Reborn Healer Chapter 1

Author's note: I've been experimenting with a new idea on the side. I'd love to know if anyone has interest in it! I have a few more chapters, but I'm not entirely sure whether or not I'll continue it at the moment. Since you lovely folk have been with me throughout The Silent Archmage, here's a sample of Reborn Healer (title in progress).

The last thing I saw before I died was the pillar of light outside my plane window.

The first thing I saw after I died was everything. There weren’t many better ways to describe it; in that instant, I realized what it meant to have your life flash before your eyes.

Eating alone in middle school. Being ostracized in high school. Finding friends in college. Moving into what should have been a proper life.

The accident. Not knowing how to save a life. Losing her.

Being fired. Retreating into games, fantasy novels, and the internet. Into a world that couldn’t hurt me.

Years of nothing. Years of wanting to be better but never trying to. Sleepless nights alone punctuated only by fighting on the internet. Never speaking to another soul. Stagnating.

Getting onto a flight for a fresh start. A new resolve to finally become something. To leave my mark on the world. Maybe not the most significant mark, but it had been better than nothing.

Funny how that worked. The moment I had worked up the courage to change, I died.

I don’t want to die.

Was this really it? Was this what I’d amount to?

What a waste of a life.

The lights faded, the memories coming to a halt, and I came to the realization that in the deep, empty black, my light had not been the only one.

Behind me was a blindingly bright sphere larger than anything I could have conceptualized. I didn’t know how I could see it, seeing as I no longer had eyes, but it remained in my perception.

In front of me was another point of light. Distant, but still as bright as the one behind me. It grew, bit by bit, and I got the sense it was beckoning to me.

I needed to go back. I had so much left undone, so many things I wanted to try. The light was just behind me, it was so close—but it was impossible to move that way. Instead, I drifted towards the distance.

As the sphere grew in my vision, I thought I could hear whispering. Instinct told me it was important, but try as I might, I couldn’t make out the words.

Then the light encompassed me entirely, and I was somewhere else.

#

“Ren.”

The unbearable brightness faded, and I opened my eyes to see a concerned-looking man who couldn’t have been much older than twenty. He was saying something, but the words meant less than nothing to me.

Had I suffered a head injury of some kind? That would make sense. A lot of people who suffered traumatic brain damage reported a near-death experience, which would explain away the light and the flashbacks. If that was the case, maybe I’d also lost the ability to understand language?

No, that couldn’t be it. Though I couldn’t tell what he was saying and my hearing seemed more muddled than usual, the man spouting out rapidfire, unintelligible words was indeed saying words. I could clearly identify the sounds, and they definitely weren’t English. The recognizable sound Ren kept slipping out every time he gestured at me.

Also, if I had been that injured, I definitely would be feeling pain, right? It was kind of hard to breathe right, but other than that I felt fine. Also, extremely naked.

Maybe I’d imagined the pain at the end and I’d been towed away to a foreign hospital. Would a random foreign nurse have this deep a concern for me, though? And… hold on, was I being held?

Hands on both of my sides turned me, and I looked up to see a blonde-haired woman about the same age as the man I’d seen.

“Who are you?” I tried to ask. “Where am I?”

Instead of words, however, what came from my mouth was a gurgle and a whining cry.

That seemed to calm the man and woman both, who started speaking to each other in that same rapidfire accent.

I finally realized what had happened minutes later when the man took me into his own arms and I caught a glimpse of the room around us. It could have come out of a ren faire, rustic as it was. The woman who’d been holding me before was lying down on a bed heaped high with cushions and blankets, but that was about the only normal thing in here. Torches lit the walls, and propped up on a wall was an honest-to-god sword almost as tall as I was—or, as I realized, had been.

Whoever owned that sword clearly took pride in it. It had been polished so brilliantly that I could see my own reflection.

The first time I saw it, I was convinced I was hallucinating. Even now, having been set down in a crib next to the bed, I still thought there had to be a better explanation for this.

In the reflection, I was a baby.

There was no way this was happening. It had to be a dream—except it couldn’t. My dreams had always been a chaotic mess with no rhyme or reason. Meanwhile, it had been over an hour since I had been—what, been born?—and everything seemed to be entirely normal.

I ran through a dozen possibilities, each less feasible than the last.

Occam’s Razor said that the most likely explanation for something was usually the correct one. The thing was, in my mind, that explanation made no sense.

But if I chose to believe that I was of sound mind and hadn’t been put into some kind of elaborate drug-testing scheme, then the only possible explanation was that I had actually died and been reborn.

It was preposterous, but looking at the facts of what I had experienced, it fit. I had thought that my last moments had been some kind of desperate defense mechanism by my brain to unlock something it could use to try to save itself, but I remembered the lights. The strange whisper.

I could table that issue for the time being, since I had more immediately pressing issues.

Namely, the fact that I was now a baby. My body was frustratingly unresponsive, my vocal cords especially so. Whether or not I had been reborn or was experiencing some kind of incredibly vivid delusion, I had to take my situation at face value.

What was I supposed to do from here?

#

The answer I settled on, as it turned out, was to live. Days passed, then months in the same life. I was constantly exhausted, so I slept a lot. I wasn’t sure whether that was normal for a baby or not, but it wasn’t like I had much else to do.

Obviously, I was no regular baby. If my theory about rebirth was true, then I had twenty-seven years of memories in this body. Had I replaced the mind that was supposed to be in this body? Should I be worried about that?

That worry bubbled up from time to time, but I dismissed it. Even if it was true, what the hell was I going to do about it?

Instead, I tried to learn. That was kind of hard to do as a baby, even after I graduated from being in the crib all the time to being let out to crawl around what I gradually learned was a pretty expansive house.

It was definitely larger than the shitty jail cell of an apartment I’d been renting for frankly criminal prices, but it also lacked a lot of features. Nothing was electric, we didn’t seem to have any form of real plumbing, and there just wasn’t any form of technology that I would consider remotely modern.

On the other hand, there was plenty of stuff that I didn’t recognize. There were a few books written in a language I couldn’t read stacked proudly on a single shelf. Beyond that, we seemed to have a great deal more swords, knives, and kinds of jewelry I had never seen before. Most intriguingly, we had a basement, but not only was the door handle too high up for me to reach, it was visibly locked.

The greatest progress I made in the initial six months or so of this new life was in understanding the language. I had quickly realized that when my parents said “Ren,” they were referring to me, but comprehending more past that was difficult.

I had gone through a phase of learning Japanese before, so I had some familiarity with the concepts of learning one. Living in a house where conversation was only ever in this strange new language was pretty much ideal when it came to learning it, but it kind of didn’t help when I couldn’t ask for clarification on anything because my undeveloped vocal cords turned everything into a baby’s cry.

Just from listening alone, I was able to gradually build a basic understanding of the language, but I couldn’t even come close to reading it. Even if the writing system was anything approaching phonetic, the letters wouldn’t be written in a language I recognized.

Still, it was gratifying to have that understanding. Though I still thought in English, only six months of listening to them was more than enough to unlock and develop this new skill. It had been a long time since I had been willing to put in the effort to push myself. For lack of literally anything else to do, I had been forced to learn, and… it felt good.

Trying to walk was another story entirely. As it turned out, babies didn’t take a year to start walking just because they didn’t know how to do it. That was a large part of it, of course, but for the first few months, my body was painfully unresponsive to my commands. It was like trying to play a shooter game with half a minute of input delay—it just wasn’t working out.

I finally managed to take my first tottering steps around seven months in, which my new parents were very happy about. They generally seemed worried about me for some reason, which I eventually managed to discern from overhearing their conversations was because I was constantly silent for hours at a time. 

They were worried it would mean delayed development for me mentally, which I couldn’t stop myself from laughing at. At least that worked.

From that day forward, I started making an effort to try sounding out sentences, which calmed both of them down somewhat.

I managed to form my first words nine months after I was born. My parents, whose names I learned were Aria and Vallis, were ecstatic.

Once I was able to walk, they let me freely around the house, though not outside. I was deeply, achingly curious about the world outside, but all I could do was look through our windows.

It did seem like even that free movement worried my father, though. I overheard them talking about me from time to time when they thought I couldn’t hear.

“Should he really be out and about this young?” I heard him ask one day, shut in his study. “I worry for him. He’s still so quiet. How will we know if he hurts himself?”

My mother’s voice replied, smooth and sure as I had grown accustomed to hearing. “Ren is your child as much as he is mine. He is more careful than you know. Besides, if he does get hurt, I’ll feel it and you’ll fix it.”

“Even so, with him as young as he is—“

“Shh. Preparation is healthy. Worry is not.”

They didn’t seem to get much work done after that, and so I continued my rough exploration of the house.

We were deep in the countryside. Our house was one of a couple dozen scattered throughout vast fields. The seeming underdevelopment of the place I was growing up in was mirrored by the other buildings. Once or twice, I even saw horse-drawn carriages outside, tracing their way through roughshod paths between what looked to be large-scale farms of some kind.

By the time I was just about a full year old, I was certain that this was no delusion. I had been reborn into… I wasn’t sure where yet. Another world, like those fantasy novels I had so loved during my worst years? I wanted to think so, and there were a lot of things that pointed towards it, but it just as well could have been a part of some country I hadn’t visited.

That changed on my first birthday.

My parents didn’t celebrate my first year, not formally, but I had been counting the days. If this was indeed another world, I wasn’t sure if a year worked the same way, but at three hundred and sixty-five days, something changed.

When I woke up that morning, a great pressure had taken ahold of me. I had no sensation to liken it to in either of my lives—it was as if somewhere deep within me, I was being torn into two. The closest feeling I could equate it to was the strange, indescribable one I had felt in the short period after my death, but this was certainly different.

That pressure quickly grew into sudden, sharp pain. I cried out involuntarily, bringing my mother running over from where she’d been cooking.

“Vallis!” she shouted. “Vallis, come here!”

I doubled over, the needle-like pain increasing. I barely heard my father approach.

“What’s wrong?” he asked me sharply.

I couldn’t respond.

“He’s in pain,” Aria said, panicked. “Can you heal him?”

“You know the risks,” Vallis replied, a note of steel in his voice. “He’s barely a winter old yet. His soul—“

I screamed, cutting off the rest of his sentence. Something was carving a hole inside of me, devouring me from the inside out, and it wouldn’t stop.

“Do it,” Aria said, her voice suddenly firm.

“You’re sure?”

“I can feel what happens if you don’t.”

That was enough encouragement for Vallis, who held a hand down on my forehead. He made a surprised noise, then a concerned one.

“Vallis. You can do this,” Aria said. “Trust yourself.”

“Yes,” my father said. “Then…”

He muttered a chain of words that I fully could not understand, then finished it with a phrase I could.

“Rebind Soul!”

Threads of something passed into me, intersecting the yawning void that the devouring, tearing sensation had generated, and suddenly, the pain stopped.

Within me, I felt the two halves start knitting back together.

This is nice. The thought came to me, unbidden. If this had been my real parents—previous parents, maybe—they wouldn’t even have cared. I remembered being yelled at in the playground for crying after I’d taken a nasty fall and broken my arm so bad it had needed surgery. This kind of unhesitant warmth… had I ever felt like this before?

With the pain gone, I opened my eyes—and nearly shouted again, this time in surprise.

There were words in front of me. Words in the same language my parents spoke, incomprehensible—but a soft, strangely familiar voice read them out.

Your soul has been touched by the alms of the gods. You have awakened.

Name: Ren Kane

Core: None formed

Spells: None learned

Skills: None gained

Holy shit.

If nothing else had done it, that cemented it for me. This was another world. One with magic. One with a game-like system like the ones I’d dreamed about waking up to seeing.

Magic existed beyond words on a screen. Holy shit.

I had already wanted to make something better out of my life before.

Now, it was clear that better was going to mean something entirely different.

My resolve had shattered easily on Earth, but now, it felt unshakeable.

This was a second chance. A real second chance with a family who loved me, a world entirely unlike my own, and seemingly endless opportunity.

I wasn’t going to let it go to waste.