I died too fast to understand anything at all. One moment I was walking, thinking about nothing important, and the next there was a blast of light, a violent shove from the world itself, and then a drop into cold, swallowing darkness. No pain, no struggle, just the sense that everything I was had been cut loose and scattered.
I didn't expect to wake up.
I definitely didn't expect to wake up underwater.
Warm pressure wrapped around me, heavy and steady, the way the sea holds something that belongs to it. My eyes opened into a world of drifting silt and greenish light rippling down from above. For a moment, I thought I was dreaming, but then the water moved through my lungs calmly, as if my body had done this a thousand times before, and the illusion shattered.
I wasn't drowning.
I wasn't even close.
I tried to lift my hand, and something else rose instead. A limb thick as a tree trunk pushed through the water, scales overlapping in dark, rugged patterns, each ridge catching the faint sunlight like stone. I froze, waiting for the hallucination to fade, but the limb stayed there, part of me, heavy and ancient and wrong.
A cold awareness crept up my spine—longer now, broader, nothing like the one I'd always known. I moved again, slower this time, and the entire world shifted around a body far larger than anything I had ever lived in. The water hugged my sides, clinging around a shape that didn't match the memory of my old form in any way.
My head broke the surface on instinct. Sunlight hit me like a knife, blinding at first, then softening as my eyes adjusted. I felt the air tremble around the top of my skull, felt the rumble of a growl escape my throat without my permission, a low vibrating sound that rolled across the bay like a warning.
The coastline stretched ahead, unfamiliar and untouched, dense with green and shadows. Nothing looked modern, nothing looked like home, nothing looked like anywhere I recognized. The salt-heavy air rushed across my snout, carrying scents layered in ways I couldn't explain, each one sharp and vivid, each one telling a story I somehow understood.
The hunger hit me next. Not small, not human, but deep, demanding, primal. My body wanted flesh. It wanted to hunt. And somewhere beneath that instinct was a quieter whisper, not words, not a voice, more like a rule etched into bone.
Feed, grow, survive.
I slipped beneath the water again, moving without thought, my body cutting through the murk with terrifying ease. Every shift in the currents spoke to me, every ripple mapping the world around me. Far ahead, close to the shore, something moved — heavy, quick, careless.
I drifted toward it, driven more by instinct than reason, and the water shallowed until my back scraped the surface. When I rose again, I found myself staring at a creature on the muddy bank, thick-bodied, tusked, rooting through the ground with slow grunts. A boar, larger than any I'd ever seen, but so small compared to the mass of my new body.
It didn't hear me.
The hunger sharpened into something vicious.
I slid closer, letting the tide of instinct cover every remaining shred of hesitation. The boar lifted its head, sensing something too late, and then the water erupted around me as my jaws snapped shut around it. Bone cracked like dry branches, the sound swallowed by the roar of my movement. The world turned into the taste of flesh and the rush of victory that wasn't mine alone.
When I tore the boar from the shore and dragged it under, something inside me shifted. The flesh melted down into something more than nourishment. Power rushed through my limbs, subtle but undeniable, like a flame being fed its first piece of fuel.
I felt myself grow. Not in size, but in certainty. As if the world had acknowledged what I truly was.
The last bubbles from the drowned boar drifted upward, vanishing into the fading light above, and that quiet message echoed again in the depths of my mind, sharper now, clearer.
With every kill, I grow stronger.