It was the sound of a bird pecking her windows that woke her up. Stirring from slumber, she blinked a couple of times to adjust her eyes to the current luminosity.
“The fever subsided”, she heard an elderly masculine voice say, sensing a hand touching her forehead, “she is going to be alright now.”
A grunt came in response to him and Lyanna could finally see clearly. She tried to sit up, but the hand left her forehead and gently push her back,
“Take it easy miss Delacour, you should lie down a little more.”
The person speaking was an elder man with quite a long white beard, he was imposingly muscular but looking at her with gentle eyes. She frowned a bit, unable to recognize him and turned her head to look at the other one in the room with them.
On the other side of her bed, there was another elder, with stern facial features. Compared to the first, he was on the slender side; this one didn't have a beard but his long hair was white of old age. He resembled her grandfather a lot and for a moment she was going to exclaim to him, but the joy in her eyes left as quickly as it came. It wasn’t her grandfather. This man was frowning too much and was way too unapproachable to be her gentle, loving, and always smiling grandfather. He had, in his being, something of an aristocrat with the clothes to match this assumption.
Blinking twice, she looked at them both again, but opening her eyes they were still here. In the end, she asked in a voice she herself could barely hear,
“Who are you?”
Even though the medical staff changed from time to time, they were always presented to her long in advance and she never saw these two people.
The man, who resembled her grandfather more than she was comfortable with, had his frown deepened, and he turned to the person closest to her, asking,
“Is she really alright?”
“Are you hurt somewhere?” the other man busily asked and Lyanna shook her head, “do you feel dizzy?” she shook it again, “what do you remember last?”
She wanted to say, being in her bedroom before falling due to another seizure but she suddenly glanced at her hands and shook. Small little hands they were. She rose abruptly startling the elder with a long beard, sitting on the bed, she shook off the thick blanket from her.
Tiny body in an unfamiliar nightgown. Her physique was so small, like that of a child. Her eyes widened and darted to the room. A big and luxurious room draped in elegant and costly tapestry, pricey poufs, big windows with intricate curtains... Heaven! Even this bed had its own fine set of curtains albeit they were folded for now.
There was nothing she could recognize in this room! Stuttering, her eyes widened more if possible and she asked, scared witless,
There was nothing she could recognize in this room! Stuttering, her eyes widened more if possible and she asked, scared witless,
“What happened to me?” The voice of a little child came from her mouth and she blanched putting a hand on her throat. She herself was unaware of how much she was shaking.
“Calm down,” said the man pushing her to the bed again, “you had an …” he glanced at the other person in the room who slightly shook his head thus he finished by saying “accident” without explaining more. “Thankfully, you are alright though”,
Alright? Lyanna didn’t feel alright at all!
“Who are you? What happened to me?” The panic was thick in her voice and the man glanced at the aristocrat which turned Lyanna's attention to him “who is he?”, annoyed by her own unrecognizable voice, she said, “and who am I? What happened to my body!” in a sort of ironical way. Because obviously, there was no way she was 'herself' again.
***
The man tugged her to her bed and covered her with the blanket, patiently explaining to her, he was a doctor and they were now in Rosacrea. She was inside the house of her grandfather, the duke of Tulip. Apparently, that person one with a stern expression was her grandfather and her, she was Britannia Annabeth Delacour. That doctor had actually taken her literally and really explained her identity. And the answer only led Lyanna to panic even more.
It took her a while and many attempts to flee, to ultimately understand that it was indeed real. She was Lyanna no more. From a teenager, she became a child, a six years old child. And the differences were huge. The stark contrast, besides her age, was her appearance. She had now a vibrant red hair color that she apparently took after her mother, forest green eyes that she shared with said grandfather.
That particular man wasn’t a talkative person, completely different from the grandfather she dearly missed. When the doctor had started to explain things, the other man had left the room after briefly glancing at her. Though he wasn't her real grandfather, he looked so much like him that Lyanna couldn't help but feel abandoned and had to bite her lips to stop herself from calling him back.
The doctor seemed to understand her plight and lightly tapped the hands that were clutching the blankets in the guise of support. He told her a bit more about herself and that she was to wait for her father’s return in this mansion. As for her mother, he briefly told her that she wouldn’t come, for the time being, adding nothing more to it.
***
Lyanna was slowly digesting and accepting the new reality she was now living in but needed time to adjust. For the servants of the house, that she was always in her bedroom unwilling to take a step outside was the expression of her loss even if she couldn’t remember. For them, the shock of her mother’s and brother’s deaths in front of her had been so great that she lost her memory. Added to that the fact that she couldn’t see the father whom she was always attached to, they could only sigh while pitying her.
The duke of tulip wasn’t a man of many words and didn’t console her at all, they felt grief for the child, not that the duke was any less pitiable. After all, the poor man lost his wife just a year ago and now, only a mere couple of days ago he lost his daughter and his sole grandson who ended up as war’s casualties. That family was just too pitiful!
They just hoped now that the general won’t die on the battlefield and will be able to come back safe and sound to his daughter and father-in-law.
***
Lyanna rummaged through her bedroom, searching for some kind of rational explanation. She paused when she saw, inside of one of the drawers, a necklace, the shape of a heart, with a hide. It was made of pure gold and had an exquisite tulip design engraved. Inside the space, there were two pictures, one for each side. One was a man. He had dark blonde hair with a smiling face and golden eyes. The other side was a woman. A beautiful red-haired woman with a gentle smile. Her mother, certainly, for there were striking resemblances with 'this body' she got to see in the mirror. So, she concluded, the other must be 'her' father. Those people were pleasant to look at but beyond that, Lyanna couldn’t say more. There was in her heart no attachment, no pain, no longing, nothing. She tried hard but couldn’t access to what she thought was the original body’s memories and in the end stopped trying.
***
After thinking about it for a long time and testing many hypotheses, Lyanna finally concluded that maybe, she really did transmigrate; that her soul entered the body of this little child whose grandfather had similar traits to hers. She, after all, dearly missed the man and upon her death, wished to be reunited. Maybe that was the link which brought her here.
It never occurred to her, that actually, it could really be that she lost her memories and the only ones she could remember now were those before her rebirth in this world. For Lyanna, she started her new life in this new mansion the day she woke up from a dreadful fever that certainly claimed the child’s life.
At first, she really didn’t know where she had transmigrated to. She didn’t think much of it anyway and slowly started learning things from scratch. Lyanna didn't exist anymore, so she must now learn to be a daughter of a general and granddaughter of a duke.
How was she to know that she was inside that one book she actually didn’t read until the end? A long-forgotten gift from three years ago. That aside, how could she even remember that book with the irrelevant information she had? Really, she couldn’t be blamed for Britannia Annabeth Delacour hadn’t been an influential character in there but someone who was just mentioned in the passing, to emphasize the heroine’s beauty. That name appeared just like ten times in the book, maybe even less.
The book, ‘In the name of love’, wasn’t one that really appealed to her and she would only realize the truth of her condition far in the future when the time to enter school would come. For Lyanna, at this moment, she just transmigrated into another world where she wasn’t sick, she had a stern but loving grandfather and for the biggest part of her childhood, she lived as the normal girl she never was.
For Lyanna, now Annabeth, it was the end of those never-ending days spent on the bed, the end of constant pain, terrible seizures and the wait for death. She was finally given the chance to enjoy life and she was going to make the most of it.
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