Chapter 4: Not that Much of a Snowflake

She felt her consciousness coalesce, pulled into a physical body for the first time in who knows how long. Like carbon shaped into a diamond, her soul was compacted and reformed, reshaped, fundamentally changed from what it once had been.

Her first sensations of physical reality was excruciating. They felt hard and sharp, against the indeterminate amorphousness of the astral. The cold ground her naked body laid upon stung, life cold fire burning at her nerves. It felt as if she was some corpse laid atop ice, the cold penetrating deep into her skin and bones.

She didn’t dare open her eyes, the light dancing beyond her eyelids already stabbing holes in her irises.

Voices. One of sharp surprise.

“What in Knowledge’s name?” She exclaimed. “How did the ritual create a person? Redell, Chelsea, Laius, I need you all here.”

“It’s not a monster, is it?” Another woman asked.

“No,” A man said, his voice deep and concerned, “She has a soul. An outworlder.”

“Redell,” The first woman said, apologetic, “I had no intention of inducing a summoning or producing an outworlder. It shouldn’t have even been possible with my ritual.”

“What’s done is done, Amara,” The other woman said, “You may have no fault in this, for once. I’ve checked your work too, and it shouldn’t have been possible for a soul to pass through.”

“I’m not without ethics,” Amara said, “This is a situation I specifically engineered to avoid.”

The voices ravaged her fresh, newly physical eardrums. They pounded like taiko drums, reverberating within her skull like heavy metal pinballs.

She clutched her hands over her ears, groaning.

“Hush, both of you,” The man referred to as Redell said in a softer voice, “Things have come to this. We should properly address it.”

A soft blanket was wrapped over her bare skin, and she was gingerly lifted. The soft sensation was still torturous to her raw senses, but less so than the previous cold ground.

She let out an inadvertent sigh of relief.

“The benevolent night, embrace us with your gentle arms. Lull us into pleasant dreams.” He said in a low, singsong tone. It relaxed her body. The nerves that felt as if they were rubbed with fiberglass calmed. Her mind drifted, lulled into a sleep.

It was the first rest she had had in a very long time.

*****

When she awoke, she felt as if her body was restarting after a very long, pleasant sleep. She was cradled within a large, soft bed. The right side of the room was opened to a large veranda, sunlight filtered with muslin fabric drapes. The décor was calming with earthy and green tones, matched by leafy ferns and waxy plants potted around the room. The interior plants mirrored those beyond the drapes, a lush, almost mammoth jungle in the distance. She swore those jungle trees towered taller than skyscrapers, weaved with large vines traveling their entire bulk and stringing from tree to tree in some massive, verdant net.

She realized the stimuli no longer stung her eyes.

A soft knock at the door shook her awareness.

“Can we come in?” A voice said from the other side of the door.

“Go ahead,” she said, her own mouth not moving to form words. Her hand shot to her face, checking to see if it had a mouth in the first place. To her relief, it did.

A mouth, a nose, two eyes, and two ears. Her eyebrows, strangely, were missing, as was her hair. All she felt was a completely bald skin, missing even the peach fuzz of a freshly shaven scalp. She stretched out her hands observing a total of ten fingers. She flexed them, one by one, feeling the sensation of moving joints.

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“I guess I’m human?” she said to herself.

“Technically, that’s incorrect,” A woman said, as she strode in with three others, “You’re an outworlder, which is what people are changed into when their physical body is annihilated, and they cross the dimensional boundary without protection.”

She gave off the impression of an Amazonian warrior of lore, tall and powerful. She had deep midnight skin, and gold-sun eyes. Her dark brown hair was gathered loosely behind her in a low ponytail.

The next was a chestnut-haired woman with soft green eyes. Her hair was cut in a short wavy bob. She moved with the lightness of a forest nymph. Had she moved through a forest, soft green buds would spring forth from her every step and trees would arch their branches to line her way. What was strange was her long, tapered ears.

“An elf?” She asked. “I thought those weren’t real?”

“I’m perfectly real, thank you.” She said, her tone was not nearly so soft as her initial impression. “I am Chelsea. This one is Amara.”

“Nice to meet you, Chelsea, Amara.”

“What is your name, dear?”

A slightly-tan skinned, brown-haired flecked with grey, steel-blue eyed man entered the room. As his large frame entered, a gentle invigorating aura permeated the room. His well-maintained beard and small scar beneath his eye lent him an air of maturity and experience. He looked the sort of man that would feel equally in place swirling whisky while reading a newspaper as relaxing on a park bench with a large dog at his feet.

“They called me Wanderer,” She said, “I don’t remember my name.”

“They?”

“The beings in the astral,” She said, “Some dude named Allais, and another named The Reaper.”

“The Reaper?” Amara’s sculpted eyebrows arched up, “You met it?”

“Met? I don’t really know. He talked through this other guy. Chrome said he was a vessel.”

“Chrome?”

“The Reaper said Chrome’s progenitor the Keeper of Time told him to teach me ritual magic so I could find a way back to reality. It’s how I hijacked your ritual magic circle.”

“You altered my magic from the other side?” Amara said, contemplative, “I hadn’t considered that was possible.”

“Usually,” Chelsea said, rolling her eyes, “That isn’t possible.”

“Move aside both of you. I need to check the integrity of her body,” Redell said, shooing the two women.

She was thankfully, now dressed. She wore comfortable white fabric, like a long loose shirt, in a tunic style, with similar loose white pants. They resembled pajamas or underclothes more than daily wear.

The warm blanket was pulled back, and Redell waved some strange devices over her. Strange rods, glowing with a soft light. Semi-circles that he passed over her limbs. This clearly wasn’t Earth anymore. She didn’t recognize these strange devices—were they magic? As he used these devices to inspect her condition, he jotted stuff down on a large notebook.

She hadn’t noticed when he had entered, but a peculiar panther-man leaned against a wall. His fur was sleek and jet-black. His lithe and powerful body exuded the sharpness of a sheathed blade, ready but controlled. He didn’t think of her as a threat, and relaxed where he stood, his tail flicking in curiosity he didn’t bother to hide.

Redell followed her gaze, “That’s Laius. Don’t mind him—he’s quiet but friendly. Won’t bite, I promise.” He begun to repack his diagnostic equipment. “I’ve managed to stabilize and repair your body to what is typical for an outworlder. You showed up awfully broken, you know. Like your body had been scrapped together.”

“It’s that bad?”

“I can’t say,” Redell said, “I haven’t seen a soul in the state yours is in before. Before that, we should discuss your situation.”

“My situation?”

Amara picked up for him, “If you are the one who altered my ritual, why?”

“I was trying to find a way back to reality.”

“Find a way back?”

“Well…” She explained, “One day I was eating a Christmas dinner with my family, and I fell asleep, warm and comfy. The next moment, some crazy being was torturing my soul. I sort of escaped wherever I was, and found myself in the astral. I didn’t want to go back to where I was and whatever I did to escape in the first place scattered my memories and soul. I probably sound absolutely bonkers, ha-ha,” she weakly laughed.

“Christmas?” Amara asked. If she had animal ears, they would’ve shot up in curiosity.

“Outworlder culture, most likely,” Chelsea said, “Focus, Amara.”

“That’s pretty much it,” She said, “Chrome taught me enough ritual magic to do a magical version of a google search through all of the cosmos to find magic that satisfied my requirements to re-enter reality. It then pulled up the found entry, and I crossed through the gate. The gate,” she continued, “Was a visualization of your magic ritual that connected reality to the astral.” She was feeling pretty proud of herself for sounding coherent.

“Your requirements to re-enter reality?” Chelsea probed, “Such as?”

“That too much time didn’t pass between when I entered the astral and when I exited it. Or else all my family would be dead without even a chance to see them again,” she said plainly.

“That was insensitive of me, sorry,” Chelsea said.

“It was a fair question. I’m not that much of a snowflake.”

“So, what time did you manage to find?” asked Amara curiously.

“2 months. I think I did pretty well,” she said, placing her hands on her hips in bed pridefully.

“Well done,” Amara said, “That must have been a monumental effort, learning enough magic to cast a ritual that sorted through rituals of all of time.”

The surprise praise struck her, like she had been hit over the head with a cast-iron pan. She had had genuine human interaction for some time now, beyond Chrome and some of the other astral beings she talked to during her period of tutelage and wandering.

Genuine, heartfelt praise shook her heart. She felt her mind waver, and her eyes water. She looked away, embarrassed, hiding her happy tears.

I didn’t think I was always this sensitive. She thought. Under the gaze of a powerful, warm as sun Amazonian goddess, she was a melting snowflake.