Alira had since left the building she arrived in, carefully exploring the new area. The view that unfolded in front of her was.. awe inspiring. And weird, bordering the limit of Alira's comprehension.

At first glance, she had just seen a few ruins, fallen to time. But upon a second look, she noticed just how strange this place was. The buildings were of a design, and most even made of a material, unknown to her. While she was by no means an expert in anything, especially not architecture, she was sure, that nowhere on earth did structures like these exist. Some of the ruins were still hundreds of meters high! Not even the best magically apt builders known to mankind would be capable of such a feat, at least Alira was pretty sure of that.

Oh yeah, and the sun. It was not yet fully beyond the horizon, but already at least ten times bigger than the sun of her home world, which she was certain of now, was definitely not THIS world. The strange buildings might have been explained away by arguing about ancient forgotten empires and shit, but the sun? Try talking away that one. Way too big for her liking, and dyeing everything in a deep crimson light. Beautiful, in a sense, but a little ominous, too.

Well, very ominous. Like the sun itself liked everything better bathed in blood.

Snapping back to more immediate circumstances, her stomach growled. She still had no real clue why the long walk through empty space didn't starve her at all. Or did she just think it was a span of years?

Maybe it was just an elaborate illusion, because she had inspected herself in a hastily polished chandelier, acting as a high cost mirror. She didn't appear to have aged a day. On the other hand, could someone really imagine decades in seconds? She doubted it.

"Just add it to the mental box of things i will never again think about" she told the air in front of her. "Yeah, let's just do that." She pretended the gem she still held was an actual conversation partner.

Oh well, i need to find some people soon, or i will go bananas for real, she thought.

Much to her disappointment, this place seemed to be devoid of life. Not even plants. Which really wasn't optimal for her right now, thirsty and hungry and all. One slight comfort was that nothing did seem to want to eat her either. The last thing she needed was some freaking creature, hunting her under the red sun.

Still, she moved cautiously, by principle. While this indeed seemed to be a dead place, this was by no means a guarantee there actually was no life present. Life that she could consume, was good. Life that could shred her to tiny appetizing pieces, not so much.

In moments like these, Alira regretted being a poor orphan more than usual. If she was a nobleman's child, or even just a decent commoner's, she could've learned magic. At least a bit, she didn't know if she was talented at all, because no one ever tested her. Anyway, with magic, she could at least scout for water, or inspect the surroundings with less danger of running into a trap.

"Can't change, what you can't change." she reminded herself, instead focusing on her current worries. Find water. Then food. Shelter, luckily, was no problem. She looked around and laughed. Shelter everywhere. Ruins sure are handy in that regard.

She hadn't seen any water so far, either. Shit.

She decided to walk in a fixed direction, eventually, she had to get out of the ruins, didn't she? So Alira picked a nice looking hill in direction S (Improvised South, using the building she appeared in as base), telling herself that beyond that hill was a paradise of whine and meat. Just kidding. Of water and bread, of course.

...

A few days later (AN: Very Happy [https://forum.royalroadl.com/images/smilies/biggrin.png], this means days on earth)

...

Yeah, no, fuck you.

Everything went wrong.

That's what Alira thought. She had arrived on the glorious hill, only to be greeted by ruins fading into the horizon in every direction. It had taken way more than she initially assumed to reach this place, so having to acknowledge that the promised land of sustenance didn't exist, at least not here, made her tired, even more than she already was.

For a brief moment, she contemplated running back to the original house and try to enter the void again, just in order to not starve. In the end, she was pretty affirmative though, that she would never make it back. She could already feel her strength fading, her legs a bit wobbly, her throat really, and i mean REALLY, sore.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

In fact, as far as she could witness in any direction, reaching water, if there even existed any in this shit hole of a forsaken place, was beyond her capabilities now.

People tend to think in what if - terms, like what if i had gone into another direction, but Alira tried to suppress that train of thought masterfully.

Back at the beginning, heh? She mused herself. Burning from a fireball, or burning on a stake was in the same category as dying of dehydration, at least to her.

Still unwilling to give up, she strolled across the mountain slope (which was just an exaggerated dune, really).

If she was fond of bad puns, she would’ve traded this desert for a dessert by now.

“Oh man.. this is it, i think, for real this time..” that kind of thought started to form in her mind.

In the last days, she had noticed that the day and night cycle here was.. long.. at least longer than she’d been here.

But finally, the day time seemed to come to an end.

“If i have to die, i at least want to see an epic sunset on another planet.” She told Gem-y (She named her shiny, perfectly round, companion she still carried around).

So instead of looking for salvation, she looked for the best place to watch the sun set, one ,and a final, time for her. Soon, she found something that looked like a palace. Even though it had mostly succumbed to the ravage of time, pillars protruding atop the big dune like the ribcage of a forgotten giant, it still looked majestic as fuck.

Once, when she was so little, her parents were alive, her mother had told her a tale. That tale was one of the most precious memories she had, and also one of the only that remained from her family.

It was a children's story about a princess in a high castle, sitting on her throne in the garden, watching over the green slopes of her lovely kingdom. She fought dragons and beasts, always victorious, and the people loved her. The princess got it all. Wealth, a dreamy prince, something to drink and eat, a country to rule over..

Yeah, i want to be like her, Alira admitted to herself.

Maybe there is a throne in that rotten ruin? She half heartedly wondered, almost blushing a bit from being embarrassed about getting excited about such a stupid thing.

"Well, this is it, little friend." Yep, still talking to a rock. Or gem, whatever.

With great effort, she struggled the few hundred meters over to the palace of the old. And, for once in her life, she was not disappointed. There was indeed a throne. The hall was even clean, so clean, she could make out intricate carvings on the white marble floor and the throne itself. Had she not been on the brink of death, she might have realized how odd that fact was. Right now, she didn't.

Almost in a delirium, she half crawled over to the exalted chair, which seemed to be made of a starry night's sky. Depthless black, with glowing sprinkles, probably reflections of the setting sun.

As the last act she ever planned on doing, she pulled herself up onto the throne, and tried to get into a comfortable position. As if the makers of this place, so long ago, had known that she would come one day, the throne was in a perfect position to see the landscape where the sun just begun to set.

A peaceful smile appeared on her face, as she awed the beauty that unfolded in front of her. She watched, as the shadows of the ruins got longer and longer, like shadowy hands reaching in her direction. Spooky, but peaceful and nice. The soft rustling of the seldom blowing wind on this world made the experience the most worthwhile she could imagine.

Half way over the treshold that mortals only ever pass once, she imagined herself to be the ruler of this planet, with everything on it her loyal items (because there are no subjects / people), cheering for their queen.

Then, as she closed her eyes, her consciousness finally faded, embraced by the one thing that ended all struggle and would never let her go again. If one could witness this moment, he would see a brave little girl, ruined by hunger and thirst and the world, with a sunken in, pale and dirty face, and an unhealthily slimmed down body. A girl that prevailed at first, yet had no choice but to surrender to the reality she lived in, in the end.

This is where her, and this, story should have ended. But.. circumstance.., sometimes, is more than one can hope to grasp.

...

As Alira's heart took its last beat, another heart, buried millennia ago, in the deep below the throne, started to beat in her heart's stead. While that was highly unusual, yet another happenstance was more noteworthy: Her chest started to lift and fall to the foreign heart's beat.

And the oddities had just begun. As the buried vessel of feelings and life continued in its steady rythm, Alira's jowls reversed from a display of drought and dirt to healthy looking, slightly peachy, blushing cheeks, and her body gained the mass a girl her age should have.

That still wasn't all, however. In a pillar of blue and black light, washing over her dead body from below, her clothes and skin lost all dirt on it. She looked freshly showered now, and even smelled like a field of flowers, the sweat and mud and tears shed before forgotten. Even the tears in her simple black gown had knitted themselves back together, as if they had never existed in the first place.

Her fate had just been changed. Not that she could have noticed, the dead notice nothing, after all. But at exactly the same time these events occurred, ancient runes, carved to seal something very old, and very dark, forfeit their duty against the foe that is time and released something that had been sealed, stashed away in secret, since this universe began.

With a series of gasps, Alira opened her eyes and jolted upright.

"W-What?"