Reborn as an Elven Mother - Prologue

This will be our new ongoing Friday story as of the 28th! The New Sirens will be finishing next week so I thought I'd give you a sneak peak at what is to come!

Commissioned by Azena

When Cameron, a relentless workaholic, falls into an exhausted sleep one night, he wakes up in the body of an Elven maiden in a strange fantasy realm. Suddenly thrust into a life he doesn’t remember, he must learn how to be a mother while not letting on that he's not who he appears to be.

~

Prologue

It was dark by the time I pushed my way into the apartment, swearing as my shoulder rammed into the coat rack and knocked my phone and half the groceries I'd been carrying out of my hand. The work chat had gone blessedly silent for the first time all day, all week really. It was Friday night, and even my workaholic colleagues had plans. 

Linda had some PTA meeting for her brats; why she'd volunteer her time to do more meetings in her spare time when we spent half our work day in them is beyond me. Janet had yet another date with some poor sob who would be scared off by her enthusiasm by the end of the night; at nearly forty, she was starting to get a little manic about becoming a spinster. I told her nobody uses that term anymore, but she said that doesn't make her childlessness any less painful. Telling her to view it as a blessing had apparently been enough to warrant a complaint against my boss, Jim. Who secretly agreed with me but decided to play nice since Janet brought in the last three big book deals. 

I clicked on the light and was immediately greeted by my reflection in the hall mirror. My hair was pushed back from my forehead at all angles due to my fingers running through it too many times in one day. My grey eyes looked tired, and I somehow had accumulated a five o'clock shadow despite shaving that morning. I really needed to schedule an appointment with the barber. When I had time. If I had time. I had three manuscripts to read and approve this week. 

My phone pinged as I picked it up, a little yellow envelope with the number twenty-three next to it. I swore again. As always, I'd cleared my emails when I left the office. I'd stayed late to do it, as always, and then, as always, it had started to refill itself on the commute home while I was busy texting my list of frantic authors.

Cameron, I have this really cool idea for a story inspired by Sliding Doors.

So sorry hun! I promise I will get the opening chapter polished. Please don't drop me, I am just going through a slump!

Hey Cam, it’s Linda. Could you take over that manuscript from the new girl, what’s her name? Sorry, you know me, no memory for names and faces, not like you!

Hey Cameron, me again. Somebody left another 1 star review on my book. Is that normal? The ratio is starting to slide from 4 to high 3s…

Cameron, why is the cover proof so bland?! Nobody is going to buy my book with such a boring cover! People do judge by those, you know! Saying or not!

I kept telling Jim we needed more employees, but he was still hung up on our publishing house staying small to 'focus on quality'. Hard to focus on quality when we were all up to our elbows in emails, calls and texts. I was doing twice the work of anybody else in the office simply because I was the only one who could handle multiple manuscripts at once. Every time Linda or Janet tried to take more than one on, they got the names mixed up and plotlines crossed. 

I gathered up my dented can of beans and set about reading a few of the emails while I made dinner. Beans and toast, a bachelor's dream. Most of them were from authors on our list; some of which hadn't had a best seller in years. Half-finished manuscripts, promises to have more to use soon, a series of emails from the UK publishing house I was in talks with to set up a Zoom meeting about localisation. I cursed the quiet work chat; with everybody else busy, it was up to me to answer. I worked through one after the other, scowling as more replaced them. I didn't have anything else to do, though, well, nothing but my beans and toast-

"Shit!"

I sprang up from the chair at my tiny kitchen table and rushed to the pot, which was smoking. Fine, just toast then. Toast and coffee; I was going to need it if I was going to get through all of these and get a few hours of sleep before work tomorrow. Breakfast for dinner, who said being a workaholic meant being boring? That was the sort of spontaneous shit people did in those fluff books Linda always got published. The kind with a marriage on the rocks that ended in passionate sex on page two hundred that made me want to dry heave. It sold, though, damn if it didn't sell. 

My toast went cold while I worked, but I didn't mind. The coffee was enough, really. I was caught up in the dopamine rush of ticking things off my todo list. Granted I was adding things just as fast, but that was normal. I hadn't finished my to do list in years, if I ever did I genuinely don't know what I’d do with myself.

I grabbed my laptop, plugged it in to avoid an embarrassing shutdown like last time and got started. I'd finished off the emails, called four frantic international clients, and had just about finished reading through the last manual I needed when a painful orange light flashed from my laptop screen. For a second, I panicked; I'd cooked my last laptop and there was no way Jim would give me an allowance for a new one this early. Then, I noticed the light wasn't from the screen at all; it was the reflection of the sun filtering through my open window.

"Fuuuuuuuck." 

For the first time and hours, I glanced down at the time in the bottom corner of my screen. 5:12am. Fine, that was fine. I didn't have to leave until 6, I could do a quick, forty minute power nap. These clothes were still good, I removed my tie, shirt and pants as smoothly as possible to avoid extra creases and hung them over the chair, ready to be put on again. I thought about grabbing a fresh pair of boxers out to sleep in but decided against it; I'd change when I woke up. The unmade bed had never looked so inviting as it did right now, and I barely had the forethought to set the alarm before falling asleep. The words '43 minutes until alarm' burned into the back of my eyelids as they closed. 43 minutes of sleep; I'd functioned on less. It would be fine. It would all be fine. 

~

Nine times out of ten, when the question gets asked, people say the same thing. 

"I want to die in my sleep."

The smaller percentage always say something edgy or something they think sounds profound. But in the end, nobody really wants to see their death coming. There is one thing nobody takes into account, though, and that's the absolute confusion you face when you die in your sleep and have no idea how or why. 

Did my apartment burn down? Was there a gas leak? Did I have a heart attack at thirty-five and become one of those tragic tales of overwork? I had no way of knowing, all I knew was that I was dead and somewhere in between. At least, that's what I thought because, for a moment, there was nothing, and then I felt an immense heat filling every fibre of my being. I was burning alive. No, it wasn't that, there was something else. Another presence, rapidly fading, as we passed each other like ships in the night, and then there was a voice. 

"Please stay with me, Mama. Please."

The voice was young, a little girl, definitely not a voice I knew. And yet, she sounded so sad, the heart I no longer had ached. That other presence that passed me seemed to react; we brushed against one another as formless entities in the darkness, and then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone, and I felt myself slam down to Earth. 

The heat flared for a moment and then dissipated, leaving me feeling exhausted and strangely numb. Slowly, sensation returned; I could feel my heavy eyelids protesting my attempts to open them, my fingers twitching in somebody's tight grasp, and the weight of soft cloth across my chest. 

A hospital; that was the only explanation. But if this was a hospital, why did it smell so homey? Like bread and earth, it reminded me of a lifetime ago when I used to watch my long dead mother bake on the weekends. There was no beep from a heart monitor either; no shuffling sound of nurses, and who was holding my hand? I didn't have any family left, no girlfriend; the only person in my life who relied on me was Jim, and there was no way he was holding my hand like that. 

Whoever it was squeezed my fingers, and I realised something important: the hand was small. Much too small to be an adult, a child was holding my hand in a room that smelt of bread. Nothing about this made sense. 

I forced my eyes open and blinked as sunlight dazzled them. The roof was thatched above me, and bunches of herbs hung from the rafters. I puzzled at them for a moment before I turned my head. My cheek met soft hair that was much too long to be my own and yet, it was. I felt the tug at my skull as I turned. I shifted in the bed and realised that my body felt...wrong. Too willowy and thin, the weight was all in the wrong places and there was an odd empty feeling between my legs and...was I wearing a nightdress? 

I was so taken aback I'd almost forgotten the person holding my hand. I looked down and found a figure asleep, head against my thigh, kneeling on the floor by my low bed. It was a little girl with honey brown hair that reached her mid back and elaborate braids framing each side of her face. A face slack with sleep, a small amount of drool building in the corner of her mouth. 

She looked exhausted, with the slightest blue beneath her eyes that made me frown; no child that age should be so sleepless. She was wearing a dress and smock that looked like something a medieval peasant might wear, and most notable of all were her ears. Long and pointed in a way that human ears just weren't. Did this girl have some sort of deformity? Or were they fakes, like from TV? 

Without thinking, I reached out and ran a finger along the shell of her ear, warm and real the whole way. That wasn't the only thing; my hand was delicate, my nails perfect little ovals; no hairy knuckles and no scar from that time I cut myself trying to open a box of new releases. 

The girl stirred, and I froze as her eyes blinked open, cornflower blue and wide as dinner plates, she couldn't have looked more innocent if she had tried. Immediately, I froze, mind whirring. People would have a field day with this, some strange man touching a little girl's ear like that! My mouth opened and closed as I tried to think of some excuse, but the little girl spoke first, and what she said made me speechless for a whole host of other reasons. 

"Mama! You're awake!"