I did not get my wish of practicing magic in the womb and remembering my own birth. I was vaguely aware that I had a previous life from about half a year old, but my mind was young, unformed.

  I was, quite frankly, incapable of complex thoughts or advanced understanding.

  I was born Miranda de’Isla y Yarin. Not that I learned the family names quickly.

  I was focused on learning to move this unruly new body.

  And move my body I did. As soon as I had the barest glimpse of awareness I ‘worked out’ flailing my tiny limbs in the movements of weightlifting.

  I had a brief but intense period during college where I strongly considered kinesiology as a major. Computers won out by a slim margin, and for the same reasons body movements caught my attention. Boys.

  Specifically Morgan Johnson a basketball player who i think might have been into me but I can’t be sure. Spectrum friendzones are deep and easy to fall into.

  And the change came specifically because of Cole Watson who actually asked me out the first time we met. He was spectrum too and we clicked deeply the moment we met.

  Fortunately for my job prospects I loved Computer Engineering Technology. Unfortunately for my romantic intentions Cole had wandering eyes, hands and attentions.

  Anyway, I retained my book learning about human anatomy. I knew how to move to build muscles. My earliest memories of this life are doing complex combinations of specific movements over and over. Complex out of the desire to obfuscate my intentions.

  During this period of my life my wet nurse and only constant companion was a low elf named Griselda.

  Not to be confused with High elves, Low elves are known for several things, huge families, 200 year life spans and the ability of their women to produce extraordinarily nutritious breast milk. All the women who lived in the palace hired them. It was a status symbol and it was rumored it helped human children gain magical strength.

  My parents wandered in and out frequently but I didn’t even learn their names until they walked in together one day to admire the usurper in the bassinet.

  The nursery room wasn’t huge and that bassinet, even pushed close to my little toddler bed, ate up half of my floor space. His wet nurse took up the other half with her rocking chair and changing table.

  At least he explained why I hadn’t seen my mother in months.

  “Oh, Arnault, he is just beautiful.” My mother enthused.

  “Well done, Krissy, my love.” He put his arms around her and kissed her temple. “Do you want to go for the spare immediately or would you like a few years of rest before the next one?”

  “Her highness has demanded that I wait.” Mother sounded reluctant. “She wasn’t happy I conceived without her permission. She’s likely to send you on a long mission if we don’t wait.”

  Since I wasn’t even a whole year old I was on her highness’s side. Whoever her highness was.

  He snorted. “As if she had the authority to order around the treasury officials.”

  “She could make you audit some backwater nowhere and demand that I stay.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He looked troubled. “Then you will get her permission before we try again.” He sighed and stepped away from her. “I wish…”

  “Shh. Don’t wish for me to fall from grace, even here in private, the walls have ears.” She glanced at the doorway where the wet nurses had retreated.

  Tatiana, the boy’s nurse, was also a low elf, but she was a rainbow elf, which was more prestigious than Griselda the wood elf. She was haughty and dismissive towards me and my nurse.

  My parents barely looked at me when they visited now. Why hadn’t matriarchy been an option in the choosing rooms? It seemed that I was stuck in a male dominated primogeniture society.

  The best thing to come of the whole brother situation was that Tatiana and Griselda talked together a lot and that vastly increased my vocabulary in my new language.

  The second best thing to happen because of my brother was the toddle garden. This was an actual garden, not a school.

  Children who lived in the palace, at least the noble ones, had access to an herb garden that was specifically designed not to harm them. There were cork outdoor cushions on the flagstones. None of the playground equipment was terribly dangerous.

  I finally found somewhere to do pull ups, something that I struggled with before but seemed easy to my tiny body. The early conditioning I had done had brought great results.

  I could boost myself to standing on my hands on the pull up bar. I quickly learned to flip around it like a gymnast. The day after I made my first flip I was amused to see someone had brought over a thick mat. I practiced falling on the mat.

  Like all the children I was closely accompanied by my nurse. She gasped when I flipped. I was cackling madly.

  Then she laughed. “Enough of that for today, you little hooligan. Let’s try the climbing wall slide. You’ll love that.”

  I did love the slides, all of them. The tallest one was accessible by the wall she mentioned. Griselda was always there, spotting me while I climbed and somehow she was always there at the bottom too. She would scoop me up and laugh as she carried me back to the wall side.

  When I seemed fatigued we sat in the gazebo for a nursing. Then I would play more sedate games.

  I particularly enjoyed the sand box. I loved to sit in the sand and draw. Sometimes I made lines by dragging something, sometimes by dripping sand from my hands.

  I started with basic shapes, letters and numbers from my first life and patterns.

  It did not take Griselda long to catch on. I was equipped with wax tablets and a stylus a few days after I was exposed to the garden.

  I slowly became aware that garden time periods were segregated by age. At first I assumed older kids played somewhere else, but then I noticed children waiting for baby play time to be done.

  I quickly began focusing my fine motor skills practice to my tablets rather than the sandbox.

  “She’s going to put her eye out with that.” Tatiana scoffed when Griselda put the stylus in my hand for the first time. I tried for a full alphabet and got to R before my hand hurt. Then I set the stylus aside carefully and went back to the pile of slates again and again.

  By the time the boy was placed on the floor with me had started drawing. My favorite was elaborate Celtic style knots. That is a truly finicky pattern to draw. I had a book on how to draw them when I was a kid the first time.

  Sometimes I traced the shapes with my finger before I started, sometimes I scribed little squares, triangles and so forth and connected them in pattern. Griselda seemed very reluctant to recondition the wax tablets so I often scribbled over my drawings as soon as they were finished.

  Griselda brought out a hard paged book from the storage closet that held our toys and clothes. Again, Tatiana scoffed at her for it.

  “What is she going to do with that? She hasn’t even said a word yet.”

  I looked up at the pinch faced rainbow elf. “Bitch.” I said in English. It wasn’t a word in this language, as far as I was aware. I had been walking at nine months and I was determined to read by two years.

  Griselda just laughed and started reading the book to me. The content was simple, 33 wooden pages with one letter and a beautiful picture on each one. “A is for apple” simple.

  Of course apple was spelled with an S in this language, but the idea is accurate.

  I eagerly stood at her knee doing my best to form the sounds she made.

  It was at about this age, more than a year and less than two that I began to suspect I wasn’t spectrum here.

  Autism and other atypical brain configurations are partly physical, partly chemical and definitely genetic. I had a completely different body than my old life. If I wanted to hold on to my brain I should have teleported in with my gear.

  My grief for my old brain was brief but intense.

  The thing that struck me so deeply was that my aphantasia was gone too. I could build an image in my mind and hold it there.

  As I said, I got over the loss quickly. Make no mistake, it was a loss. I have never regretted my spectrum traits.