Simon writhed in pain until the sun set hours later. He was as hoarse from his cries as he’d ever been from casting a spell, and there were several moments he would have killed himself during the ordeal if only he’d been capable of uttering the word of force necessary to sever his own head and give him a clean death.

Sadly, that was impossible. All he could do was lay there, feeling each bone dislocate and each organ shrink as he inadvisably forced nature to reverse herself at his unnatural command. It wasn’t until evening that the world started making sense again. That was when he could see that the burned-out silhouette of a tree still flickered above him. It was an ugly sight, but it was one he rejoiced in as he found his tide of agony receding.

He found that sitting was harder than laying there and looking at the night sky. So, instead, he lay there, appreciating that the fire that was the sole reason that he probably wasn’t deep into hypothermia.

He looked out in the direction of his camp and his horse, but he couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t rise either. His body was entirely spent. The most he could do was raise one hand in front of his face and verify that his hand did seem smaller and less hairy than it had before all of this. His clothes fit much more poorly, too, which were all the signs he was likely to see without a mirror.

So, smiling at that, he just rolled over and drifted to sleep at the edge of what felt like his own funeral pyre. He was too stiff and sore to sleep well but too tired to stay awake. So, instead, he drifted in and out of a dreamless sleep for hours before he finally forced himself back to his feet long enough to stagger back to his camp.

Stagger was the right word, too. His limbs were too short, and his center of gravity was too high; even his reflexes felt wrong.

It felt like his body no longer fit him. His clothes certainly didn’t. That was something he’d thought of before he did this, he realized. The fact that he hadn’t prepared adequately for that outcome was obviously because, deep down, he didn’t think it would work. Still, when he got to his snow-dusted tent and pulled his mirror from his pack, he was surprised to see a much younger face looking back at him.

“Wow, what am I, fourteen?” he asked himself as he touched his unfamiliar features experimentally. Simon immediately jumped at the sound of his now much higher-pitched voice. It was unnerving. “What in the hell did I do to myself?”

He’d gotten exactly what he’d hoped for, and sometimes, that was the greatest punishment of all. Simon relit his fire and ate a little, but otherwise, he spent the rest of the day in his bedroll doing what he could do to make the clothes he had fit better with alterations that could be affected by dagger and rawhide thong. In the end, there was nothing he could do about his boots, except to stuff them with extra socks so they wouldn’t fall off his feet when he walked.

Fortunately, with his horse, he didn’t have to do a lot of walking. Less fortunate was the fact that riding a horse was much more challenging when he was almost two feet shorter. He found that out two days later when he started heading south again and found he had to practically redo his whole saddle set up, and compared to packing everything up and reloading his saddlebags with tired, suddenly weakened limbs, that was the easy part.

“Maybe I didn’t think this through,” he said to himself as he rode south.

He’d been so sure of the right way to take down this city in a way that would help the future timeline that he hadn’t thought of any of the practical issues with suddenly becoming a child again. Those turned out to be legion, and each time he camped, he discovered some new problem.

His armor was useless. His weapons didn’t fit much better than his clothing had. Simon was still okay with his dagger, but he was completely useless with his scimitar. Okay was being generous, really, because he wasn’t good at much of anything for those first few days. Still, he got better, and after a week, with the soreness gone, his body started to feel like it belonged to him.

After a lifetime of being old, he’d once marveled at how young he felt when he returned to the body of a thirty-year-old. This was like that, but even more extreme, and while he didn’t quite revel in it, Simon certainly found it fascinating. Not only that but suddenly, he had more energy than he’d had in a long time.

What he didn’t have was any credibility. Each time he stopped in an inn after that, the proprietor wanted to know where his parents or his master were. “Are you lost?” one kindly older woman asked.

“What happened to your parents?” another inquired. “Are you really traveling alone so far?”

Simon kept the same name he’d used as a merchant, and married that old name and new face to an even newer background, but it did little good. Nijam tried several lies, but no one seemed to buy them. Soon, he gave up on those, and after he found a cobbler that he could buy shoes from, he eschewed civilization as much as possible on the way to the city because being treated like a child was just too surreal.

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No one had tried to talk down to him in a long time. He had the aura of a man who knew what he was doing, no matter his age. Now, though, it was all upside down. Some people tried to baby him, but others immediately sought to take advantage of him, and both were intolerable.

Simon was sure that the latter group would only intensify after he reached Zurari. The city might have been one of the safest he’d been to, but it was rife with scammers and schemers, and he’d encountered more than a few pickpockets in the market.

Still, it wasn’t as if he could avoid it on that basis. He was going to have to find a place to lie low, and then he was going to have to search the city until he could find a Selection and figure out a way to get himself picked.

Of course, they might not pick you, he told himself as he saw the silhouette of the walls and the ziggurats on the horizon for the first time. They don’t choose all the children, and they’re almost certainly looking for the sight that you don’t have. How are you going to work your way around that?

Simon didn’t know. He certainly lacked the clarity to make any sort of attempt at seeing other people’s auras right now. Transforming himself into a child had muddied the waters of his soul for a long time, and he was quite sure that any glimpses of that sort of thing were well beyond him.

Still, even if he couldn’t perform that minor miracle, his aura was in pretty good shape these days. He was approaching negative a hundred thousand. He would just have to hope that was good enough to be considered a child that had led a hard life. Truthfully, Simon had no idea what he’d have to have done as a teenager to rack up such a pile of karmic debt, but he was sure he could figure something out. If anything, he’d just tell these guys the same sob story he told the Whisperers when they’d interrogated him so long ago.

Before he worried about any of that, though, he had to secure lodgings and learn to do a better job of being a kid because, right now, he was failing at that miserably. He could tell by the way people regarded him. Even if he didn’t speak with them directly, he could tell that after a few minutes, they began eyeing him strangely.

The first problem was easily solved with a small coin purse and a forged letter from a nonexistent master claiming that he was the apprentice of some far-off trader looking to establish an office here. He had to let the owner of the building he was renting think that he was taking advantage of Simon, but he didn’t really care. A couple gold coins bought him a small building in a nondescript neighborhood for a year, and it was privacy he really needed now, not coins. That space bought him enough room to hide his valuables and time enough to blend into his role.

After that, it was all about getting proper clothes. He chose nothing fancy and traded coppers with the rag pickers so that he could better get into his role as an orphan. He even bought a smaller knife. Though he still prized his vampiric dagger, it was large enough on his new, smaller body to draw the eye, and though he could fight with it, he couldn’t hide it.

Throughout the week, Simon accomplished those things so that he would blend in, but the whole time he tried to figure out why it was that he still stuck out so plainly. That took some time, and even after examining himself in the mirror, he could find no real problems. It was only after he studied other kids that he figured it out. He was much too serious.

When he studied children near his current age across the bazaar or in the streets, Simon noted that they were always moving. They were always chatting or playing, even if it got them cuffed by their parent or some other adult who had grown annoyed with their antics.

That was all well and good. He certainly didn’t hate the behavior, but he also didn’t mimic it. Compared to his new peers, he was like a statue. He moved less, he spoke less, and he certainly played less, even after he tried to join in their games.

The cause for that was obvious. He’d spent several lifetimes, and in particular, this lifetime, cultivating patience. Now, suddenly, it felt like he was going to have to unlearn that. More than that, though, he was going to have to unlearn the small nagging voice in his head that told him he could be working on something more productive when he spent an afternoon playing tag in the streets with strangers or tossing the hard leather ball around with a couple of the boys he spent the most time with.

For the latter category of activity, that was easier. Practicing hand-eye coordination was an activity he could defend to himself. It wasn’t play. It was practice. The same went for wooden swords. He enjoyed that, and even pretending to be worse than he really was able to beat even slightly older boys handily. That wasn’t a surprise. His new friends didn’t have decades fighting with a sword in hand like young Nijam did. Unfortunately, other tasks were harder.

Simon played tag and hide and seek without too much complaint, but other word games, like the trading of riddles, he had an especially hard time with. He was far too clever to be a child, and he didn’t really know how to play dumb properly for any length of time.

You’re going to have to learn, though, he told himself. Even if you get in with the Magi, you’ll end up in a cage like Freya instead of accomplishing what you want.

That thought gave him pause, and for the first time, he began to doubt his goal. His doppelgänger had tipped him off once before, only for Simon to fall into the trap that had been laid for him. Was he about to do so again?

“That’s not possible, is it?” he asked himself. “There’s no way that he could know enough to do that unless, of course, he really is me.”