“Ascension, The Zenith, Gran’Cosmos’ Pinnacle, The Seat of Godhood…thousands of names but they’re all the same in the end aren’t they? A peak. A end to the struggle. Peace.

  We get up, we struggle for resources, we sleep. Repeat that till we die. Is this truly all there is to life?

  I don’t know.

  I can’t know.

  Each second I ponder this is another second where my rivals are cultivating power, creating alliances and gaining advantages over me. We are all drowning men looking for the lifeboat of Zenith. We are all slaves.”

  -A Dissertation of Enslavement

  by Ibithis Alisas, Professor at Redforge Academy

  Unknown amount of time after the Great Slaughter

  Awareness slowly flitted into my body as my consciousness resurfaced. Slowly, my eyes opened, then widened. I was sitting in a vast, fathomless void.

  I tried to push myself up from my prone position when a distinct feeling of wrongness filled my body.

  My hands were too thick, my eyes were at the wrong place, and something was very, very wrong with my face. I looked down.

  Then I regretted that.

  I had disproportionately large, curved claws on large arms covered in brown-grey fur. Between my eyes, a snout pushed out that would be the cause of many why-a-long-face jokes.

  What the- WHATS HAPPENING?!

  Then something appeared in my mind’s eye.

  …

  Keep calm, Balm. You must breathe in, and you must breathe out.

  You know what? Actually fuck that.

  PANIC!!

  I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. I wanted to run around throwing stuff. I wanted to brutally assault something.

  I settled for the fourth option, trying to do everything, getting tripped on this body and falling.

  Small drops of salty water made their way down my fur. Dad. Mom. My friends.

  I put my claws over my head and fell on the ground. I felt blurry. I felt insane. This couldn’t be real. It just couldn’t.

  But something screamed in my brain. This was definitely real. Some hidden part of the message seemed to seep into my brain and told me it wasn’t lying.

  Slowly, I got a hold of myself.

  By the message’s implications, they are in different worlds. I’m fine as long as they're fine.

  I took a deep breath in and out. It was unsteady, but delayed - my emotions bottled up to explode in my face at a later date. Maybe I’d somehow meet them sometime if I followed the instructions in front of me. I’d hope, at the very least.

  …

  I mean, there is one correct answer, and it’s probably the one SCREAMING “Pick me I’m different!”. Seriously, it should have been in neon rainbows and fluffy clouds all over it.

  Clearly, this overpowered one I’m talking about is the wind affinity.

  …

  Nah. Just kidding. Anyway, I’m doing the smart thing and picking the Echo and Knowledge one. One of them literally says that it connects to all causes and effects. Now, I’m not a betting boy, but I’m pretty sure that it’ll eventually give me super-duper overpowered fate abilities or something. And if not, sound and learning abilities on their own would be super-duper overpowered in their own right.

  Instantly, my world erupted into extreme and unyielding pain. Every single neuron in my body screamed as it felt muscles and organs and body parts shift. Rivers of fluids shifter course, and my brain faltered as I felt something being forced into it.

  I wanted to scream, but my body kept twitching and writhing and changing.

  Then slowly, I lost consciousness.