Chapter 2

  Acclimating to a new body is painful. I was used to muscles that already had mass, that already knew how to move. Now, I had muscles that were weak. Fresh, without any muscle memory. It took months to stand. But once I did, I was not going to be standing still. Well, until my new muscles gave out, that is. I fully intended on walking across the room. I did not intend to fall flat on my face. Luckily, I didn’t have far to fall. My muscles ached like I had just worked out for 8 hours. I suppose, in a way, I had. As a baby, though, my muscles were quick to recover, and slowly they started learning the movements I wanted them to.

  I was not idle learning about the threads, either. I didn’t know what they were, but I had a few ideas. I had read a fair few fantasy novels in my last life. A few of them were even reincarnation based. Never believed it was a possibility though. At first, I tried to grasp the threads with my hands. Needless to say, that did absolutely nothing. I imagine my parents watching me thought I was grasping at air. I didn’t have any idea how to try to mentally grab them, though. I tried staring intently, imagining myself grabbing them, ‘pushing’ my will out, everything you could imagine. Nothing seemed to work. I kept trying, though. One day, if this was magic, I would grasp it.

  In the meantime, I continued to learn to walk, then to run. I ‘worked out’ every day. Not that a baby can do much actual working out, but every movement was a workout as a baby. My parents never commented again on me being ‘advanced’. They started giving each other a look whenever I did something beyond what a 6-month old should be able to. Others commented on how I seemed to follow conversations, or how quickly I learned to walk, or how I rarely cried. My parents would just look at each other, agree, and change the subject. I didn’t care though. I was going to learn as much as I could, as soon as I was able to.

  It was through listening in on the adults that I discovered my second heart, wasn’t actually a heart in the sense I knew. It didn’t pump blood. It didn’t really ‘pump’ anything. No, it was more like a well, or maybe a reactor. It provided raw power to the Weavers. It seems that magic users on this world were called Weavers. No one quite understood why they were called that, though I suspected it had something to do with the threads I could see.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Time passed, and I learned to walk. I began to speak. At first, I tried to baby speak to throw off suspicion. Ma-ma. Da-da. Ba-ba. That didn’t last long, though. Within weeks I was speaking full sentences, to the amazement of my parents. I asked questions about the threads, about the Weavers, about the world. They would answer my questions as one answers a child. With short, small answers, that barely scratched the surface. Follow-up questions were always answered with “You’ll learn that when you’re older”. Or, “I can’t answer that. I’m not a Weaver”. It seems that the threads I could see, they couldn’t. They were, however, completely known about, since Weavers could see them.

  Still, I did learn there was a library in town that would have at least some of my answers. Not that I could read this language yet. That means it would take time to find out the knowledge I wanted. I guess I needed to learn to be patient, then. In the meantime, I figured I would learn how to meditate. I knew the basics from my past life, but never really did any true meditation.

  I sat down, closed my eyes, and tried to think of nothing. Do you have any idea how hard it is to think of nothing at all? I tried to find my ‘nothing box’ from my previous life, but it was nowhere to be found. So how does one learn to think of nothing? By learning that it’s not about thinking of nothing, but of letting nothing you think of stick in your mind. You will have thoughts. Just let them float on by, do not pay attention to them, do not focus on them, do not even acknowledge their existence. After a week or so of trying, this method was the only one I could get to work.

  When I finally fell into my first trance, though, something strange happened that snapped me out of it. I felt a presence, an energy, a feeling, just beyond my awareness, that seemed to pulse in time with my second heart. ‘What the hell was that?’ I thought. My eyes flew open, half in awe, half in fear. I could feel the power and it was immense. It had the feeling of a deep cave, the bottom of the ocean, a thunderous storm cloud, the time between moments, the space between atoms, and the core of the sun all at the same time. I could not even begin to describe it in words, but I knew that whatever it was, it was related to the threads I see around me.

  I attempted to capture that feeling a few more times over the next few weeks, without ever quite managing it. Trances eluded me, for fear of that awe-inspiring power. But I would not give up. I would capture that feeling once again. And when I did, my world would completely change.