In another world of Magic Armor and Knights

Year 1 of 18 | — | — | Dawn | ☀️ | The Kettenweg, a caravan wagon, Aschenmark

You died somewhere else. Maybe a truck.

You open your eyes to two excited parents calling your name. You do not know speech yet, so you are not sure what they said.

Wrapped tight, warm, rocking. Above you a canvas roof lit gold by a sun that has not cleared the hills, and the creak of a wagon wheel, and somewhere ahead a man's voice counting horses. You cannot lift your own head. You try to speak and what comes out is not a word.

You have been reincarnated. Into a body one year old, in a caravan wagon on a road you do not know, in a world you do not know — and you have eighteen years before it asks anything of you.

Something answers the thought. Not a voice. A reading, flat and grey, hanging in the air where only you can see it.

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THE GAUGE  ·  subject: one year old  ·  road: Kettenweg
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Eighteen years. One choice each.
What you learn opens what you can learn next.

YEAR 1 — choose one:
  WALK    — the body, and where it can take you
  READ    — the letters, and everything written in them
  MAGIC   — the sense of it, before anyone thinks to forbid it
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awaiting choice _

Outside, iron rings on iron. Something heavy walks past the wagon — heavier than any horse, with a sound in its stride like a forge breathing — and the canvas goes dark for the length of it, and then the sun comes back.

Nobody in the wagon looks up. Here, that is an ordinary thing.

In the wagon behind yours, three other children of the string are asleep, none of them a year old. You will not remember a time without them.

[Your first message: WALK, READ or MAGIC — and, if you like, who you were before.]