The world returned in pieces.
Like a puzzle that was slowly being put together.
At first, Wren couldn't tell what any of those pieces were. There was pressure against her back. Air moving across skin, a slow thumping heartbeat somewhere inside her chest, and the sensation of breathing and air filling her lungs. The distant awareness of muscles she hadn't possessed a few moments ago. Each realization arrived separately, as though her mind was being forced to rebuild itself one thought at a time. She knew something important had happened. She just couldn't quite remember what.
Ughhh...wha..
Then the memories returned.
The Void.
Occatus.
Junkyard.
The Earth System.
The Primordial Vampire.
The second chance.
That last one hit harder than everything else combined.
A body.
She had a body.
The realization should have filled her with immediate excitement. Years of illness, weakness, exhaustion, and limitations should have made that moment triumphant.
Unfortunately, her new senses chose that exact moment to wake up.
The resulting experience was less "triumphant return to life" and more "being violently informed that the forest exists."
Thousands of sounds slammed into her awareness simultaneously. Leaves shifted in distant branches. Tiny insects crawled beneath bark. Something burrowed underground. Small creatures moved through undergrowth. Water flowed somewhere beyond the trees. Countless living things breathed, moved, hunted, and existed around her. For a few moments, Wren genuinely couldn't determine whether she was hearing individual sounds or the collective insanity of an entire ecosystem.
Then came the smells.
That somehow made everything worse.
Damp earth.
Ancient wood.
Flowers.
Moss.
Flowing water.
Animals.
Things she couldn't identify. Things she instinctively knew she absolutely could identify if she focused. The realization was deeply unsettling, because those instincts weren't hers.
Or perhaps they were.
That was probably the more alarming possibility.
Wren slowly opened her eyes; immediately regretting it.
Not because of brightness.
There wasn't much brightness.
If anything, the forest should have been nearly pitch black.
The problem was that she could see it anyway.
Every leaf. Every crack in bark. Every blade of grass. The world possessed an absurd amount of detail and her brain insisted on noticing all of it at once. She shut her eyes and considered whether becoming a vampire came with an option to lower the graphics settings.
Several moments later she tried again.
This time she managed to keep them open.
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The forest stretched around her beneath a canopy of ancient trees. Silver moss clung to bark thick enough to swallow entire buildings. Strange flowers glowed softly among tangled roots while tiny lights drifted lazily through the darkness like wandering stars. The entire place looked magical in the most literal sense possible.
Then another realization arrived.
It was night.
Actually night.
The thought only occurred because she happened to glance upward. Until then, the darkness hadn't registered as darkness. Her eyes simply... ignored it. The canopy opened briefly, revealing a sky unlike anything she had ever seen. One moon hung large and silver above the forest, familiar enough to remind her of Earth. Another floated nearby, smaller and bathed in a faint blue glow. Beyond them, the heavens stretched endlessly overhead, darker in some places and lighter in others as though someone had painted the sky with watercolors that had never fully dried.
Not Earth.
Not even close.
The realization struck her harder now than it had while standing beside Occatus.
Because it was real.
Not theoretical.
Not something that would happen later.
Present tense.
She had actually done it.
Somehow, impossibly, she had survived.
Then she looked down.
And noticed the body.
A great many things immediately made sense.
An equally great number of things became significantly more confusing.
The hand resting in front of her certainly belonged to her. It moved when she told it to move. The evidence was fairly convincing. The problem was that it didn't resemble her own hand at all. Pale smooth skin reflected moonlight with an almost unnatural softness. Long slim fingers ended in long elegant nails. There wasn't a single feature she recognized.
Wren raised both hands and inspected them carefully.
Nope.
Definitely not her.
The realization wasn't exactly surprising. She knew reincarnation involved obtaining a new body. She had simply never stopped to consider what that actually meant. Her old body had been ordinary. It had been human, but it had been hers for her entire life.
This one looked as though reality had spent entirely too much time perfecting it.
Way...way too much time.
Then she noticed the hair.
An ocean of impossibly black strands spilled around her shoulders and pooled across the forest floor where she lay. It stretched to just above her lower half in stark straight strains, that swallowed the moonlight rather than reflecting it. The color reminded her of the Void itself. Not darkness.
The Void.
The distinction was important.
Wren grabbed a handful.
Silky.
Soft.
Real.
Attached to her.
"...Oh."
Then her eyes drifted lower.
The next realization happened immediately.
"...OH."
She was naked.
Completely.
Utterly.
Unquestionably.
Naked.
For several moments she remained frozen as her brain attempted to process this development. On one hand, she had died, crossed universes, been reincarnated as an ancient supernatural species, and acquired enough sensory input to qualify as an environmental monitoring station.
On the other hand...
Naked.
The second issue felt much more immediate.
Wren folded her arms instinctively and glanced around.
"So, I can cross universes to reincarnate into a new body...but giving a person clothes are where they draw the line...?"
The question left her mouth before she realized the absurdity.
Then she looked around again.
Trees.
More trees.
An unreasonable number of trees.
The forest appeared entirely dedicated to remaining a forest.
No villages.
No roads.
No civilization. Get faster updates on g.com.
Nothing.
For a brief moment, that should have made her feel safer.
Instead, another realization surfaced.
She was alone.
Completely alone.
Occatus was gone.
The Earth System was gone.
Earth itself was gone.
Nobody remained to explain what happened next.
The excitement she'd been riding ever since seeing the reincarnation succeed suddenly collided with a much simpler truth.
She was standing naked in an alien forest beneath two moons while inhabiting the body of a Primordial Vampire.
That wasn't a future problem.
That was a current problem.
A branch snapped somewhere in the distance.
Wren turned instantly.
Far too instantly.
One moment she was looking ahead. The next she was staring directly toward the source. Something moved between the trees hundreds of feet away. Large. Silent. Watching.
For several moments neither moved.
Then the creature left.
Not fled.
Not attacked.
Simply left.
Wren continued staring after it long after it disappeared.
Then she exhaled.
The creature was gone.
The embarrassment wasn't.
Standing motionless in the middle of nowhere suddenly seemed less appealing than before. She began walking without any particular destination, stepping between ancient roots and glowing flowers while her thoughts struggled to catch up with reality.
This was real.
The thought kept returning.
Actually real.
No more managers.
No more deadlines.
No more endless overtime.
No more pretending a job she hated somehow counted as living.
That entire life was over.
Finished.
Gone.
She should have felt terrified.
Instead, she found herself staring in wonder at crystal growths protruding from ancient trees, at streams glowing with faint silver light, at strange flowers larger than her head blooming beneath moonlit roots. The forest looked like something torn directly from the pages of a fantasy novel.
And somehow, she wasn't reading it.
She was inside it.
Wren looked down at her pale hand, watched moonlight slide across unfamiliar skin, and felt a strange smile slowly spread across her face.
She had died.
She had lost her humanity.
She had become a Primordial Vampire.
The sentence remained completely ridiculous.
It was also true.
And for the first time in her life, she genuinely had no idea what would happen next. That uncertainty should have frightened her.
Instead, it felt like freedom.