Dr. Evelyn Weiss stared down at the construction blueprints under her unit’s responsibility. With the coalition forces’ commitment in the region rapidly drawing to a close, she had found herself stuck overseeing the erection of a bridge in the absolute middle of nowhere - some godforsaken backwater country.
If there was one lesson her years of service as a military engineer had hammered into her, it was that openly criticizing the sheer idiocy of command was an exceptionally foolish move.
So she held her tongue. While she and the other officers drafted out the project’s phases, the enlisted grunts broke their backs erecting a massive span - a structure that held virtually zero tactical value for the allied forces already pulling out en masse.
That was right: pulling out. Or rather, running away. Evelyn may not have cared for this hellish corner of the earth, but she considered the hasty withdrawal a monumental disaster, especially when the local government forces were utterly incapable of holding off the rebels without foreign backing.
In her eyes, hundreds of billions had been poured down the drain and thousands of lives extinguished, only for a full retreat to be ordered before the mission was even secured. They were abandoning an unstable, fledgling state to fend for itself. It was the exact same script history had played out countless times before, and everyone knew precisely how the story ended.
Yet despite her private indignation at the geopolitical circus, on a purely personal level she welcomed the prospect of going home. She far preferred idling away at a domestic base, losing herself in grand strategy titles, city-builders, and farming simulators. Whenever she wasn’t buried in infrastructure, logistics, or materials science, she poured her spare hours into those very games - or into deepening her grasp of military history, economics, mechanics, and archaic manufacturing techniques.
She was, after all, an exceptionally well-rounded academic: having graduated at the top of her class in engineering before earning a doctorate in military engineering and materials science. Ever since childhood, the way things were built had held an almost obsessive grip on her mind. Hand her a mechanical device, and she would rather strip it down to its barest components and assemble it anew than use it without a second thought.
Upon reaching adulthood, she had spent the bulk of her leave haunting libraries and archival vaults, tracing the precise births of the industrial and agrarian revolutions; she dissected every technological leap, figuring out how to replicate modern advancements using crude, bygone methods.
Blessed with a photographic technical memory and a razor-sharp analytical mind, she retained those concepts with effortless permanence.
She never presumed to call herself a walking encyclopedia, but she knew enough about civil engineering, metallurgy, and fabrication processes to guide craftsmen from raw theory straight to finished steel if ever called upon. Naturally, such an obsessive lifestyle did few favors for her social life.
Her solitary pursuits had left her single, unattached, and without dependents. She didn't even keep pets, considering it an unfair burden to pawn an animal off on relatives every time deployment orders came down.
And now, here she was - stranded in the wasteland, supervising a bridge build in a country the military would officially abandon in less than a month. The brass's thought process completely eluded her; in the end, it was nothing more than another grotesque squandering of taxpayer dollars.
The local forces might theoretically put the bridge to tactical use, but could they truly not build one themselves? It was a purely rhetorical question. She was all too familiar with their level of competence, harboring zero illusions on the matter.
As she brooded over the absurdity of it all, the banter of several non-commissioned officers drifted in from the background, their voices filled with crude jokes as they debated how best to celebrate the mission’s wrap-up. Those grizzled veterans had been in this war too long to harbor a single shred of idealism; they couldn't care less about military prestige or the operation's looming failure. All they wanted was to go home. Evelyn could hardly fault them for that.
Just as one of them started detailing her leave plans, a thundering roar detonated in the distance, instantly followed by the bone-chilling shriek of incoming artillery tearing through the atmosphere - screaming on a direct trajectory toward Evelyn's command post.
A single thought flashed across her mind in that split second:
Goddammit!
And with that parting thought, her consciousness was violently swallowed by a blinding flash of fury, the concussive shockwave instantly obliterating her and everyone else stationed at the site.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
Just like that, Evelyn was snuffed out - instant, permanent, and meaningless, like thousands of others swallowed by this pointless war.
***
Seraphine jolted awake with a ragged scream, her hoarse cry bouncing off the heavy stone masonry of an immense chamber.
Her eyes darted frantically across the room.
It took a few disoriented moments to realize she hadn't been torn to ribbons by high-explosive shrapnel. Instead, she lay sprawled upon a massive four-poster canopy bed.
Standing right beside the mattress was a young girl on the verge of blossoming into womanhood, her wide eyes locked onto Seraphine in sheer terror.
Marielle was her younger sister. Despite her youth, she was already strikingly lovely, possessing cascades of pale golden hair and bright, luminous blue eyes the shade of a cloudless summer sky.
As Seraphine stared at the frightened girl, a jarringly sober realization pierced through the haze of her mind:
Marielle?
Sister?
Since when do I have a sister?
What is going on here… and why was that the first thought that popped into my head the moment I saw this total stranger?
Seraphine furrowed her brow, desperately clawing through her own memories. It was as though two completely distinct lives had been forcibly welded together inside her skull.
One belonged to the flesh she now inhabited: Seraphine Karsfeld, a futa sired by Adelgarde Karsfeld, and the eldest heir to the Barony of Karsfeld under the ancient laws of Sire Primogeniture. She was turning twenty this year.
The other set of memories belonged to Dr. Evelyn Weiss - a modern military engineer who had met a sudden, fiery end under an artillery barrage.
Have I been granted a second life?
What the hell actually happened?
Before she could piece together another thought, the girl lunged forward, clutching Seraphine's hand tightly as fat tears spilled down her cheeks.
“I thought I'd lost you! Heavens be praised, you’re alive, elder sister!”
With trembling fingers, the girl hurriedly traced the sign of the cross over her chest, whispering a soft prayer in a language Seraphine instantly recognized as Latin.
Seraphine sank back into the plush pillows, struggling to corral the wild chaos in her head as a deluge of memories belonging to the former Karsfeld scion flooded her consciousness.
This world was an uncanny, alternate reflection of the late medieval era.
Her house’s lands comprised a modest barony nestled within the borders of the Alarian Empire - a colossal imperial realm known by that name here, though politically shattered into dozens of practically sovereign domains.
Yet while the continent's geography and the broad strokes of its history closely mirrored the Europe she once knew, the deviations were staggering.
Not only were the biology and the entire social hierarchy of this world centered purely upon women and the futa who commanded lineages and armies as Sires, but the grand geopolitical landscape had been radically altered as well.
The East–West Schism had never torn the Church apart. The eastern and western rites had never fractured into bitter rivalries; their relations had remained cordial and unbroken, leaving the Church - and the Pontifex of the Sacred Dominion - with vastly greater authority and absolute spiritual dominion than anything seen in Evelyn’s previous life.
Because the rulers of the Aurelian Empire to the east had never been branded heretics by the west, the holy lands reclaimed during the Crusades were placed under the direct stewardship of their imperial dynasty, who held the most legitimate historical claim. As a direct consequence, their eastern empire remained a premier superpower across the Mediterranean basin, utterly spared the devastation of the Fourth Crusade that had precipitated its historical fall in Evelyn’s original world.
Within the Alarian Empire itself, the balance of power had shifted just as dramatically. The Crown of the Kingdom of Aurelia to the south grew increasingly formidable by the day, while the Kingdom of Alaria was reduced to a second-rate holding within the empire - perpetually teetering on the precipice of bloody civil war as squabbling feudal lords and ladies clashed for leverage and the imperial throne.
And those were merely two prominent examples from an endless catalogue of historical divergences.
If Seraphine wished to fully comprehend the treacherous nuances of this world - its feudal hierarchies, peerage networks, and the delicate power politics of the empire - it would require hours upon hours of painstaking study.
The sheer onslaught of conflicting knowledge and superimposed identities made her skull throb with agonizing intensity. Raising a slender hand, she began rubbing her temples in slow, deliberate circles.
Marielle, mistaking the wincing gesture for a relapse of whatever affliction had laid her low, instantly cut her prayer short and bolted to her feet.
“I’ll fetch the leech-wife at once!” the girl blurted out, her fine noble gown fluttering past the doorway as she sprinted into the corridor.
Seraphine visibly shuddered at the word alone.
From everything she knew of medieval medicine, whatever primitive treatments the local sawbones cooked up stood a far greater chance of finishing off the patient than curing any real ailment.
Her throat, however, was so parched and cracked that she couldn't summon the breath to call out and drag her little sister back.
Left alone in the cavernous bedchamber, she could only sit with her scattered thoughts, an alien body, and a migraine that felt ready to split her head wide open.