Mira's POV
I run like death itself is chasing me.
Maybe it is.
My legs pump through the alien forest, jumping over roots as thick as my body. The trees here are HUGE—so tall I can't see their tops. Their bark glows faintly blue in the weird purple twilight. Everything about this place screams WRONG.
Behind me, something crashes through the forest. Trees snap like toothpicks. The ground shakes with each step of whatever's hunting me.
My nursing scrubs—the stupid pink ones I wore to my volunteer shift this morning (was it this morning? A lifetime ago?)—catch on thorns. The fabric tears. My arms get scratched up but I don't stop. Can't stop.
Because that ROAR comes again, closer now, and my whole body recognizes predator even if my brain doesn't understand what kind.
My lungs burn. My legs scream. Back on Earth, I could barely run a mile without wheezing. Here, I feel lighter—like gravity isn't pulling as hard—but I'm also weaker somehow. Like my muscles turned to jelly.
I risk a glance back.
BIG MISTAKE.
A massive shape barrels between the trees. It's too dark to see clearly, but I catch glimpses: huge, covered in dark fur or scales, eyes that reflect light like a cat's but BIGGER. So much bigger.
I face forward and push harder, my heart hammering against my ribs.
There! Up ahead—the trees thin out. Maybe I can—
My foot catches on a root.
I go down HARD, skidding across moss and dirt. My chin smacks the ground and I bite my tongue. Blood fills my mouth.
The crashing behind me stops.
Everything goes silent.
I freeze, face-down in the dirt, too terrified to breathe. Maybe if I don't move, it won't see me. Maybe it's like a T-Rex and only sees movement. Maybe—
Hot breath on the back of my neck.
Oh god oh god oh god.
I feel it sniffing me. Hear the wet sound of its nose working. It smells like earth and meat and something wild. Its breathing is so loud, each exhale ruffling my hair.
This is it. I survived Marcus drowning me just to get eaten by an alien monster. The universe has a sick sense of humor.
The creature huffs once more, then... backs away?
I don't move. Don't even blink. Just lie there, tasting blood and dirt, waiting for teeth to sink into my spine.
Instead, I hear it leaving. The crashing gets quieter. Farther away.
It's... leaving?
I wait thirty more seconds, counting each heartbeat. Then slowly, so slowly, I push up to my hands and knees.
The forest is empty. Whatever hunted me is gone.
"What the hell?" I whisper.
My voice sounds too loud in the silence. Also wrong—like the air here carries sound differently.
I sit back on my heels, shaking all over. Adrenaline dumps out of my system, leaving me weak and dizzy. I touch my tongue where I bit it. It's already stopped bleeding.
Wait. Already?
I just bit clean through it. That should bleed for minutes. But when I run my tongue over the spot, it's... healed? No. Not completely healed, but healing way faster than normal.
My left arm tingles.
I look down and gasp. The golden marks from before—the ones that burned into my skin when I first woke up—are glowing softly. Pulsing in rhythm with my heartbeat. They're beautiful and terrifying, swirling from my palm up to my shoulder in patterns that look almost like words in a language I don't know.
I touch them carefully. They feel warm but don't hurt anymore. When my right hand brushes the marks, golden light sparks between my fingers.
"Okay," I say out loud, because hearing my own voice makes me feel less alone. "Okay. So. I drowned. Then I woke up in an alien forest with magic tattoos and something tried to eat me but changed its mind. This is fine. This is totally fine. I'm just having a mental breakdown in Marcus's bathroom and none of this is real."
But it feels real. The scratches on my arms feel real. The two moons rising higher in the purple sky feel real. The strange humming I now notice—like the whole forest is singing at a frequency just below hearing—feels REAL.
I'm not crazy. I'm somewhere else. Somewhere impossible.
I need to think. Make a plan. I'm good at plans—that's how I was going to escape Marcus. I had it all figured out: bus ticket, new city, aunt's address, enough saved money to start over.
Instead, I got murdered and reincarnated into a fantasy world.
"Focus, Mira," I tell myself. "You're a nurse. Well, almost a nurse. You've dealt with emergencies. Treat this like triage. What do you need right now?"
Safety. Shelter. Water. Food.
And information. I need to know WHERE I am and HOW to get home.
If there even is a way home.
That thought makes my chest tight. What if I'm stuck here forever? What if—
A sound stops my spiral. Not a roar this time. Voices.
Human voices? No—they sound human-ish but different. Deeper. Speaking a language I don't recognize but somehow almost understand, like my brain is trying to translate on its own.
I creep toward the sound, using the massive trees for cover. The voices get louder. Angrier. Like they're arguing.
I peek around a tree trunk and my jaw drops.
The forest opens into a huge clearing. And in that clearing, dozens of creatures are fighting.
Except they're not creatures. They're... people? Sort of?
They walk on two legs and have human-ish shapes, but they're MASSIVE—seven, eight feet tall. Some have wolf heads with fur and fangs. Others have scales and lizard-like features. They're wearing simple leather clothes and carrying weapons made of bone and stone.
And they're tearing each other apart.
Blood sprays as a wolf-man slashes his claws across a lizard-man's chest. The lizard-man hisses and stabs back with a spear. Others circle and fight in brutal, savage combat.
This is tribal warfare. Primitive but deadly.
I should back away. Hide. Run in the opposite direction.
But I can't move. I'm frozen, watching these impossible creatures kill each other.
Then one of the wolf-men turns his head.
His eyes lock onto mine.
Time stops.
He's huge, even for them. White fur covers his muscular body. His face is half-wolf, half-human, with piercing blue eyes that don't look animal at all. They look intelligent. Aware. And right now, they're staring straight at me with an expression I can't read.
His nostrils flare. He's smelling me from fifty feet away.
Then he roars—not like the creature that hunted me, but like a command—and every fighter in the clearing stops.
They all turn toward me.
Dozens of wolf-men, lizard-men, and other creatures I can't even name, all staring at the tiny human girl hiding in the trees.
The white wolf-man's lips pull back, showing fangs as long as my fingers.
He takes a step toward me.
Then another.
The other creatures begin moving too, circling toward my position from different angles. Herding me like prey.
My paralysis breaks. I spin and run.
But I only make it three steps before something massive slams into me from the side, tackling me to the ground.
I scream and thrash, but whatever has me is impossibly strong. It flips me onto my back and pins my wrists above my head.
The white wolf-man looms over me, his face inches from mine. Up close, he's even more terrifying. All muscle and fangs and wild blue eyes.
He leans down and inhales deeply, smelling my hair, my neck, my fear.
Then he speaks in that almost-understandable language: "What are you?"
And my golden marks explode with light.