Back again

Asterion was the name they had given him. And that too ten days after his 'birth'. It was a strange custom of theirs. Well, the entire experience was strange and mind-boggling, this whole reincarnation business.

It had taken him a couple of days to work it out that he had reincarnated, and a couple of months to figure that it was not the same world as the previous one.

The main reason for this was that his memories of the 'Previous world' were foggy at best and void at worst. For one, he could not remember his name, or age, or even gender. He could not remember what he did, where he worked, or even where he lived.

The simple things that he could remember were quite mundane. Such as walking through crowded streets of a metropolitan area, commuting in trains, buying groceries at supermarkets, and other activities like that.

There was one more thing lingering in his mind. It was a short but profound memory of fire. It was etched in the back of his head. As if it was his final thought before he...no, he did not think of it. There was surely a way for memories of his former life to return. Or perhaps they might even return naturally as time passed on, at least if fiction about reincarnation and new worlds was to be trusted.

Speaking of 'new worlds', figuring out that he was reborn in one was a bit tricky, to say the least, but only at first. One might think that the obvious giveaway would be the language and the lack of modern technology. But there were thousands of languages in his previous world and hundreds of communities that preferred to have an anachronistic lifestyle, not using any modern inventions.

He assumed that he had reincarnated in another country, somewhere in Northern Europe perhaps judging by the appearance of his parents, Nathan and Phoebe. Nathan had a sturdy build, dark brown hair, and grey eyes, while Phoebe was a tall, slender woman with vibrant golden hair and green eyes. He had inherited Phoebe's golden locks and Nathan's grey irises.

The language spoken by his parents and the people around sounded similar to a bit Germanic, on the basis of sentence structures, grammar, and phonology. It only took him about half a year to get his baby brain around it and that was even before his vocal cords had fully developed.

As for how he realized that this world was different from his previous one was by overhearing a conversation between his mother and a neighbor. Although most of it was focused on trivial matters such as the sheep and the crops and the looms, but what caught his attention was the mention of his mother's lineage.

From what he could make out of the sentence, he was pretty sure that he heard that his mother, Phoebe, was a quarter elf. More specifically, her paternal grandfather was an elf. At first, this sounded ridiculous to him. It was not as if this was a fantasy world with elves and magic.

Very much to his surprise, it did turn out to be a world of elves and magic. Well, he had not seen an elf yet, but he did see the latter.

It happened during a warm spring evening, around a couple of months after his birth. His mother took him to the chapel at the village center for the dusk prayer. The chapel had a caretaker, a young woman who went by the name of Tilde. Somewhere around the same time when Phoebe and he were there, a boy came running to her, crying. It turned out that his knee was scraped. Tilde snapped her fingers and with a swirl of golden light, the wound vanished.

It felt unreal. But then again, all of it felt unreal. Living as a baby felt unreal. Learning to walk again felt unreal. Having parents that looked after him felt unreal. Adapting to a whole different life felt unreal. But this was what it was now, and he, Asterion, had no choice but to accept that fact.