Once I had calmed down a bit, feeling a tad embarrassed by my sudden outburst, I took a deep breath, and finally turned my attention to the reflection staring back at me from the still floating mirror.
By this point, the floating effect didn’t do so much as mildly surprise me anymore. I had just proven the existence of magick, after all. And I had known, at least intellectually, that this mirror was a magical item. A minor one, sure, but magical nonetheless.
As I had expected, the image that stared back at me was just what I had expected. Vuthe de Thal, in all her glory, stood before me, looking exactly the way I had imagined her to look like. The sensation was quite surreal, all things considered, but also strangely… exciting.
Vuthe was, by far, my most developed character, with more lore and history than all my other characters combined. Despite my giddiness, the thought had me frown slightly.
She was by far my most developed character, but also the one that had, historically, given me the most headaches. Ever since I had the absolutely moronic idea of posting the very first draft of the then-current version of the story online, which, unsurprisingly, just ended with me realising the sheer amount of mistakes I had made during the writing of said draft, I had been unable to actually sit down and fix the story in a way I was happy with.
I had spent years trying various things, from minor rewrites to full reboots, but no matter what I did, I just never felt like I was actually happy with it. There were so many things that bothered me about the setting, the plot, if you could even call it that, the characters, and the overall timeline. Yet, at the same time, many of the things that bothered me also felt like the sort of thing that I couldn’t remove without fundamentally destroying what the story was about.
Turning slowly, I took in the image from all angles I could manage, studying the form I was now occupying with a critical eye. While most of what made Vuthe had remained the same from the first iterations, there were minor details I had only changed later, most of which now stood out to me.
It was nothing major, but still obvious to me. The way she was slightly taller than she had been originally, the slightly more mature aura she carried herself with. Thinking about that, I took a moment to take on a more aloof and royal posture, trying to mimic the way I’d imagine Vuthe to act.
Despite lackluster acting skills, it fit the image before me perfectly, and I smiled softly.
Really, I couldn’t have asked for a better rendition of the character. In a way it felt almost too perfect, as if she had jumped out of my mind exactly the way I had envisioned her, with every last little detail present.
I nodded to myself. For all the headaches this character and the story surrounding her had given me, I couldn’t be happier to see her in the flesh. To be inhabiting her body, no less.
That thought brought me back to all my troubles I had over the years, trying to remedy the mess I had made in the original draft.
So far, the most prominent approach across all my later revisions had been to scale down the plot and the lore surrounding Vuthe. I had added quite a few ideas over the years, but I somehow never managed to get to a point where I was happy with how they all combined. Really, the only thing I had done that had gotten me anywhere close to feeling better about it, had been her removal from the throne, but that had its own litany of issues.
The story was called ‘The Dragon Queen of Thelvadore’ for a reason, so removing the aspect of Thelvadore from the equation, and basically removing Vuthe from her position as Queen, just didn’t sit right with me. Because her being a Queen was one of the fundamental core concepts on which I had built her entire character.
The end result was that I had about fifty different versions of the story written out in various stages of completeness, scattered across dozens of documents, all of them with different ideas mixed into them. And the only thing they all shared in common, was the displeasure I had when I thought about them. It was to the point where it almost felt like some author version of self-inflicted torture.
Now that I thought back on it, the biggest issue I really faced with the version of the story I had posted online was the whole ‘returning to Earth’ debacle. I had just finished reading another story with a similar premise at the time, and decided to throw myself right into that sort of setting. But, over time, Vuthe diverged far too much from the original premise for that to make any sense.
Ignoring, for a moment, the litany of plot holes I had introduced with the decision of her returning to Earth, I was pretty sure that most of my troubles could’ve been solved if I just ditched that aspect and focused on what I really wanted to do: Exploring a fantasy world. Yet, at the same time, I felt like I couldn’t. I had shared that story with people, and they liked the premise. They wanted more of it. And I felt obligated to deliver.
In a way, it was kind of ironic how now, when I somehow ended up waking up as Vuthe, I did so on Satien, and not on Earth.
I stared at the reflection I found in the floating mirror, and Vuthe’s unrelenting, glowing purple eyes stared back. I had always envisioned them to carry some weight, some presence. Vuthe was, in almost all variations, a three thousand year old dragon. One that, ironically enough, used to be human, way back before she first arrived in Satien, and one that had grown quite powerful over the years. Mostly because she felt like she had to.
I had it on good authority that many authors were rather ruthless when it came to inflicting horrors beyond human comprehension upon their characters, and Vuthe was definitely a prime example. She was in the running for most traumatised character I’ve ever written, and that was saying something, given that I was known in my circle of friends for making fucked up character backstories.
The fact that I, her creator, a former human, now inhabited her body through means unknown, was ironic on a level I only now really managed to appreciate. Doubly so, given that the core concept of Vuthe started with a self-insert isekai idea about my absolute love for dragons.
And now, here I was. It was almost enough to make me laugh.
Almost.
Because despite how awesome it was to live in the body of one of my favourite characters, I couldn’t stop thinking about what me being here actually meant. Vuthe’s life had not been an easy one, by design. The scars that I had found littered across this body had been the result of years of enslavement and mistreatment, which eventually led to her becoming part of a guild of Assassins. The Order of the Scythe. An institution that was selling her the idea of being able to do something about the slavers from the shadows. The guild itself was run under the crown of a kingdom that no longer existed, and they were the ones that trained her to become an Assassin.
And a damn good one too.
Only for them to betray her, which resulted in her kind of going mad. Because she realised that instead of working against the slavers, she had actively been helping them.
My frown deepened as I continued to meet the gaze of my own reflection.
Vuthe had been a trueblooded Shadow Dragon in almost all the revisions. A being that, by its very nature, was evil. Why exactly I first introduced the idea I couldn’t recall, especially given that I usually despised the vision of dragons usually found in various TTRPGs, where the alignment of a dragon was dependent on their nature as chromatic, metallic, or gem dragons. Perhaps it was simply a remnant of the far more edgy development of the character that eventually became Ga’zeith de Thal.
Whatever the case, it meant that Vuthe had to actively fight her nature to not become a genocidal murder machine. A fight she lost when she learned about the guild betrayal, which ended with her eradicating the guild and the kingdom they worked for in a night now remembered as the Night of a Thousand Screams.
Yes, edgy, I know. Sue me.
Suffice to say, while over the years she managed to build a positive reputation for herself, she certainly does have some bleak history and isn’t necessarily liked by everyone. Most, in fact, would rather keep away from her.
The thought made me turn my gaze towards the palace. As I had found earlier, it looked to be in a bit of disrepair. Not exactly destroyed, but pretty damaged. And now that I was thinking about the possible implications, I realised that it might have an inkling as to why.
Among my many attempts at ‘fixing’ the story, I had written a few versions with her losing the war she was involved in for the majority of her life, with her kingdom destroyed at the end. The idea was to have a reason to be rid of Thelvadore and all the issues it brought to the story, without fundamentally changing the very concept of the character.
Of course, those ideas never went anywhere because it made no sense for Vuthe to just throw in the towel and say ‘fuck it.’ She was duty-bound and took her responsibility towards her charges seriously. Their death would, at the very least, end with her having a bit of a mental break and laying waste to whatever or whoever had the audacity to piss off a Goddess of War.
But this place didn’t strike me as having survived either. There were no guards, no attendants, no sign of life at all. Vuthe had never much cared for etiquette, but she still kept a royal guard close by. Mind you, not because she needed it, she was by design far more powerful than most, but she was still a Queen and that came with certain responsibilities and requirements.
Not to mention that when I woke up, I woke up in the middle of the dais. Not on her throne. Or in the hallways somewhere. Or even her bed chamber, not that she used it much.
And anyway, what happened to Vuthe? Had I replaced her? Was I possessing her? If death worked the same as it did in my stories, then with her death, her body should’ve been destroyed.
She was a dragon, her body was purely magickal in nature. The moment her soul met Altis and passed on, her body should vanish, as the magick that made it up slowly dissipated. It was why dragon scales were so valuable. Not only were they insanely useful for crafting, you only had a limited amount of time to work with them, and needed a properly capable craftsman to include them into the crafted item in such a way that it impressed enough Intent for the scale to become part of it. Otherwise it would just disappear with the rest of the corpse.
I sighed yet again, dismissing those thoughts. There were far too many questions that needed answers, and I had no good way of getting those answers for the time being. As much as I might be able to infer about the world from what I, as its creator, knew, I couldn’t even be certain that that would hold true. Nor could I say for certain which version of this world I actually ended up in. Because it was definitely different from the story I had foolishly started posting so long ago.
“Well, I suppose the first step would be to take stock of this mess.”
The voice that spoke was rather pleasant to listen to, but it still made me feel weird to speak, since I knew this voice wasn’t my own. And while I couldn’t really recall what my own voice sounded like, I knew it wasn’t this.
The idle thought made me snort yet again, the realisation of just what I was worried and creeped out about making it feel so much more ridiculous.
I have a Discord!
Join my patreon to read up to five chapters ahead!