Edward Smith 

It had been roughly two years since I had been reborn into this new world. I was aware of this because today I had celebrated my second birthday.  

In my old world, birthdays were celebrated every five years. So, when you were five, ten and finally when you were fifteen, when one came of age. Of course, we continued to celebrate even past the age of fifteen, but the fifteenth birthdays were the biggest of celebrations by far. After all, it was the coming-of-age celebration. However, in this world, it seemed to be custom to celebrate every two years, with the coming-of-age celebration being the age of eighteen.  

I found it quite odd that you were considered an adult in this world at the age of eighteen and not fifteen. But it was a strange world and of all the differences and oddities, this was by far the least impactful. 

So, for my second birthday celebration, my parents decided that they’d take me out to a sort of Circus. I had seen quite a few circuses in my time as Alex in Aroa. Though, that was due to most of them being conducted by illegal syndicates that used enslaved humans and animals to perform party tricks and mock battles for the sick entertainment of those who attended. For me, the night usually ended bloody and left me feeling empty inside as I failed to learn any new information about the culprits behind the attack on the church. However, in this world, circuses seemed to be a legal sort of entertainment primarily targeted towards children. Which was a rather pleasing surprise to say the least. 

I went into the circus fully intended to be bored out of my mind. After all, I was a twenty-nine-year-old man who had lived a life filled with battle, torture and death. The sort of entertainment that the soft and pampered children of this world enjoyed surely wouldn’t be any source of entertainment for a former king. And so, I had sat down on Mary’s lap, Jon beside us, fully intended on spending the entire two hour long show meditating and strengthening the clump, which now resembled a small spherical ball, that I had been progressively building within my heart. Which had grown quite significantly over the last year. However, things didn’t go quite as planned for me. 

To be honest, I was star struck. Completely flabbergasted about what I had witnessed. First off, the show started off with a man, dressed as a clown with white face paint, red lips and a giant red rubber nose, floating down from the sky. A raging, yet perfectly controlled tornado at his feet. Carefully gliding himself down to the ground. As soon as I saw that… my jaw dropped to the ground and my attention had been fully captured.  

See, this wasn’t exactly the first time I had seen something like this happen. I had seen snippets of incredible feats like this on the glass screen, the television, back at home. But I thought that was all fake. I mean, if cars, metal boxes that could move themselves and buildings that stretched high into the sky whilst being made of mostly glass could exist. I’m sure there were ways of faking the manipulation of the elements. Some were even capable of doing so back in Aroa. Punching so hard that gusts of winds erupted from their fists, or slicing a blade infused with spiritual power so fast, that the wind around it turned into blades that shot from it and slashed through stone itself. Hell, in my own world, I’d seen those use their spiritual power to blow into torches of flame and send a stream of hot fire rocketing before them like the breath of a dragon. 

But this was different. This was a whole other level. They weren’t using their spiritual power to manipulate the elements around them. They were manipulating the elements around them. And from what I had seen, they were in complete and utter control of them. It was simply wonderful. 

“What that?” 

I had asked my parents straight away, pointing at the clown above the tornado, using the broken baby talk that I had to use, despite knowing how to fully articulate full sentences by now. 

All that reading they had done with me had worked wonders for me. The spoken language wasn’t that estranged from the human tongue of my old world, but the written word was. If I had to put a time frame to it, I was probably able to have a full-blown conversation around about the age of ten months old in this world, though naturally I hid that. Even though this world was different… I doubted that babies were just chattering away with their parents. 

Learning the written language had taken me slightly longer, however. Though the spoken tongue was similar with a few miner tweaks. The written word was like night and day and so it had taken me a few months longer to be fluent in the written word then spoken. Thankfully though, when I had turned one, my parents had bought me a little plastic scribbling device that allowed me to write on it and immediately erase it with the swipe of a leaver. Which sped up the process from simply trying to memorise what each symbol represented, to being able to actively write them out and gain muscle memory in how they were written.  

Still, being fluent in both the spoken and written word at the age of about one and a half years had to be some kind of world record. Of course, unless there were others like me out there in the world. Which was of course very possible. 

“That? That’s magic. M. A. G. I. C. Magic.”