first walk

You wake up on cold stone floors, sunlight filtering in through a window searing your sensitive eyes from even behind your eyelids. The first thing you’re able to see, barely, when you open them, is your specially tempered glasses lying broken a few feet away. The light hurts, and now the only thing that let you live in the desert without blinding you is shattered.

You drag yourself out of the direct sunlight and close your eyes tightly to let the searing on your retinas wear off. It hurts to see right now. With your large ears, you hear the footsteps of people all over whatever building you’re in; talk of magic, enchantments, artifacts. Your first thought is that you’ve somehow ended up in the halls of a Curu’nen wizard cloister. Considering how your entire body hurts, it wouldn’t be surprising if you were being considered for augmentation to save your life. The man in the bubbles must have found you and taken you here. But if that were true, how did you end up on the floor?

You don’t even know what happened.

Trying to replay it in your head is an exercise in futility. It’s a blurry haze of colors and fear and anxiety. Of course, everything is anxiety to you. That’s your life and it’s always been. You were never good enough for your peers. Never good enough for your family. Definitely never good enough for the throne. They could have chosen anybody else, but they chose you for your horns, your wings, your tail. You’ve always known the traditions, that dragon-bloods are always chosen. But you never expected them to name you queen, to be presented with a throne, a court, and a pile of laws and legislation you know nothing about. And to top it all off, you had to do it alone, without your sister.

… Your sister.

If she could even be called that anymore. That bitch wormed her way up the ladder of a completely different country and abandoned you. You only ever saw her at meetings between the rulers, and when you did you could never get the chance to talk to her, because all anyone wanted to talk about was import. And when you finally worked up the nerve to go there and tell her exactly how you felt, the flux happened. Suddenly, ancient spirits woke up. Suddenly, there was an influx of magic and a wellspring of oases.

It didn’t hit Darastrith as hard as it hit other countries. Xiyaotl shifted from a land of fear and death, to a land of roaming warriors and demons that could even be called noble in a strange way. Curu’nen suffered explosive vegetation, uprooting infrastructure within days or even hours, but they learned to adapt, they always did. Invictus exploded into riots and its ruler, the asshat, went fucking nuts. Glasbryn’s populations were decimated as the warrens turned against each other, with only Japik and a few others remaining untouched in the burrows, though the Loup took the Flux in stride. Elpis was in turmoil over its leader’s dreams of artifacts and destructive magic, and he needed more than anyone to understand how the magic could be used to help his jungles.

Thanks to the previous king, expectations to figure out what to do to right this fell onto you. The previous king was focused on honing his military and keeping justice in the ten kingdoms. But you, you were never that. Your passion was in music and in training yourself, honing your body and mind into something that wasn’t small and shitty. The courts pressured you, and your royal guard pressured you, until you shattered. You ran for it when your guards weren’t looking, and fled to the seas on the coast of Curu’nen. You jumped into the ocean despite not knowing how to swim, and let the water take you.

Just like now, when you woke up you didn’t know where you were. But waking here is painful. When you woke up there, you were surrounded by the softest things in the bubble home. Under the seas, the sunlight wasn’t strong enough to hurt your eyes, and even then, it was surrounded by thick tangles of kelp. There, you met the wizard who owned the bubble, and he allowed you to stay for as long as you needed to sort out your mind and the magical capabilities you were beginning to manifest. He agreed to tutor you, and from him you learned magic.

Over the course of that time, a student-teacher relationship slowly transformed into something more. You’d even go as far as to say you love the man. When you were ready to stand up and face the world again, he was behind you. You promised him you’d come back. You showed the royal guard that you were alive after weeks, and now you were ready to decide what to do. Out of spite, you let Invictus burn. There was no justice to be had in that city, that man would have to adapt on his own. If he expected your dragons to fall upon his people to enforce his iron fist, they might fall upon him instead. No, to your concerns, Glasbryn and Japik, and Elpis and Zerah, needed the outreach much more. You sent agents to the burrows to initiate talks, while you yourself were bound for Kaldraixen. You would go yourself to Elpis later. He was your friend.

Kaldraixen was the land your sister ruled now. You had no idea why. You still don’t. But you voyaged to its cityscapes and found murk where there had been none before. It felt strange here. Blacker. Darker. Since you were new here, and didn’t know the lay of the land, two young batfolk offered to take you to her place of ruling to see her. Perhaps naively, you agreed to go with them, and they deceived you. They led you deep into the heart of the swampy alleyways of the capital city, almost at the last minute before you would have arrived. And there, they pulled daggers on you. There, they tried to kill you.

They didn’t anticipate that you would disappear from beneath their blade and reappear behind them. You turned them swiftly into pretzels, and you stormed the capitol building. You were furious that she would allow this to happen. To anyone at all, but especially to you. She was allowing them to lead away threats, and she didn’t expect you to ever come here. It took every fiber of your being to hold back the urge to break her neck. You knew you could, and that scared you. Instead, you went back to the bubble in Curu’nen and cried. You cried yourself to sleep, and you cried the entire next day, too.

The last thing you remember was waking up in a haze. That had depressed you, and the rest of that day was a blur. Now you’re here, lost and confused. You’re still angry, you’re still upset. You still want to cry, but you know you can’t. A queen never cries in public. Your entire body hurts, but your eyes still hurt the worst. All you can do is sit here, curled into a ball, shaking and trying not to sob like the pathetic child you know you are.

You’re afraid. Again. You’re always afraid. Literally everyone else is always better than you at everything forever. You are a worthless waste of space. But not as much of a waste of space as your murder-condoning bitch sister… what are you saying? No, don’t think like that. She’s better than you too.

Finally, it stops hurting enough to open your eyes.

This is definitely not Curu’nen’s hospitals or wizard cloisters. This is much less modern-looking. The architecture is strange, almost Invictus-like, but you don’t feel the same choking atmosphere or the prying eyes of soulless angels. It’s different. Too different. The people look different, but not by much. The clothes are different. People are staring like they’ve never seen anything like you before.

“What is that?” You hear one whisper.

“I’ve never seen anything like it on all of Dominaria.” Another replies.

“She wasn’t there a few minutes ago.” A third chimes in.

“How do you know that’s a she?” The second again rebuts.

“Look at the way she’s dressed, that looks like a she to me.”

“By Urza’s beard,” A fourth one inputs, “I think this might be a planeswalker.”

Despite all your questions, you can only manage barely audible stutters. All of this is going way too fast to comprehend. What’s a Dominaria? What’s a planeswalker? Who’s Urza? Why can’t these idiots tell a woman when they see one? Have you somehow managed to teleport yourself across the Vast Sea?

“Quick, go get one of the archmages.” One requests, sending another off. You’re not sure you want to meet one of these archmages if they’ve never seen foxfolk, or a half-dragon before. You’re not interested in getting dissected like you’ve just crash-landed into Livenslurji. Oh dragon dongs, what if that’s where you are? … No, it can’t be. That window is way too bright to be anywhere in that freak show.

One of them bends over and hands you your shattered glasses as you try to get to your feet. Even broken, it’s better than nothing. You rush to the window you woke up under, and are shocked by what you see. This doesn’t look like anywhere on Chrontomus that you know of.

You’re definitely not in Darastrith anymore, that’s for damn sure.