Chapter VI - With a heavy heart

*** Kiara ***

Whoever designed those toys she was currently using might be a god damn genius. Once released of her nightly prison of her crib and allowed to roam in her roam, she went straight for the other toys. Inspecting them closely she had found about three dozen different cubes, all numbered consecutively with a small number etched into them.

They were like little puzzle boxes. Even without any magical interaction, she could see them becoming increasingly difficult. The first ones, only had single or very few lines and didn’t seem to be constructed in layers, but the lines slowly went from straight to curved to bent at different angles and grew increasingly longer. Then dead ends were introduced and the structure got more and more complex spanning all sides of the cube for the first time. The first cube introducing a second layer was a strange one. One side of it was inlayed with some kind of glass or crystal. It wasn’t really see through but one could at least guess at what structures were beneath it. After that all cubes were showing layers and the difficulty ramped up steeply as far as she could tell.

Finally, an intellectual challenge more to her liking.

*** Magdalena ***

Magdalena’s heart was heavy, weighted down by what she was about to do. A small knife, enchanted with weaves over weaves to bind, to poison and to destroy was tucked in her belt. She had to make sure. Her sacrifice could not be in vain. Her family would hate her and most likely banish her out of their life. Even little Petro her slightly dull grandson would look at her different.

It would probably kill her inside as much as it would them, but she had been weak and kind before and others had paid the price. Now it was the time for her to be strong, do what no one wanted to do, but what must be done and bear the burden.

Her cloak hid her presence as she slowly streaked through the night. It was unlikely anyone would see her, but the darkness warped around her made for an additional layer of protection. The protection wards she had weaved around her daughter’s house years ago, when she had moved here were keyed to her, but to at least keep up a plausible deniability she had to break them. She doubted it would make any difference in the end. She had been too vocal about her mistrust of Kiara and she was unwilling to step low enough to hide her among many. She was no monster. She was just hurt and disillusioned. Kindness was a weakness and the only true way to protect the ones you loved was to have the strength to do it yourself.

The only problem with breaking the ward was, she took no short cuts when it came to protecting her family and one did not introduce a vulnerability into a system one wanted to be impenetrable. Of course, she could overwhelm it easily or break a single component without triggering the build in lockdown mechanism, but without triggering an alarm to warn her family was much more challenging.

In the end she opted to introduce an additional weave into the ward which would draw energy and redirect it away from one area in the ward before reintroducing at a later place. Nobody in the city would be able to do so except her. You would need an expert in weaving and wards who was intimately familiar with her specific design, something which would take weeks of studying, but was at least in theory possible. Maybe she could make up a story about an old colleague who knew her work and used this trick in the past. She thought, but internally having already come to term with the consequences of her actions.

She just needed one spark of hope to remain, to stay alive, else she wouldn’t be able to go through with it and it allowed her to delay for just a little bit longer.

Slipping silently into her family’s home. A flimsy window lock was easily pried open. Taking cover beneath the window to check the orb one last time. The coast was clear. Kiara was sleeping and the rest of the room was empty, no one in sight. Slowly she pushed the window open and climbed through. In near complete darkness she stepped on one of Kiara’s toys and had to keep herself from cursing out loud. Even through the soft leather of her shoes that had hurt like hell. She disabled the sender orb.

Drawing her knife, carefully as not to cut herself, she neared the crib. There Kiara was lying. Tucked in by Maya. She probably gave her a loving kiss on her forehead and wished her a good night, just like she had done with her daughter all those years back.

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She noticed tears rolling down her cheeks. She had thought about simply taking Kiara and killing her somewhere else to safe her daughter from the pain of finding her child murdered during the night while she was sleeping only a few steps away. It would break her she knew it. The guilt alone would be too much to bear. However, the unknown might be even worse. Hope could be as much of a poison as despair under the wrong circumstances, but one which never really went away and therefore never really healed.

Imagining her daughter coming into this very room tomorrow morning and finding her child cold and lifeless, crying and screaming. She had seen it before. Damn she had felt it before. It felt like the strings keeping one upright and the world in its right place were suddenly cut and just like a puppet’s strings being cut one suddenly crumbles to the ground and the world no longer makes sense.

Magdalena took a deep breath. She hesitated. Could she really do this to her daughter? What else could she do? She knew the child was pretending to be something it wasn’t. It was growing fast and it might be dangerous. It lied to its parents, pretending not being able to talk.

She made some quick, temporary adjustments to the cribs weave and reached in with one hand and shook Kiara awake.

*** Kiara ***

It was the middle of the night. At first, she was disoriented she had dreamt of a snowy mountain top, where they had their first short vacation trip in her past life. It had been damn cold and windy and having severely underestimated how taxing the climb up would be she or he in her past life had packed way too much stuff, but it was a memory she thought back to fondly.

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness in her room. Magdalena was shaking her and leaning over her crib. In one hand she was holding an evil looking knife marked over and over with runes. Her eyes looking directly at her.

“I know you can understand me” she said in a calm voice. Her eyes looked like she had been crying.

“You can scream if you want to. No sound is leaving the crib. I made sure of that.”

Her eyes hushed over to the weave on the crib and saw some additional lines gently glowing, before focusing back on Magdalena.

“I want to know just two things from you. What are you, because we both know you are not a normal child and what are your intentions regarding my family?” her tone was cold, resigned and empty of emotion.

For one instance Kiara was frozen. She was completely vulnerable. Ambushed in the middle of the night no time to think or prepare and even with preparation time there probably would be nothing she could do.

“I don’t know.” she said quietly and waiting for her grandmother to react in any way. Magdalena was just waiting.

“I think I died together with my girlfriend and something happened, I was pulled along and then I awoke here. I can’t really tell you much more and regarding our family… They seem like nice people. They have been very kind to me so far. I don’t want anything bad to happen to them, but I did not know how everyone would react. I was afraid and so God damn lonely in the beginning” she started calmly before tears overcame her. She was silently sobbing, but it felt good. It had been some tense months for her and she still hadn’t really adjusted all that well to her new situation. She tried to put on a calm front most of the time, but internally she had struggled and now her grandmother was threatening her with a knife.

*** Magdalena ***

How had the monster she had seen in that crib so suddenly turned into a small crying girl in front of her eyes. She had heard of cases of reincarnation, they were rare. Really rare! And only gods or other higher beings could pick up a soul in one universe and throw it into another. It had happened, but all cases she was aware of reincarnates were powerful priests, born to a priestess, accompanied by a prophecy and raised by one of the churches to further their agendas or fight an old evil. It nearly always meant war when a prophet was crowned.

On top of it sounded like the gods or at least one of then had fucked up, rather badly.

“Ok, calm down. Let’s say I believe you. Do you have any way to prove your story?” she asked, but her grip on the knife already slowly relaxed.

“Not really, please don’t kill me. I can tell you a little about my old world and I have some skills, like math which I should definitely not know so far.” Little Kiara said while still slightly sobbing.

Neither was really prove of her story. One she could make up on the fly and the other. Well, she did not know, whether demons, ghosts or whatever else she might be had any skills in mathematics.

And yet she tended to believe her. Deep down she was soft.

“By the gods please don’t let me regret this decision.” She half mumbled half prayed.

“Ok here is what we are going to do…” Kiara looked fearfully up to her, her eyes darting to the knife in her hand.

“No, I am not going to kill you. For now! It would break my daughter’s heart and we are finally getting closer again, I don’t want to ruin that. But I will keep a close watch of you. I do not trust you yet. I have no way to verify if what you say is true. For now, you will become my unofficial apprentice at least for a few hours each day, so I can keep an eye on you. We will have to find a way to convince Maya of that idea, which might not be easy, but we will find a way.” Magdalena spoke out loud and made up her plan on the fly.

Neither trusted the other yet, but it helped them both to talk and together they made a plan to convince Maya and decided to not involve anyone else for now.