The darkness felt strangely warm. Briar had always imagined darkness being cold. Then she realized that she could feel. Shouldn’t dead people, being spirits, not be able to feel anything?

Hmmm…It was strangely soft, too.

As she pondered this, everything suddenly became colder and bright.

She heard voices around her as she was lifted up. She opened her eyes and tried to focus them on a rather large looking face staring down at her. He smiled and said something in an unfamiliar language.

What? Hey! Put me down!

She tried to say, but a child’s cry came out, causing her to pause. Was there a baby in the room?

She tried to move her head to see around her, but she felt incredibly weak, and could barely even move it an inch.

What is this? Where am I? Who are you?! She tried to ask the man. There was that sound again! The baby sound was coming from somewhere incredibly close by… She raised her hand jerkily to scratch her head and glanced at it.

Her hand had become short and chubby, and oddly familiar. Then she remembered what it reminded her of: a baby’s fist. She moved her arm right; the baby’s arm moved right. She brought her arm left; the baby’s arm jerked left.

Then the large man said something in that strange language again and stooped down to hand her to another large person: a woman who looked down upon her, sweat beading her forehead, but a beautiful smile upon her face.

“Thera.”

She said, and then spoke some more things Briar couldn’t understand.

Briar listened, confused. Even if she couldn’t fully translate them all, she was quite familiar with the main languages of the world. But this was not any of them. It was a completely new language.

The woman’s large hand came up to caress Briar’s forehead, lovingly cradling Briar in her arms. “Thera.” She said again.

Then realization dawned. She had been reborn as a baby, and had just been named ‘Thera’!

“EEEEEEEEEEEHHHHH!!!!?!!” She shrieked with her screaming baby voice.

Her mother’s brow wrinkled in concern, and she made comforting noises and rocked Briar to and fro.

As Briar’s body was that of a newborn, she soon ran out of energy to shout. Her long drawn out screech of surprise was soon brought to an end by an overwhelming urge to sleep. Struggle though she might, Briar’s consciousness still swiftly slipped back into the dark realm of sleep.

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The next time Briar awoke, she stared at an unfamiliar wooden ceiling.

The morning sunshine was peeking through a nearby window. Blinking in confusion, she tried to get up, but found she couldn’t move.

She found herself wrapped up in a huge soft, green blanket. This is strange. This sort of thing shouldn’t prevent me from moving! She struggled, but it was no use. She couldn't move. She frowned and tried to move again, but her arms felt strangely weak…

Then everything came rushing back to her.

That’s right. She had died and had been reborn as a baby, somehow, with all of her memories intact, in a land with a strange language.

It was ridiculous. She had only ever heard of such a thing in fantasy novels. This never happened in real life! This has to be a dream-Gururururururuuuuruuu.

Her stomach growled. She looked around. Now what to do?

She tried to sit up, but her head was still about one third of her body weight, so after struggling for a few minutes, she gave up.

Hey! Is anybody there? She tried to say, but it only came out as baby cries.

She waited for about two minutes before her patience ran thin.

HEY! IS ANYBODY THERE!! She tried to yell, which was then conveniently changed into a baby’s shriek.

After that, the giant face of ‘mother’ came into view. With light brown hair, and dazzling emerald eyes, she smiled gently at Briar.

Another giant face popped into view over the crib’s side, also, but Briar ignored it for now.

Food was more important...

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Later that night, Briar was awake, quietly staring at the ceiling.

The people back home had probably heard of her death by now. Return…probably wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be helped. She had died, after all. That’s right: she had died.

She accepted this fact.

She had never really been one to cry or fret about things. Crying and fretting had never fixed her problems in her previous life, so she had gradually stopped by the age of seven. It was around then that she had vented her frustrations in running, jumping, climbing: exercises of all sorts.

Eventually, even that wasn’t enough for her.

Once she was old enough, she had thrown herself into learning: martial arts, guns, traveling, observing, and changing herself.

Even when others had asked her why, she didn’t really know herself. It was just something that she felt she had to do. If she felt the ‘her’ at that time was pathetic, all she needed to do was improve, right?

Thinking back on it, it all probably stemmed from the fact that her mother had never smiled.

Perhaps everything Briar had ever done was to try to see her mother’s smile, to gain her approval.

Failure simply meant that Briar had not done enough

-that she hadn’t tried hard enough,

that she was not good enough.

Eventually, Briar had left her family behind in her pursuits of self-mastery: a pursuit which had led her to her death in the middle of the ocean, far from home.

Briar recalled the smile on her new mother’s face from that morning.

This mother wasn’t expressionless, or cold.

She had smiled at Briar. That smile had nothing to do with whether Briar was good enough or had done amazing things. It was done simply because she had taken joy in Briar’s existence.

Up until now, Briar had hesitated to accept the reality of it all.

She had hesitated to accept her new family because of her past life. But now she saw that she had a chance to start over from the beginning, to wipe the slate clean and discover everything that comes after that first smile.

Maybe it won’t be too bad. Her eyes took on a determined look as she made a decision. From now on, Briar would be Thera.

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After about three to four weeks of intense observation, Thera was able to understand about half of what was said.

The new face was her older sister, Margie. Her mother’s name was Helen, and her father’s name was Sir Maverick of Rose Manor.

He was a lower noble and knight in the kingdom of Grayell. Tall, with brilliant red hair, and ice-blue eyes: he looked nice enough.

But he tried making weird faces at Thera whenever he thought she was looking at him, at which point, Thera would just frown at him, not knowing what he was trying to do. This seemed to disappoint him immensely.

It was only later that she realized that he was trying to make her smile.

They had four maids and a cook, who all lived in the house. The maids’ names were Jean, Rebecca, Martha, and Nessa. The cook’s name was Ruth. Later, Thera learned that they also had a gardener, James, but as he rarely came inside, she didn’t know about him until much later.

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While Thera could understand the language after a month, she still could not perform basic actions very well, like standing and speaking.

In order to strengthen her arms and legs, and develop a better control over them, she decided to do some basic therapy exercises that she had had learned at a hospital. She would lift a single arm or a leg in the air, and lower it as slowly as possible, lifting it again as soon as it touched the bed.

She repeated this as long as she could before she had to stop.

The first week, she could only do it ten times before having to rest her limbs. The next week she could do it twenty times. Two weeks after that she could do fifty reps on each leg and arm.

She could also sit up, although her head was still a bit wobbly, due to the normal head/body proportions of a baby.

It was around this time that Thera first encountered one of the two books that would change her life forever.