Waking up was, in my opinion, generally a rather pleasant experience. If one were to exclude moments of stress, such as after a nightmare, or the panic of potentially oversleeping, waking up in the morning, and slowly returning from the land of dreams, was one of the better parts of the day. Really, it was only topped by the moment in the evening, when you could say your goodbyes to the world in preparation for a good night's sleep.
So it came to a bit of a surprise when I suddenly snapped to consciousness without the usual and pleasant process of gradually waking up. One moment I was asleep, the next I was wide awake, no in between. The immediacy of the situation, and the complete disconnect from the sight I was expecting and the sight I found myself looking at had me blank for at least a few seconds, eyes blinking, my brain trying to catch up with the reality of the situation.
Then I blinked some more when my brain finally managed to wrangle some meaning from the input it received, moving to rub my eyes, just in case something was wrong with them. Yet, the sight didn’t change. Another moment of confusion passed as I stared up in disbelief.
The sight of an unfamiliar vaulted ceiling–easily more than ten times the height I would expect to find in any reasonable apartment–stared back at me, unchanged. The style reminded me of images I had seen of the Kölner Dom, although far more fantastical than I could remember, and in a far worse state.
For a long moment I wasn’t sure what to make of it, and I tried to strain my memory to remember just what the hell I could’ve missed to end up here. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter how desperate I tried to recall the previous evening–or anything coming before, really–all that my mind came up with was a clueless shrug and the sense of ‘I dunno, but we’re certainly not home anymore.’
Feeling a slight tad lost, and not quite sure what else to do, I finally did my best to sit up. I was pretty obviously laying on the floor, and one quite uncomfortable. Cold stone slabs, if I had to guess, with little in the ways of carpet or similar.
My guess was proven semi-correct when I finally leveraged myself upright, gaze wandering across my surroundings in a confused search for answers. The floor was, indeed, made up of some version of stone, although I was not laying on it. Instead I found myself laying on a small dais placed at one end of what I could only assume to be a cathedral of some variety.
The dais was made of some black stone without any carpet, as I had surmised, although there was carpet through a good bit of the rest of the building, I idly noted. Mainly leading from the large main entrance to the foot of the dais I was currently occupying. The sight reminded me of the depictions of old throne rooms and mediaeval castle designs.
The building itself was quite large and in quite a bit of disrepair, although not yet damaged enough to warrant the term ‘destroyed’ being used to describe it.
Along the walls on either side were a number of weapon and armor racks, the seats you’d imagine to find in a place of worship entirely absent and replaced with an area I somehow knew was meant for kneeling. Generally speaking, I had no clue where I was, but despite having never seen this place before, the more I looked around, the more this place felt strangely… familiar. Perhaps not in the concrete, but certainly in the abstract.
A twitch of motion at the edge of my vision caught my attention, and I turned my gaze downward. I found my own body, of course, laying on the ground, clad in some strange looking obsidian black combat dress, that simultaneously managed to look elaborate yet somehow simple at the same time, my tail twitching slightly laying next to my legs.
For what felt like the hundredth time in the past minute or so, I was completely lost yet again, the sight having me come up short. It took me a couple of moments to even parse what my senses were trying to convey to me. Then I blinked some more, when my brain finally caught up with what my eyes were perceiving, and then another time, when I tried to make sense of it on a more conscious level.
A part of me idly wandered if that was going to become a new habit of mine, just owlishly blinking at everything I didn’t grasp. Or has that always been something I’ve been doing?
For a long moment my thoughts spiralled, before I finally found my mental footing again, chastising myself inwardly at getting distracted like that. There were more important things to focus on. I couldn’t keep spacing out like this.
That could be fatal.
The thought came with such certainty that I just knew it to be correct, even if I couldn’t say how or why I knew that to be the case, since danger was typically not something I’d typically expect to encounter.
Taking a deep, somewhat shaky breath, I did my best to focus.
The body I was currently occupying was not the same body I could remember having, although if pressed, I couldn’t for the life of me give a description of what my body should have looked like, if not like this. I raised my arms, clenching and unclenching my fists with uncertainty, finding that they, too, were different from what I would have thought them to look like, clad in metallic vambraces that flowed into the rest of the combat dress design quite fittingly.
A design that I just knew was familiar somehow.
I sat there for what felt like an eternity, trying to come to grips with the situation without losing my mind in the sheer absurdity of it. The more I looked around, the weirder I felt, my fractured recollection providing me more and more pieces about my current surroundings, each simultaneously more confusing and enlightening at the same time.
It was the small details that really stood out to me. The way the weapons were positioned along the weapon stands, the way the torchlight flickered on the walls and the ceiling, the way the shadows played along the surface of the various pieces of armor placed between the racks. They gave the entire scene a level of depth and realism that I wouldn’t have noticed in any other circumstance.
Or perhaps immersion was the right word. Whatever the case, once I had gotten over my initial shock, the sight sent my mind racing. And it quickly arrived at one possible conclusion that could explain the weirdness before me.
I had often imagined myself waking up in a world not my own, finding a body less troubled by health issues, and freed from the issues that suffused my life. Yet, for all that I immediately jumped to that train of thought, I just couldn’t bring myself to actually believe it. The thought was insane by all accounts. Such things were just some idle fun, a game of imagination, a life reserved for the protagonists of books and novels, to be read about and expand in my own mind.
Despite not knowing what I had looked like previously, or how I had ended up here in the first place, though, I just knew, somehow, exactly that that had to have been what had transpired. Although, again, I wouldn’t be able to say why with a gun pressed to my head and a finger on the trigger.
My contemplations had a theory starting to form in the back of my mind, one that I couldn’t yet decide if I liked or not. Too many things stood out to me in strange ways, even though I reminded myself that the human mind had the tendency to search for patterns where there were none.
Strangely… I felt far less panic and existential dread than I would have imagined. Especially after it had taken me so long to even parse the situation I was in. It was almost worrying how little my subconscious was actually complaining at this development, and how easy it was for me to accept it.
Shaking my head, and lowering my arms once again, I focused on more immediate concerns. Through all the strangeness of this entire mess, I had to keep a level head. And a part of me, one I had ignored all the way up until now, was increasingly getting louder about my need to check myself over for injuries.
Truth be told, even with the urgency of that tiny voice in my mind, and the rationale that it would be a good idea, I somehow doubted I’d find any. As utterly outlandish as the thought was, if my theory about what was going on was correct, I wouldn’t want to meet the thing that managed to actually inflict damage onto this body. But better safe than sorry. After all, so far I had no proof that my idle musings had any basis in reality, despite my observations so far, and I’d rather not miss something that crucial if I could avoid it.
What was the point of having a proper mental breakdown if you didn’t survive long enough to see it through. The least I could do was to verify I wouldn’t suddenly bleed out.
With a bit of uncertainty, I slowly got up from the ground with uncanny grace, and inspected myself for any obvious wounds. I couldn’t feel any pain or discomfort, save the slightly cold chill that had been noticeable from laying on cold stone slabs, so that was a promising start. And even after a more proper once over, I couldn’t find any hints of wounds.
Which wasn’t to say I found nothing of note.
First and foremost, the whole tail thing. It reminded me a bit of a lizard's tail, although the mere thought of that was somehow enough to piss me off. This was definitively not a lizard's tail. Reptilian, then, covered in obsidian scales and with a rather vicious looking blade at the end. The look of the blade reminded me a bit of a certain flagship monster from my favourite series about hunting big, bad monsters.
That in and of itself was enough to make me frown a little, mentally adding it to the collection of things that served to prove my theory, even if only in some minor way.
Despite the lack of detail when it came to my recollection, I was pretty certain that I hadn’t been… whatever kind of demi-human looking species this current body belonged to before. I had theories of what species exactly it belonged to, but I made a conscious effort not to jump to conclusions quite yet. It didn’t help that I had little to no issues accepting the existence of the tail and what it implied.
I wondered if that might have been due to my inklings about who and what this body originally belonged to, or if that was due to external influences. Granted, I had never been particularly enamoured with my own humanity, my opinion on the species was quite bleak all things considered. But I still found it strange.
Another thing to add to the list of things that stood out to me.
What I found far more concerning than the tail–and my complete lack of surprise, or rather mental disconnect that came with it–was hidden underneath my clothing. I had only given it a glimpse, in case there were wounds I wouldn’t be able to see with the fabric and armor in the way, but that alone had been enough.
This body was littered in scars. To the point that even a brief glance down my cleavage unveiled a sight that many would find gruesome. None of them were fresh, but all of them looked… deeply unpleasant.
It was the first thing that left me genuinely concerned for a moment, even if, by this point, the sight itself didn’t surprise me much, if at all. I had almost expected it, really, given all the other details in place so far. But, even the lack of surprise didn’t make it any less gruesome and worrying to look at. It was a primal sort of concern, stemming from the realisation that a scar needed a wound to form, which meant that I had been injured before, yet I couldn’t recall those injuries.
Another minor item of interest was also my complete lack of trouble even seeing them. The clothing I wore was quite dark, deep blacks mixing with more obsidian colours and dark greys, and the room itself, while illuminated by torches running along each wall, was rather dim. Yet I could see the scars as well as if I had been standing naked in open daylight.
By this point it felt harder and harder to dismiss the theory building in my mind. As utterly insane as the thought of it was, the more I explored, the more I found supporting evidence, and the less likely it felt that all of it was just pure coincidence.
After I had confirmed that I hadn’t suffered any wounds around my body, I decided to quickly check over my head. It was, after all, one of the most important parts of the body, and with no mirror in proximity, the best I could do was searching for any potential wounds by touch.
My face seemed unharmed, and unmarred by scars from what I could tell, which I found rather curious. The back of my head also didn’t reveal any obvious wounds, no pain when I slid my fingers past and through my hair, nor any uneven surfaces that would indicate scabs or scars.
My hair, as I found, was now a deep black. By which I mean, deeply jetblack. Black enough that it almost seemed like it was absorbing the little bit of light that was around. I frowned at the revelation, eyeing the strand I had pulled into view.
Again, that wasn’t entirely unsurprising, although the growing certainty left me feeling a bit… lost.
Then I found what I could only guess to be my horns. At this point I wasn’t even surprised at their presence, the mental image forming about my appearance more and more in line with the suspicions that I had.
I had four horns, and even without being able to see them, and only explore through touch, I was almost certain that two were growing upwards, starting from my forehead and growing first outward to either side, before curving back inward and back over my head. The other two were smaller, originating from the same spot as the other two, but growing downward and curving over my eyebrows.
In between I found a tiara, one that I was almost certain to be silver before I even pulled it down to check. I was right.
I sighed, closing my eyes for a long moment–eyes I was now almost one hundred percent certain would be a glowing purple–and tried to think about just what in the world could’ve happened for me to end up in this particular body.
Of course, rationally speaking I couldn’t be completely certain until and unless I found an actual mirror for a more thorough check over. While unlikely, this could just be a row of coincidences stacked on top of each other for all I knew.
That said, even the most pessimistic part of me found that to be a rather optimistic hope. And that didn’t even mention the place I found myself in.
I turned, looking behind me, and, as I had by now expected, found an obsidian throne. Its surface was carved in careful detail, the work of a master craftsman, depicting various different draconic figures. It was quite large and grand, drawing the immediate attention of anyone present, and if I had to guess, would be insanely uncomfortable to be seated on.
Something I could check in theory, but definitely wouldn’t want to. If only because of the implied acceptance of the role that me sitting down on it would carry. As silly as it sounded, that was quite the important detail.
Because I knew this place. Or rather, I knew of this place in the abstract, as did I the identity of the person the body I now inhabited originally belonged to.
After all, I created it all. I wrote that story. I was the creator of this world, its inhabitants, and the person whose body I was now stuck in.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
My voice was almost exactly as I had envisioned it. Feminine, rather high pitched, soft, and carrying a weight and authority that was almost enough to physically bend my surroundings to my will.
Through events I could not explain, I had just woken up in the body of one of my oldest characters, the protagonist of a story I had spent years trying to write, yet somehow failed at every turn.
Trained assassin, genocidal murderer, Dragon Queen of Thelvadore, Shade Dragon Vuthe de Thal.
And this cathedral I was standing in? I would bet all my life savings on it being her Palace. It, or at least the throne room I was now standing in, fit the descriptions I had given of it to a tee.
I sighed, rubbing my face. Just what in the world was going on?
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