Prologue

I die on a Tuesday.

There is nothing poetic about it. No swelling orchestral score, no cinematic slow motion, no final words whispered to someone who loves me. There is only the intersection of Millbrook and Fourth, the shriek of tyres against wet asphalt, and the peculiar weightlessness of a body that has forgotten how to belong to the ground.

I remember the rain. I remember thinking it smelled of copper pennies and exhaust fumes, that particular grey-city scent of a world slowly rusting itself to death. I remember the headlights blooming through the downpour like twin suns being born, and the absurd thought — I left the oven on — and then nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Until.

The first thing I know is pain.

Not the clean surgical kind. Not the dull throb of a bruise or the bright sting of a paper cut. This is foundational pain, the kind that rewrites every molecule of your being, that takes your bones and melts them to tallow and pours them into moulds that were never meant for a human shape. This is the pain of becoming.

I try to scream. My throat produces a sound I have never heard — a low, resonant hiss that vibrates through chambers I do not recognise as lungs. The air that fills them tastes of sulphur and wild thyme, of volcanic glass and something sweetly rotten, like orchids left to decompose in standing water.

I cannot open my eyes. My lids — are they lids? — feel sealed shut, crusted with something that flakes away beneath a pressure I only belatedly understand is my own attempt to blink. When vision comes, it arrives in pieces. First: light, but wrong. The spectrum is shifted, stretched, as though someone has taken the world and tilted its colours three degrees to the left. I see ultraviolet trembling at the edges of everything, a halo of impossible purple that limns the stones, the roots, the sky.

The sky.

It is the colour of a wound. Deep reds bleed into arterial oranges, streaked through with veins of gold so bright they hurt. Two moons hang there — one vast and pockmarked, the hue of old bone, the other small and fierce and green as an emerald held up to candlelight. They do not belong to any sky I have ever known.

I try to sit up. My body does not cooperate. It is too long, too low, too many. I feel myself in segments — a torso that bends in places a human torso should not, a neck that extends far beyond what my proprioception insists is reasonable, limbs that end in arrangements of claw and scale and membrane that my brain refuses to catalogue.

What am I?

The question arrives with a violence that eclipses even the physical pain. I am not myself. I am not — I reach for my name, my human name, and find it dissolving like sugar in hot water. Sarah. No. Sera. No. Seravyn. The syllables settle into me with the weight of prophecy, rearranging the architecture of my identity as surely as this new body has rearranged my bones.

Seravyn.

I flex my fingers and find I have none. What I have instead are foreclaws — four on each hand, if hand is even the word — dark as obsidian, curved like scimitars, each one thrumming with a faint warmth that pulses in time with the beating of my heart. Hearts. I have more than one. I can feel them, a staggered percussion deep in my chest: the primary heart pounding slow and massive behind what I think is my sternum, and a secondary rhythm further back, quicker, lighter, threaded through with heat.

I bring one foreclaw up to my face.

Scales.

They cover me in overlapping plates of iridescent black, each one rimmed in dark emerald that catches the dying light of this alien sky and throws it back in fragments. They are beautiful in the way that armour is beautiful — functional, unyielding, designed for a world that will try to break you. When I run the tip of one claw along my forearm, the sensation is bizarre: I feel the pressure twice, once through the claw and once through the scale, a doubled awareness that makes my vision swim.

Something moves behind me. I whip around — too fast, the motion serpentine and fluid in a way that sends my stomach lurching — and find wings.

Wings.

They unfurl from my shoulder blades like dark sails, membranous and vast, the webbing between each finger-strut so thin I can see the wounded sky through it. They are not feathered. They are leathery, veined with the same dark emerald as my scales, and when I flex muscles I did not know I possessed, they stretch wide enough to cast a shadow over the hollow of stone and root where I have apparently been born.

Born. Hatched. Arrived. I do not know the word for what has happened to me.

I open my mouth to speak and my tongue — my tongues — flicker out before I can stop them. Forked. Split at the tip into two delicate points that taste the air with an intimacy that is almost obscene. I can taste the minerals in the stone beneath me. I can taste the particular chemistry of the approaching dusk, the way the air cools and contracts, releasing scent molecules that my old human nose would never have detected. I can taste, distantly, water — fresh and cold and moving over rock somewhere to my left, perhaps two hundred metres away.

The precision of that knowledge terrifies me.

I curl inward, wrapping my tail — my tail — around myself, and the scales click softly against each other like a rosary being worried between anxious fingers. The sound is oddly comforting. Reptilian. Alien. Mine.

The hollow where I lie is a cathedral of roots.

Some vast tree — if tree is the word for something this enormous — has driven its roots deep into a cleft of dark stone, and those roots have woven themselves into walls, into arches, into a canopy that filters the light of the twin moons into shifting patterns of silver and green. The bark is black, slick with moisture, and when I press my snout against it, I feel a slow deep pulse that might be sap or might be something else entirely. Something alive in a way that trees in my old world never were.

The air here is thick. Saturated. Every breath delivers a catalogue of information my human mind struggles to index — the loam of rich dark earth, the ozone crackle of distant lightning, the musk of creatures I cannot name moving through undergrowth I cannot see. My forked tongue flickers constantly, an autonomic reflex I cannot seem to control, and each flick adds another layer to the overwhelming tapestry of this place.

Eranvael.

The name arrives unbidden, settling into my consciousness like a stone dropped into still water. I do not know how I know it. I do not know how I know that the twin moons are called Vael and Ossyr, or that the tree above me is a Thornmother, one of the ancient sentinels that mark the boundaries between regions. I do not know how I know any of this, but the knowledge is there, pressed into the folds of my new brain like fingerprints in wet clay.

I know other things too. I know that I am in a region called Erpon, a land of deep forests and deeper stone, where the earth itself remembers and the mountains have names older than language. I know that the creatures who live here — the Erponai — are not human, though they walk upright and build cities and wage wars just as humans do. I know that they hunt.

I know that what they hunt includes things like me.

A sound cuts through the forest — low, mournful, resonant as a church bell struck underwater. It comes from everywhere and nowhere, vibrating through the stone beneath me, through the roots above me, through the twin hearts hammering in my chest. My wings flare involuntarily, a defensive reflex so primal it bypasses thought entirely, and I press myself flat against the hollow floor, every scale prickling with an electric awareness.

The sound fades. The forest breathes.

I wait.

Nothing comes.

I teach myself to stand on the third attempt.

The first time, I overbalance spectacularly, my centre of gravity so different from what muscle memory insists it should be that I topple sideways and crack my skull against a root. The pain blooms bright and starry behind my eyes, and I taste blood — hot, coppery, but with an undercurrent of something metallic and strange, like licking a battery dipped in honey.

The second time, I manage to get my foreclaws under me, my haunches coiled beneath my weight, before my tail lashes sideways of its own accord and sweeps my hind legs out from under me. I crash down again, hissing in frustration, and the sound that emerges from me is so inhuman that I freeze, my own voice a stranger in my throat.

The third time, I think about it differently. I stop trying to stand like a person and start trying to stand like what I am. I lower my centre of gravity. I spread my weight across all four limbs, letting my claws dig into the stone for purchase. I extend my neck forward as a counterbalance to the heavy sweep of my tail. And slowly, trembling, my scales rasping against the rock like whispered secrets, I rise.

The world looks different from this height. Which is to say: it does not look different enough. I am not tall. I am perhaps the height of a large dog, my body long and low-slung, built for speed and sinuosity rather than the upright dominance I once took for granted. My wings fold against my flanks, and I can feel the way they want to open, the way the muscles along my spine ache with the potential of flight. But I am not ready for that. I am barely ready for walking.

I take a step. Then another. My claws click against stone and then sink into soft earth as I move toward the edge of the hollow, toward the smell of water and the promise of something beyond this womb of roots and darkness.

The forest beyond is alive in ways I am not prepared for.

The trees move. Not in the way trees move in wind — this is deliberate, considered, a slow rearrangement of branches that might be curiosity or might be threat. Bioluminescent fungi climb their trunks in spiralling patterns of soft blue-green light, pulsing gently, and where the light touches my scales, I feel a warmth that has no temperature, a phantom heat that exists only in the nerve endings and not in the flesh.

The undergrowth is dense and strange. Plants I have no names for press close, their leaves broad and dark and faintly iridescent, some of them opening as I pass, others closing tight, their movements too quick and too coordinated to be merely phototropic. Something with too many legs scuttles across my path and disappears into a crack in the earth, leaving behind a trail of faintly luminous slime.

I follow the scent of water.

My new body moves through the undergrowth with a fluidity that shocks me. Where my human self would have stumbled, tripped, crashed through bracken and bramble, this form slides. The scales part the foliage like fingers combing through hair, and my low profile carries me beneath tangles that would have caught a taller creature. My tail follows the sinuous path of my body as though it has always known how, and the forked tongue tastes the air in rapid flickers, building a three-dimensional map of scent and moisture and life.

The stream, when I find it, is black.

Not dirty-black. Not polluted-black. It is the black of deep space, of obsidian, of the pupil of an eye adjusting to darkness. The water moves over stones that gleam like wet coal, and where the twin moons catch its surface, the reflections are not silver but green and gold, the colours of Vael and Ossyr dancing in the current.

I lower my head to drink and catch my own reflection.

The creature that stares back at me is a thing of nightmares and fairy tales. A serpent's skull elongated and elegant, tapering to a blunt snout. Eyes that are too large, pupils slitted vertically, the irises a molten gold that seems to generate its own light. Dark scales that drink the moonlight and return it as emerald fire. And behind the head, the suggestion of a body that goes on and on — coiled muscle and folded wing and the lazy curve of a tail that could crush stone.

I am beautiful.

I am monstrous.

I am both of these things at once, and the duality of it opens something inside me that I thought had died on the corner of Millbrook and Fourth — a capacity for wonder so vast it leaves no room for grief.

I drink. The water tastes of minerals and moonlight, of deep earth and the particular sweetness of a world that has never known industry. It fills me with a cold clarity that sharpens every sense, and when I lift my head, the forest has changed. Or rather, my perception of it has changed. I can see the threads now — faint lines of light connecting root to stone, stone to water, water to sky. They pulse with a rhythm that mirrors my twin heartbeats, and where they cross, where the lines intersect and tangle, the air hums with a pressure I feel behind my eyes, in the hollow of my throat, in the space between my scales where the skin is thin and tender.

Magic.

The word is insufficient. What I feel is not the theatrical sorcery of fantasy novels, not fireballs and lightning bolts and dramatic incantations. It is something far more intimate — a warmth that begins in the marrow of my bones and radiates outward, a vibration that makes my scales sing. It is the world speaking in a language I am only beginning to hear, and my body — this strange, terrible, beautiful body — is an instrument tuned to its frequency.

I close my eyes and let the warmth build. It gathers in my chest, between my two hearts, a pressure that is almost painful, almost pleasurable, existing in the liminal space between ecstasy and agony. My scales ripple. My wings shudder. The split tips of my tongue taste ozone and copper and the ghost of something that might be starlight, if starlight had a flavour.

When I open my eyes, the dark water of the stream is glowing.

Not the reflection of the moons. Not bioluminescence. The water itself has begun to emit a soft, pulsing light, green-gold, and where it touches the stones, they too begin to glow, and the glow spreads outward in concentric rings like ripples from a dropped stone, until the entire streambed is a river of living light.

I did that.

The knowledge arrives with a certainty that is terrifying in its completeness. I did that, though I do not know how, though I could not replicate it if I tried. The magic moved through me the way electricity moves through copper — I was the conductor, not the source. And yet.

And yet.

The light fades slowly, reluctantly, sinking back into the water and the stone as though it never was. The forest exhales around me, and I could swear — I could swear — that the trees lean closer, that the bioluminescent fungi pulse brighter, that the whole living cathedral of Eranvael holds its breath and whispers: yes.

I spend my first night in Eranvael curled in the hollow of the Thornmother's roots, my wings wrapped around myself like a leathery cocoon, my tail coiled tight against my flank. Sleep does not come easily. Every sound is a revelation — the chittering of creatures in the canopy above, the slow groan of root against stone, the distant mournful call that I heard before, closer now, though still far enough that my body does not bristle with alarm.

I think about dying.

I think about the rain on Millbrook and Fourth, the headlights, the weightlessness. I try to feel grief for the life I lost — the apartment with the leaking tap, the half-finished novel on the laptop, the cat who will wonder where I am — and find that the emotions are there but muted, as though someone has placed a pane of glass between me and the memory. I can see my old life. I cannot touch it.

Instead, I feel the bark against my scales, the slow pulse of the Thornmother's ancient sap-blood, the way the earth beneath me hums with a frequency that resonates in my secondary heart. I feel the air moving across my wings, cooling the thin membrane, and the automatic adjustments my body makes — muscles contracting, scales tightening, the thermoregulatory choreography of a creature designed for survival in a world that is hostile and wild and profoundly, staggeringly alive.

I think: I should be afraid.

I think: I should be screaming, clawing at this skin, demanding my old body back.

But the truth is simpler and stranger than fear. The truth is that I feel, for the first time in a life I can barely remember, like I am exactly where I am supposed to be. As though every wrong turn, every failed relationship, every morning I woke to the grey ceiling of that grey apartment in that grey city was leading here — to this hollow, to this body, to this world that breathes and pulses and hums with a magic that runs through me like blood.

Seravyn.

I whisper the name into the dark and my forked tongue tastes the syllables as they leave me, tasting the particular chemistry of sound and breath and intention. The name does not echo. The Thornmother absorbs it, draws it down into her roots, and I feel — or imagine I feel — the faintest tremor of acknowledgement. As though the tree has heard me. As though the forest has heard me. As though Eranvael itself has heard me and has answered: welcome, monster-born. Welcome, and beware.

I close my eyes.

My twin hearts beat their staggered rhythm.

The moons traverse their foreign arcs above the canopy.

And somewhere in the deep places of the world, something ancient stirs, and waits, and watches.

I sleep.