No wonder kids don’t remember their own births, this shit is traumatic to experience from a baby’s perspective. I’ll spare you the big details. Healthy birth, lots of blood, sweat and tears, etc, etc. I couldn’t really see much with my undeveloped eyes seeing light for the first time, but even I could tell my new mother was absolutely beautiful as she held me. 

“Please cry baby, please cry girl, come on…” She rubbed my head, attempting to coax tears out of me. Oh right, I think I read something once about a baby’s cries after being born being important to check their lungs are working properly. I’m alive, I’m breathing, don’t worry mom, I’m here. She just kept rubbing my head, her hands so warm and delicate to the touch. I felt as safe as I did when Troy hugged me after I came out, maybe safer. The tears began to flow, and before long I was crying like the baby I now was. 

“Oh thank the Goddess, she’s alive!” The voice was deep and boisterous above me and mom, and somehow I could tell this was my new father. His voice is so familiar to my memory, exactly like I had heard in my dreams. Were those dreams visions of my true life? The future I have in store? 

“Would you like to hold her dear?” My mom said, and dad accepted, feeling myself be passed from one parent to the other. His hands are so large and calloused, I wonder what kind of work he’s done to beat them that badly? I’m sure I’ll figure it out soon enough. For now, I’ll just enjoy this moment while it lasts, feeling so safe in my parents care. Safer than I’d ever felt with my old family.

“Our beautiful daughter, our beautiful Aria…” My father whispered to me. The same words that brought me my name in my dreams, now right here in front of me. I started to cry all over again, sending my parents into a fit of laughing and crying themselves. 

Soon after my eyes began to fully adjust to the world around me and I was met with the place that was now my home, or at least the common area of it. Mostly made of wood and stone, with a crackling fireplace at the front center of the room. Outside it seemed like the dead of winter, with a blizzard going in the middle of the night. I’m sure my parents will tell me stories of this night in the future, the miracle of my own birth. I was born during a blizzard in my old life too, or so my old mom told me. “The day you were born was both the best, and the worst day of my life.” She had said. Because of me, she had her only child, and because of me she was trapped with my father until she had enough and… I remember all the drugs and arrests, how she went so far down a path she couldn’t find her way up again and died drunk behind the wheel in the middle of nowhere. Leaving me alone with my bastard of a father who was a narcissist and a bigot, all the way until the end. I bet he won’t even cry when he figures out I’m dead. 

But now’s not the time to reminisce on what was. I have to keep moving forward, at least for now. To become a young woman that I could be proud of. That my new family could be proud of. I tilted my little head towards my dad and reached towards his dark stubble. He had some big emerald green eyes and dark brown hair, resembling how I might’ve imagined I’d look if I hadn’t realized I was trans. Except my old eyes were dark blue, not emerald green. He mentioned something to the doctor and mom about fetching more firewood from the shed since the blizzard showed no sign of stopping and handed me back over to her. Mom tried to protest, saying it wasn’t safe, but dad was having none of it. 

“I’ll be ok Lila, just take care of Aria for a bit. Doc, you should stay here for the night, it’s too dangerous to go back right now. We have a guest bedroom upstairs.”

“Thank you Eutychus, I’d like to keep an eye on your daughter and Lila for a day anyway, make sure the birth had no complications.”

My mom looked to the doctor. “Thank you doctor, you’ve always been so good to our family.”

“ It’s no problem, you’ve done me more services than I can count in the decade I’ve known you Lila. You two should get some rest.” He smiled at me for a moment, the warm old man that he was. He may be just a doctor, but at this moment he felt more like a kind grandfather. “She looks like you, you know.”

I looked at my mom’s features, with her soft face and… wait, purple eyes?! That’s awesome! Is that a normal eye color in this world? Are my eyes purple? SOMEONE GET ME A MIRROR! Fine, later. Her hair was so long that I reached out with my tiny arms and grabbed a little of it, her hair dark as night, fading out to the same purple as her eyes at the end. On Earth there’s no way her hair would be that color naturally, but I had a feeling the rules were different here. 

She looked down at me and smiled. “You’re right, the only thing about her that looks like Euty is her eye color.” Ah damn, there goes my purple eyed dreams. At least dad’s eyes looked like a unique shade of green on their own, though I have a feeling I’m grasping for straws here. 

As if on cue, my father burst back into the room, heavily breathing and with an armful of firewood, enough to last us the whole night easily. You go dad! 

“Welcome back dear! You’re covered in snow, you should get a change of clothes.” Mom said. 

“Yeah, it’s really coming down out there. Though really not as cold as it looks at least! I’ll be back in a minute, and with a new blanket for Aria too.” I had just been wrapped in a scratchy towel until now, so I breathed a tiny sigh of relief.

“She sounds happy about that!” I blushed. A newborn baby, blushing out of embarrassment! My mental image of that is probably way more entertaining that what it really looks like, though it didn’t stop mom from giggling anyway. I had a feeling we were going to be really close after that. 

Soon after, I fell asleep deep enough that I never even noticed dad come back. When I awoke, the sun was shining outside, snow still piled on the ground from last night.

***

From then on, the time passed by quickly over my first year of life. I didn’t gather much about the greater world, but from what I did learn is that we were semi-well off farmers from the countryside in a place simply called “The Human Continent.” The way everything was in English perplexed me at first, until I listened to my mom read me a book for the first time and I saw the letters. It was an alphabet, but not English. I assumed that the goddess simply gave me the ability to process whatever this language was as the one I was already most familiar with, but I also entertained the possibility that whatever this language is (that I now refer to as Common, as many fantasies do), was simply spoken like English but written differently. I was a bit too young to learn how to read though. 

My parents were both frightened and extremely excited to hear that their daughter could speak full sentences after her first year of life and when they thought I couldn’t hear they cheered over how good they are at parenting. I mean they were but… they also kinda had it very easy, not gonna lie. 

The first priority now was learning how to read. Why? To nerd out over this world of course?! Well, and to learn lots of important information that would help me make sense of this new life and the goal that the Goddess had sent me here for, but that was priority two. 

Lesson one of isekai: Never underestimate an introverted nerd with too much time on their hands.