Chapter Text
March, 2026
The last thing Clara Taylor remembered from her old life was eating reheated pad thai and starting Inuyasha again for what must have been the thirty-fourth time.
She’d been sitting on the couch in her apartment in Cleveland, Tennessee. Wearing sweatpants with a hole in the left knee and a t-shirt her twenty-year-old son Tyler had left behind the last time he visited from college. It was a Tuesday. She was forty-three years old. She was nineteen months into a divorce that had been, in her ex-husband Greg’s words, “amicable,” which was a word that meant “our kid is 18 now, we can stop going through the motions. I found someone younger four years ago and I'm telling you now and I’d like you to be gracious about it because I have a good divorce lawyer."
She’d been gracious about it. She was very tired of being gracious about things.
The pad thai was from two nights ago and tasted like salty cardboard, but she ate it anyway because the alternative was going to the grocery store, and the grocery store required pants without holes in them and a level of emotional fortitude she did not currently possess.
Then the light came.
Not a flash of light like she might have expected if someone had told her she would be Isekai-ed today. It was a saturation. The air in her living room thickened with gold, and the pad thai container fell out of her fingers, and she heard a voice that was not a voice in her head.
It was female and gentle and sounded impossibly warm and kind.
It said: ‘A mother? Oh, you’ll do nicely.’
And then she was somewhere else, and she was screaming.
Twenty-Two Years after The Hero Himmel's Passing
The pain was indescribable.
Worse than anything she’d ever experienced. She’d broken her wrist and her ankle at once falling off a horse when she was fourteen. When she’d done competitive archery as a college student, she’d had a bow string snap against her arm and tear off a strip of skin. She’d given birth at twenty-three. Tyler had come hard and fast before her epidural had even kicked in at all. She’d given herself second degree burns tripping while holding a pot of boiling soup at thirty. She’d had kidney stones at forty. This was worse than all of those together.
Everything was wrong. The geometry of her body was shaped differently than she remembered. Her hips were narrower. Her spine curved at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible. She was wearing a black shirt with stars on it that felt like real silk, and whatever lower garments she’d been wearing had been stripped. Two objects were sticking out of her forehead, and that would have been her first concern if it wasn’t for the agony between her legs.
Something inside her was pushing, demanding exit, and her muscles knew what to do.
The tiny layer of conscious thought she had under PAIN was screaming at her.
‘I’m giving birth? What? How? WHAT!??’
She was contracting in violent waves that felt automated, like her body was a machine she was trapped inside.
She was in a cave. She could see the ceiling. Rough grey stone, damp, streaked with something luminescent and green. Could see the entrance. A shaft of moonlight painted the chamber in an eerie, haunting silver. The air smelled like wet rock and copper and something else, something organic and sharp.
She was naked on a heap of animal skins. Fresh ones, reeking of death and coated with blood. Her own blood. She could feel it pooling from her. Her hands were gripping something and she looked down and saw that she’d torn furrows into the packed earth floor with fingers that were too long, tipped with nails that were closer to claws. Her skin was pale. Pale-pale. Like milk or bone.
She hadn't even begun to wrap her head around the situation when the baby came out in a rush of fluid and agony, and she felt something tear.
Blood pooled around her. ‘I’m going to die.’ She thought dimly, teetering on the edge of consciousness in a blaze of pain.
She didn’t die.
She started to itch, and she snapped to alertness. She stared blankly at the pool of blood around her lower half as she felt her body begin to knit back together with a warmth that felt like a heating pad on an ache. It spread through her abdomen. The healing was automatic. Effortless. She didn’t do anything. Her body simply decided it was not going to be injured anymore, and the body complied and the injury metaphorically slunk off with its tail between its legs.
She lay there gasping, blinking at the cave ceiling, trying to remember how to think.
‘What. What. What?’ Coherent thought had apparently went out to lunch.
The baby made a sound.
Not a cry. That was the first thing wrong with it.
Babies cried. This baby made a small, sharp vocalization, more like a fox kit’s bark than a newborn’s wail, and then fell silent. She heard movement. Shuffling. The soft scrape of skin on stone.
Clara forced herself up onto her elbows and looked.
The baby was already sitting up. That was the second thing wrong with it.
He, it was a he, she could see that. He was sitting in the mess of birth, in blood and fluid. His hands were planted on the cave floor, his head turning slowly as he surveyed his surroundings. He was the size of a human toddler. Not a newborn. A fucking toddler. His limbs were proportioned like a three-year-old’s, sturdy and functional, and his eyes were open and focused in a way that no infant’s eyes should be. They were pale amber, almost gold, and they tracked across the cave with methodical precision before settling on her.
He looked at her. Really looked, with awareness and presence. That was the third thing wrong with him.
She looked at him.
His hair was white. Soft and downy and white, like dandelion fluff, sticking up in every direction from a head that was slightly too large for his body the way all toddlers’ heads were. His ears were slightly pointed. There was still blood and fluid on his skin. He had horns. Two tiny little nubs on his forehead, like a baby bighorn ram’s growing pair. She stopped making lists of things wrong with him. Her brain didn't have space for them all.
She dazedly reached towards the objects she could feel on her own forehead. Felt like bone. ‘Horns. I have horns.’ She thought hysterically.
He cocked his head. Blinked at her once, then began trying to stand.
His legs wobbled. He fell. He tried again. Fell again. On the third attempt, he managed an unsteady crouch, one hand braced on the cave floor, and he looked toward the mouth of the cave where grey daylight filtered in. His nostrils flared. Testing the air. Cataloguing. He looked back at her.
‘What is this? What kind of dream?’ Clara thought, panic setting in as the pain receded, which was only adding to the panic because ‘WHAT THE FUCK? How did I push that out and not die?!'.
The “baby” wobbled to his feet. Took one step. Two. Towards the cave entrance.
Then he stopped. His stomach growled, loud and angry in the confined space.
He looked at her. Not with longing. Not with attachment. With something more pragmatic than that. His golden eyes dropped to her chest, then back to her face, and his expression, if you could call the micro-adjustments of his features an expression, was assessing.
He toddled back toward her on unsteady legs. Stared at her. Pawed at her shirt.
She felt it then. The faint wetness at her breasts. “Oh! One second.” she rasped, still breathing hard. The silk shirt she was wearing had an opening for cleavage at the front, held closed by actual strips of fabric instead of a zipper or even a button. She opened it and he was on her like a wolf on a deer.
He collapsed against her side with a graceless thump, and latched on to nurse with a mechanical efficiency that made her skin crawl.
His mouth was warm. His body was warm. His tiny fingers curled against her skin with surprising gentleness, although she suspected the gentleness was not consideration but simply a lack of grip strength. He nursed with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling, at nothing, his jaw working in a steady rhythm as he blinked occasionally.
Clara stared at the cave ceiling and tried not to hyperventilate.
“I am in someone else’s body’, she thought.
‘I have horns and just gave birth in a cave and there is a horned baby that looks like a toddler drinking milk from my body and I was eating leftover pad thai seven minutes ago.’
She laughed again. It came out strangled and high and it echoed off the cave walls and the baby, the horned baby, flinched at the sound but didn’t stop nursing.
She looked down at the baby.
He was still nursing. His eyes had drifted closed. His breathing had slowed. The tension in his tiny body, the survival alertness that had been there from the first second, had loosened, just slightly, in the warmth of her.
He looked like a baby.
He looked like a baby who had fallen asleep nursing, which was something Tyler had done a thousand times, curled against her chest with his fingers tangled in her shirt, his breathing going slow and deep as the milk and the warmth pulled him under.
‘He’s not Tyler’, she told herself. ‘He’s not human, whatever he is.’
He was still a baby. She didn’t put him down.
She sat in the bloody mess and held a horned infant against her chest and listened to him breathe and felt her body knitting itself back together and did not put him down.
A faint, distant part of her still had the strength to be disgusted with everything. She had given birth, had horns, and she was lying on what she strongly suspected were fresh deer skins. She was covered in various bodily fluids. Naked from the waist down. Everything ached. Everything reeked. It didn't matter. She was exhausted. There was a warm, sleepy baby nestled into her. She could feel herself drifting off. Maybe she’d wake up and be back home, and whatever hallucination or dream this was would be over.
She slept.
She woke up and she was still in the cave. The baby was still there, asleep on her, boneless and limp. Letting out tiny, snuffling, frankly adorable, snores. Golden light trickled through the cave entrance. Early morning. Sometime between 8 and 10 AM. It smelled like spring. The baby on her chest stirred. Awoke. His eyes locked on hers immediately.
He stared. She stared. He blinked at her. Once. Twice. Three times. “Good morning.” She said, for lack of anything else to say. She felt stupid immediately afterwards, flushing.
He cocked his head at her. Made the same fox-like yip as before, and immediately pushed himself off of her and tried to walk towards the cave entrance. A day old. Still covered in blood and afterbirth. He took four stumbling steps. Fell on his back like a turtle. He let out a frustrated hiss that sounded like the bastard offspring of a pissed-off cat and a tea kettle, and tried to roll himself up.
“Whoa! Hey, where are you going sweetheart?” Sweetheart. She said it unprompted, the way she’d spoken to her actual son Tyler when he was little. ‘Don’t overthink it Clara.’
He looked at her again. That same tilted-head. Same blinking. His face seemed to say ‘Why are you talking to me you weird lady?’ It was a very expressive face. His lip curled down in a slight pout, and his amber eyes bored into her. It didn’t look like a face that belonged to a baby or a toddler. It looked like the ‘don’t fuck with me’ look a hardened gang member would give you when you walked past them on the street. She ignored it.
“You can’t go off on your own little guy. You could get hurt.”
Another yip, then he started trying to push himself up again.
“Here. Let me help you.” She started to put her hands on him to help him up and he recoiled like she was going to hit him. He hissed again, anger and fear warring on his face. He tried to bite her, and she yanked back her hand. Then she stared at her own hand. She had never moved that fast even when she’d been a lanky teenage tomboy riding horses and shooting bows at deer targets in Dad’s yard. That could wait. There was a more important thing to address.
“What was that for?!” she snapped, and the boy quailed with such immediate fear that she instantly felt like an ass. He made a face at her like a kicked puppy, all eyes and a big pouting lip. “Look honey. You can’t go around biting people. Especially when they’re trying to help you. Especially not your Mo—” she paused. ‘Your Mom.’
She looked around the cave again. Something like moss or algae on the walls. It faintly glowed green. She’d been to caves before, on day trips and field trips. Caves didn’t have bioluminescent plants in real life. The only bioluminiscent cave anything that she knew of was in New Zealand. This wasn't New Zealand. This had to be a dream. Right? Right?
‘It was probably a dream. But if it wasn't... 'Treat this as real. Treat him like you would any other baby.’
“Especially your Mom.” She repeated. “It’s not kind. Not how people behave.” His face shifted back from fear to that blank hard stare again. He looked confused.
‘You’re being stupid Clara. He was just born. He doesn’t understand you.’
“Don’t worry about it honey.” She moved to help him again. He’d managed to pull himself up so he was sitting. She moved with very slow motions. His eyes tracked her like a cat watching a mouse the whole time. She slowly, glacially, stretched her hand out towards him. He stared at it like she was giving him something that stank. Then he clasped his hands around hers and pulled himself up with shocking strength.
“That’s better.” she rasped. “You want to go outside?” Another blank look. She motioned with her shoulder to the cave entrance. He yipped again. She stared. She had no idea if he understood her or not. The fact that she had no idea instead of being sure that he didn’t was another brick in the wall that was labeled ‘What The Fuck Is This Situation?’
She was still holding his hand. He didn’t hold it the way a child should hold his mom’s hand. He held her hand like she was a crutch. A support to help him walk. “Come on baby. Let’s see what there is to see.”
He made another noise, more a breath than sound, and followed along with slow, careful steps.
Stumbling, they walked out the cave.