The days—or what I assumed were days, measured only by the ebb and flow of light outside the narrow, vertical window—blurred together into an endless cycle of sensation and exhaustion. I slept most of the time. My new body, small and utterly dependent, was too weak to do much else but feed, eliminate, and cry. It was a prison of soft flesh, incapable of even lifting its own head.
But my mind… my soul… it was wide awake.
I remembered everything. The clarity was terrifying. It wasn't the hazy, emotional memory of a past life often described in folklore. It was a perfect, unblemished playback. My name: the mundane sound of my old identity, now completely irrelevant. My wife: the specific curve of her smile, the exact pitch of her laughter, the warmth of her final, tearful goodbye that I now realized I never returned. My children: the weight of their small hands in mine, the pride of watching them grow, the deep, fundamental love that had defined my previous existence. The warmth of my old home, the smell of the rain hitting the asphalt outside my window, the endless, rhythmic drone of a perfectly ordinary life. And finally, the sudden, brutal rupture—the screeching tires, the blinding flash, the absolute cessation of sound and self. My death.
And now… this.
I had reincarnated. The word, an abstract concept I'd once dismissed as spiritual fiction, was now the terrifying, undeniable reality of my existence. But this wasn't just another birth. This was too clean. Too clinical. It felt… chosen. The overwhelming presence from the moment of my birth—that ancient, watching consciousness—had not returned with words, but its silent oversight was a constant pressure, like a low-frequency hum vibrating through the cradle. Someone, or something, had decided I was needed here.
I began to catalog my surroundings, using the only senses available to me: hearing and a fragmented, blurry sight. The language spoken around me was guttural, harsh, but rhythmic. It sounded less like human communication and more like the clash of metal on stone, punctuated by deep, rolling vowels. It was definitely not Hindi, or English, or any of the two dozen Earth languages I'd familiarized myself with over four decades. The sounds seemed to demand a different physical structure for the throat and tongue, confirming a growing, icy suspicion: I was not on Earth.
My new mother was the first and most immediate point of investigation. She had pale, almost silver-toned skin that seemed to absorb the muted light rather than reflect it. Her eyes were large, almond-shaped, and the color of polished glass—a strange, luminous grey that seemed to hold both immense exhaustion and a watchful intensity. Her hair was a shock of white, not the white of age, but the stark, vibrant color of new snow. Her hands, when they lifted me, were not the soft, plump hands of my memory. They were lean, almost too long, and deeply calloused, their texture speaking of harsh labor or perhaps, worryingly, of combat. Her entire aura was tense, a coiled wire of anxiety and vigilance.
The physical environment reinforced the alien nature of this world. The air carried a strange scent—metallic and sharp, like the smell of a blacksmith's forge mixed with something herbaceous and wild, like crushed, unfamiliar mountain herbs. The light that filtered through the narrow window was almost too bright, yet it was distinctly tinted slightly blue, lending the room an ethereal, almost cold quality. The furniture was minimal, made of a dark, heavy wood I couldn't identify, and the few decorations seemed to be intricate carvings of stylized, flying creatures.
This wasn't Delhi. This wasn't London. This wasn't Earth. I had been born into another world.
I couldn't move much. My head lolled helplessly. My arms flailed without direction, and my legs were useless weights. My baby body betrayed me at every turn, reducing the capable man I once was to a screaming, helpless sack of flesh. But my adult mind remained sharp, an intellectual engine caged behind a pair of blurry, newborn eyes.
I listened. I observed. I waited.
The people around me—the mother, a tall, severe-looking man who I assumed was the father, and occasionally a woman in dark, heavy robes—spoke frequently. Their conversations were a torrent of the harsh, rhythmic tongue, and with every passing hour, my mind began the painstaking work of aural triangulation. I couldn't understand concepts yet, but I was registering phonetic patterns, stress placement, and tonal shifts. My subconscious, the incredible language-processing machine I'd spent a lifetime cultivating, was starting to build a vocabulary from scratch. I was an adult taking a college-level course in survival, but the textbook was the sound of my parents' grief and their strange, cautious joy.
The man, the supposed father, often held a long, sheathed object wrapped in dark leather, resting it near the crib. It looked like a sword, or perhaps a long, ceremonial blade. It was another unsettling detail, one that painted a picture of a society where weapons were not relegated to a museum or a secured armory, but were kept within arm's reach of the nursery. This was not a world of peace. This was a place of tension and threat.
Every observation, every strange scent, every glimpse of the silver-skinned woman and the man with the sword, all piled up into a mountain of evidence that screamed consequence. I hadn't merely been shuffled back into the cosmic deck; I had been transferred. The universe had not simply rebooted my consciousness; it had surgically placed it here, in this strange, cold, beautiful, and clearly dangerous world.
And all the while, one question echoed inside me like a blade dragged across stone, dominating the silence, the cries, and the unintelligible language:
Why?
Why was I spared my final peace? Why was a man of spreadsheets and ordinary Earth-logic chosen for a world of silver-skinned people and swords? Was I meant to observe? To atone? To complete a destiny interrupted by my death? Or was this entire second chance simply a cruel twist of fate, a new life granted only to face a more elaborate, perhaps more painful, end? The Ancient Presence remained silent, watching. My helplessness was absolute, but my will was steel. I would survive this infantile stage. I would learn this harsh language. And then, I would find the answers. I would find out why I had been brought here. And when I did, I would find a way to return home, if that was even possible.
I closed my eyes, the silver light still penetrating the thin lids. The cry of the infant was trapped in my throat, but the resolve of the man echoed in my soul. I was a spy in my own life, a veteran trapped in a nursery. The struggle to reconcile the two was exhausting, but the knowledge that my life was not my own, that it had been reassigned, gave me the motivation to endure. I would not be defined by the helplessness of my body. I would be defined by the relentless, demanding, and utterly clear memories of the life that was stolen from me, and the question of the life I had been forced to claim.