The blue sitting room of Graf Manor disappeared in the bright violet of the portal. Wind screamed past Roark’s ears as if he were falling from a great cliff. Then the violet light blurred and stretched, splitting into rays of lilac, amethyst, burgundy, and indigo. Waves of pain tore through his body. It felt as if he were being ripped apart one muscle fiber and bone splinter at a time, then pieced back together over and over again. On the faraway fringes of the torment, some detached part of his mind wondered whether that was how this portal killed its travelers—by shredding them endlessly until their consciousness fell apart and nothing was left.

What felt like centuries of agony later, awareness slapped Roark in the face like a wet washcloth. He wasn’t falling anymore, he was walking. Odd. Very much so. He looked around, searching for clues as to where he had come out. The crumbling remains of what looked to have once been a great citadel lay before him like the bones of some ancient beast. A cold black fog rolled along trampled muddy earth, broken up here and there by weathered cairns of vitrified stone.

It sure as all the hells wasn’t the safehouse. This dead citadel was like nothing he’d ever seen in Korvo. It didn’t look as if it belonged on his home planet, let alone in his home city.

Furthermore, his body felt strange. Awkward. Clumsy. Slow. Perhaps he was still recovering from the whirlwind of torture, first at the Tyrant King’s hands, then inside the portal. If he took a moment to regroup, maybe he could make sense of this.

Roark lifted a hand to his head and froze, staring at the leathery blue flesh of a scrawny, disproportionately long arm. Where was the familiar olive skin laced with fading spell scars? He looked down, heart hammering away inside his chest. Instead of his own lean, rangy body, he found a bird-chested torso that flared into a potbelly and ended in a pair of bowlegs. A dirty loincloth strung around his waist was all that preserved his modesty, and judging by the strange, misshapen parts that had replaced the rest of his body, he didn’t want to see what was under there.

His mind spun. This was all wrong. What had that portal done to him? Had he even made it into the portal at all? Maybe the Tyrant King had killed him and now he was being resurrected as some sort of dark creature built to serve the Ustar Empire. There’d been rumors of experiments in the north, chimeras pieced together from animal and human remains.

If that was the case, then what had he been made from? Roark studied the arms again, this time with emotionless detachment. Some sort of thick, leathery blue hide, almost like that of a Great Sea whale. The stubby, dirt-caked fingers ended in black claws like a bird of prey. He ran his tongue over a set of wickedly serrated teeth. A shark, perhaps?

No, if he’d been killed and rebuilt to serve in the Tyrant King’s armies he would have weapons or armor. None of this added up.

Roark looked down again at his narrow, birdlike chest and realized with a start that the topaz pendant he’d snatched from Marek was hanging around his neck. Somehow that bit of jewelry had made it through the portal unaffected.

Before he could study it more closely, movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention. He snapped his head around and spotted another small, malformed creature with blue skin hiding in the shadows of a crumbling downward staircase. Thin white letters floated over the creature’s head.

[Changeling]

Had the Tyrant King’s mages found a new way to write spells in the air? Was that what they’d been experimenting with? Was it how they had turned him into this thing … this Changeling?

Roark headed toward to the staircase. At first, he tried to move carefully, not wanting to provoke an attack or frighten the other creature away. But the awkward slowness of his new body wore out his patience within seconds, and he broke into a clumsy trot.

The Changeling in the shadows of the staircase didn’t attack or run. Its eyes didn’t even focus as he approached, it just stood there staring and swaying on its scraggy legs. This Changeling wore a grimy loincloth identical to Roark’s, but it also had a strip of leather around its bald head, moth-eaten black feathers stuck into the band and swaying in time with the creature’s body.

Roark opened his mouth to demand some answers from the Changeling, but all that came out was a croaky grunt. Anger and frustration flared, but he pushed them down. Filling his narrow chest with air, he began again.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“Where?” Speaking was like overseeing a three-way duel between his mind, his vocal cords, and his too-wide mouth while pulling every sound up from the pit of his potbelly. “What are this? Where are this?”

The Changeling grunted and pointed stupidly out at the eddying fog.

Perhaps the magic which created Changelings also damaged the brain. Working carefully through each question, Roark formed the words in his mind first, then forced them out through his serrated teeth. He felt his potbelly jump with each croaked syllable.

“Where. Are. We?” he asked. “What is this. Place?”

The Changeling continued to sway on the spot. After several moments, it cocked its head and grunted.

With a wry smile, Roark told the Changeling to slow down a bit, but in his rush the quip came out as just another meaningless croak.

Roark rubbed his pounding temples with dirty, claw-tipped fingers. This was going to be unbearable without sarcasm. A world without biting wit simply wasn’t one worth living in.

The swaying Changeling grunted as though it agreed and pointed out at the fog once more.

Roark sighed and searched the citadel for anyone or anything slightly more sentient. No other creatures wandered the muddy ground inside the ruins, but there was a gap in the top of the wall opposite the crumbling staircase where some long-ago attack had smashed the stones inward in a heap of broken rubble.

He left the Changeling swaying in the shadows and headed for the gap in the wall, hoping to get a better view of his surroundings if nothing else. Climbing the stone pile should have been easy having grown up climbing the cliffs and mountains around Korvo, but with the unfamiliar limbs it was a slow, clumsy process. Especially since each one of limbs seemed to be a different length. Finally, though, Roark made it to the top. He grabbed a handful of stone wall on each side of the gap and pulled himself up.

Down below lay a graveyard peppered with broken, weather-worn tombstones that shined white as bone in the moonlight. Crypts in various states of disrepair had been torn open, and crumbling mausoleums stood with doors ripped off their hinges.

Lumbering between these stone monuments on stiff legs were walking corpses. Desiccated flesh and scraps of cloth hung from their bones, and many of them had ancient-looking brass swords hanging at their sides or cracked dark-wood bows slung over their shoulders. Like the Changeling, thin white lettering glimmered over their heads.

[Shambling Revenant]

Roark settled his misshapen backside onto the wall and crossed his scrawny legs, resting an elbow on them while he thought this over.

In Traisbin, it was common practice for the handiest priest or mage-noble to make out writs for those who died to assure that their souls would pass on undisturbed to the afterlife and remain out of reach of necromancy. It had been one of the many duties the men and women of his house had carried out for the people of Korvo. There were always stories of mages who’d gone mad and tried to build corpse armies by murdering men and leaving their bodies unwritten. For a while, rumors had even circulated that this was how the Tyrant King was sweeping the continent so quickly. Baseless rumors, Roark knew. The Tyrant King had come to power through bloody swords in the hands of regular, order-following humans while other regular humans turned a blind eye.

The writing in this place did seem to hold some sort of magic—the letters could exist with nothing more than the air as a medium—but Roark didn’t think this world was the same one he’d been born on. When looked at objectively, the evidence all seemed to be pointing toward the portal having dumped him out in some other dimension.

Just as he came to this conclusion, an arrow thudded into his leathery blue knee. He croaked in shock as white jags of pain lanced in all directions from the wound, and his leg kicked involuntarily. A strange vial decorated with intricate gold filigree appeared to his right, half full of some glowing red liquid. Before his eyes, the mysterious white lettering appeared.

“Aw, hells yeah!” a voice shouted. “Get wrecked, son!”

The clash of metal on metal filled the graveyard. At the far corner, two humans in shining plate armor and one in deep purple robes were attacking the undead with greatswords and showers of lightning. The angry groans of Shambling Revenants mingled with the excited whoops of the fighters, but the rest of the Revenants continued their pointless circuits of the graveyard as if nothing were happening.

Roark had barely enough time to wonder why the Revenants weren’t simply overwhelming the humans with their superior numbers when a smoky shadow moved near the broken graveyard gate.

An arrow whistled out of the patch of darkness and slammed into his chest.

Pain throbbed outward from the shaft of the arrow, and the filigreed vial at Roark’s right flashed twice as the remaining red liquid drained out. He felt his body topple backward off the wall, arms and legs flopping and flailing with an unlikely disregard for basic physics. The mysteries of this new world faded to nothingness along with everything he could see, and Roark von Graf died.