Chapter 1: A Free Fall into Flight

The first thing I realized was that I had shrunk. The second was that I was entirely naked. The third, and most alarming, is this giant woman holding me and crying tears of joy.

My previous life was monotonous to the point of embarrassment. No friends. No close family. I spent my twenty-third birthday eating a microwave dinner alone, and the last thing I ever said to my younger sister was a flat "bye" as I left for college four years earlier. We never exchanged a single message after that.

I don't miss her or anyone at all, really. I left behind nothing worth grieving.

Who hasn't wished for a fresh start?

"Congratulations. The boy was born well and healthy," Said the man in the leather apron.

"Yes... I can see that." The woman gazing down at me had tears in her eyes and love in every line of her face. "He really is a cutie."

My body was difficult to process. Impossibly small. Impossibly thin. No height, no weight, no nothing — just raw, overwhelming sensory input arriving from all directions at once.

Right. That actually happened. I'm a baby.

My surroundings were unexpected. The walls were rough, rustic wood rather than painted white. The woman and I lay on a plain double bed — no monitors, no IV drip, no machines of any kind, no antiseptic smell.

I was in someone's house. A home birth.

Who in their right mind, in the twenty-first century, chooses not to go to a hospital? What an irresponsible mother—

Oh. Maybe I simply wasn't in my century anymore.

I remembered Nikola Tesla. The midwife told his mother, "He'll be a child of darkness," after he was born at home during a heavy storm.

His mother replied- 

"He'll be a child of the light."

Oh... That was exactly it. My new mother completed it for me.

"Doctor." The woman still hadn't looked away from me.

"Is something wrong, ma'am?"

"Yes. Why isn't my son crying?"

The man hesitated. "I have never seen this in my life."

Of course. I'm a baby. Crying endlessly is the law of nature. But I have my memories, and I can control myself. There's no reason to perform distress I don't feel — and frankly, I'm not sure I remember how.

It made me wonder: are all babies born carrying the consciousness of a past life, forgetting it piece by piece as they grow? Maybe that's why they cry at birth — grief for the life they're leaving behind.

Which would mean my past life was so shitty that it isn't even worth crying over.

"Gustavo, stop hiding. Come here."

Gustavo. A male name. Could that be—

"O-Okay, Mom..."

A small boy rose from a stool at the foot of the bed.

Black hair. Honey-colored eyes. His clothes were the plainest, most worn things I had ever seen — brown and white, rough at the seams. He walked toward us slowly, and as he got closer I could see he was crying, doing everything in his power to keep it together the way a young man is supposed to.

"Are you all right, son?" she asked warmly.

"Y-Yes, Mom... it's just that—" He broke between sobs.

"It's okay. Come here. Hold him."

"M-Me?" He pointed at himself, wide-eyed with terror. "Are you sure?! But— But—"

"Come on. Hold your brother."

He gave a small nod, and he picked me up.

His tears fell steadily onto my skin, irritating in the most literal sense of the word. But Gustavo had stopped trying to hold anything back.

"Welcome to the world, little brother." His voice cracked. "Nicolau Britton."

I had never felt so comfortable in my life.

Or in what came before it.

Six months passed.

I'd always heard that a baby's life is the most peaceful thing in the world. Having now lived it — truly lived it — I can confirm: yes, absolutely, without question. But almost too much.

I still can't walk. Can't crawl. I am condemned to spend roughly ninety percent of my time staring at a wooden ceiling. Worse, thanks to the severe insomnia I apparently carried over from my previous life, I sleep maybe ten hours a day, while a normal infant is supposed to log at least sixteen. The remaining hours are just me, the ceiling, and the occasional intrusion of my mother or my brother attempting to tickle me like I'm some kind of wind-up toy.

Still — being alone has its advantages. You get very good at watching.

The room belongs to my mother, and like the rest of the house, it's thoroughly premodern. No appliances. No electricity that I can detect. Everything is raw wood, hand-fitted and worn smooth. The house is small but more than enough: three bedrooms, one floor. For now, my crib lives in her room. I'll presumably move to the empty room once I'm old enough to be trusted.

From the window, I can see a small, peaceful countryside village called Fecho. The number of houses can be counted on one's fingers. Beyond them: agricultural fields, and a dense forest that swallows the horizon. This is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone's name — including, apparently, the man who delivered me.

Did I land in the medieval era? I'll admit that would be cool. There is a popular question that every man has to answer: Would you rather be a cowboy, a pirate, or a samurai? I always picked the fourth option: medieval knight. The castles, the armor, the aesthetic of it. But apparently that is a personality test. So it must say something about me that I am unaware of. And now I will probably never be able to find out.

The most striking thing, though, is the language. From the very first moment of my birth, I understood everything spoken around me. Not my native English — something else entirely. Grammar I'd never studied, words I'd never encountered, yet it landed with the same ease as a language I'd spoken my whole life. I wasn't translating. It was simply there, as natural as breathing, even if it didn't feel like mine.

My mother — her name is Eduarda, I've learned — is a calm, industrious woman who moves through the house with quiet, unhurried purpose. She took me to visit a neighbor once, a family whose daughter was two years and some months older than me. The girl could walk, had a full set of teeth, and within minutes of being left alone with me, decided — without apparent motivation — to bite my arm.

Baby skin is very soft. Very thin.

I wanted to scream. I almost managed it. But that small demon clamped her hand over my mouth before the sound escaped, and I had no choice but to sit there and suffer.

It was true torture.

And it wasn't the last time we went to visit them.

I also learned — from watching my brother read one evening, a book he held up where I could just barely see — that women in this culture are born with only a given name. No surname. They're expected to marry and take their husband's family name, because, and I'm paraphrasing here, men are the ones responsible for guiding the family's blood.

Patriarchal, obviously. But not a system I recognize from any historical period on Earth, and I know my history. Something here doesn't fit. And by the way, how are they supposed to differentiate between women with the same name? 

It also raises a question: if women take their husband's name upon marriage, why doesn't my mother have one? She's had two children. They must have been together at some point.

Who is my father? I still don't know. And I have no way to ask.

My brother, Gustavo Britton, is ten years old and, against every expectation I had for a child that age, surprisingly composed. Every morning he volunteers to wash the previous night's dishes — which requires a round trip of roughly two kilometers to the nearest river. He spends his days outside doing something I can't observe from my crib, and returns each evening to study theology with a focus I find almost unnerving in a ten-year-old. What a gentleman.

He does try hard, though. Once, he walked up to me, narrowed his eyes, stared directly into my soul with complete and total gravity, snapped into a crisp military salute, and announced: "I will protect you no matter what!"

Yes, cute, very cute. But I confess I held myself back a lot to keep from bursting into laughter.

The village, from everything I can see, is peaceful to the point of perfection. Crime rate: probably zero. My mother leaves me alone regularly — off to visit the neighbors, I assume — and while I'm not entirely sure that qualifies as responsible parenting, I don't mind.

I'm not really a true baby, after all.

One last thing worth noting: above my crib, my mother hung a small cross. A man crucified on wood.

Catholicism. Or something close to it. There's a church in the village — by far the most carefully built structure visible from my window.

I've always been a theist, even if not a devoted one. I don't know what to make of finding this symbol here, in whatever world this is. I file it away.

I've always needed a goal. For the last three years of my previous life, that goal was simply to survive. But this is a new world, a new life — a genuine clean slate. I'm not going to waste it. I won't have two people at my funeral again.

For now, the goal is simple: study. Observe. Figure out where I am.

"Nico! Your big brother's home!"

Just another ordinary afternoon. Gustavo had barely crossed the threshold before making a beeline for my crib.

I've grown to like that. I understand something now that I never did before — why children want so much attention.

"You know," he said, planting himself in front of me with a raised finger and a grin, "today is April thirteenth. Your six-month birthday. Congratulations!"

April thirteenth. So I was born on October thirteenth.

Then, in the span of a blink, the formal composure he usually carried evaporated. In its place: barely-contained, unfiltered excitement.

"I'm giving you your first present! Or half-birthday present. Whatever."

A present. For me.

The last time anyone gave me something was when I turned eighteen. After I started living alone, no one even said happy birthday anymore.

But I haven't even turned one yet. I'm fairly certain he just found an excuse to finally show me something he's been dying to show someone.

"You are going to love this. This is the coolest thing in the world. I swear."

He reached into the crib and lifted me out, arms careful and deliberate — genuinely mindful of how small I still am.

"I've trained enough," he murmured, mostly to himself. A flicker of doubt crossed his face, then hardened into resolve. "Yes. Enough. There's no reason to be afraid." He looked at me with a grin that was three parts confidence, one part bravado. "Let's go, Nico."

He floated.

Both feet lifted cleanly off the floor.

"Don't worry. Everything's fine. I've got you."

He pushed off, and we flew — through the window he'd already opened, and out into open sky.

The air hit my face immediately. Sharp, cool, rushing. The cloth wrapped around me did almost nothing.

But it didn't matter.

The sky was incredible.

Nothing above us but clouds and morning blue — the view of a hawk, of a skydiver, of someone with absolutely no business being this high up. And I was cradled in a ten-year-old's arms, completely still, while the world stretched out in every direction below.

The sun climbed brighter at the horizon.

"Please don't tell Mom. She would absolutely kill me." He laughed — a real, unguarded laugh that I hadn't heard from him before. "It's cool, right? Look down."

I looked. Our house had shrunk to a rooftop, its bricks barely visible through a layer of thin, yellowish-white cloud.

"Nico." His voice shifted. The laughter settled into something quieter and more honest. He was watching the horizon with the kind of expression people usually only develop much later in life. "This world is huge. Someday, I'm gonna see all five kingdoms. Heck, maybe I'll even find the crowns and become God! Sounds stupid, right? But I'm gonna do it. I promise you."

Five kingdoms. The crowns.

So I really am in another world.

And yes, Gustavo — it is a little stupid. It is completely childish.

I love it. I love you for saying it out loud.

I'm very glad to be your brother.

"Thank you."

The words left my mouth before I'd decided to say them.

"Ah—?! What did you just—"

The shock went through him all at once. His arms went slack.

And he dropped me.

My back met the open air. The wind took me. The cloth whipped free and spun away somewhere above, and I was completely bare, falling, my cheeks pressing flat against the rush of it, the rooftop swelling fast and inevitable below.

"No!"

Gustavo folded himself into a dive, one hand thrust forward, fingers splayed wide, the air around his fist rising with a sound I had no name for.

He pushed everything he had.

But the roof kept coming.

There was a point — I could see it clearly — where it became mathematically impossible for him to close the gap.

"Nicolau!!!"

He didn't catch me. No one caught me in their arms.

And yet — I wasn't falling anymore.

I was floating in the air with him.