Tea’i wanted to learn to say, she could learn to say it with thread.
Except that she couldn't do that either.
Her fingers still lacked the dexterity for threadspinning or weaving.
She could read rather well though.
As time went on, and her knowledge increased, she began advancing along her studies for cloth reading quite quickly.
Cloth reading required knowledge and intelligence, but it was also an intuitive task.
Reading threads and patterns was like a puzzle, which she was quickly advancing in.
By the time she turned five, she was able to read the surface intention of cloth articles at a glance.
As she advanced, she sensed her grandmother taking a special interest in her.
Her mother still handled her training, teaching her everything she could fit into her mind at once.
Her grandmother began challenging her to discern the meanings of different weaves of cloth brought by guests.
She also noticed her great-aunt and great-uncle taking an interest in her.
They would often challenge her to discern the meanings of different articles.
She could not speak, so all these tests required questions that could be answered by either pointing at something or answering yes or no.
Whenever she got a question wrong, they would point to this weave or that thread and explain what she had been missed.
At seven, she was able to answer every challenge more-or-less correctly.
Her entire family began treating her differently.
Her aunts doted on her.
Her father did as well.
Her mother put even more focus into her training.
She wasn’t certain what was happening, but it was clear she had become more important.
The flower juice she was given became richer and had more energy.
She was given as much of it as she wanted.
This was also the age when she finally learned to talk.
Once she managed to get some of the more difficult sounds down, the rest came fairly quickly.
She was completely fluent within three months.
Now that she was able to hold conversations, her mother started grilling her on her knowledge to see if she had withheld all the information she had been taught.
She was also asked to explain in her own words how she could read certain aspects about various cloths.
She continued getting better flower juice and the added nutrients seemed to benefit her growth.
Though she was enjoying her improved diet, a weight was bearing down on her.
It was one of the reasons she had worked so hard to learn to speak.
She wanted to make sure she mastered the language before saying it.
Her mother had put so much time and energy into teaching her, and her already poor family seemed to have taken a special interest in her growth.
She wanted to make them proud and do right by them, but she had to tell them the truth.
They had all seemed to assume that she would be a threadspinner.
Her mother put every waking moment of both of their lives into teaching her the art.
But she didn’t want to be a threadspinner.
She found the artform fascinating, and had great respect for her family.
But she still remembered the giant game screen and the choices she had made.
Finally, when she was seven years, nine months, and seventeen days old, she worked up the courage.
Her mother had decided it was time for her to learn to work the loom, everything was ready, and all the fibers had been prepared.
She decided it was now or never.
“Mother,” said Tea’i.
“I want to be a mage.”