I didn't stop running because I felt safe.
I stopped because my body finally forced me to.
My legs—too many legs, wrong legs, half-forgotten shapes I hadn't fully dismissed yet—gave out beneath me, and I collapsed into a shallow ravine choked with ash and half-burned undergrowth. Heat shimmered in the air behind me. Even here, miles away, the sky still glowed faintly, like the world hadn't decided whether it was day or night yet.
I lay there.
And for the first time in a very long time—
I felt.
Not just sensation. Not just data.
Emotion.
It hit me all at once.
Excitement, sharp and electric. Fear, coiled tight in my core. A wild, disbelieving laughter that never made it to a throat because I still didn't have one. My thoughts weren't flat anymore—they spiked, raced, looped.
I feel again.
The realization nearly knocked me flat all over again.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I traced it backward. The hydra. The magic. The fireball. The moment the spell slipped out of control and became something impossible.
The second sun.
I should have been horrified.
I was horrified.
But layered over that was something else—relief. Genuine, selfish relief.
So that was it.
All that time as a cell. Dividing. Hunting. Optimizing. Existing without highs or lows. I hadn't noticed what I was missing because I'd forgotten what it felt like to miss anything at all.
And then—boom.
Catastrophic magical failure.
Emotional defibrillator.
I almost wanted to do it again.
The thought scared me more than the fireball itself.
No, I told myself immediately, the emotional spike making the refusal sharper, louder. Absolutely not. I'm not waiting around to find out if I need to crack a mountain every time I want to feel human again.
I forced myself to breathe—metaphorically, anyway—and let the feelings settle. They didn't vanish. They stabilized. Logic slid back into place, but now it had company.
That was… dangerous.
Useful.
Both.
I pushed myself up and changed shape again, smaller this time, quieter. Something built for hiding, not fleeing. I listened. Nothing followed me. No roars. No spells. No pursuit.
Good.
I wasn't ready for anyone to know I existed.
Not yet.
Far away—very far away—the world noticed.
The light had been visible above the clouds, a brief but unmistakable flare that painted the sky white and gold. Sailors swore they'd seen a second sunrise ripple across the horizon. Astronomers dropped instruments and recalibrated in a panic when their charts no longer made sense.
Mages felt it first.
Scrying orbs flared to life across towers and academies, showing the same image from a dozen angles: a scorched forest, a mountain with its crown torn away, stone glowing like molten glass.
Guild halls went quiet.
Then loud.
Orders were written, sealed, rewritten. Reconnaissance teams were assembled—not heroes, not yet, but scouts. People whose job it was to look and come back alive, if possible.
Kings convened councils behind closed doors. Borders weren't closed, but patrols doubled. Messages were sent using spells that hadn't been touched in decades.
Find out what did this.
Priests prayed. Scholars argued. Old maps were dragged out and compared to newer ones, searching for anything that might explain why a place that had always been forest was now something else entirely.
No one liked the answers they were circling.
Because nothing they knew could do that.
And whatever could—hadn't stayed to be seen.
I didn't know any of that yet.
All I knew was that my heart—whatever passed for it now—was racing, and that the world suddenly felt real again in a way it hadn't since the day I died.
I curled deeper into cover, every instinct screaming caution, my thoughts buzzing with plans and worries and possibilities.
The world was looking.
I wasn't ready.
But for the first time since waking up in that pond, I felt something dangerously close to anticipation.
Alright, I thought, emotions humming under every word.
Let's not do that again.