I'm the Chimera (A big, floofy mistake that melts hearts with a look)

When it awoke, the great beast, with the build of a lion, the horns of a goat, and the whipping tail of a snake, smashed through its stone cage and rampaged in the forest.

It was pure instinct, driven by hunger, and it went and ate where it pleased.

As time went on, however, the needs of the body began to overcome its strengths. All the livestock and wild fauna it found did not sate its great appetite, and slowly it began to grow sluggish.

The Malevolence did some help keeping it going, but eventually enough was consumed that the great beast began to shrink.

The more it shrank, the more something foreign, something inserted, began to take hold. It echoed the template of a syhee that predated what form the flesh took on now, and so, it began to shift in ways that would closest mimic it.

The Chimera groaned with a woman's confused voice, and walked upright. The meat and fur folded away for later use, and the horns hollowed out and snapped off, leaving two smaller alternatives on the skull.

This creature could only stare at her strange new extremities, this alien form, and shout aloud to no one at all–

“What the hell is going on?!”

Before she collapsed face-first into the dirt, a wave of fatigue crushing all resistance, and lay still.

In the darkness, it wasn't quite dreaming, which was why she knew the voices coming her way weren't from her own head.

(Jane? We're sorry, but we need your help.)

The consciousness of Jane stirred, and asked, “Who are you, and why should I?”

(We are Spirits of another world. Your soul is currently in this world, in a new body.)

“Send me back.”

There was an uncertain silence on the other side that made Jane begin to fear. “Send me back, now,” she repeated.

(We cannot. A soul is loosened and moves when the physical body dies. Your body back there died.)

“What? What the hell? I died? How?”

(It seems another killed the body for its possessions.)

If Jane had the ability to laugh, she would have, incredulously. “I teach yoga out of a studio apartment! What the hell would I be mugged over? This is a joke, I know it. Wake me up.”

(We will, soon. When you do, we will try to help you how we can. You've woken alone and without time to understand. So we will try to help you learn. Your new body is naturally attuned to hear Spirits like us. Just understand that we're sorry to put you in this position, but our options were limited. That is why we will be by your side.)

That half-remembered promise drifted from her mind as she slowly reawakened. With a few bleary blinks, the Chimera holding Jane’s mind found herself in the dark.

“Where the heck am I…” Jane groaned, trying to peer through the dark. Surprisingly, she found her eyes adjusting near immediately, allowing the details of the pitch black room to come clearly through. It reminded her a bit of a cat’s night vision … which should have been impossible, except–

Yes… The dream that said she died. That was a bit too silly to believe, but it was true that her days until now were spent teaching others in a studio how to contort themselves for general wellness, and, well…

There was no explanation for why she was in a room in the dark. Looking down at herself, Jane saw she was dressed rather shabbily. Not even “off-the-shelf” – she had pants but no shoes, and a long cloak that settled against her bare back in a fashion that seemed to imply there was nothing else that sufficed for covering her. Nonetheless, looking at one arm that poked through the split in the outfit, she saw how her fingers seemed to taper off into claws that flexed slightly. When she stood, she felt an unusual weight hanging from the small of her back, with an errant thought bringing around a scaly tail to whip into view.

This was not her body. Or at least, this was not her old body, regardless of how easily it moved with her intent. It was absurd to imagine something like “Spirits” being a valid explanation, and yet…

Cutting off her pondering was the opening of a door in the back of the room, admitting a bedraggled man who looked like he and his clothes had seen better days. However, the torchlight he offered was a welcome change to the room, though Jane had to squeeze her eyes shut for a second to block out the sudden intensity. The man’s voice echoed in the confined space, aged and halting.

“Y-you’re awake? Oh… uh… you’re not corrupted, are you?”

Jane wasn’t sure how to even begin responding to a question like that, and simply returned an unamused stare. “Is this really the way you think I’ll start liking you?”

“Oh, no-no-no!” The man babbled, raising his hands imploringly and defensively. “We’ve never seen a syhee with so many features before! We just want to be sure… we don’t have much left, but we took a gamble when we found you. It just wasn’t right to leave you there, but you look dangerous…”

Her? Dangerous? Jane wasn’t sure, claws aside. She was still facing the full brunt of the whiplash of waking up entirely elsewhere, but at the very least, she had eyes and ears. If nothing else, the apologetic, almost frightened way he spoke sounded authentic to her – if only because the pricking of the strangely altered appendages atop her head was insisting that it was fear worth pouncing on, literally.

She gave him a second, proper look. If nothing else, his clothes seemed to be threadbare enough to give a sense of desperation to his plea. A man, or perhaps more, who seemed to be short of everything, and still choosing to protect another who was unconscious…

It seemed worth meeting halfway.

“I might be,” Jane finally admitted. “But I’m not going to bite your head off or anything. Just – where the hell am I?”

The man, who addressed himself as Velstrik, and to whom Jane self-introduced in turn, offered a lot of words that Jane wasn’t sure how to parse.

They were somewhere in the depths of a place called Forness Heart, which had experienced an extremely exaggerated version of history, as far as the horned woman could tell. It was not the first grand civilization to settle on the land, and when it went the way all cities did, the next round of clueless or ambitious settlers only saw sunken land and built over the ruins, ad nauseam.

This was the explanation for what was apparently nothing less than a man-made ravine made out of two halves of collapsed civilizations, and bridged over by various arcades and aqueducts from times past. Collapsed buildings sat atop each other in ways that reminded Jane of Asian cities whose skyscrapers were packed so tight that one could spend all day traveling via overpasses and basement connections.

Jane could make out the shadows of figures as they huddled around fires or moved between the sides of the chasm, and it was no small number.

“It’s the city under the city people tend to forget,” Velstrik said through weak laughter. “Just like we’re the leftovers no one else noticed after the war ended. Perhaps…you might be like us..”

It was a lot to take in, all the subtle references and terms Jane needed time to understand, though as she felt the weight of the monstrous protrusions on her body, she was getting a sense of Velstrik’s warning. Beyond even this, the disembodied house guest in her skull echoed once again.

(We sense your confusion. But that’s why we will help.)

“I’m leftovers, huh…” Jane murmured, distracted for a moment, before looking at her current guides. “Well, I'd better get a full explanation right now as to why I’ve become one.”