Pieces

The world came back in pieces, slowly, over years.

For a long time there had only been fragments: the warmth of a body, the smell of woodsmoke and something herbal I had no vocabulary for, voices I couldn't make sense of, a song someone hummed off-key while they rocked me. Then the fragments started lining up. Then they fit together. Then one perfectly ordinary morning, with sunlight coming through a gap in the shutters and a fly bumping its head against the glass over and over, the last piece clicked into place.

Eighty-five years of memory, all at once, inside a five-year-old's head.

My name had been Harold Mercer, of Poughkeepsie, New York. Two kids, three grandkids, one mortgage paid off the same year my employer downsized me into permanent retirement. My wife Carol had gone first, ten years before me. The end came in a hospital bed under bad fluorescent light, with so much morphine in my veins that I had been pleasantly unbothered about leaving.

That was supposed to be the end.

It very obviously was not.

I was in a cabin: real logs daubed with gray clay, a fireplace built of river stones with a black iron pot on a hook, a wooden floor mopped recently enough to still smell faintly of something piney and definitely not Pine-Sol. The bed under me had a quilt on it I did not recognize, and a mattress that crunched when my body shifted, which suggested straw, which suggested I was no longer in the United States and possibly no longer in any year that started with the digit two.

The language was the strangest part.

Two women were arguing about firewood, in perfectly clear English, which did not match the rest of the room at all.

"Light the fire, Maelis. It's too cold in here for Knox."

So my name was Knox now. Hello, Knox.

The voice had come from a younger woman, pretty in a worn-through way, with brown hair pulled back hard enough to make me wince in sympathy. She wore a long woven dress patched twice at the elbow, and her hands looked like hands that had never seen a bottle of lotion in their life. When her gaze landed on me, her face softened. That, then, was my mother.

The older woman was something else.

Maelis was a small woman, thin and hard, with steel-gray hair yanked back tight enough to give her eyebrows a permanent look of mild surprise. Her mouth was set in a flat line and had been for a long time. Her eyes rested on me without any expression at all. She had not moved toward the fireplace, and judging by my mother's face, that wasn't unusual.

"Why are you bothering, Halira," Maelis said. "His mind is too far gone to notice if his fingers turn blue."

My mother's spine snapped straight. "Don't you start."

"I'm only saying the truth, girl."

"Don't."

"You'll figure it out eventually," Maelis said, levering herself up off her stool with a soft grunt. "How much this little mongrel has ruined your life. Marrek already did. That's why he isn't here."

My mother's face went through about six emotions in two seconds and settled on a furious one she did not let out of her mouth. Good for her. There was no winning that argument. Maelis was cruel on purpose, and she was good at it.

What happened next bumped the argument out of my mind entirely.

Maelis held her hand out over the kindling. There was nothing in it, no match, no striker, no clever little device tucked up her sleeve. A flame appeared above her fingers anyway, drifted down into the wood, and the wood began to burn. The cabin started to warm.

I sat on the bed with my mouth slightly open and watched it.

The first thing my brain did was look for the trick. That was forty-some years of engineering talking. There had to be a striker palmed in her hand, or something in the kindling, or a hidden flint, or a chemical reaction, or a piece of stagecraft I had missed because I had been distracted by the argument.

There wasn't.

Her sleeves were short and her palm had been empty. The flame had appeared above her hand, drifted down into the wood, and that had been the whole of it. She had brushed her hands off afterward without hiding anything, because there was nothing to hide.

My pulse jumped before my brain caught up with what I'd just seen.

That had been magic. Real magic. The world that had felt strange a minute ago felt much stranger now. There was a small old woman in here who had reached into the air and pulled fire out of it, and apparently that was something that happened in this world. Which meant this world was not the one I had come from.

My mother was already turning back to me, the angry face gone, the cheerful one back. She did not seem startled. Maelis had moved on to other things and seemed entirely uninterested in the flame she had just summoned. Neither of them noticed the five-year-old boy on the bed whose entire understanding of how the world worked had just been pulled out from under him.

For a long stretch nothing happened in the cabin except the fire crackling and the fly bumping the shutter over and over. My breathing took a while to slow down. Eventually the engineer in me, who had been through a lot in his time, started doing what engineers do when something breaks: look for the smallest piece of the problem that could actually be fixed.

I was here. I had a body, a mother who appeared to like me, a grandmother who actively did not, and apparently a world where fire could be summoned by hand. None of that was changing in the next five minutes. I also still needed to figure out where here was and who I was supposed to be, all without giving any of it away to Maelis, who had already volunteered her opinion that I was a defective grandchild. But that was a longer-term project.

The smallest piece within reach was getting off this bed.

Getting down off the bed turned out to be a job. The knees were too short, the center of gravity was wrong, and the body wanted to do things and forgot halfway through. My belly hit the quilt, my legs slid down feet-first, my socks hit the floor, and somehow the rest of me kept going. Two steps, then a third, then a wobble and a correction, and the far wall stopped me before the floor did, which was more dignity than I had managed in the last six months of my previous life.

My mother made a small sound and went very still.

"Knox?"

"Hello," I said, because polite seemed like a good default.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

"Honey," my mother said carefully, "when did you learn how to walk?"

"Just now, I think."

The silence kept going.

"And to talk?"

"My head was fuzzy. Now it's not."

Maelis was staring at me, hard, and after a long moment she let out a short dry laugh with no humor in it whatsoever.

"Well," she said. "Isn't that something."

Then, perfectly casual: "Too bad you didn't wake up before Marrek decided he didn't want a half-rate son. Could have saved your mother some trouble."

A whole lifetime had taught me how to be polite to people who did not deserve it: customers, bosses, the man at the DMV, decades of practice. The five-year-old version of me considered all of that and decided not to use any of it.

This lady is a nasty piece of work.

Then my feet carried me over to her, because I had a question.

Up close she smelled of woodsmoke and dried lavender, with something sharper and mineral underneath. Her face did not change. Her hands were folded in her lap, small and brown and freckled, and they had just made a flame appear out of nothing at all.

"How did you do that?" I said.

"Do what?"

"The fire."

"Magic."

"How."

She considered me for a moment with what was probably the first sign of interest she had ever shown me.

"Magic is rare," she said. "Most people don't have it. I doubt you do." Her mouth twitched. "But come here. Let's settle that."

"Maelis," my mother said, tight, already losing an argument she had not started yet.

"Hush, girl."

"He's five."

"I know how old he is."

"One thing first," Maelis said. "When I push the mana into you, one of two things happens. If you have the gift, your mind goes somewhere else for a moment. You will see two paths in front of you. One is called Enlightenment. The other is called Body Enhancement. Pick one. Don't dawdle. Don't try to pick both. There's nobody in there to answer questions, so don't waste your breath asking. Whichever one you choose is the road your magic takes for the rest of your life."

She paused.

"If you don't have the gift, nothing happens, and we go back to ignoring each other. Ready?"

"Wait. What's the differ—"

Her hand came down on my chest before the question got out, flat and warm, right over the place where my heart should have been if hearts had been the relevant organ. Something sharp ran down my arms and out into my fingers and back up through my jaw. Warmth spread in the middle of my chest, poured down through my legs all the way to the soles of my feet, and rose up through my neck into the back of my skull, where every part of me came awake at once.

Then the cabin was gone.

Floor, walls, fireplace, Maelis, my mother. All of it gone.

What replaced it was open space. Black going on forever in every direction, with stars hanging in it and a few enormous slow-turning clouds of color in the distance. It felt like a falling dream at first, but I was quickly able to calm myself and look around.

Across the black, in crisp white terminal text, were three options.

Three.

Enlightenment
Body Enhancement
System

So my very loving grandmother had forgotten to mention one. Touching, that.

A description came up under each option as my attention settled on it.

Enlightenment was familiar territory. Meditation, contemplation of the underlying nature of reality, the dao, the relationship between the self and the world. The summary said it increased mana capacity and potency, neither of which it explained. Maelis would not be explaining either, of that much I was sure.

Body Enhancement was simpler. Strengthen the physique. Infuse the body regularly with mana to harden it. Slower mana growth than Enlightenment, but a tougher shell.

System was the strange one. Levels, ability slots, a personalized progress interface. Pure video-game terminology, the kind of thing the boys had spent their childhood explaining to me at the dinner table while I nodded politely and tried to remember which game was which.

It occurred to me that maybe Maelis hadn't mentioned the third path because she didn't know about it. People in a world with no electricity wouldn't have a frame of reference for a system. Was this something customized for me because I reincarnated from Earth? It seemed like it.

Enlightenment was off the table, since I doubted I'd get any help on that path. That left Body Enhancement and System. Becoming Hulk-like would be great, but my heart was set on learning magic.

It also occurred to me that Maelis had left off another important detail: how was I supposed to select anything? The words floated out there in the dark, far away, like the Hollywood sign seen from down in the city.

Well, let me try with my mind. Select System.

The System option brightened for a moment, more than the others, and then all three blinked out. A huge list opened up in their place.

Choose your starter ability.

So I get to pick a spell of some sort. This thing seemed to accept mental commands, so hopefully it would let me narrow things down that way.

What I needed more than anything was information. Being able to blast a monster to smithereens with a fireball would be neat, but it wouldn't scratch my itch for knowledge.

Show me any abilities that will help me learn how to use various magical spells.

The list collapsed to three.

Sage's Inquiry: Ask limited questions and receive precise answers.

Truthseeker's Eye: Detect lies, illusions, curses, and hidden magical structures.

Analysis: View basic information about people, spells, and inscriptions.

Truthseeker's Eye was off the table immediately. It was an ability for somebody planning to walk into dangerous places on purpose, which at five years old, I was not.

Analysis sounded great on the surface. Walking around looking at people and spells and getting a readout on each one was exactly the kind of thing I wanted. The problem was the word basic. Basic information meant whatever the system decided was basic, and if I didn't already know the fundamentals of magic, "basic" might mean a name and a number that meant nothing to me. An ability that handed me jargon I couldn't parse was an ability I'd be staring at uselessly for years.

Sage's Inquiry had the same drawback in its description, the word limited, but at least Sage's Inquiry let me ask my own questions in my own words. If a clean answer to "what does mana capacity mean" was on the table, that was worth more than a string of unexplained labels floating over people's heads. The starter rank would be narrow, sure, but a narrow tool I could aim was better than a broad tool I couldn't read.

Sage's Inquiry.

The list dissolved. A new screen took its place.

[Profile]
Name: Knox Vaeron
Age: 5
Level: 0

[Abilities]
Sage's Inquiry I

[Attributes]
Strength: 2
Agility: 1
Vitality: 5
Perception: 12
Intelligence: 22

Knox Vaeron. A last name I had not known I had a few minutes ago.

Strength two and Agility one tracked with a five-year-old body. Perception twelve made sense, since the eighty-five-year-old in here had been paying attention to things for a long time. Intelligence twenty-two was the strange one. If I was remembering right, and at the age I died that was in doubt, Intelligence governed mana, not raw thinking. An adult brain crammed into a child's skull shouldn't have moved that number. Which meant my mana pool was large for some other reason. Worth flagging for later.

I read the sheet over once more, trying to commit it to memory, and then the void started coming apart around me. The black thinned out. The stars went dim. The slow-turning clouds faded until there was nothing left of them.

Then I was back in the cabin.

My body had not fallen over, which surprised me. Maelis's hand was still on my chest. My mother was still pale.

Maelis took her hand back. Her mouth was a little less flat than usual.

"Well," she said. "Look at that."

My mother had gone white.

"You weren't supposed to."

"I know."

"You weren't supposed to until he was sixteen. You could have killed him, Maelis. You absolute..."

"But I didn't."

"You could have."

"But I didn't."

They stared at each other. My mother's hands were shaking. Maelis's weren't. I stood between them in my strange new full-body warmth and let the realization settle. She does not care if I live or die. Underline that twice.

"You owe him," my mother said.

"Owe him what."

"Something."

Maelis let out a long sigh. "Fine. I'll teach the boy how to push his mana around. That's it. I'm not teaching him to make fire while I'm living under this roof. Understand me?"

"Fine."

She turned back to me, mouth thin again. "Pay attention, boy."

She held out her hand palm up. A ball of pale blue-gray fog gathered itself above it, slow and steady, turning gently. Easily the prettiest thing in either of my lives so far.

"That's mana. Every magic begins with it. Every. Single. One. You feel that warm spot in your chest? That's your core. It answers to your will, but you have to make it. Tell it to release a thread, and push the thread down your arm to your palm. There are channels in the body for it, but the mana doesn't move on its own. You have to pump it, the way your heart pumps blood. Close your eyes."

I closed them.

"Find the warm spot. Open it. Push the thread down your arm. Stop it in your palm. Hold the shape."

The warm spot was easy enough to find, sitting just behind my breastbone, right where her hand had been.

Opening it was harder. The first push of will did nothing, and the second did nothing either. On the third try something gave, a small loosening from somewhere deep in my chest, and a thread of warmth started moving.

Getting it down my arm was real work. The mana didn't want to travel. Every time my focus slipped, the trickle slowed and almost stopped. I kept pushing, harder than I had expected to, until it reached my palm and held.

"Open your eyes."

I opened them.

A blue-gray ball of fog sat on my palm, turning gently.

A grin spread across my face before I could stop it.

Maelis didn't grin back.

"There. Done. Now we're square."

Square my ass. You tried to kill me a few minutes ago.

I kept that to myself. The top priority now was getting clear of this old bat as soon as possible. The problem was that a kindergarten-aged kid didn't have a lot of options for going anywhere.

"Thank you, Grandma."

Her mouth tightened at the word grandma. Useful to know.

I stopped pushing the mana. The trickle slowed, the fog dissolved, and the warm spot in my chest closed back up.

My mother had a hand pressed to her mouth. Maelis was already pouring herself a cup of water like none of it had happened.

The bed seemed like the safest place. I climbed back onto it and sat down.

There was a lot to figure out.