Chapter 1: birth of a being

The first thing I noticed when being born was the feeling of a new… energy, for lack of a better term lets call it energy, one not present on Earth. It was an unfamiliar energy but at the same time it felt oddly comforting and friendly to me. As I tried opening my eyes I was instantly blinded by the light. Closing them quickly once again I instead focused on the sound. I could hear what sounded like people talking but it was no language I recognised from before death. The sounds were to simple and many of the sounds seemed to repeat quite often. I thought about the current situation for a moment and quickly realised that what I just experienced must have been birth. Trying to open my eyes once more, the light quickly came flooding back but I persevered and managed to adapt to the overwhelming light. The area was unrecognisable to me. It was lush and very green but the plants were unlike what I recognised from home. They were bigger for one but also had more colourful leaves as opposed to just flowers. The feel it gave was alienating but not nearly as alienating as the appearance of presumably his father and mother. They looked like humans but far closer to monkeys, almost like they were less evolved than their modern day counterparts. A more ape like facial structure combined with thick hair on most of the body. Quickly overcoming my apprehension due to this body recognizing its parents I realized that I was somewhat out of sync with this body, almost like I was disconnected with it. When I tried to move my arms they moved but only after a short delay and I needed to consciously move them as opposed to being able to simply move them. Then the crying started, this body did what all new-borns do and that was bawl loud enough to alert every being in a 5 kilometre radius. Incapable of stopping it I simply cried until I fell asleep.

When I woke up once again I saw that my parents were part of a shabbily built village that looked like it preceded even the oldest of civilisations. It was quite a bustling little village since I could see many people walking around although I could not get a full picture due to me laying inside a separate house. Looking around the house I saw that it was made of a sort of clay combined with a roof made of thatch. The room itself was filled with primitive cradles, each appearing to hold a child. The cradles themselves were made of wood with a bed of a sort of straw. They weren’t very comfortable but I myself could barely be affected because it seemed that my disconnection with this body also extended to touch and my other senses. It was like there was a filter to my senses. What I could feel was the mysterious energy that I detected earlier everywhere around my body and even in my body itself. Thinking of what it could be tired me out enough to the point of passing out once again. When I woke up again it was dusk and I was moved closer to the centre of the village together with a group of other children who were crying loudly due to the cold, my body did the same. The place where we were connected nearly everything of the village and I could now clearly see the size of the village. There were probably roughly 40 houses, all made of the clay and thatch the earlier house was also made of. This sort of village centre had a couple of tables and in the middle a man was trying to light a fire place with two wooden poles on either side, covered in something that probably was meant to make it more fire resistant. On top of the two poles was a spit with a pig on it. The man who was trying to light the fire was wearing clothes reminiscent of an old shaman with a skull on his head and pelts covering most of his body. He got a stone which was probably a flint and used it to start a fire while making grand gestures, as if it were a magic show. What surprised me was that while he was making a fire, I could feel the energy flow around the flint and into the wood, creating a fire. How was this possible? If this was a new energy but it was capable of starting fires, how did we start them back home? While thinking of that I realised that the fire started way too soon, usually making a fire with flint would take a couple of tries but this time it created a good enough spark on the first try. Could the energy be some sort of universal energy? Why was it everywhere? Before I could complete this train of thought, I felt my body getting tired due to the warmth and I went to the land of non-dreams once again.

When I woke up I was back in the house with the other children who were all still sleeping. Thinking of sleep I realised how weird my own sleep was. I could wake myself up due to my mind being still somewhat aware during sleep. I was not capable of actual thought while my body was asleep but I still realised that I was capable of waking myself up. Of course this would be a bad idea due to the body needing sleep but it was a possibility. I also did not dream at all which was odd. Thinking back to the energy I realised that it was somewhat comparable to the energy of life that I was missing while dead. Could it be some kind of similar all governing energy? Maybe it was the energy of death? No that could not be right since I remember death being  an absence. This energy felt more wild than the life energy I can now sort of sense.

A revelation struck me.

A foreign energy, capable of doing things out of the ordinary and pervading everything, weirdly coloured plants and lastly my rebirth, something unexplainable by science.
Could this be magic?
It would explain things but it seemed so illogical, how can magic be real?

In the spirit of magic I decided to declare the energy to be named Mana. As I thought it something suddenly happened. I felt the Mana respond to my thoughts and it started to flood my body until I could feel myself brimming with it. I felt it having almost doubled compared to before. Sadly exhaustion quickly started to overcome me before I could do anything. In a sort of experiment I tried to stay awake by moving some of the Mana in the body. Instead of me staying awake I could suddenly feel my mind disconnect more and more from the body. In a panic I tried pulling on the string of Mana that connected the body and my mind. Strangely enough it obeyed my commands perfectly and I could feel myself return to the body and exhaustion started to overtake me once again. Continuing to experiment despite the shock of feeling my mind disconnect from the body, I could feel there be a sort of rope between the two and I could either bind my mind close to the body or keep it on a leash of sorts which would make it so that I was not troubled by the exhaustion but neither could I feel much of anything to do with the body. Although I could now remove my mind further from the body, I still could not properly connect with the body. Deciding that sleeping would be a good idea until I knew the possible side effects of keeping my mind awake I figuratively pulled on the rope of Mana once again and returned to the state of half awareness.

The next time I awoke it was still day and this time my mother was there to feed me. While looking at her I found the arrangement for the babies strange, why were we being kept apart from the rest of the village? A baby would require proper influence from their environment for quite a while to learn to learn many things including the language. While my mother was with me quite often it was still probably less than half the time that I was awake, maybe she had a time intensive job within the village?

After I was fed my mother played with me for a bit until she went back to whatever it was that she did and I decided to test out my magic more. I felt that I could move my Mana around my body and I tried using it to somehow reinforce my body parts since this current body could barely move on the count of being, well, a baby. I tried pushing it and sort of merging it into my muscles but it quickly became apparent that it would simply flow back to an equal balance of Mana in my body. One thing of note that I did manage to figure out that while Mana normally is evenly spread out throughout the body, the brain does have more Mana than other spots in the body, probably due to it being the centre of all activity for magic. Since I did not see a use for Mana inside of the body my next test I decided to try and expel it. Through concentration I managed to gather a part of the Mana in my body towards my finger tips and tried to push it out with all of my will power but it did not seem to wish to leave in the slightest. Somewhat defeated I went back to thinking about what could have gone wrong and this time I decided to let my body sleep while my mind thought.

A possibility was that there was no real magic in this world and the energy that I think is Mana is in reality something wholly different and the surge in energy was simply coincidental. While this is a possibility, it didn’t feel like the truth especially since I can move the energy quite easily and it is a possibility that my mind is playing on tricks on me, I doubt it.

That leads to the next possibility: there is magic in this world but there is either no way to manipulate it outside of the few things I have done so far or I am simply incapable. Leaving this possibility out for a moment since it doesn’t help, there are more possible reasons.

Another reason could be that I am doing something wrong with my attempts and it is not willpower or skill that I lack but understanding. Going with this theory I started to think about what it could be and I thought back to the times that I saw magic in action. The first time was when it managed to create a spark at once and the second time was when I named it Mana, or wait, I never named it Mana, I declared it Mana, could intent be the key?

Pulling on the rope to send me back to the body I woke myself up and started on getting magic to work. If I could make progress in magic I might be able to evade death this time.
That idea filled me with an immense joy to never have to experience, the darkness, the absence of life, the terrible fear, ever again.

With my motivation higher than ever I decided to try and focus on what I saw Mana was capable of doing: producing fire. Testing out my theory I closed my eyes and focused on fire and the feeling of my Mana, not letting it out but manifesting it. I could hear the woosh of a fire suddenly blazing to life my eyes shot open realising something went wrong. What I saw was a flame at least 3 meters high float in front of me, I quickly shut off my Mana and the fire went out but the damage was already done, the thatch roof was on fire and quickly burning. I heard people rush towards me and the other babies but before I could think of anything else I noticed that I was growing faint and that my Mana reserves were incredibly low. I fell unconscious just as the first people starting appearing.

Once I woke up I saw that there were quite a lot of people surrounding me, including my parents. They looked…. Worried, oh dear, that’s not good. They started shouting in joy once I opened my eyes which led me to believe that I might have gone into coma for a while, I have no idea how to check for how long though, I can’t ask them either. Well I did finally get some attention so they do care for me, there must be a reason they cannot be with me constantly. I wondered what happened to the other babies, I hope they made it out alright but once again, I cannot ask anyone since I do not speak their language yet.