Winter snow came. I turned three years old.

  I still played the obedient child by day, with all the naps, babbling, and drooling that came with it. But by night I was trying to solve a meat jigsaw puzzle.

  I collected medical tomes from all over Endil. I began to write down my own notes and findings, stashing ink-stained pages in my camp so no one would find them.

  And slowly, painfully… beautifully…

  …I became a healer.

  Not a grand one yet - not a sage. Not to toot my own horn, I was pretty darn good at it.

  It was just that the single thing I wanted to heal didn’t.

  But every failure made me better.

  It was weird. All of this this was so weird.

  Three years old.

  Other children played with blocks. But I was in a horror story.

  I could theoretically cast my first four-word spell:

  Eir, Pana, Tuo, and Kane.

  Again, in theory, it was a healing spell. But at that point, it would just be spamming, and I wasn’t sure I’d survive casting it.

  So I kept going.

  I wanted to know why. And who? And most importantly, what happens when I succeed?

  And I thought I had to write something in Geshich’s book.

  There was no indication of when my time would run out, or rather, when Geshich’s patience would run out and he’d punish me for my inaction.

  So, I started writing.

  But just because I read many stories didn’t mean that I was a talented storyteller in any way.

  Caleb Lightbane wasn’t an isekai-ed man in my version of the story.

  He was the youngest child of a lesser house of a nobler lineage.

  He was smart, talented, and was born different from most other children. Not someone who was in constant fear that his time would be cut short by a bored god.

  That’s what I wrote, quill wobbling in my chubby toddler hand. The ink smudged where my fingers were too clumsy to keep clean. My letters looked like a dying man had written them. I hadn’t written much in the script of the new world.

  This was my first real try, but I continued on.

  I dipped the quill again, steadier this time. I didn’t write the reality where I had blundered into killing those bandits.

  That wasn’t good storytelling.

  Instead, in the tale:

  The bandits attacked me first after I wandered into the forest by accident, as dumb little children sometimes do.

  Steel flashed.

  Dark intentions glimmered in their eyes.

  They wanted to kidnap me - ransom, or worse.

  I defended myself bravely.

  Heroic.

  Dramatic.

  I might have exaggerated my dramatic one-liner - something about “justice” or “light” - but no one could prove I didn’t say it.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  Next, when I found the trunk.

  No.

  I wrote that I tracked it.

  Clues in the dirt.

  Whispers of wrongdoing.

  A noble mission.

  In the story, when I cracked open the lock, it wasn’t with toddler fingers straining for an hour. It was with cleverness and grit, fueled by a vow:

  “I will discover the truth - and save whoever needs saving.”

  I added one of those longer dash-line thingys that I’ve seen in writing sometimes, but less so a short while before I died, so make it look more professional.

  That’s how I put it.

  Inside, I wrote that I found fragments of… someone.

  Not grisly hacked meat. Not the truth that made me gag that first night.

  No.

  In the book:

  They had been broken into pieces by a great and terrible magic.

  I mean, it must have been; what else could it have been?

  And so, with winter pressed into me in the forest, I continued my efforts.

  But tonight, though… tonight I was three years old and desperate enough to try the nuclear option.

  Four words.

  I prepared the bodies and myself.

  I arranged them as best as I could.

  Magic surged like a rising tide. My heart thundered like an overheating engine.

  My vision got fuzzy and then blackened completely.

  “Eir-Pana-Tuo-Kane.”

  When the spell finished, I was still blind.

  I think I literally blinded myself trying to cast the spell.

  But with just Pana and Tuo, I could heal my eyes. Just one word alone didn’t do anything except soothe some of the pain.

  Breath still coming from each piece. Still alive - after a fashion. But it wasn’t what I wanted.

  Still a puzzle.

  I sank onto my stool - the one I had stolen from the manor kitchens - and held my hand to my chin.

  I could fix bone fractures, stop bleeding, and literally heal my eyes, but this?

  Was this just beyond healing magic?

  A curse? A suspension? Something deliberately holding them in this state?

  And then a terrible-but-brilliant idea struck me.

  If magic keeps them alive like this… Remove the magic.

  A dispel.

  Not something I’d ever been eager to try. Why would I?

  Dispelling the magic could turn “pieces-but-alive” into “dead-pieces” very fast.

  But through a twisted lens…

  But not today. I was too exhausted, halfway to fainting, to attempt another four-word spell. I wanted to consult a few books first to see if I could find anything about dispelling.

  I sealed the trunk, said a small apology to the girls inside, and staggered back toward the manor.

  The next day was a blur of drool, blocks, and baby-talk performance art. But less of it.

  I was getting big after all.

  And that night, I stood taller.

  I'm not going to sugarcoat it this time; I stole a few books. Four of them.

  One called “Applied Cursebreaking for Clerics and Fools”

  I mean, it was about breaking magic.

  That day I spent reading, and the next I would try out my little theory.

  I smuggled one book back into the manor with me, a terrible idea in hindsight.

  Up in my room, I shoved the book beneath my pillow.

  A pillow hiding illegal contraband.

  Peak criminal behavior.

  I only had a few minutes of privacy before someone remembered to check on the youngest Lightbane heir, and I played innocent, but when I was alone, I flipped through pages as fast as my stubby fingers allowed.

  The next day, I prepared everything and stood above the arranged pieces. My hands shook - not from cold.

  This wasn’t trial and error on a chunk of arm muscle.

  This was a life and death.

  If the magic holding the pieces ended, what would happen?

  I stared down at the arranged pieces, children’s bodies built from fragments.

  I was about to risk killing them.

  Not by accident, like with the bandits.

  By choice.

  Oof. That hung a bit on my conscience.

  These girls didn’t get a say.

  They didn’t choose to be stuck like this.

  I pressed a hand to the sheet. They were still in there, somehow.

  “I am trying to save you,” I said.

  There wasn’t a lot of confidence in my voice as I cast the first dispel.

  “Heca.”

  The dispel word tasted like iron filings and nausea. The air warped. The colors around her dimmed. Gooseflesh rose on every piece of flesh at once.

  The breathing faltered.

  Stopped.

  All at once. And slowly, the bleeding and oozing began.

  “Oh?” I said at first, and then more worried, “Oh?!”

  I threw out healing words like candy.

  Then-

  The torsos jerked. Not a breath, but a convulsion. A knee twitched. A hand clawed at the sheet. Teeth chattered inside a half-formed jaw.

  Haha. Yes!

  But also: No!

  This was instinct. Bodies suddenly remembering that death existed and refusing to accept it.

  I forced my voice steady. Four words, again.

  This was going to suck.

  “Eir-Pana-Tuo-Kane.”

  There were a few seconds I could still see.

  The breath came back - slow and dragging, like someone trapped underwater finally getting up to the surface.

  Sweat slicked my curls to my forehead. My legs went numb. And then things went dark.

  But I could hear the spasming slow down.

  And slowly, I could hear the rhythmic intake of air.

  Alive? Please be alive.

  I swayed where I stood, lungs struggling to drag in air like they’d forgotten how to do the job. My palms hit a table, and that was the best I could do to keep upright.

  My vision was nothing but darkness. Not painless like before but burning, sharp, and raw. I hissed through my teeth.

  My hands found a scrap of cloth - clean-ish, used from wrapping pieces hours earlier - and I tore it into a strip with clumsy, trembling fingers. The fabric rasped against my skin as I tied it around my head, knotting it tight across my burning eyes.

  I didn’t know what I looked like now - if my eyes were intact or if they’d melted like wax under a candle flame. If there were jagged cracks of exposed magic trying to leak out. I didn’t want the girls to wake to that.

  If they woke.

  Better to be cautious. Better not to show them something monstrous before I could even say hello.