"Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up."

I did not move because I knew the next thing that came after that voice, the demonic words, would already be assembling at the back of my tongue and the demon that would be waiting for me when I opened my eyes.

I had already used my staff once to escape the waking, and the loop had given me back to the same moment with the same voice and the same horror still living behind my teeth.

And so I did not move because moving was the beginning of all of it again, at least, I was no longer screaming inside my head.

So I lay still and did not open my eyes and waited for the demon to come back, and it did not come back, so I waited longer and listened harder to find the demonic syllables at the back of my tongue and found them absent.

The screaming inside my head had stopped. The horror seemed like a memory and was no longer sitting in my chest the way it had been sitting in my chest a minute ago.

The voice came again, and it was different, making me frown inside my head.

"Elric? Wake up, or I am going to encapsulate, um, I mean escalate, yes, escalate!"

What was happening? Was that Mel’s voice? Why did it sound younger and even more annoying?

I could hear her puffing and her legs tapping the ground, and I could also feel the dip in the mattress where her knee was resting on the edge of the bed.

A bed, not a cot!

This was the final detail that made me open my eyes, and the ceiling above me was not canvas.

What was above me was wood, worked oak wood dark with age that I recognized, highlighted by the light coming from the window.

And this was all the detail I needed to know that I was home, in my own bed, inside my parents’ house.

And turning my eyes from the window to Mel looking at me, I froze in shock.

She was kneeling on the edge of the bed in the linen shift she always wore in summer, with her hair tied back in the slightly crooked plait.

The last time I saw her, she had longer flowing hair, and this hairstyle had been retired years ago, but the answer to that was simple: she was about eight years old here.

Round cheeks, with her front tooth missing on the left side, and I blinked when I noted she was holding a stick.

Now I remembered why I dealt with my sister with a gentle hand, this little munchkin was vicious!

"You blinked," she announced. "I have been waiting for that. Now I get to use the stick."

"What stick," I said, pretending I did not see she was holding it, and then I realized that my voice was wrong, younger.

"This stick," Mel said, holding up the stick, and I sighed when I saw that it was a very ordinary stick.

"Mum said I could not use it on you while you were asleep, because that would be assault, but you have just woken up, so it is fair game."

"Mel."

"What. I am explaining the rules to you. Most criminals do not have the courtesy."

"Mel, I..."

"Lazy cur," she interrupted, with great satisfaction. "I learned that last month, and I have been saving it."

She tapped the stick against my shoulder. It was not a hard tap; knowing her, she was conserving her energy for later, more important applications.

I stared at her; my replies had almost been reflexive, but my eyes could not stop looking at her.

My sister was eight years old, six years before now, in our parents’ house three hundred miles from the Aldenmere Academy and considerably further than that from a sky-fallen pyramid and the things that came out of it.

I sat up slowly, feeling incredibly frail because my body was a child’s body, and the arms that lifted me off the bed were the arms of a ten-year-old who had not yet started his Anima training and whose Anima Depth was zero because he did not yet have an Anima Depth in the measured sense.

Instead, I had an Anima Sensitivity and a greater soul than a normal kid, and because of that, I was plagued with nightmares, and I could see and hear things that others could not hear or see.

And there were moments in times of fear or rage that I levitated a chair, caused spontaneous combustion, or created a cloud in the parlor that created rain for minutes and nearly flooded the entire house. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Such feats were the result of my soul touching the essence of the world; it was relatively harmless, but if I was not taught proper control, then it could be dangerous, and the best fate for myself would be to become a warlock, or I would end up dead or mad at worst.

I shook my head and saw that the hands at the ends of my arms were small. The fingers were unmarked by the calluses that two years of staff work had built. The skin was the skin of a person who had not yet died.

I lifted my left hand, turned it over, and looked at the palm, the back, and the unmarked fingers, and I held the hand very still while I waited for the rot to begin.

It was going to happen, and that demon would whisper madness into my soul, speaking about a god that I did not know.

But as I waited, my hand did not change and stayed a hand.

Mel poked me with the stick again. Her face had shifted from triumph into the specific, narrowed expression she used when she had decided that something was wrong.

"Are you having one of your dreams again? Don’t break the house with your mind, or..." she asked.

"No," I said. The word was automatic."I am not dreaming, and I can control my magic."

"Control, eh, I don’t believe that for one second, but you look like you are having one, nothing to be ashamed about."

"I am not having a bad dream, Mel. Why are you in my room with a stick?"

"To wake you up," she said, with the tone that made me feel she was beginning to suspect that I was stupid. "Mum wants you to eat breakfast. Dad has gone to the river already, so we have to eat without him, which means I am in charge of the porridge."

"You burn the porridge."

"I do not burn the porridge. I char it. There is a distinction, and one day you will have the intellectual sophistication to recognize it."

She had clearly been saving that one, too.

’What is happening?’ I whispered inside me.