The first girl I met in this world who was actually my age — mentally excluded, obviously — was Elara Voss, the baker's daughter.
She was seven, like me. Brown hair, brown eyes, a light dusting of flour permanently embedded in her everything because she lived above a bakery. She was loud, opinionated, and had the unshakeable confidence of someone who'd never once questioned whether she belonged in any given situation.
I met her because she threw a bread roll at my head.
It was market day again, two weeks after the previous chapter's events. I was sitting on the low wall outside the temple, reading a book I'd borrowed from Father's study — Foundations of Sanctus Theory, Vol. I — while Mother handled errands. The book was dry, dense, and absolutely fascinating.
The bread roll hit me right in the temple. The body temple, not the building temple. Although I was also near the building temple, so the sentence works both ways.
"OW."
"CATCH IT NEXT TIME."
I looked up. A girl my age was standing about ten feet away, hands on her hips, glaring at me with the intensity of someone who'd been personally wronged.
"...Why did you throw bread at me?" I asked, rubbing my head. It was a soft roll, at least. Could've been a baguette.
"Because you were ignoring me! I said hello THREE TIMES."
Had she? I'd been pretty deep in the book.
"Sorry. I was reading."
"You're ALWAYS reading. Every market day, you sit here and read. Don't you do anything else?"
"I also eat."
"That's not a hobby, that's a requirement."
She marched over and sat on the wall beside me without invitation. This, I would learn, was extremely characteristic of Elara Voss. She didn't wait for invitations. She assumed every space was hers and dared the world to disagree.
"I'm Elara. My dad runs the bakery." She pointed to a shop across the square. "You're the Saint's kid. The weird one."
"I prefer 'the contemplative one.'"
"See, that's what I mean. What seven-year-old says 'contemplative'?"
Fair point.
"I read a lot," I said.
"Yeah, I noticed." She peered at my book. "Sanctus Theory? Isn't that for seminary students?"
"Probably."
"Can you even understand it?"
"Mostly."
She stared at me. Then she grinned — sudden, bright, like someone had flicked a switch.
"Cool. I can't read very well yet. Teach me."
"What?"
"Teach me to read. Better, I mean. I can do basic stuff but the long words trip me up. Dad says I need to learn if I'm going to take over the bakery because you have to read invoices and contracts and stuff."
"...You want me to teach you to read. We just met. You threw bread at my head."
"To get your attention. It worked. So? Will you teach me?"
I looked at her. Seven years old, flour in her hair, absolutely zero self-consciousness. In my old life, I would have made an excuse and retreated. Social interaction was energy, and I'd been chronically low on energy for twenty-six years.
But this wasn't my old life.
And honestly? I was kind of lonely.
I had my family, and I loved them, but I was mentally an adult surrounded by people who saw me as a child. I couldn't talk to anyone about the things I actually thought about. I couldn't be fully honest with anyone. That was isolating in a way that was hard to describe — surrounded by warmth but unable to fully share it.
Elara wasn't going to solve that problem. She was seven, actually seven, with seven-year-old thoughts and seven-year-old concerns.
But she was also sitting next to me on a wall, asking me to teach her something, and looking at me like I was a person rather than a curiosity.
"Okay," I said.
"Really?"
"But no more throwing bread."
"No promises."
That was how it started.
Every market day, Elara and I sat on the wall outside the temple. I helped her with reading — starting with simple texts, working up to longer passages. She was smart, actually. Quick to pick up patterns, impatient with memorization, excellent at contextual guessing. She'd figure out words she didn't know by the shape of the sentence around them.
In exchange, she brought me fresh bread. This was, objectively, the better end of the deal.
"Your family's bread is really good," I told her one afternoon, three weeks into our arrangement.
"Obviously. We use a double-rise method with cultured starter. Been in the family four generations." She said this with the casual pride of someone who'd grown up watching mastery and absorbed it through proximity.
"Cultured starter? What's that?"
Her eyes lit up. Elara Voss, I discovered, could talk about bread with the same intensity I reserved for mana theory. What followed was a twenty-minute lecture on fermentation, yeast cultures, flour quality, water temperature, and kneading technique that was frankly more educational than most of what I'd read in Father's books.
"You know a lot about this," I said.
"I know a lot about bread," she corrected. "That's different from knowing a lot about things."
"I don't think it is."
She paused, mid-bite of her own product. "What do you mean?"
"Knowing a lot about one thing deeply is more valuable than knowing a little about everything. You understand fermentation better than most adults. That's expertise."
She blinked. Something shifted in her expression — surprise, maybe, that someone had framed her knowledge that way. I suspected that in her world, knowing about bread wasn't considered "smart." Smart was reading books and doing sums and eventually maybe going to seminary.
"You're weird," she said.
"So I've been told."
"But like... nice weird."
She went back to eating her bread, and I went back to reading my book, and we sat in comfortable silence on the wall while the market hummed around us.
It was, I realized, the first time since being reborn that I'd made a friend.