Day 1.1: Humans make unexpected choices

Cold. Unbearable cold.

Stinging numbness struck my every nerve, each limb throbbing as if torched by invisible flames. Icy water, dark, thick, and viscous, swirled around me in a relentless dance, seeking to claim me for its own.

I swam upwards, fighting the current.

For a dream, this was an exceptionally unpleasant sort.

I slammed against the ceiling of ice above me with my entire body, silently banging against it with my fists. It didn’t give, didn’t crack.

Squinting through the gloom with stinging eyes that felt like they’d been pickled, I noted the direction of the current and swam perpendicular to it, aiming for the palest patch of ice above me, betting my survival on a hunch.

My knee suddenly collided with the submerged rocks. I’d made a miscalculation. This was the shore and the ice was likely thicker here, even harder to break through! I pressed on with the determination of my last seconds of life, reaching a lighter section of the ice as the space between the ground below and the ice overhead gradually diminished.

The pain became more intense, my body begging for oxygen. No dream could be this realistic, this agonizing.

It was strange, I should have started to lose feeling by now in water this cold.

Summoning every ounce of remaining strength, I pushed my body against the ground, leveraging my entire frame against the slippery rocks and roots beneath me. Colourful spots danced in my eyes from the strain. I gritted my teeth, refusing this to be my end, kicking at the ice with my feet.

Which were… wrong somehow. But I didn’t stop to check.

I wanted life like I wanted my morning coffee. NOW! And, preferably, warm.

The ice suddenly gave way with a resounding crack. I kicked against it again and again, until it shattered and then pulled myself out of the icy river, inhaling precious air and feeling completely drained.

It was the dead of winter or perhaps late autumn. Large snowflakes fluttered from a distant, gray sky wrapped with a blanket of thick clouds. My entire body trembled from shock, pain, and cold.

When I dredged water from my lungs on the ice-covered ground, a new realization took hold–this was not my body.

My new limbs were thin and covered in a thick layer of grey-green skin? I quickly pulled off the wet clothes that clung to my body. The crude attire, tattered and soaked, looked like it came from a long-forgotten age, with a distinctly Scandinavian or perhaps Slavic look. The knowledge that I had somehow lost my muscles and height was a bitter pill to swallow.

What cruel, improbable event had conspired to cast me into the frigid embrace of this icy river, to awaken in the form of a bruised, skinny, waterlogged teenage… boy?

Of a sort. I had the right anatomy. Just with an added helping of digitigrade legs tipped with short, thick claws.

Feeling a strange weight on my face I felt out the shape of my jaw and was horrified. It seemed I had a pig-like snout with four curving tusks or horns. Two tusks grew from the end of my jaws like those of a normal boar, but I had two more half-grown things curling up from the top of my snout and curving backward over the front of the face and towards my forehead like the tusks of the Indonesian deer-pig, the babirusa.

A leather rope featuring a half broken blue agate amulet with a drawing of what looked like a… boar-woman?–An orc?–with feathers sticking from her hair dangled from my chest.

I pulled my shirt off and the rope holding the gem frayed apart. The agate piece twinkled down right into the hole in the ice, vanishing in the river before my trembling fingers could catch it.

Silently I cursed whatever arcane force or god that existed in this world. I mean, come on, if you are going to give me an animalistic body. Give me FUR. Granted it probably would have been wet in this situation and therefore not a lot of help.

I also saw that a large, red, crude drawing of intersecting triangles glittered on my chest, slowly flaking off me as I moved. The questionable hexagram and the now lost agate amulet were the least of my worries.

Shivering violently, I needed to stave off the relentless advance of hypothermia, thoughts racing with my chattering teeth.

I wrung the icy water from my clothes as quickly as possible.

Realistically I was still probably going to die out here. But I didn’t lie down and wait to freeze. Call me an optimist.

In a few moments, I quickly checked myself over for injuries and dressed myself once again in the damp fabric and leather boots, aware of the scant protection they offered against the biting chill that hung in the air. I needed to find warmth and shelter as soon as possible.

Barren trees flanking the water’s edge stood like lonely sentinels, gnarled branches reaching skyward. In the distance, smoke rose from the remnants of what looked like a ruined village.

Smoke meant fire and fire meant warmth. Ha! Life! I forced my aching body to rush towards the village even as it begged me to lie down and to embrace the lulling cold.

With faltering steps, my body trembling from the cold and rising panic, I made my way to the smoldering ruins. When I came nearer, the acrid stench of smoke filled my nostrils.

I definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore. If the tusks in my own damn mouth hadn’t already given that away.

I refocused myself and began walking atop the lightly-snow-sprinkled ground, looking through windows. Inside I was greeted by grim piles of ashes.

Shivering, I headed towards the nearest fire hoping to warm up. Getting closer to the flames, I noticed a very peculiar oddity. The flames had a surreally unnatural hue to them, the color twisting and turning from white to emerald to brilliant blue.

Feeling slightly less like I was about to freeze to death, thanks to the warmth emanating from the flames I attempted to recall more of myself, to pull at the thread of my mind that felt like someone scooped parts of it out like ice cream.

Come on brain, who am I?

I saw… a blurry lab. Flasks and Bunsen burners.

*Biochemistry.*Yes. Something to work with!

I rotated the word in my head. It tasted foreign yet incredibly familiar, like it belonged to me. Not the grey-green teenage-me wrapped in wet furs. ‘The Biochemist’ me who awakened in this frail, underfed, orcish body.

The memory of Biochemistry burned brighter, sharper as I focused all of my will on it. It felt defined, solid compared to the fog of general confusion engulfing me since my escape from the frozen river.

I clung to it and pushed it to the forefront of my mind, trying to awaken more memories of my former self.

Staring at the weird-colored flames, I mentally catalogued various chemicals capable of altering fire.

Copper compounds produced blues and greens. Strontium and lithium compounds made reds and pinks. Basic principles from undergraduate chemistry.

It was then that I noted another odd phenomenon. The fire seemed to warp and bend, unnaturally rippling ever so slightly in my direction with radial waves.

What the hell?

My mind kicked into higher gear as I stepped left and then right. The waves of fire followed me, trying to reach out to my body.

The behavior of the flames violated fundamental principles of thermodynamics. Heat convection should create upward motion in flames, not lateral attraction toward a nearby observer. The pattern reminded me of electromagnetic fields.

Fire consisted of ionized plasma, not ferromagnetic material, why was it behaving this way?

It would make sense were I and the flame strongly electrically charged, but at that point sparks of electricity would be jumping off me constantly. That kind of charge didn’t occur in nature except during lightning strikes, and as far as I knew fire was always electrically neutral.

Retreating a step, I re-evaluated the burning village with newfound wariness. Some of the flames around were of a mundane color and acted normally, belching out black smoke.

Meanwhile, blue-green flames danced and twisted in radial patterns around the trees scattered near the village, as if in some perverse near-embrace. They produced almost no smoke.

Bewildered, I snipped a fresh, bendy branch from a nearby bush and threw it into the heart of the blue-green fire.

The flames eagerly engulfed the branch, their tendrils weaving spirals around it like rippling waves before reducing it to ash in mere moments with a blinding flash. The combustion occurred far too rapidly. Green, fresh wood should have resisted burning, taking minutes rather than seconds to ignite properly.

I raked my memories for a rational explanation.

Boosting the oxygen supply to a fire could intensify the flames and turn them blue. This is due to complete combustion energizing the gas molecules. However, excess oxygen didn’t account for any green hues or strange movements. Only in lower gravity, the flames become more spherical and spread evenly in all directions.

Neither memory explained why the fire was purposefully attacking organic life in radial waves.

The defining characteristic of humanity is our curiosity, the desire to understand everything. I might have tusks and claws now, but I still considered myself quintessentially human and a very curious person.

I ripped a small cloth patch from a ragged, colorful banner hanging on a half-broken wall and threw it into the blue fire. It didn’t even bother to ignite.

Maybe I should have been more concerned with my survival. I was still slowly freezing to death in my wet clothes, much slower now that the fire was certainly helping, but perhaps I should have prioritized shelter. Instead I was doing what humans did best: poke fire and watch it burn.

An alien observer might have regarded me as completely insane but this was humanity at its best: unbridled curiosity had led to our most profound achievements. Our pyromania had led directly to the industrial revolution through coal and steam power long before electricity had come about!

I blinked at the piece of banner in the flames, waiting for the cloth to burn, yet nothing happened. I felt my mind sliding sideways into complete noncomprehension. Dry cloth with fibers exposed to flames exceeding 800°C should have combusted instantly. Maybe this was some kind of non-flammable fabric.

I quickly gathered a handful of random items from the ground near me: a desiccated scrap of leather, splinters of wood from obliterated furniture, fragments of rope, a bunch of straw spilled from the house roof and even tattered fragments of parchment paper.

One by one I obsessively threw them into the fire.

The green-blue flames did not ignite them at all. Carbon-rich compounds should have fed any normal flames, yet the objects sat unmolested.

There were only two answers here: either I was hallucinating or the world I found myself isekai’d into… operated beyond the rules of my former reality. The second option was far preferable.

I felt a thrill surging through my veins.

Purpose crystallized in me like a lattice structure. Whatever forces were at work, whatever messed with the known laws of physics… I would unravel them all with the scientific method, dissect, understand them all and bend them to my will! My survival depended on it!

Using a rusted knife, I snipped off a lock of hair from my head and threw it into the strange flames. The hair flashed and ignited. I frowned.

Why did keratin burn while the straw and wooden beams did not? All three were products of organic materials!

Whatever eldritch bullshit controlled these flames specifically wanted to burn specific things while preserving everything else. This had a hint of intelligent design to it beyond simple combustion, perhaps something like a… Neutron bomb.

“Khrm, khrm,” the guttural sound of a throat being cleared resonated from behind, interrupting my thoughts of ultimate bombs.

I spun around, dropping the rusty knife in a fumble of frostbitten, barely responsive hands.

Right in front of me stood an incredibly old woman, draped in furs and leaning heavily on a gnarled wooden staff. She looked like a… witch, or maybe a Nordic shaman, the face obscured by an elk’s antlered skull. The more I examined, however, the less human she seemed.

Large, densely furred, oval ears like those of a hare emerged from beneath her skull-mask. She lifted the mask and I nearly jumped back in shock.

Feline.

There was a distinctive… feline shape to her cheekbones, featuring fangs and whiskers that reminded me of the mountain cats of Earth. Maybe a snow leopard or a Pallas’s cat. Yet, whatever skin I could see was grotesquely stretched and wet, like a mummy in the final stages of decomposition. A pair of brilliant, sunken blue eyes shined with an unsettling intensity from the far-too-damn-old-to-be-alive face.

Her dress was woven from hemp ropes and fragments of animal bones with a tint of green to them as if they were carved from malachite.

“Ioan Starfall,” the woman boomed. “Your family’s sacrifice has worked!”

“Huh?” I blinked at her.

Was my name… Ioan?Ah… it must have belonged to the boy whose body I now inhabited.

“What sacrifice?” I asked. My newfound voice was quite high-pitched. To my surprise, the words leaving my lips were not in English, but in a foreign unfamiliar language that sounded like a mix of Finnish, Norwegian and Slavic. The old woman also wasn’t talking in English, yet I somehow understood her.

“Four hundred and seventeen lives burned to ashes,” the woman said as she bounded forward on digitigrade legs causing me to leap back. “So one may live and become strong.” With a too long, gnarled finger, featuring a grimy, long fingernail, she gestured towards the frozen river.

Beneath the mask-face, she looked old, incredibly old, eyes sunken deep into her skull. She reminded me, in uncanny ways, of the Skinwalkers of Navajo myth.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

“I am Yaga Grandhilda,” she continued, “the witch of the Shalish wood, my domain about nine thousand steps from here. It was I who foresaw the looming death of everyone in this village in the shawl of my precognition and beseeched all the adults to bring me seven drops of their blood. Using it, I created a potion with which the parents painted protective hexagrams upon the children. Alas, you are the sole survivor of the massacre and… have gained great power by straddling the precipice between life and death!”

I simply stared at her.

“Ah. I see that you forgot me.”

“Why did I forget you?”

“You’ve made a pact with Glinka. The river spirit took some of your memories as you dove headfirst into it, young Ioan,” the witch explained. “I sense that in exchange you have been cleansed by the waters of river Glinka, your soul filled with great potential and knowledge from far beyond the thread of your former life!”

The river took more than some memory. It took Ioan’s entire life, utterly obliterating what he was. It must have given partial memories of a biochemist to this misfortunate teenager in exchange.

“Now,” the witch intoned, “Per my agreement forged in magic with the village of Svalbard, I shall bestow upon you the mark and title of a hero!”

“A hero?” I asked.

“Yes. This is how heroes are made!”

“Heroes are… made?” I blinked at her.

“All heroes are made by witches like myself!” she declared. “The monster responsible for the desolation of your village is the Great Dragon Zarnitza. As a marked hero and a DyrkJarl of great renown, you shall wield powers beyond mere mortals, enabling you to exact retribution upon the vile dragon! If you get strong enough and rise in might by defeating smaller beasts, you might someday avenge your kin and bring down the abomination that devastated your village from the sky!”

I squinted at her.

“From this moment on, you step onto the path of being the DyrkJarl of Midgard, a hero…” Her clawed hand extended towards me, lanky finger suddenly glowing with an ethereal luminescence, casting eerie, off-color rainbows in the air.

“Wait, wait, wait. How about we don’t dick-jarl me yet,” I backed away from her.

“Why?” The witch’s eyes grew wide. “You do not wish to avenge your family? You do not wish to decimate villains and monsters, cultivating strength to extract vengeance and stamp out evil wherever you find it? Surely that is the goal of every noble lad!”

“No,” I shook my head.

I wasn’t Ioan. The original memories of this body were gone. I felt no desire to slay dragons, and didn’t want vengeance.

“The sacrifice of your kin will fade away when the magic-infused blood of your parents flakes off your body in about eight hundred heartbeats,” the witch said. “When it does, my spell will dissipate and fade into the ether… unless it is bound properly to your soul. You must not squander this opportunity! This is your destiny, take it before it’s too late!”

Eight hundred heartbeats… approximately ten minutes?

The red hexagram on my chest must be breaking down according to some predictable decay function, like a radioactive half-life.

“To hell with destiny,” I said. “I… I want to make my own choices!”

The witch raised an eyebrow, examining my set face.

“I want to know more!” I declared. “What are the drawbacks of being a… DyrkJarl?”

“Visibility,” she conceded with a huff. “Heroes amass power by vanquishing their enemies and monsters. By taking life, a DyrkJarl becomes stronger… and also more attractive to monsters.”

“Attractive… how?” I asked.

“Via smell. Monsters and other DyrkJarls will smell the burning air and hear the thunder of Perun emanating from a DyrkJarl’s Aura and will seek to usurp the power that thrums within you,” the witch revealed. “Jotuns and trolls can smell the blood of a hero from a thousand steps away. The life of a DyrkJarl is one of fierce valour and constant battle! The hollow women from the South are known to enslave young DyrkJarls with their dark magics!”

A thousand steps, maybe around 700-800 meters of detection range. Even in the natural world, certain moth species could detect pheromones at almost unbelievable distances. Was this “hero aura” some kind of potent biochemical signature?

“So essentially, I would be painting a huge target on my back?” I asked. “No, thank you.”

I definitely wasn’t willing to become a meat shield for a dubious witch, especially if being a hero made me visible to slavers and monsters from 800 meters away. The old woman’s frown deepened.

“Is there no alternative?” I asked. “What happens if I don’t become a DyrkJarl?”

“I already told you! The magic chains wrapped around your body will snap and you will lose whatever it is you gained from the river spirit be it knowledge or special skills,” she said. “It is snowing. If I do not turn you into a dragonslayer, you will forget who you are and then inevitably freeze to death!”

“Hmmm, yeah, that does sound bad,” I said. Losing my rationality, memories and understanding of my current self would suck.

“Yes. Which is why you must…” Yaga insisted.

“You won’t offer me shelter?” I asked.

“I’m not actually here!” She barked, getting frustrated with me.

I stepped closer, noticing that her body shimmered slightly at the edges like a mirage.

“Can I not walk to your… witch house?” I asked. “Which way is it?”

“No,” she shook her head with a sad expression. “Many dangerous beasts seek to devour me. Even if they cannot see me, they stalk the edge of my domain, attracted to its magics. If you walk directly to my grove, your death in the jaws of a Jotun during the day or the talons of a Sirin after sunset is assured. You must slay many weaker beasts to grow stronger, only then will you be able to visit me!”

Things weren’t adding up: Everyone in Svalbard was dead. I was the only survivor. There was an incredibly suspicious feline witch character at the scene of the mass murder, offering me incredible power. More specifically, a witch who had the clear motives of killing everyone here to create a dragon-slaying DyrkJarl.

My paranoia intensified.

“How does one become a witch?” I asked, trying to find a loophole in her words.

“A sacrifice of life, a pact with a local nature spirit or another witch and the desire to bind yourself to a place,” she explained. “A wish to be safe, to tend to the land. Desire to seek connection to the All-Mother Zemlya above all things.”

“And are witches… perhaps routinely hunted and killed?” I inquired, suddenly thinking of the Spanish Inquisition.

“As much as anyone else is,” the witch shrugged. “It is however exceptionally hard to slay a Yaga on her land, for we are domain-bound, and are able to dream of the future. We draw our power from the fecund earth beneath our feet and lose our magical prowess if we venture beyond our domain. While cursed beasts can smell our domain, they cannot see the witch as long as she stands on her land.”

I evaluated my options:

The witch was lying about everything and was trying to turn me into her hero patsy to send on dragon-slaying quests. I didn’t see the dragon personally. I woke up under a river, not recalling a single thing about myself as Ioan. Maybe she cast an amnesia spell and pushed me into the river and killed everyone in the village with a spell. Maybe there was no dragon involved at all. Without checking thoroughly for dragon paw prints, I had no reason to believe any of Grandhilda’s words.

The witch was honest about her intentions and if I didn’t become a hero then I would lose all of my new, shiny memories, lose my scientific understanding of the world, lose my ability to rationally observe patterns and to break them down.

“Three hundred heartbeats,” she warned. “Before the blood sacrifice is rendered futile!”

There was only one way to determine if Grandhilda was even slightly honest about things. I had to derail the entire ‘hero’ narrative she wove for me, demanding something… entirely unexpected.

“Bind me to this village,” I declared. “Make me into… a warlock!”

“W-what?” The ancient crone blinked. “I don’t understand that word. What’s a ‘warlock’?”

“Witch me up!” I said. “Give me witch powers!”

“You are a boy!” Yaga Grandhilda declared.

“And?”

“Don’t you know anything?!” she asked. “Earthly wisdom and feminine wit belong to Zemlya, the Goddess of Fertility. Bravery and strength belong to her husband Perun, the God of War! The land belongs to Zemlya while the sky belongs to Perun.”

“Meaning what?” I asked, prying for more information as to why warlocks weren’t a thing here.

“You are not a girl!” The witch barked. “Girls meditate to commune with spirits and breathe magic out of their bodies. You… you’d make the weakest witch in the world, one blind to the wild! Men inhale magic to become stronger, they cannot see nature spirits! Men cannot communicate with spirits, cannot cast magic out of their bodies no matter how much they meditate! That is the way of the world and…”

The Yaga’s words sounded like excuses. If men couldn’t communicate with nature spirits directly could they simply not hire a woman to be their medium or something?

I decided to press on with my attack, confident that either she would accidentally reveal the truth about murdering everyone here or make me into a witch, which was fine too because it would make me less visible in a dragon-populated world.

“Please make me into a warlock… err, a witch, Yaga!” I urged. “Magic me up. Bind me to the land. I’m ready. That’s my greatest and only wish!”

Yaga Grandhilda stared at me like I was mad.

“Don’t you want to leap over the trees, to lift weapons with incredible ease?” She attempted to market the strongman abilities of the sky-god-aligned heroes to me. “If you live long enough as a hero, you might even learn to fly atop of your sword! Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

Flying on a sword? I suppressed a chortle as I contemplated the aerodynamics involved.

The surface area would be entirely insufficient to generate lift for a human body. Unless magic completely rewrote the laws of physics, which… seemed increasingly likely in this world.

“Nope, I want to be a witch!” I insisted. “Flying on swords sounds extremely unsafe, what if I fall off?”

“Heroes don’t just…” the Yaga sputtered.

“Flying round these parts just seems dangerous,” I added with an exaggerated look of a scared teenager. “A dragon could eat me.”

“Very well,” she sighed. “So be it. As inordinate as this is… I suppose that a male witch, or worry-lock-whatever, just might be possible. It’s better than you simply freezing to death as a mortal. Maybe in a few centuries’ time… if Zemlya takes pity on you, you’ll learn to commune with the spirits of the wild.”

I nodded.

“Step forward, quickly, to me!” She barked. “We have only sixty heartbeats left!”

I did.

With a swift motion, she tapped the center of my chest where the hexagram converged with her glowing finger.

“Lie down and embrace the Earth-Mother, Zemlya, beneath you and yearn to be her eternal… virgin maiden and dedicated caretaker,” she instructed, chortling slightly at the ‘virgin maiden’ bit. “To aid all who venture here with the power of the wilds, to persist through the breath of the land from this point on forevermore! Focus your mind utterly on that which you desire to become!”

I obeyed, my arms encircling the icy ground, head turned to the witch.

Focus on what I wanted, hum?

I definitely wasn’t interested in being a virgin maiden aiding pilgrims.

I focused my mind on the desire for safety and protection, for invisibility and anonymity. Firstly, I needed a sanctuary of my own, a haven in which I might conduct experiments and unravel the mysteries of the new, magic-filled universe that now surrounded me.

I envisioned a future… of progress and creation. Humanity’s defining desires, to acquire by understanding.

Secondly, I wanted to be myself… Human. As human as possible. An absolute unit of me, human to the power of human, not whatever species of gray-greened boar child I woke up as.

Within moments, I felt a peculiar sensation as if an invisible chain snapped between me and the ground. I saw that my entire body ignited with a violet shimmer akin to Cherenkov radiation, the eerie blue light produced when particles exceed the speed of light in a medium. The glow was violet, presumably somewhere around 400 nanometers on the electromagnetic spectrum, just at the edge of human visual perception.

“Is this…?”

“This is normal,” the witch reassured me.

I felt my limbs growing heavy.

She traced a circle in the ground with a gnarled staff. “Farewell and good fortune… Yaga… Ioan Starfall!” She smirked at the word Yaga, seemingly amused by the absurdity of a male witch.

“Umm. Do I not receive an apprenticeship, or some form of guidance from here?” I asked.

“Seek me out in the Astral Ocean,” she replied cryptically. “But first, claim your land and draw sustenance from it and make it bloom!”

“How?” I repeated. “Isn’t it the middle of winter?!”

“All things that decay and bloom in your domain’s soil will gradually empower you.”

“Uhm. Right,” I tried to process her words.

An unsettling thought took root.

“I am not going to look like you, am I?”

I didn’t want to be rude by pointing out she looked like something that should have starved to death years ago, but frankly I had no interest in becoming that boney and… moist.

A short cackle sounded from her lips before she shook her head.

“No child. I am old. It will take you many centuries to learn to braid a cape of flowers and earth.”

I took a closer look as she shifted and noticed she indeed had a cloak of… braided flowers and grasses growing off her back like the pelt of a rabbit.

“What if something tries to eat me or my… garden?”

“Night predators will no doubt attempt to devour you tonight,” the Yaga said with a nonchalant look, sliding her skull mask back on.

“What?!” I sputtered, struggling and failing to move, feeling like most of my body was currently afflicted with sleep paralysis.

“Simply remain in your glade and do not move, do not breathe and most of all do not speak, if one approaches. Your domain shall hide you from the spirits and monsters wishing your harm,” she said.

“Don’t breathe? What?” I blinked at her.

The average human could only hold their breath for a minute or two before autonomic responses forced inhalation. What kind of predator would I need to hide from for such a short time? Did witches not need air?

“Seek me out in the Astral Ocean, should you have further questions!”

“How?!”

“To reach out to me, replant the mushrooms that will bloom below my feet into your grove. Once they turn deep red in two weeks’ time, squeeze the juice from them and drink a fistful of it before going to sleep!” She declared. “For now, survive and draw power from Mother Zemlya, be akin to a tree root! Tonight will be your first test as a newborn witch! Do not step away from your glade at night, no matter what you are promised!”

“Promised what by whom?” I asked, feeling very woozy even in my horizontal position as if my inner ear decided to go on vacation. “What mushrooms?!”

The Yaga stuck her staff into the ground.

A circle of tiny, spotted yellow-red mushrooms suddenly bloomed at the Yaga’s feet, small caps rapidly unfurling like the petals of a flower. Her figure shimmered and wavered, and in the blink of an eye, she was gone as if her body simply folded away.

As I remained on the ground, the pull of the earth seemed to intensify, as though gravity itself had conspired to draw me ever closer to my newfound domain.

My head slammed into the earth, sending my consciousness careening sideways into the abyss.

I felt myself sinking into the ground.

At least I wasn’t so cold anymore.