A year had gone by.
Not that he had been keeping track, but because he could see how long it had been since he woke up and stared up at the golden-haired woman above him.
Since then he had learned some basic facts about this new reality that had taken the place of the old one, a year of learning a few little bits at a time, slowly figuring out his surroundings.
As he listened to conversations that he still had trouble following but gradually came closer to understanding.
He knew that he was in a small town called Varidin in the Elyndor kingdom. Other facts were beginning to form in his mind, pieced together from the conversations around him.
He couldn't speak the language yet, and he probably shouldn't expect that to change in a short time, but he was gradually coming to understand it well enough, and that was progress enough for him.
He also knew that his name here was Ash Vulkan, and this was also still taking some getting used to.
His mother was called Rose Vulkan. She was just as beautiful as she had appeared on that day, maybe even more beautiful after he had been living with her for a whole year. Elegant was definitely the word for her.
She seemed to have a kind of grace that made everything else appear slightly less elegant.
She was a homemaker, and rarely ventured outside of the house, except for brief intervals to run errands in the garden behind the house, where she stayed only long enough to take care of whatever business she needed to do before going back to her life inside the home.
This was her world, and she lived in it with every cell of her body.
Which made her quite an enigma to Ash. In many ways, she had made life very difficult for him in the past year.
Breastfeeding, for example, had been terrible at first. Not because he objected to it or anything – that would be absurd – but simply because of how shocking it was for a teenager to be subjected to.
The first few attempts he had almost vomited from disgust and shame. Then something had changed, and it had stopped being unpleasant. Now it was just… not terrible, anymore. He did not like to think about that too much, though.
The daily baths that his mother took had been a different problem. For her there had never been a need for awkwardness; it was a perfectly normal thing to do, after all, as she bathed her infant son.
However, for Ash, who knew very well whose mind resided in this body, the daily process of his mother stripping naked and getting in the bath while he watched her was more than a little uncomfortable. Again, though – for reasons quite unexpected to him.
There had been no bad thoughts or anything. His mind had known without telling him that she was his mother, and therefore nothing about the situation was unusual.
Only his body hadn't caught up with that fact quite yet, making the entire process quite strange indeed. He didn't particularly like that either.
His father had been different, entirely, in that Ash barely saw him.
He was Draco Vulkan. The man had short blue hair and red eyes that were frighteningly sharp, and the first time Ash had met him, he had felt something tighten in his chest for reasons he could not explain at the time.
Fear, not really, but something that told him that this man was not ordinary, by any means, and whatever Draco was doing, Ash's mind did not understand.
From his brothers, he had gathered that this was because Draco had been a Raider before becoming a noble for his services to the crown, a fact that explained quite well what Ash had felt in their first encounter.
Whatever it meant to be a Raider, Draco had been an excellent one, apparently.
His brothers were also easy enough to identify: the eldest of the three was called Ray and was the spitting image of his mother – same golden hair, same blue eyes, while Flamir, the middle brother, was six years old and had inherited his father's looks, namely red eyes but with blood red hair to match.
Along with an abundance of energy that Ash found quite tiresome to watch, from his place in the crib, especially considering that the boy would not stop running and shouting until he was exhausted enough to sleep on his own.
Still, in comparison to the other revelations, that was easy enough for Ash to deal with.
What excited him was that in this world magic existed. This world had magic. Proper magic, and not the kind portrayed in films, that was simply spectacular and moved the plot along without further implications.
Here magic meant different rules, different worlds, different opportunities. Where there was magic, adventures were always nearby.
And adventures were something that Ash Vulkan was desperately craving. Even if the exact details eluded him now, the thought was sitting comfortably at the back of his head.
There must be places to explore here. People who go to places nobody else goes, to experience things no one else does.
One day…
--------------------------
For now, Ash was lying in the crib, staring at the ceiling above his head in frustration.
'Damn it!' he thought, rolling to his side and then back on his back because neither position improved the view, really. 'Being a baby is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to me.'
He had been staring at the same ceiling for the better part of an hour now. And he couldn't help it; he had tried to move but nothing he had done thus far had helped. He felt restless and frustrated and… stuck.
'This is driving me crazy,' he thought, turning again. 'Why can't the damn crib become more interesting?'
It didn't help that it remained stubbornly the same as it had always been.
'I can't wait until I learn how to walk, talk, think better and move on my own without being tied to this stupid crib.'