Chapter Text
ARC ONE
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“ —You have got to be kidding me.”
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When I was seven, I found out about magic. Not the gimmicky things that magicians do on stage; not the sleight-of-hand tricks that strangers would have you believe is the real thing, but real, bona-fide magic. The kind of thing that allowed Matilda Wormwood to move things with her mind, the kind of things that were in my fairy-tale books of witches and fairies and warlocks.
It wasn’t a dramatic revelation like I would’ve thought it would be from reading those fictional coming-of-age fantasy books.
It just … clicked. Like my memories did when I was three.
I’m not making sense, I know. I’ll go back to the beginning. (Oh, god, here comes the exposition that we all know and hate. But, y’know, it sort of is needed. I’ll try to make it quick.)
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Being a baby came with certain expectations— like crying loudly, having an unpredictable sleeping schedule, and generally making the life of the adults around you difficult. I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but my parents love to expound on how as a newborn, I clearly was made for greater things, as evidenced by how uncannily calm I was, rarely crying unless I was hungry or needed a nappy change —and staring solemnly at people like I understood far more than I should have the rare moments I was awake.
(Spoiler: I didn’t. That didn’t come until later.)
I’d like to say I was a fairly average baby. Fairly average child, even, at least until I was 3. I’d been coasting along, doing … baby things; spitting up, learning to walk, learning to talk, and then growing into a toddler, doing toddler things like asking too many questions, refusing to eat sprouts, and collecting interesting things.
(Rocks. I collected rocks. What? Some of them were interesting, and Mama still had some in a box that she thought I didn’t know about, which, y’know proved my point about them being interesting.)
And then one night, I went to sleep, an ordinary child, and the next morning, I woke up with my mind stuffed to the brim with, well… memories of a whole lifetime. A previous life that ended not violently in a car crash or a mugging or a shove down some perilous stairs like most isekai–transmigration—reincarnation—whatever stories, but rather peacefully in a hospital, at the tender age of ██, after suffering from a chronic disease.
It really wasn’t all that dramatic; I was a go with the flow type of person, always had been, adapting to most things that came my way, and breaking down the problems that couldn’t be adapted to easily —and I’d known (or, well my previous self had known) that I’d be dying young.
The memories, well, they settled. Eventually. I was in a daze for most of the week, but that wasn’t unusual for me; honestly if I had started piping up about investing our money or spouting philosophical questions about what constitutes a self, and if souls were real, then my parents or my babysitter would have definitely noticed that something was off.
Oh, sure, it hurt. Immensely. Imagine trying to pour an ocean into a teacup all at once, fragile enough that it should break, but somehow didn’t. My brain had to accommodate to the vast overflow of information, neurons being made, pathways being forced to be made, reinforced and strengthened, and well— let’s just say that migraines were a constant in my life.
I certainly wasn’t the same as any other three year old —not that my parents could tell, me being their only child. But at the same time, I wasn’t a full grown adult, not in mind, and especially not in maturity. I was at least thankful that I hadn’t been old enough to develop a personality, so to speak. I was just now coming out of toddlerhood, and so I didn’t have any deep-rooted habits or opinions to set me apart from any other children my age; and that meant that if I did an about-face, then it would be attributed to the ever-changing whims of children.
(If I still laughed at fart jokes, and threw a tantrum or two, well.)
I was maybe a year or two older in maturity and emotional regulation than my physical body would suggest, and that didn’t really phase me too much; assuming that I would grow into it, well, there wasn’t much of a point worrying about it.
I went with the flow as I always did, so I was off the radar, so to speak. Honestly, it didn’t bother me all that much. I’d died, sure, and this did prove that something came after death, but all in all?
Nothing really changed.
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Life went on as it did. I was enrolled into nursery when I was four, giving my parents some breathing space to go back to work without having to worry about childcare, and freeing the house from the general chaos that a preschooler could get into. Nursery was… fine. I don’t know, maybe I understated my mental age, because being with a group of three to four years olds for eight hours of the day was honestly exhausting when I had a grown adult in the back of my mind reminding me of how conversations could be much more rewarding than what passed for intellectual stimulus here .
I had friends in the loosest sense of the word, and we shared toys and crayons, having the occasional squabble over whose turn it was to be on the swings, but… well, oh, I don’t know. I liked to sit in the reading corner and read picture books, even though they were so painfully simple that I finished them in minutes.
Mostly, I daydreamed. I had an entire lifetime of memory in my head, and they didn’t really intrude onto my toddler self unless I consciously thought about them. Like books on a library shelf, closed and gathering dust until opened, I had the fleeting impression that I knew a great many things, but I had no real reason to open them. I was content as I was, and really what was I going to do with the depressing memories of mortgages, hospital visits and Adult Responsibilities™? No, better to leave them alone, occasionally grabbing a book from my mental library and flicking through the memories whenever a random bout of nostalgia hit me before I closed it again and returned to being four again.
The teachers tried gently to encourage me to socialise more, and whilst I took them on that about half the time, the other half I’d retreat back to the reading corner, done with dealing with children. They left me alone with some slightly more advanced books— think more Biff, Chip and Kipper than The Cat Sat on the Mat —and when I devoured them in an afternoon, gave me more until I was reading at an age much higher than I was supposed to.
(Oops.)
Being reborn in the ‘80s, and currently inhabiting the small restless body of a child meant that I was spectacularly bored, which led to incidents like having my reading level bumped up to Year 4 or 5 books. I didn’t have the internet as I knew it in the ‘20s, couldn’t see smartphones and tablets and computers everywhere I looked; there was no epidemic of AI, and the endless scrolling that came with short attention spans.
But it also meant that once I had done the meagre chores expected of me, I had the freedom to go outside and disappear for hours, with no worries of when I’d be back, no GPS or trackers to track down my every movement. Of course, my parents weren’t stupid, allowing a four year old to wander off by herself even in our little neighbourhood. But with a few of the neighbourhood children and the repeatedly drilled-into-us rule of staying within the same 3 streets, well, I was free to roam.
Our neighbourhood was quiet and pleasantly sleepy, nestled in the Cotswolds near the south. We were solidly upper-middle class, and looking back on it, I lived a life that was absurdly comfortable. I had no idea what my parents did for a living, and quite frankly, didn’t care —as a four-year-old, all I cared about was if I could convince Mum to let me get more books from the library, getting myself dirty exploring the local wildlife, and seeing how far I could dig a hole in our backyard before Dad found out.
Life went on. I turned five, and then six, and then seven, all the while resolutely Not Thinking about the extra Memories. I was above average when it came to reading and writing, but nothing that would raise eyebrows and have my IQ tested. My ferocious love of reading was attributed to having discovered the library early, and seeing as I was nowhere near genius with any other subjects, it was attributed to being a quirk of mine.
One thing about me, though, was that I was insanely curious. And sure, that could’ve just been the natural nosiness of a child, but I went the extra step in anything I’d heard or witnessed; climbing the trees to eavesdrop on the older kids, lingering near garden fences when two adults were having arguments, and asking far too many questions about anything and everything.
I’d gained the reputation of being quite a busybody; any mildly interesting thing that happened in our sleepy town, any minor scandal or disagreement, then I was one of the first to be there when it became public knowledge. I lived for gossip, hanging around the older neighbours of our street and begging to hear any juicy stories they had from when they were younger. They indulged me, of course, and soon, I had entire decades worth of neighbourhood drama, stories from the wars and strange family feuds stored away in my mind.
(Who wouldn’t be inclined to indulge me, cute as I was? I was no child model, but then again, I was no slouch either. I had a mix of features from my parents, leaning closer to my mother than my father; a lithe frame that wouldn’t put on weight no matter how much I ate, black hair that grew far faster than it was worth, getting tangled in the hedges and branches when I went exploring on the weekends, and large, brown eyes reminiscent of a fawn were features that I inherited from her.
From my dad, I had inherited his freckles, although unlike his that were dusted on his shoulders and arms, mine were confined to my nose bridge and splattered across my cheeks, dimples when I smiled, and a nose that stood straight, with a slight upturn. Truly, it was the sort of face that adults cooed over, and I knew from the scattered memories tucked away in my mind when I had the time to look at myself in the mirror that I was, if not beautiful, at least adorable.)
All in all, I was happy. I had a solid little group of six and seven year olds as friends, a kind mother and father that trusted me enough to explore to my heart's content. I had Mrs Crabstree who ran the sweetshop, giving me some extra when I puttered about, ‘helping’ her around the shop, and Mr Longstabby who gifted me a hedgehog after I tried rescuing the ones who wandered into his garden every evening. My teachers wrote that I was a delight to teach, and my parents thought they had a quiet, bookish daughter who got into harmless trouble gossipping and liked to explore in her spare time.
It was an incredibly peaceful childhood, all things considered, and I didn’t have much to think about apart from which friend I’d play with during lunch time, and what book I wanted to read next.
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The problem— or, well, no I shouldn’t say problem, considering that the situation quite literally sprang forth from my greatest dreams, was that once I reached seven, strange things started happening around me. I had no way of knowing if this had started before I was seven, but considering how I had started to gain Opinions, refusing to lose to others graciously, and getting unnecessarily worked up about fairness and whose turn it was on what, well, emotional outbursts were sure to trigger the change.
I’d brushed off some of the smaller incidents; when it was my turn on the swings, for example, I was able to swing higher, land further than the other kids. At the time, I had attributed it to … I don’t know, being better on the swings? Once, when Mum and Dad had some incredibly boring people over, and they had started to become a little rowdy, both my door and the living room door downstairs slammed shut; again, I attributed that to a particularly strong breeze. Another time, I’d climbed too far up a tree, and with the sun starting to dip lower, I’d been afraid that I was going to get scolded . But then I looked down again, and it seemed that I hadn’t climbed as far as I thought I had, because I was closer to the ground than I thought I’d been.
But all of these other incidents could be explained away; despite the faintest scent of lemons and the weak taste of honey in my mouth around these incidents, it was nothing to be remarked upon. This one, however? This one had no way of being explained by anything other than it was.
It happened on a Tuesday. I remember the day, because Tuesdays were the days where we were able to escape school for an hour in favour of marching down in pairs to the library in town; the building was small, as were most in our town, built from the same honey-coloured stone as most others. Shelves stretched up towards the ceiling along the wall, and the windows provided sunlight that warmed up the room. It was my favourite building in town, Ms Woodward having come to recognise me as the child who’d clear out the shelves, reading them there most weekends and returning them before the week was out.
I had already worked through the majority of the children's section, both fiction and non, with Horrible Histories being my favourite, Ms Woodward going so far as to set aside copies when a new one was released. I had tentatively been branching out into the Young Adults section, but considering my age, it was slow going trying to convince Mrs Hampstead or my parents to allow me to borrow from those shelves, no matter my advanced reading age. Some things, apparently, weren’t appropriate for seven-year-olds, no matter that they could read on the level of sixteen-year-olds.
That particular afternoon, I’d been trying to get an interesting looking book from the top shelf. I wasn’t short by any means, being one of the tallest in my class, but being a seven-year-old wasn’t very conducive to reaching anything more suited to the height of grown adults. I was on my tiptoes, huffing and red from the exertion of stretching my arm out and jumping wildly in place, just barely brushing past the shelf. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to simply ask someone to fetch the book down, but I was getting not just frustrated, but quite stubborn about it.
(That book would come down on my own merits, no matter what, damn it!)
I had no idea why I could smell the sharp scent of lemons when I wasn’t anywhere near the cleaning supplies, or any suspiciously placed lemons; it grew stronger by the second, until I was convinced that someone must have been either cleaning very vigorously or eating an extremely potent lemon-flavoured product. Add that to the taste of honey in my mouth, slowly thickening until I was halfway certain that I’d somehow swallowed a spoonful of the stuff in the last half hour, and had simply forgotten, well I was growing slightly concerned about my sense of smell and taste.
And then, right before my eyes, said book wiggled out of its place, shoving past the two it was sandwiched between, and then floating down into my hands, which were dangling by my sides in shock.
I stared at it, before looking left and right to see if anyone else had seen what had just happened.
Ms Woodward was sat behind the desk, and from what I could see, was stamping return slips with a grim sort of dedication. Peering behind me, I could see two older boys arguing quietly over a comic, and looking around the shelf, I could see my classmates scattered across the children’s section, Mrs Hampstead trying to shush them into a manageable level of sound, with varying results.
No-one had seen what just happened. What I had just done. Very slowly, I looked down at the book in my hand. The lemon and honey had been fading, but with a sharp sort of resurgence before it disappeared entirely, the book twitched in my hands, and it opened onto the first page.
“… You have got to be kidding me.”