[Doctor! What is happening to her?]

Die once… Die once, and you are spared…

[We are checking, my lady. Please be calm. Check the numbers…]

Die twice, and… You are… Warned…

[This is the first response she's had in years! Please help her! Oh lord…!]

Die the third time… And you… are DEAD!

You are of no… importance… A puppet…

[Lord, please…]

Plucked from your world were you…

[Her heart is slowing… Quick! Bring it now!]

And brought to… this world… in which…

… You don't BELONG!

[Help her!!]

Vi screamed.

She bolted upright, panting heavily, her eyes wide, her head aching horribly. Too bright, everywhere was too… colourful. She shielded her eyes instinctively from the brightness, and looked about her. She was… on a bed. Alive.

No, that's impossible.

"Why…" She heard a voice croak. It was hers. Nothing was making sense. She tried to remember what had happened. She had been killed. Cut on the neck. Her hand immediately reached for her neck, touching it gingerly. Nothing. It was smooth and fine.

"I… I was…" She reached for the other side of the neck. The same. She looked at her hands once more, they were very pale and white, with glowing tattoos on the back of her arms. And they were shaking badly.

She had woken up in another body.

A sharp ache went through her head and she winced. When her hands went for her head, something dropped to her dress. Little drops of clear liquid, each quivering as they met the fabric on her laps. Her eyes went blurry, distorting her vision. Were these… tears? She'd seen people shed these tears, but had never understood how they worked, or what their purpose was.

Now here she was, also weeping.

“I had died…” she whispered to the empty room. What was going on? Why was she here? "Why am I not dead?" She found herself asking. "I had died…" Her voice grew frantic, hands raking through her head and pulling at her hair. "I had died! Why am I still alive?! Why am I…?"

Die once… Die once…

The deep and ethereal voice drove her to a shivering halt. “Who said that?” No one answered. Her eyes swept the large room, from the closed door to the whitewashed walls to the marble floors to the big gold-and-blue furniture, flicking to and fro in each corner until her eyes ached.

The voice couldn't have come from her head, right? She never heard voices. But here she was, hearing them now. Her head spun, black spiraling lines twisting and turning like a child's meaningless scribbles, all going in reverse as if to go back to the point when it was just a blank space.

She hugged her knees and buried her head in them, rocking herself back and forth, eyes wide open, tears still flowing, body shivering.

I shouldn't be alive, right? I served the Great, right? That was the point of my existence, right? I am existing, right? What am I? The questions flooded her mind, spinning and spinning, unable to come out to the world, with no one to answer them.

The black lines of madness spun rapidly in her head until it reduced to a single straight line. Then memories flooded her mind. Memories of times she had spent in the bodies of other people. The ones that went many years back and had been lost to her. It felt like a cloud had been cleared from her mind. A cloud which had blocked so many things, now dispersed in her head, leaving her stranded in a strange but familiar abyss of memories...

She didn't belong here. She was… she was something else. Someone else. She had to be… right? The voices she had heard before waking up, they felt familiar. A woman's voice, pleading for Vi to be saved. A man's voice, trying to calm the woman. They felt so close to her, if only she could try to reach for them…

"I…" She shuddered at the overwhelming memories washing over her. "I have a past… I am somebody…" And she raised her head to look at the ceiling of the room, as if it could provide an answer of sorts. "But… who am I?" She blinked, her tears already running dry. Was this… emotion? Despair?

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

She took to calling herself Vi, because that was the only memory she could hold onto. She was supposed to be nothing other than that.

A puppet… useless… a toy.

“Stop it…” She tried to shut out the voice, with each word uttered filling her with fear and darkness.

A brief knock on the door brought her a calming respite. But it wasn't for long. She inched back on the bed, came to realise how soft the bed was. It could be someone after her life. The blue glowing tattoos on her hands meant that she'd woken up as a Skybeing. A royal at that, with the gilded outlines of the tattoos acting as proof.

“Who's that…?” Her voice was hardly audible. It could be Gimm, maybe he'd realised she hadn't died, somehow. Though he was a human, he could actually find his way to this Realm just to end her life. With that thought, she carried one of her plush pillows, ready to throw at the person and bolt out of the room the moment the door swung open.

The voice that came through the door was much lighter than she'd expected, though. “My lady, is everything alright?”

She recognised the voice immediately, memories of the owner of this body brushing her mind. A familiar push started deep inside the body, the owner fighting to take back what was hers.

“I heard you scream so I rushed here…”

Vi carefully got out of the bed to open the door, but her feet remained rooted to the ground, her temporary heart sinking to unknown depths. Her breathing grew heavier, and something screamed in her mind to look back! But she wouldn't dare.

Something was behind her. Something ominous, imposing. She could almost see the shadow cast before her in the early morning light shining through the windows. Somehow, she just knew that if she looked back, it was death.

“Are you the one doing this to me…?” She whispered between bated breaths born from utter fear.

No one answered.

She couldn't keep this up. She spun around in one swift motion, a daring move in the jaws of death. Perhaps she was only able to achieve that as one who'd already experienced death. She was prepared for whatever it was that awaited her.

She wasn't exactly prepared to see nothing behind her, though. Just the same bed and window beside it, no sign of anyone being there.

But the presence was still there, as horribly close and dreadful as ever. She was being watched. If she had been watched before she died, then it wasn't as close as now.

“My lady?”

She jumped at the sudden voice, composed herself when she remembered she left someone waiting outside. “Avara.” The personal handmaiden of Lady Oria Reival. The latter being her, at least for this week.

“May I come in?”

“No!” The words escaped her much quicker than she intended. “I need to…”

What if she came in and saw the creature that Vi couldn't see? Even worse, what if she could see Vi herself? She'd never thought about the possibility of that before, but now the thought wouldn't leave her head, causing a ripple in her already weak composure.

She rushed to the door and pressed her back to its smooth surface, “I need to get ready first.”

“Oh, but you don't have to worry about that, my lady. We are here to get you ready for the suitor's arrival. He and his family are already on their way here.” Avara seemed pretty excited as she explained, her voice carrying a light bounce through the door.

“Suitor?” What suitor? She hadn't gotten the time to search through Oria’s memories. So far, she only knew her name and the fact that she was the daughter of the Prime Ruler of Arimel. In other words, a princess.

“Um, yes? Lord Klaur and his family, for the marriage proposal?” Avara was confused.

“Right!” Vi quickly covered up her mistake. “Right, of course I remember… Just that, ah…” With one hand through her long white locks of hair, she asked in a small voice, “What day… is today, Avara?”

“Today is one-day, my lady.”

Vi froze. One-day? That's impossible. She'd died in Rikha's body on four-day, the middle of the week. That meant she'd been dead for three days. She stared at her hand, still shaking. Something had brought her back from death. And that very thing could be the one casting its eerie gaze on her even now, its voice snaking into her mind to plunge her into her bleak past.

“I see.” She said softly, then stepped away from the door and opened it for her handmaiden.

Avara was a tall lady with delicate features and hair no different from Oria's. She could easily pass off as her sister, but then the atedans had their unique ways of differentiating themselves. A memory brushed through Vi’s mind. Her own memory, of a time when she'd woken up as an atedan merchant. She'd done her best to maintain the skywoman's blooming business for the week that she was in her body.

“We shall get you ready in no time, my lady,” Avara bowed and gracefully clapped her fine hands twice. She placed both hands on Vi's shoulders and led her outside while more handmaidens joined them, with others filing into her room.

***

While the handmaidens dolled Vi up to royal perfection, she took the time to go through some of her past memories.

A general knowledge she'd gained was of how her transmigration worked. Every week, she changed bodies from across the Five Realms of the world. And she never woke up in a body of the same race consecutively. But there was no order to the rotation. As she was a Skybeing now, next week she might wake up in the body of a Netherbeing or a rukar, or even a human again. And it seemed there was no way of knowing what would happen the next week, who she'd wake up as.

She also sensed that ominous presence now bound to her in her memories. It had always been there, just not as obvious. Like a guard watching a prisoner. It could be that there had been nothing she did back then to make the presence reveal itself. She'd been very obedient. But now, something had changed. And it was being extra cautious.

Worried I'll run away? She couldn't even escape, as far as she could tell. She was a prisoner in every sense of the word.

A good thing was that no one could still see her. She could still hide beneath any skin, which gave her the advantage to covertly make her research. For now, she was Oria Reival. And she had a proposal to accept… or turn down.

It appeared Oria had still been undecided about this when she went to sleep the previous day.

With no clue on what to do about the situation, Vi stared at herself in the mirror, dressed up in a simple and comfortable, but also lavishly royal attire. Her face was even more beautiful than it had been when she saw it this morning, with her hair neatly bundled up and her tattoos glowing even brighter, the design running all the way up her arms to connect to a much larger one on her back, the latter being the nation’s insignia.

Avara stood behind her, seemingly satisfied at the final result of their work. Her room was enveloped in a comfortable silence. But the silence allowed too many thoughts into her head. And it made the Watcher’s–as she'd taken to calling it–gaze on her even more profound.

She quickly asked. “How would you describe this Lord Klaur, Avara?” Oria's voice was deep, automatically carrying a noble air to it.

Her handmaiden looked a tad confused by the sudden question. She contemplated her answer, then gave her only two words.

“Husband material.”