Reincarnated As An Archmage’s Daughter

The transition from the Tower’s training hall to wherever this was came as a dizzying freefall. It ended with a muffled oof as Hania slammed face-first into a massive mountain of dried hay.

Dust exploded around her, making her tiny nose twitch.

“Achoo!”

The sneeze nearly flipped her backward off the pile. She blinked through the haze, eyes watering. This wasn’t the floor of the hall or her room.

Hania scrambled to her hands and knees, sliding down the haystack until her boots hit solid ground. Her mind kicked into triage while her tiny body struggled to keep up. She was inside some kind of abandoned structure. The roof had caved in long ago, leaving rotting wooden beams like skeletal fingers pointed at an unfamiliar sky. Giant trees had smashed through the stone walls, their massive roots twisting across the floor like sleeping pythons.

“Okay. Okay, think,” she muttered, her voice trembling as she checked herself over.

Hands: ten fingers, covered in chalk and hay dust. Dress: torn at the hem but mostly intact. Hidden pocket: still there. She patted the spider-silk pouch at her waist. The silver hair inside was gone, burned away to fuel her accidental eviction.

She took a deep breath. “Spatial displacement. The domain spell shunted the caster. But how far?”

If she was still in the Northern territories, Dravin would find her in minutes. His passive sensory network across the Noctis lands was absurdly dense. If she was outside the borders…

Hania shook her head and forced her short legs forward. “Find a perimeter. An exit. A landmark. Anything.”

She picked the direction where the stone wall had crumbled completely and pushed into the dense undergrowth.

It was a disaster. A hundred meters to her adult mind was nothing. To her tiny legs it was a full-body ordeal. Thorny briars snagged her sleeves. Damp soil caught her boots and sent her stumbling into the moss.

“Stupid toddler biology,” she gasped, wiping sweat from her forehead.

She stopped and tried to channel a basic tracking pulse or even a spark of light. She reached for her core.

Click.

Nothing. Her internal mana reserves were bone dry. The failing domain spell had drained the active ten percent of her unsealed core down to absolute zero.

Then came the ultimate betrayal.

Grumbleeeeee.

A hunger roared through her stomach. Her vision swam. Her knees turned to wet noodles.

“I didn’t even get to eat the creambread,” she whimpered, lower lip trembling with real toddler despair. The piece she’d hoarded was crushed to dusty crumbs in the fall.

She couldn’t keep going. If she pushed harder, she’d faint and become easy prey for whatever lived here.

Defeated, Hania crawled to the base of a massive pine tree. She collapsed against the bark, knees pulled tight to her chest.

“It’s fine,” she whispered, staring at the eerie shadows stretching across the forest floor. “Totally fine.”

Her mind ran the logistics. A spatial crack that size in the private training hall would have triggered every alarm in the Tower. Kofery would have broken down the door in seconds. When he saw the scorched circle and realized she was gone, he’d panic and run straight to Dravin. And if he somehow missed it, Lusha’s spirit spiders were everywhere.

“Dada will come,” she said aloud. “He’s the Archmage. Finding a missing kid is freshman-level for him. I just have to stay put. Standard survival protocol.”

She closed her eyes and pictured it: Dravin tracing the residual air, finding the tear’s trajectory, tearing open a portal right in front of her. Those red eyes looking down. Calling her an insolent problem. Taking her home.

Yeah. Any minute now.

She waited.

The light shifted from gold to deep purple. The temperature dropped. Hania shivered in her torn dress.

One hour. Two.

The forest filled with clicking insects and distant hoots. No tearing fabric. No spike of Noctis mana or dark robes.

Three hours. Four.

The certainty in her chest began to fray. Her stomach growled again, weaker this time. She looked up through the pine leaves. The sky was fully dark.

She was alone. Her magic was gone. Her stomach was empty. As the night grew colder, a dangerous thought took root.

What if they never find me?

Worse… what if they don’t want to?

She stared at her dirty hands. Ever since she reincarnated into this body, she had been nothing but a complication. A problem. She broke Dravin’s silence, tore out his hair, and forced an Archmage to deal with a teething child. Her core was sealed because she was unstable.

Maybe this was the breaking point. Maybe he had simply decided he was done.

In the shadows, she could almost see it: Dravin in his robes, turning his back while the Tower doors locked forever. Erasing her like a failed experiment. The thought stung deeper than hunger.

If she wanted to get back, she couldn’t wait for rescue.

The wilderness outside the ruins was too vast. Her short legs could barely manage stairs, let alone cross a continent or whatever this place.

But sitting here wouldn’t fill her stomach.

“Gotta move,” Hania rasped. She pulled herself up, head spinning.

Guided by faint moonlight, she wandered through the thicket, vision blurring, focus narrowed to one desperate goal: anything edible.

She noticed the smell only when she was practically on top of it.

Hania pushed past a massive rubbery leaf. Her foot caught on a vine. “Whoa—”

She pitched forward over a sudden drop and landed with a wet crunch on something thick and warm.

She blinked. Her hand came away coated in thick amber sludge.

She had fallen straight onto a monster honeycomb. It was enormous, wedged between the roots of a glowing oak. The hexagonal cells were the size of dinner plates, oozing golden syrup. Starving toddler instincts took over. She dipped three sticky fingers in and shoved them into her mouth.

The honey exploded across her tongue—intensely sweet, laced with warm magic that sent vitality rushing back into her veins.

“Oh my god,” she whispered.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

The ground shook. Hania’s eyes snapped up.

Three monstrous bees, each the size of a hunting hound, hovered above the canopy. Their eyes locked on the intruder face-first in their winter stores.

“Right. Nature bites back,” Hania squeaked.

She scrambled out of the sticky crater as the first bee dove. It slammed into the honeycomb hard enough to shatter wood. Hania didn’t look back. Sugar rush fueling her legs, she tore through the brush, ducking branches and weaving through thickets the giant insects couldn’t follow.

The thrumming wings chased her down a steep slope. The sound faded as she plunged into thorny briars that scraped their wings and forced them to break off.

Hania collapsed against a mossy log, gasping. She was still starving, but that taste of magical honey had done something important. A tiny puddle of Noctis mana had pooled at the bottom of her core.

She couldn’t leave without more. If she was going to survive out here, that honey was her best chance.

“Just a little bit,” she muttered, eyes sparking. “Quick smash-and-grab.”

She crept back downwind, staying low. The guard bees were busy repairing the damage. Hania reached an overhanging section of comb, channeled her tiny spark of mana into the edge of her palm, and chopped down. Crack. A solid block broke free. She couldn’t run with three pounds of sticky wax.

Think. Think....

She closed her eyes and reached for the edge of her mana. She focused on the hidden pocket in her dress and visualized a dimensional space no larger than a school backpack.

A crude but functional storage pocket stabilized.

“Perfect,” she hissed, shoving the honeycomb inside.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

Hania turned. The sky above the clearing had gone black. Dozens of furious bees dropped from the canopy like missiles.

“Oh, come on!” she shrieked.

She ran, but the sugar rush was fading and her legs burned. A stinger slammed into the dirt an inch from her heel. She scrambled up a rocky incline, hands slipping on gravel. The swarm was right behind her. Ahead lay open sky—a dead end.

Her boot slipped. She tumbled sideways into a hidden fissure between two boulders.

She slid down a steep dirt chute, rolling into pitch-black darkness before crashing onto stone.

Above, the swarm’s roar grew muffled. Hania rolled onto her back and groaned. She had fallen into a deep, narrow cave. The entrance was a jagged slit of moonlight too small for the hound-sized bees.

They slammed against the stone in fury, then slowly dispersed.

Hania lay still in the dark, listening to dripping water. She patted her waistband and felt the warm weight of the stolen honeycomb safe in storage. A grin broke across her face.

Hania was reaching for another piece of honeycomb when a vibrating sound rippled through the damp air. It came from the swallowing blackness ahead, not from the slit above.

Grrrrrrrrrr.

It wasn’t her stomach. Hania froze, hand hovering over her waistband. She was trapped at the bottom of a narrow chute, magic nearly gone, and she had just dropped into something else’s den.

Slowly, she looked up.

Two glowing eyes ignited in the dark. Pale yellow. Fixed on her.

“Great,” Hania whispered. “Just great.”