The sharp-eared peasant (Multiverse, Mass Effect/Dragon Age)

When Linael opened his eyes, for the first time he couldn't figure out where he was. A peeling beige ceiling, a large wooden-framed window. His body felt eerily strange: his head hurt badly, his left leg hurt when he moved, his liver tingled, and he felt nauseous.

Linael had never felt so bad. He propped himself up on his elbows and lowered his feet to the cold floor, covered with a strange, unknown material. The iron bunk creaked under his weight.

When he looked around, he was surprised to find five more beds like this in the room. On three of them lay the Humans, in solid, loose, dark-colored suits that consisted of pants and a sweatshirt with a strange metal clasp with miniature prongs from bottom to top.

As far as Linael remembered, the Humans in the worlds known to the elves were savages who had only recently learned how to make fire. They dressed in animal skins and led a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It was all the more strange for him to see traces of magical workmanship on various materials everywhere. Take the beds-they were made of good steel. Or the window panes without a single flaw. Or the floors, unknown in nature, made of thick and flexible material, which though worn over time, but clearly has a high resistance to wear and tear.

And to make a mirror without magic was impossible, Linael thought. That was where he headed.

Stepping on his left foot was painful. Worst of all, the elf couldn't feel a drop of mana in him. He would have used a small healing spell on himself right away. It made him feel like a disabled mage. Spending a thousand years studying and perfecting magic, getting used to it, and suddenly being unable to do magic was like torture to him. It was like losing his hands.

An even greater horror awaited Linael upon reaching his goal. From the mirror, a pale gray eye stared back at him, a painfully thin man. His head was wrapped in a thick layer of thin white cloth. A strand of light brown hair protruded from beneath the bandage.

"Like a Hooman?! - mentally the elf wailed in horror. - "It can't be! Did the gods hate me so much that they decided to retaliate so cruelly?"

Many questions swirled in the mind of the elf-human. He tried to understand how it had happened. Through mental strain he managed to recall what had happened before.

The elven mage explorers had discovered a new world. That world was inhabited by green-skinned giants who worshipped spirits. And so actively worshipped them that some spirits gained divine powers, becoming weak gods. And these gods decided to help their warlike people to conquer new territories.

Hundreds of portals started to open in the world of elves, from which the crowds of warlike orcs poured out. Magic was successfully replaced by the divine power of spirits, which the gods gave to their shaman-priests. A war of survival ensued. Orcs tried to exterminate elves to the root. The elves, on the other hand, tried to get rid of the invaders with all their might. There were hundreds of times more orcs. There were numerous strong mages on the side of the elves.

Linael himself was not particularly powerful. An ordinary ordinary ordinary biomage, who preferred to work with plants. By elven standards, he was incredibly tolerant of inferior races. And his aversion to intrigue put a damper on his career advancement. By the time he was a thousand and a few years old, the young elf, seven hundred years out of the magic academy, was still a rank-and-file biomage.

Despite the fact that he was accepted into the House of Fern as a junior aristocrat, as, indeed, any elf-mage, the guy mostly had to work and communicate with the peasants. Increase yields, deliver livestock, heal animals, improve plants, and the like - that's what he did. There were few mages who wished to tinker with such tedious tasks and interact with mundanes. Linael didn't give a damn. He liked simple peasant elves, but he disliked his fellow mages because there was always fighting and intrigue among the aristocracy. He was well respected by the peasants. From the aristocrats the young biomage mostly received only a portion of contempt, like some veterinarian among human doctors.

In any case, the elves were so bad that all mages were drafted to the front. Linael, a representative of the peaceful profession, had not escaped the same fate. He was a lousy warrior by elf standards, but he had taken a standard forest ranger course in both school and academy, so he could wield a bow, a knife, and a sword. And that, by the way, is the level of the best orc warriors.

Yet he was a mage first and foremost... or at least he was. And in the army he fought as a mage.

His last recollection ends with a sabotage raid. Their squad, consisting of a star of mages (five), under the cover of three ranger stars, made a sortie into a ten-thousand orc camp. Their objective was to destroy the orc god. Without the support of an overfed spirit, the greenhorn army was easy prey for any elven mage. Even Linael could handle such a crowd, to say nothing of battle mages.

The raid proved successful, the mages managed to kill the chief shaman and capture the spirit. But something went wrong during the attempt to dispel the god. The spirit was too strong. Clearly not of the rank of the ordinary elven mage's star. He fought back fiercely. And when he realized he was losing, the spirit did something.

Linael only now realized exactly what the dying god had done. He had used all his power to exact revenge, and a very peculiar one at that. By cutting off or blocking the parts of the soul responsible for magic and immortality, he arranged for all the mages of the star, including Linael, to undergo controlled reincarnation with the preservation of past life memories.

For an immortal being with magical powers, there is no worse torture than being stripped of magic and trapped in a mortal's body. In this case, it's much worse: the human is not young, he's already in his forties, and his body is worn out, and these creatures, as far as Linael knew, live about that long.

For an elf, forty years is an instant. To a Human , it's a lifetime.

How the elf didn't howl out loud, he didn't know. Apparently, his stamina helped him keep his emotions in check.

As he did so, he reached his bunk and waited. It was clear that this was not his world, nor was it one of the worlds familiar to elves. It was a completely unfamiliar universe. And he is, judging by the fresh wound on his head, in the local Human healer's building. The injury is fresh. It's clear from it that the soul of the previous body owner has gone to reincarnation, and the nasty god has shoved Linael's soul into the vacated space.