The world was warm.
Soft. Bright. Strange.
At first, that's all I knew. The warmth of my mother's arms. The whisper of leaves beyond the window. The scent of lavender and starlight woven into my cradle.
But then, it changed.
I don't know the exact moment it happened—only that one night, as the moonlight slipped through the silk curtains, I heard a name in the wind.
Eldrin.
Not spoken aloud. Not uttered by a parent or nursemaid. It came from somewhere deeper—from the space behind my thoughts, the veil between who I am and who I was.
And I remembered.
Only fragments, like broken glass scattered on a marble floor. A name not my own. A place that pulsed with magic and sorrow. A feeling of... love? Loss? I couldn't tell. It was too far, too faded.
But it was mine.
At two years old, most children barely grasp words. But I spoke them in whispers when no one listened—words from another world. A language my current tongue should not have known. Ancient names. Forgotten spells. Echoes of lullabies from lifetimes past.
My mother called me "curious." The maids said I was "too quiet for comfort." But I knew better. I wasn't quiet. I was remembering.
---
"Who am I?" I asked the moon one night.
It didn't answer. But the wind shivered through the trees and called again: Eldrin.
---
Age 3: The Quiet Shift
By the time I turned three, the dreams no longer came only at night.
Sometimes, when the sun filtered softly through the trees, I would drift into silence mid-sentence, lost in memories that weren't mine—and yet utterly were.
I once stared for nearly an hour at the reflection in a still pond. Not to see my face, but to find her. The woman with golden hair and the voice like falling stars.
She was always in my dreams. Sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping, always reaching. I could feel her heartbeat, even if I couldn't remember her name.
At three, I should have been giggling at butterflies or stumbling through simple sentences. But instead, I was speaking in three tongues—Common, Elvish, and something older. Something the servants avoided and the books never named.
When I spoke it aloud, the air would still. Shadows lengthened. Once, the family's hound refused to enter my room for days after I whispered a lullaby from the dreams.
The adults stopped correcting me. Some avoided me altogether. Others offered me things—books, crystals, time alone.
A mage from the capital came to observe me. He smiled at my parents, but his eyes were afraid.
"She's touching the Veil," he muttered under his breath. "Or worse... something from beyond it is touching her."
They thought I didn't hear.
They were wrong.
---
Age 4: The Shift Deepens
It was during my fourth year that the shift began to show.
Not just in mind—but in body.
My hair shimmered differently in the morning light—sometimes silver-white, sometimes moonlit blue, sometimes touched with deep crimson. The maids whispered it was a blessing of the Ancients. My father, more practically, told people it was "ancestral fluctuation."
But I knew the truth.
My bloodline was not fixed. It shifted, aligned—depending on the echoes stirring within me. When I dreamed of war and fire, my eyes turned gold, and my magic burned hot. When the dreams were soft and full of starlight, my hands hummed with healing.
And always, her voice called me.
I began practicing. Balancing a stone on a leaf. Whispering to water. Following moonlight through the grass at night while the others slept.
Magic answered not as a stranger, but as an old friend.
"Talented," my father said once when he caught me coaxing a flower to bloom too early.
But I wasn't talented. I was experienced.
I had lived this before.
---
Age 5: The Veil Answers
By the time I reached five, my days were divided between silence and study.
They tried to train me. Eldrin the prodigy, some said. I let them believe it. But I wasn't learning—I was remembering.
I knew runes they hadn't taught me. I deciphered sigils that hadn't been used in centuries. And when I traced the old patterns in the air, things happened. Lights danced. Winds shifted. Water hummed.
On the eve of my fifth nameday, I looked up at the stars and whispered a single word from my dream—a name I couldn't fully grasp.
And the Veil... it whispered back.
Not in words, but in warmth. Familiarity. Like the soft breath of someone you once loved resting beside you.
I was still a child. But I was waking.
The past life I carried wasn't just fragments anymore—it was beginning to reform. And with it came power, promise, and the shadow of a destiny I had not yet chosen.