by Darkbringer
After that first six-month period, I finally got strong enough to start to crawl and explore the area around me on my own. One thing I learned quickly during this time is that I definitely wasn’t on Earth anymore. For starters, the grass here wasn’t the usual green color that I was used to; it was more reddish purple strands of weeds than anything else. The soil itself was loose and sandy, and from what I could tell, it appeared almost beach like in consistency. A smell of mist and salt was in the air most of the time, so I figured I had to be close to the ocean somewhere.
The people around me were all women for some odd reason, with the exception of one young guy with a scraggly beard on his face. I assume he must be my ‘father’. He seemed like a handsome enough man, and was well muscled and tanned, and he seemed to be much respected and carried a lot of authority with the other women around. My first impressions of him are that he must be someone of importance, but I didn’t know what type of rank he might hold.
There was one woman who stood out above all the others, and I assumed she had to be my mother. It was from her that I was fed the most, though some of the other girls would also feed me from time to time. ‘Mother’ was also a young looking woman, appearing to be early to mid-twenty, and I would’ve called her quite a beautiful woman – if I didn’t think of her as my mother. She too seemed to walk with an air of authority – perhaps even more authority than what ‘father’ had – and the other women jumped to do whatever she said, as soon as she said it.
I don’t know what rank either of them held, but they both seemed to be people of great importance in the place where I was currently.
Another odd thing that I noticed while in my crawling and exploring phase was that there weren’t any really young or really old women around anywhere. The youngest girl I ever saw looked to be about twelve or thirteen and the oldest one, besides my mother, looked to be less than twenty. It honestly was a paradise with nothing but young, vibrant teenage women around!
And, as odd as it would’ve been in my old life to say, the girls here didn’t seem very bashful or shy at all. Topless women were common, and from time to time I could even stumble across some walking around completely nude. They certainly didn’t show any problem with dragging me around with them, and I got to bath and shower with them on a regular basis – as did my father! Apparently, mixed baths aren’t a big deal where I’m at now?
I was allowed to crawl and roam freely, but there was always one girl or another nearby to keep an eye on me. Have you ever heard that saying, “It takes a village to raise a child”? Apparently here I was the only child, and the whole village was responsible for raising me.
I was at a loss to explain it. Where were the other children? The boys? The other girls younger than twelve? Or women older than twenty? A home with only young teenage girls, my mother, father, and me – what type of home was that?
There were other things which I managed to uncover while in my crawling phase, which absolutely convinced me that I had been reborn not on Earth, with the most obvious being the fact that there were two moons in the sky now. One more was a large bright luminescent white like I was used to seeing, and except for it seeming a little larger than usual, it’d be easy enough to mistake for the moon of Earth. The other orb in the sky was much tinier and traveled across the horizon much slower, making me think that it was the more distant of the two heavenly bodies, but it was green and blue as if it might have water and grass growing upon it.
I longed to be able to ask someone – anyone – if the second more held life on it, and if there was any way to reach it. Unfortunately, my vocal cords just wouldn’t make the sounds properly for me at first, and later I thought that it might not be too good of an idea to seem to grow or develop faster than other children here.
Who knows what type of reaction people might have if I suddenly started talking in full sentences being less than a year old! Would I be a genius? Or a devil’s child and burned at the stake? Best not to stand out and seem any different from a normal child, in my opinion. My body is that of a child’s; it’s probably best if I don’t show that my mind is any different.
The other thing that I noticed, that firmly convinced me that I wasn’t on Earth anymore – or that Earth physics might not even apply where I was now – was the fact that everyone around me, with the exception of my father, could use magic. The girls would make balls of fire and toss them around. Some would create fruit or water out of thin air. Others would make illusions of men and women fighting in battle. There was one of the older girls, who could somehow fly with her magic!
It took me almost a year to learn a few basic things about where I was now, and what I’d discovered amazed me. I seemed to be in a place near the ocean somewhere, women around here ran around half-naked or naked sometimes, there were two moons in the sky, and magic seemed to be something that everyone had.
Oh, and there weren’t any young people, old people, men, or other children in the world…
I was really looking forward to my body growing stronger so that I could actually start to walk around and uncover some more of the mysteries of this place I was now calling home!
Starting to Walk
Sometime after I’d grown to be a year old, my body grew to the point where I could start to stagger and walk around more. My knowledge of the world I was in grew by leaps and bounds during this next period of my life. By this point, I’d learned already that my name was Mik’hail Flamedancer – well, that was the shortened version of it. In all actuality, I was the Young Lord Mik’hail of the House of Dancing Flames. My father was Ky’rus and my mother was the Lady Eveningstar.
I had a feeling that Eveningstar wasn’t my mother’s real name, but it was the only one which she gave to people for some odd reason. I don’t know why her name would be something to hold secret, but it was. Maybe when I get older, someone will explain it to me.
As I started walking around somewhat, I also noticed that some of the girls on the island had changed. Some of the oldest ones disappeared and new, pre-teen girls took their place. By wandering, luck let me discover one of these new young girls on her first day here and I learned a lot following along and holding her hand like a good little toddler as she was shown around.
Apparently, I was on The Island of Dancing Flames, which was a piece of land that my parents owned. Mother was a wizard of quite some talent and power, and the girls that were coming here were coming to a school to learn how the mastery of magic from her! It may be that magic isn’t as common in the outside world as it is here, simply for the fact that here is where people come to learn magics!
As for the lack of other children being here, that was simple to explain as well. Mother and Father were the only true “adults” on the island and therefore the only ones who could have children. The girls showed potential for magic around the age of ten, and mother accepted them as students around the age of twelve. Her teaching period was generally about five years with the girls, and then they graduated. The young ladies were students from the age of twelve to seventeen (a few stayed a year or two longer either because they were slow or wanted extended training), and there wasn’t any who stayed after they turned twenty.
I had wondered where all the old folks were and other children and such, and it’d never occurred to me that my home might be a school of some sort! Even if I were to look at my old school, things wouldn’t have been much different – a few older people who were the teachers, surrounded by their students, and if there were any young children, they were few and far between where one of the teachers just had to bring her child with her one day.
I lived in a school, and my parents were the only teachers there! It finally made my environment make a lot more sense to me.
As to why the youngsters went naked a lot, amazingly enough, that was one of my mother’s rules. The first year at the school, the girls were forbidden to wear any clothing whatsoever. Apparently, status carries a lot of weight outside the school, and clothing must be some form
of status. To emphasize to her students that their status meant nothing here, mother stripped them completely for their first year as students. Older students who got in trouble could lose their clothing privileges as well at any time.
The girls learned not to place so much pride into their material things. Mother wanted them to learn to take pride in their talents as wizards, and their magic; not in who had the prettiest dress.
Another time the girls were required to be naked was when it was time for actual magical practice. Mother believed that mana flowed all around us and that by feeling the sun, the wind, and the ground around oneself, it could help wizards attune themselves to the flow of magic more efficiently. If anyone disliked the practice, they never mentioned it. Mother’s word was law. She was the teacher, this was her method of teaching, and if one objected, they could simply leave.
Another odd aspect of mother’s teaching style is that she refused to allow virgins actually to practice magic. They could sit in and listen to the magics, but they weren’t allowed to pull in or release any of the energy on their own. It was her belief that the blood breaking altered the flow of energy inside a woman’s body, and if they had practiced magic beforehand, they’d be weaker forever afterward.
As the only male of suitable age and body, Father had the duty of being the one to break all the girl’s chastity – and that was a job that he didn’t seem to mind at all! In fact, even after their blood was broken, he’d still sometimes grab one at random and pull them up to his office, under a tree, or visit them in their chamber at night. My father was a pervert!
And honestly, I think I was a little bit jealous of him. The previous me had never actually been with a woman before my death, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t think of it and wish that I could be. My brain still had those desires even now, even if my body couldn’t do anything about them. How lucky could one guy be – dozens of young teenage girls all able to be used to satisfy his cravings at any time!
This new world definitely wasn’t fair! Power, land, authority – they meant everything here, this was mother and father’s land, and they held all the authority in this place.
And, as odd as it sounded, the girls didn’t seem to mind father’s lecherous ways. I think it was simply a fact of them outnumbering him to the point that they did. Father always spent every night with mother, so that was time where he couldn’t bother the girls at all. It was “mother’s time”, and I never knew him to spend it with anyone but her.
As for the rest of the time, the girls were fair game – except there was probably a total of sixty girls and only one man on the island. If father pulled two of them aside for his pleasure every day, that means that the girls only had to be with him an average of once a month.
It was hardly enough that any of the girls felt harassed by him, and often they would even choose a ‘sacrifice’ to go out and get his attention on certain days. For instance, merchants brought goods to our home only a few days each month. If the girls wanted to make certain that father didn’t unexpectedly grab one of them and keep them with him on a day when they might want to go shopping, they’d ask someone to volunteer to ‘keep him busy’ or else they’d end up dicing or gambling for the job some other way.
I don’t know if Father knew what was going on or not behind the scenes, or if he realized he was being ‘kept busy’, so the others could go without any chance of him bothering them. If he noticed, he never objected to the way things were.
As to the Island of Dancing Flames itself, it was a moderately large place that I still wasn’t large enough to wander and explore fully, but from what I’d been told, it was perfectly safe. I was allowed to basically roam and wander anywhere that my little feet could carry me, which at this point in my life still wasn’t too far. Always, there was one young girl or another who kept up with me and followed along to keep me company. If I ever got tired of walking and exploring, all I had to do is hold my arms out and they’d carry me back to the main school area. If I wanted to squeeze or suck on their breasts along the way, they’d usually just laugh and stroke my head and call me “my father’s child”. Apparently being a pervert may not be a bad thing in this world.
At least, it wasn’t for me on the island my parents owned.
I truly was growing up on a tropical, magical paradise, surrounded by nothing but beautiful women. (And one old perverted geezer, but since he was my father, I won’t complain about him. He has permission to stay.)
It wasn’t the same as the world where I’d grown up and lived in originally, but it wasn’t a bad place to be.
Beginning to Grow
The next few years were a time of growth, freedom, and nervousness for me. As I got stronger, I was able to wander farther and explore the limits of the island that I lived on. I could now understand why my parents allowed me so much freedom – the whole isle was surrounded by a massive thirty-meter wall which separated the land from the ocean! Apparently, having two moons could produce some massive variance in the tides on the planet here, and the wall was there to protect the island proper from the ocean.
It also served to protect a young child of wandering off and getting into too much trouble.
My first few years of life, the girls on the island all followed me around and made certain that I wasn’t going to fall and hurt myself or anything, but as I got older they started giving me more freedom and letting me roam and explore on my own. There was a small patch of woods on the north side of the island and I could go there and do my own thing sometimes without anyone being around, but I always had to be careful as the young women had just as much freedom to roam as I did.
And, I was beginning to want to be alone more. One thing I’d discovered about myself before I turned three is that I could feel the energy mother talked about in her lessons with the youngest girls. Apparently, magic is something truly rare for a male to have, and I wasn’t entirely certain how well it might be accepted. I was afraid this was a world where only women use magic, and I didn’t want anyone to catch me using it.
So thus my nervousness. I’d discovered something great and powerful that any person would want to learn to use, and I was too scared to let anyone catch me using it. Every time I could sneak away to the forest, I’d try to find some dark little private corner of it, and then I’d practice my mother’s lessons in private. Breathe in. Breathe out. In some ways, the meditation reminded me of yoga or something similar from Earth, so I tried to incorporate as much of my old knowledge into things as my new knowledge. Mother’s way worked, but I was curious if I could find a way to make it work better.
All without anyone finding out, of course.
By the time I was four, people had gotten used to me wandering off on my own. My father simply assumed I was going out to play soldier or something in the forest and slay imaginary monsters that lurked in the woods, so that’s what I did whenever someone seemed to be around. I felt foolish hacking at a bush with my sword while pretending to slay a dragon or some other horrible beast, but it seemed to be what people expected from a child so I went along with it.
And then, when I was alone, I practiced pulling in the energy of the forest around me and holding it as long as I could before releasing it. Over time, I learned to sense the ground, the air, and even the sunlight as my mother kept trying hard to teach her students to do. By expanding my senses and focusing on the energy around me, I always had ample warning of whenever anyone was approaching. They might be able to sneak up on my elsewhere, but not in the forest.
The forest was becoming my refuge, and I was becoming its master day by day.
By the time I was five, I had taught myself enough to focus the energy around me and to start to manipulate my environment. I could make the trees bloom and produce fruit for me. I could move the earth and shift it to make walls or holes. I learned to channel the energy of the earth to dig myself tunnels where I could burrow into the ground and practice in peace, without having to worry about who might wander along.
I can’t say that my growth was comparable to the girls which mother taught, but I was happy with the way I was progressing. After all, they were all at least twice my age, and I had years to build up my strength and talent. They usually only had five years with Mother. I was going to have a whole lot more than that to take in her lessons and grow at my own pace.
I wasn’t going to be just some overweight fool this time around who killed everyone instead of protecting them. In this life, I planned to watch my weight, grow into a respectable, hardworking person, and I was going to make up for all the death and destruction I’d caused previously. I wanted to be something – someone – respectable this time around, and I really think I was growing as a wizard so I could strive towards my goal.
That is, up until I turned five – that’s when Father decided I was old enough to start learning the true ways of the sword from him!
Suddenly, every day was spent with me being pulled out to the practice field where him and a few of the ‘battle wizards’ practiced, and he tried to teach me to use a sword. Part of me felt like I was wasting my time with a blade, but I still practiced diligently with him every morning. I felt as if I owed it to him.
For all I knew, I’d killed their actual child when I was born. After all, I wasn’t growing in mother’s womb for nine months before she had me. Was I? If they already had conceived a child, what happened to it when The Flipping Fool put me in her instead? Did it die? Was it my fault? Did I have one more death on my head to account for?
I didn’t know, and I could never be certain, so I felt that I owed it to both of them to try my best to live up to their expectations. They called me their child, and I wanted to be the best child possible for them, so thus I diligently tried to learn the sword when father taught it to me.
