Consciousness returned not gradually, but all at once — as if someone had turned on the light in a dark room.
Then came the warmth.
Soft, enveloping, yet at the same time — tight. Someone was holding me. Pressing me to their chest and gently rocking.
I tried to open my eyes and realized my eyelids were too heavy.
I tried to move my arms — they were tiny, weak, my fingers wouldn't obey.
"…newborn?"
The thought was so wild that for several seconds I simply froze.
Of course, at first I was confused, but after some attempts my eyes stopped sticking together, and I looked around.
The first thing I noticed was the huge face of a pale-skinned girl who looked at me with an empty, bored gaze.
Her appearance was strange. She was too pale, and it was also visible that long ears protruded through her gray hair.
Of course, like any self-respecting person, I tried to touch these strange things with my weak little hands.
Barely managing to reach the ear, I touched it, and after the touch it began twitching from side to side.
Automatically I moved my little hand to my own ear and realized that it was definitely not human. It also twitched from the touch.
Elf — the first thought that appeared in my head.
It seems I had ended up in the body of an elf child. My thoughts flowed calmly. I felt no panic.
And then I heard a voice from the other side.
Soft. Low. Very calm. The kind of voice people usually have when they have seen everything a thousand times and are no longer particularly surprised by anything. He spoke in an incomprehensible language.
Shifting my gaze, I saw another elf. He was sitting on an old wooden chair.
A male elf with long silver-gray hair braided in a loose plait. Just as pale-faced and long-eared. He looked very much like the mother of this body. He appeared very feminine.
Both looked about twenty years old.
I shifted my gaze back to the mother and looked into her eyes empty of emotion.
I tried to make a sound.
What came out was something between a squeak and a wheeze.
The woman looked at me questioningly, then seemed to understand something, bared her small breast and pressed my face into it.
Following instinct, I began to suck the nipple.
Warm liquid filled my mouth.
"Not bad taste at all" — my thoughts flashed quickly.
A year passed.
I could already hold my head up, roll over, grasp small objects with my fingers. By human standards — an ordinary one-year-old child, slightly more developed. My parents hardly changed.
They could sit motionless for hours, staring at one point.
They could remain silent for several days at a time. Sometimes the mother sang — quietly, almost without words, in a very ancient and flowing language.
Sometimes the father went into the forest for several days and returned with some herbs, roots or rare flowers; he also brought strangely looking birds, which he then plucked and cooked over a fire near the house.
They did not coo over me. I also practically caused no problems… I would like to say that.
In reality I caused a great many problems. No one can blame me — inside me there still lived a human.
A human who was accustomed to a fast pace, to emotions, to instant reactions, to news every five minutes, to progress, to results. And this human was already beginning to quietly but steadily go mad from the speed at which time passed in this house, even though only about a year had passed.
I screamed.
Not because I was hungry or wet — but simply because I was bored.
Very bored.
Unbearably bored.
I grabbed everything I could reach and threw it on the floor.
Not because I was angry, but because I wanted at least some reaction.
At least some "tut-tut, no-no".
At least a smile.
At least mild reproach.
But there was almost no reaction.
The mother could look at the spilled bowl of dried berries that I had knocked off the table and say exactly twenty minutes later:
"They fell."
And that was it.
No irritation, no laughter, no punishment.
Just a statement of fact.
Once the father caught my hand when I tried to put a glowing mushroom he had brought from the forest into my mouth.
He simply very slowly and very carefully pried open my fingers.
Looked into my eyes.
And said one phrase:
"It glows because it is poisonous."
And went off to do his own things.
I screamed from helplessness.
I cried not like a child — not in a thin and pitiful way, but breaking into a wheeze, with real human anger and despair.
Then I grew tired and fell asleep.
And woke up — and it all started over again.
I tried to learn the language they spoke, but it went poorly because they hardly made any sounds at all. I only learned a few phrases that were used in everyday life.
To keep from getting bored, I recalled various books, movies and anime that I had watched in my previous life.
I also meditated, trying to manipulate the mana that flowed in a thin stream inside me.
Yes, mana, you heard correctly.
It was the energy I felt after several days of lying in bed. It felt like a numb limb.
I drove this energy around my whole body with the stubbornness of a donkey. As they say: "While you sleep — the enemy trains."
How do I know it's mana and not my imagination?
There are many answers to this question. First, I am a transmigrator into an elf, so naturally there should be magic too. Second, I saw how my parents used magic, for example, to light a fire.
Of course, my parents also noticed my playing with mana, but they did not react to it in any way.
And so passed my boring days in the body of a young elf.