A month or so went by in our new home. It took a while for things to adjust and settle down but we recovered, healed and began to build our lives anew. We kept apart from the rest of the town, only venturing in for basic groceries and the like. Aunt Trudy had a fairly well-kept vegetable plot out the rear of the cottage which provided some fresh vegetables and we even had inherited a chicken coop, although my father did have to reinforce it somewhat after Jack’s repeated attempts of chasing the chickens around for food. My mother and I mostly spent the time recuperating and recovering from our wounds. Each night I would lay in my crib and train my mana channels before drifting off to help aid the healing process. On occasion I would try and steal away some time and explore the cottage, I found a bookshelf left behind by Aunt Trudy there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of value, Aunt Trudy is apparently a big fan of romance novels involving burly, stern lumberjack types as well as what seemed to be a vast collection of what I could only describe as murder books, although many dubbed themselves “True Crime” they were decidedly anything but truthful. There were a few detailing specific historical events that seemed to not only have a fictitious spin to amplify the drama but also without the surrounding context made very little sense to me. From what I could piece together through all the random texts I read though was that this planet or plane or perhaps even just a nation was known locally as Alith. From a passing mention in a few of the books, I learned that unlike in my previous world there was not simply one intelligent species that dominated but several. And within each species there seemed to be a lot more variety than I was used to, in fact, the land of Alith seemed overall much larger which was interesting. I was born a humanoid, and from the little, I could glean my sub-species was human. I was taken aback somewhat by the arrogance of one subspecies to use their existence as the classification for all others but it seemed Humans had by and far the highest population and from the number of burly lumberjacks that were retired soldiers, I learned of many, many wars and campaigns of conquering the humans seemed to have initiated over the years, at least if there was any truth to the steamy novels of Aunt Trudy. I did see mention of a few other subspecies of humanoid, in particular a few that existed in fantasy tales of my homeland that seemed to resemble Elves and Dwarves. The other species were harder to nail down but there seemed to be one that was closely tied to stone, crystals and other natural formations known as Serdans, quoting from The Woodcutter’s Burning Soul I found the following description; 

As men were made of flesh, craved the flesh and felt the warmth and beating of the flesh so did the Serden with the stone. The chiselled, perfect specimen stood towering over Yelena his marble-like hands hiding a delicate truth beneath the sturdy exterior. She traced her hand across his wide boulder-like shoulders, down his cold, smooth chest and finally to his-

and that’s about as far as my research on the Serdan progressed before my Mother snatched the book away from me and put it on a much higher shelf…