*** Kiara ***

  Whoever designed those toys might be a god damn genius. She hadn’t made much progress with number 27, but as soon as she was released from her crib (or how she liked to call it, her nightly prison cell), she went straight for the other toys. Inspecting them closely, she had found about three dozen different cubes, all numbered consecutively with a small number etched into them.

  They were like little puzzle boxes. Even without any magical interaction, she could see them becoming increasingly difficult. The first ones only had single or very few lines and didn’t seem to be constructed in layers, but the lines slowly went from straight to curved to bent at different angles and grew increasingly longer. Then, dead ends were introduced, and the structure got more and more complex, spanning all sides of the cube for the first time. The first cube introducing a second layer was a strange one. One side of it was inlaid with some kind of glass or crystal. It wasn’t really see-through, but one could at least guess at the structures beneath. After that, all cubes were showing layers, and the difficulty ramped up steeply as far as she could tell.

  Finally, an intellectual challenge more to her liking. She smiled and got to work.

  *** Magdalena ***

  Magdalena’s heart was heavy, weighted down by what she was about to do. A small knife was tucked securely in her belt. It was enchanted with weaves over weaves to bind, to poison, and to destroy. She had to make sure. It mustn’t be allowed to survive or escape. Her sacrifice could not be in vain. Her family would hate her and most likely banish her from their life. Even little Petro, her slightly dull grandson, would look at her differently.

  It would probably kill her inside as much as it would hurt them, but she had been weak and kind before, and others had paid the price. Now it was time for her to be strong, do what no one wanted, but what must be done. She would bear the burden.

  Her cloak hid her presence as she slowly streaked through the night. It was unlikely anyone would see her, but the darkness warped around her made for an additional layer of protection. The protection wards she had woven around her daughter’s house years ago were keyed to her, but to keep at least a plausible deniability, she had to break them. She doubted it would make any difference in the end. Maya knew the protection ward on the crib was not intended for Kiara’s protection. It was to keep it locked up. There was a way to hide a murder, if you were already the main suspect, to make it one among many, but she was unwilling to step so low. She was no monster, or at least that’s what she told herself. Kindness was a weakness, a painful lesson she had learned long ago. The only way to protect the ones you love is to have the strength to do it yourself.

  She studied the ward in front of her. If you wanted to create something impenetrable, you could not introduce a backdoor for yourself, well, except for the ward being keyed to the very structure of her soul.

  She hadn’t taken any shortcuts when constructing it, but nothing was truly unbreakable. Overloading a glyph or breaking a line would trigger an alarm and wake her family up.

  In the end, she opted to introduce an additional weave into the ward, which would draw energy and redirect it away from one area in the ward before reintroducing it at a later place. It wasn’t a perfect solution, mainly because nobody else in the town would be able to do so. You would need an expert in weaving and wards who was intimately familiar with her specific design, something which would take weeks of studying, but was at least possible if unlikely.

  Maybe she could make up a story about an old colleague who knew her work and used this trick in the past. She had come to terms with the likely consequences of her actions.

  She just needed one spark of hope to remain, to stay alive, that she would not lose her family a second time. Without hope, she wouldn’t be able to go through with it. Adjusting the ward also allowed her to delay for just a little bit longer.

  Slipping silently into her family’s home. A flimsy window lock was easily pried open. Taking cover beneath the window to check the orb one last time. The coast was clear. Kiara was sleeping, and the rest of the room was empty, no one in sight. Slowly, she pushed the window open and climbed through. In near complete darkness, she stepped on one of Kiara’s toys and had to keep herself from cursing out loud. Even through the soft leather of her shoes, it had hurt like hell. She disabled the sender orb.

  Drawing her knife, carefully so as not to cut herself, she neared the crib. There, Kiara was lying. Tucked in by Maya. She probably gave her a loving kiss on her forehead and wished her a good night, just like she had done with her daughter all those years back.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  She shook her head to drive away those thoughts. “Focus,” she told herself.

  She noticed tears rolling down her cheeks. She had thought about simply taking Kiara and killing her somewhere else to save her daughter from the pain of finding her child murdered in her crib. It would break her, she knew it, and the fact that she was sleeping only a few steps away would make it worse. The guilt alone would be too much to bear. However, the unknown might be even worse. Hope could be a worse poison than despair under the right circumstances, one that never really went away and never healed.

  The thought of her daughter finding dead Kiara tomorrow morning was unbearable. Maya would break down, crying and screaming, once she realized there was nothing she could do for her child. She had seen it and felt it herself before. It felt like the strings keeping oneself upright and the world in its right place were suddenly cut, and just like a puppet’s strings being cut, one suddenly crumbles to the ground, and the world no longer makes sense.

  Magdalena took a deep breath. She hesitated. Could she really do this to her daughter? What else could she do? She knew the child was pretending to be something it wasn’t. It was growing fast, and it might be dangerous. It lied to its parents, pretending not to be able to talk.

  She made some quick, temporary adjustments to the crib's weave and reached in with one hand and shook Kiara awake.

  *** Kiara ***

  It was the middle of the night. At first, she was disoriented. She had dreamt of a snowy mountain top, where they had their first short vacation trip in her past life. It had been damn cold and windy and having severely underestimated how taxing the climb up would be she had packed way too much stuff, but it was a memory she thought back to fondly.

  Magdalena was shaking her head and leaning over her crib. In one hand, she was holding an evil-looking knife marked over and over with runes. Her eyes looked directly at her.

  “I know you can understand me,” she said in a calm voice. Her eyes looked like she had been crying.

  “You can scream if you want to. No sound is leaving the crib. I made sure of that.” Her hands were trembling.

  Her eyes hushed over to the weave on the crib and saw some additional lines gently glowing, before focusing back on Magdalena.

  “I want to know just two things from you. What are you, because we both know you are not a normal child, and what are your intentions regarding my family?” Her tone was cold, resigned, and empty of emotion.

  For a second, Kiara was frozen. She was completely vulnerable. Ambushed in the middle of the night, no time to think or prepare, and even with preparation time, there probably would be nothing she could do.

  “I don’t know,” she stuttered in a panic. Her brain didn’t work properly, and so she just waited for her grandmother to react. Magdalena was waiting, and so she continued and let the words just spill out of her.

  “I think I died together with my girlfriend, and something happened. I don’t know, I was pulled along and then I awoke here. I can’t really tell you much more, and regarding our family… They seem like nice people. They have been very kind to me so far. I don’t want anything bad to happen to them, but I did not know how everyone would react. I was afraid and so God damn lonely in the beginning” she started calmly before tears overcame her. She was silently sobbing, but it felt good. It had been some tense months for her, and she still hadn’t really adjusted all that well to her new situation. She tried to put on a calm front most of the time, but internally, she had struggled, and now her grandmother was threatening her with a knife.

  *** Magdalena ***

  How had the monster she had seen in that crib so suddenly turned into a small crying girl in front of her eyes? She had heard of cases of reincarnation, but they were rare. Exceptionally rare! Only gods or other higher beings could pick up a soul in one universe and throw it into another. They never did so without reason, or by accident.

  It had happened, but all cases she was aware of reincarnates were powerful priests, born to a priestess, accompanied by a prophecy, and raised by one of the churches to further their agendas or fight an old evil. It always meant war when a prophet was crowned.

  On top of it sounded like the gods or at least one of them had fucked up, rather badly.

  “Ok, calm down. Let’s say I believe you. Do you have any way to prove your story?” she asked, but her grip on the knife had already relaxed a little.

  “Not really. Please don’t kill me. I can tell you a little about my old world, and I have some skills, like math, which I should definitely not know so far.” Little Kiara said while still slightly sobbing.

  Neither was proof of her story. One, she could make up on the fly, and the other. Well, she did not know whether demons, ghosts, or whatever else she might be had any skills in mathematics.

  And yet she tended to believe her. Deep down, she wanted to believe her.

  “By the gods, please don’t let me regret this decision.” She half mumbled half prayed.

  “Ok, here is what we are going to do…” Kiara looked fearfully up at her, her eyes darting to the knife in her hand.

  “No, I am not going to kill you. For now! It would break my daughter’s heart, and we are finally getting closer again. I don’t want to ruin that. But I will keep an eye on you. I do not trust you. I have no way to verify if what you say is true. For now, you will become my unofficial apprentice at least for a few hours each day, so I can monitor you. We will have to find a way to convince Maya of that idea, which might not be easy, but we will find a way.” Magdalena spoke out loud and made up her plan on the fly.

  Neither trusted the other yet, but it helped them both to talk, and together they made a plan to convince Maya and decided not to involve anyone else for now.