“You have so many layers that you can peel away a few, and everyone’s so shocked or impressed that you’re baring your soul, while to you, it’s nothing because you know you’ve twenty more layers to go.”
Craig Thompson
“Finally,” Arawn sub vocalised as he sighed in relief at my statement. Without my stats in senses and sensory skills, his comment went unheard by my Father, Mother and sister. I could understand his point. I had bound him to keep my secrets for years now. Not that he didn’t have plenty of practice keeping his own secrets for years. Still, it must be nice for us all to be on the same page for once.
The rest of the family all focused on different aspects of my reveal.
Mother, “Another life?”
Father, “Another planet?”
Aleera, “Earth?”
It would be a lot to unpack. I started with the first question. “I remember living another life,” I answered.
“So Lady Acacia was correct; you have an old soul.” Mother asked. Did this change how she saw me?
“Yes, I guess so.” However, I didn’t think Lady Acacia expected old souls to remember as much of their former life as I did, merely excel at skills from their former lives. I hadn’t only excelled at the skills I had from my former life, but my early access to the system had allowed me to interact with it from day one and achieve extraordinary traits and skills by being so far ahead of the curve. It looked like I might have been the only one to have ever done so.
“Another planet? What is a planet?” Father quizzed.
“Well,” This might not be fun. “A planet is what we live on but refers to the whole ball, kind of like the heavenly bodies you can see in the sky sometimes that are not stars,” I answered.
“A ball? Why don’t you fall off, or do you live on the top? Why don’t the seas run away.” Father asked, confused. The infamous flat earth theory was alive and well for both the Lodestar Church and the Compass Continents. But rather than a square, they subscribed to the circle theory in line with their approximately circular compass continent. They believed the compass continent was a floating magnetic continent that floated in the Azimuth Sea held in the bowl of the gods. A magical invisible globe that contained the world. At least they didn’t believe it rested on the back of four elephants riding a giant turtle swimming through the cosmos. However, I thought that maybe in a world with Magic, what they believed wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibilities though I doubted it. Something to ask Fortuna if or rather when I saw her again.
“Yes,” I answered. Not really sure where to start unpacking that answer. Gravity, the solar system, the concepts and the space involved were huge things to try and comprehend.
“Yes, you didn’t fall off, or yes, you lived on the top?” He questioned, still stuck on the practicalities of living on a globe.
“That’s not what is important right now. It was a world without magic. It was a world without a system.” Every sentence I said only dug the hole of misunderstandings deeper. This was not quite how I envisioned this conversation going. At least they were not questioning my sanity or who I really was.
“Then how did you survive without magic, skills and stats?” Aleera asked.
“There were no monsters, only mankind,” I answered. Remembering that it was hardly a utopia. We managed to kill ourselves off plenty, even without monsters from the depths of the Lodestone or the ocean.
“No noble races?” she continued, confused by the very idea of a world without the diversity of the compass kingdoms.
“They only existed in stories,” I said. “Maybe they existed at some point in history, but if so, they were no more than myth or legend in my time.”
“Well, this helps to explain a lot.” She smiled in relief. “And . . .” She turned to the rest of the family. “It means he isn’t any better than me at all. In fact, this sort of makes him my older brother if you really think about it.” Aleera jumped on the explanation for me exceeding her in every attribute before I had officially unlocked my status. She was no longer slower or weaker than me if she was actually younger than me, despite all physical evidence to the contrary.
“How did you end up here?” Father asked.
“I don’t really know exactly. One day I was driving a truck when . . .” I started but was interrupted by my sister again.
“What’s a truck?” she asked. This was going to take forever. The questions would never end.
“A sort of magic cart without horses that moves on its own.” I simplified it as much as possible in an attempt to move on with what Father had asked me.
“But you said you didn’t have any magic.” She pointed out.
“We didn’t,” I answered, exasperated.
“Then how were you driving the cart?” she continued to question.
“A sort of magic? I asked as if that would be an acceptable answer.
“But you said . . .”
It was my turn to interrupt her, “We call it technology. And it functions on the rules that make the world work.”
“So magic?” she couldn’t quite wrap her head around the difference, but we didn’t study science here. There was no physics, biology or chemistry to explain the rules of reality. It didn’t help that reality was a little more flexible here, with us holding the power to bend it to our will through the use of mana.
“No, look,” I said, a little exasperated by the argument and the semantics. With magic, I heated the water in my cup until it was boiling. Then took a silk scarf and held it over the top of the boiling water. The steam rising from the cup lifted the scarf and made it move as it rose.
“That’s magic. Aleera bluntly pointed out. Unconvinced by the demonstration when she could see me adding mana to the water to heat it.
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“The heat is made from magic, but the scarf is moving in the rising non-magical steam. I’m not making it move with magic.”
“Technology must be very weak then,” Aleera said, considering the pathetic fluttering of the silken scarf.
“Yes and no. It's just different. But that principle of heat causing things to expand is what created the first steam engines.” I winced as I used another unexplainable piece of terminology.
“A steam engine?” she jumped on the new word.
“Look, it doesn’t matter. I was driving a magic cart when I crashed and died.” I summarised my ending as quickly and simply as I could.
“You died.” Mother asked, concerned about my well-being as always.
“I think so. At least, that is what I remember. Then suddenly, I was here, a new life, a newborn learning everything for the first time. An old soul in an infant.” I avoided mentioning remembering my time in the womb no need to make it any more awkward than it needed to be.
“You were aware from day one.” She asked, reflecting on earlier conversations where I had said I had always been able to see my system.
“Aware, yes, but I didn’t speak our language then. I had to learn.” I might have understood fa more than most infants, but it was still like waking up in a foreign land with no knowledge of the language. I had to learn everything from scratch. Great for levelling skills but slower than if I had had a teacher to tutor me.
“What do you mean you didn’t speak the language?” Aleera asked. “What language did you speak?” Probably thinking back to my first words, which to them would have sounded like nonsensical babbling.
“Much like how we have learned Elvish and Dwarvish. The languages of a different world were different.” I answered, resigned to responding to her questions. The fastest way to move forward with my tale was to blitz through them.
“What were they called?” she asked with insatiable curiosity.
“English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German.” I listed the first language skills the system had given me before I could ever learn any Bussola.
“You spoke five languages. Were you a scholar or a noble? Why would you be driving a magic cart?” It was really interesting what she was choosing to focus on.
“No, just a common man,” I answered.
“Then why did you speak five languages?” she asked.
“School.” A single word that encompassed so much more. An entire education system that was again too complex to summarise in a single sentence.
“The Luminary doesn’t teach you that many languages unless you are a merchant, noble or scholar with private tutors.” She disagreed based on her experience of education. There was more than just cultural dissonance here. Could one suffer from planetary dissonance? I guessed so.
I tried to explain, “Remember, my world didn’t have magic; it didn’t have a system or monsters. It was different in so many different ways. Our education system started when we were five years old and continued for 13 years. Some stayed in school for sixteen years, others twenty or more. It depended on a lot of different factors.”
“Not so different from here. Sounds like you were a scholar to me.” She argued.
“Five in my former world would have been three and ¾ years here, and some started as early as three. And this wasn’t just me. No, everyone did that.” I tried to explain universal education.
“Everyone did that?” She asked disbelievingly.
“Well, maybe not everyone, but most, many did.” The problem with speaking in generalities was that they were not always true. Something Arawn was bound to pick up on. At least Aleera didn’t have that skill yet. But now wasn’t the time to go into detail about the inequalities of my former world.
“Well, I suppose if you stayed in education for that long, they had to teach you something. If you aren't learning any magic, reading, writing, and arithmetic, only take so long to teach.” She suggested the reason I knew five languages. Again I was not going to go into detail about the education system, its strengths or its weaknesses.
“That’s how I knew how to make salt, how I knew how to make purple and sugar. These weren’t new discoveries of my own but attempts to rediscover methods for half-remembered realities from the history of my world.” I explained.
“So you are not a genius inventor.” She argued.
“Well, I like to think I’m more clever than most, but no the financial success of House Silversea is built on what I can remember,” I confessed.
“And the music?” she quizzed.
“The same. They are songs that I can recall from my former life. In fact, my main problem is trying to get the words to fit into Bussola rather than English, which is the language most of the ones I can remember are written in.” The problem with telling the truth or revealing the trick to the magic meant it wasn’t quite so special anymore.
“What does it sound like?” she asked, intrigued.
“What English?”
“Yes.”
“Um,” I picked up the bass rebec. I had managed to convince Lady Acacia to have made for me. The instrument was in the corner of the room ready for practice in the great hall. It was not quite yet a cello, but it was close enough. I liked the opening of this song, and it would work with both the bass rebec and the subject of telling them my secrets. Maybe one day I would be able to make the music with lightning, but for now, the bass rebec would have to do.
optional music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmLcX4sklgk
“Tell me what you want to hear
Something that will light those ears
I’m sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away
This time
Don’t need another perfect lie
Don’t care if critics ever jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away.”
“It sounds lovely, but what do the words mean?” Mother asked.
“That I’m going to give all my secrets away.” He smiled, embarrassed that I had been called on it so soon.
“Somehow, I doubt that. “ Aleera said.
“Well, there are a few more, but mainly there are not secrets so much as knowledge of another world of technology rather than magic,” I answered.
“A whole world of knowledge.” Aleera sounded ecstatic at the leverage this might give our blossoming house.
“Well, I don’t remember it all.” I cautioned. “But, try to think of technology as another system of magic.” I decided to explain it, remembering the way Clarke had described it, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ “To make light, you can burn wood or a candle; you can use spellcraft of the humans, Spellsong of the elves, glyphs of the giants, runes of the dwarves, etc. Or you can use technology to make metal glow incandescent.” I tried to explain. “My former world had a wealth of knowledge about just about everything other than that related to the mana of this world.”
“I’d love to see that. What about water? What are the otherworldly secrets of water?” She asked, teasing.
“That it is a liquid,” I replied deadpanned.
“We know that!” she replied, unimpressed.
“That it is made up of two gases.” I grinned. But something got lost in the translation from English to Bussola.
“What is a gas?”
“An element of the air.” It was difficult to describe this without the correct terminology, Bussola had a lot of the words, but they were used slightly differently or for different purposes.
“If it were made of air, it would be air, or gas as you called it.” She said, frowning.
“Yes and no. The elements of air are bound together. If you heat water, it will become a gas again, like steam, but they become a liquid at room temperature. If you cool them further, they freeze into a solid. However, if you are able to separate the two elements when in their liquid combination, they will appear as a gas once more.” Not a perfect explanation by any means.
“Sounds like magic to me.” She pointed out.
“But it's not. This is what would happen outside in nature with or without magic.” I argued.
“Fine.” She answered, not yet convinced.
“If you two have finished arguing with one another. Other than an entire world of secrets you are still keeping, what else have you to confess to?” Mother stopped our sibling spat.
“I stole the pewterware as an infant,” I added hastily. Might as well get everything off my chest while I was at it.
“I knew it.”
“That was expensive stuff.”
“Why on earth would you do that?”
“I seriously doubt that some cutlery theft is the extent of omissions.”
They all had different opinions about that revelation. Moving on . . . What else did I have to confess to? Oh yeah. “There might be a few skills I haven’t mentioned.”
“After what you have already told us, a few secret skills hardly seem earth-shaking information,” Father commented.
“They are Tier 5 skills.” I shrugged. This was a lot more fun than I thought it would be as I watched their facial expressions flicker through a range of different emotions from each revelation.