you are god of your own universe

Done :) with :) all :) your :) bitchcraft :) ✨

Did a lil dance for Marcille because I knew EXACTLY which song I wanted to have for her and I'm deep in my Dungeon meshi feels!

so we start off, and it's invasion of the bodysnatchers. a race of aliens that are definitely not yeerks are taking over the Canadian parliament. then, what's this? truck-kun?

the alien wakes up. it's been isekaiid into a fantasy world, and is now in the body of a frail albino prince. and it's up to him (and a troop of plucky heros) to defeat the demon lord!

but along the way, after slaughtering a mass of the demon lord's forces, they take a spider man captive, forcing him to serve as their guide. sparks fly. roses blossom. some weird gay alien/ spider man action commences.

My name is Proctactinium-231, and I hate my body.

Not my true body, of course. Let’s not be silly. Just the one I happen to be enslaving.

Did you know the isotope I’m named after has a half-life of over thirty-two thousand years? It’s the hardiest natural isotope of Protactinium. The body I was born into –or rather, the split fragment of my mother that developed into me after eating eighty-four other fragments (aka my siblings) – anyway, that body has a similar hardiness. It can dehydrate into jerky in the freezing void of space for a hundred years. Tardigrades, the hardiest of Earth’s animals, can’t even make it to five. Shameful.

My personal record is ninety-seven years. I wasn’t conscious for this, except for a vague discomfort. Like when you’re cold, but too deep into sleep to pull up your blanket. Our troop co-ordinator made the executive decision to blast us into space after a failed planetary conquest. The planet’s native inhabitants were really mad at us. I’d thought, once it was clear they’d won, once all our top warriors were burnt and salted, our machines exploded, and our machinations exposed, that they might be kind enough to furnish us with a vessel, so that we might bid farewell and try again someplace else. But no; these people were just horrible. In the deep cold of space, my nightmares centered around the clicking of their mandibles. 

Our troop co-ordinator had said, “Let’s make do with what we have.” And what we had were the remnants of an asteroid mine, in weak orbit, and a hardy little radio box. So, we did what anyone would do: attached the radio to a sizable rock, crawled out of the nostrils and eye sockets of our hosts, attached ourselves to said rock, and blasted off into the cold void with our radio blaring, “Help me, help me, please and thank you.”

One of us had to stay behind, of course, to launch the rock. And to launch every other asteroid he could, to give us a better chance of escaping obliteration vis-à-vis the angry planet below. Thallium-201 chose to stay, an older male who’d never successfully completed growth stage three, and thus would never be a female. Highly shameful, if I’m being honest. Our troop co-ordinator had clutched him by the shoulders and said, tearfully, “You’re a mother to us all, now. You’ve finally become a female.” Which I thought was overdoing it, but Thallium-201 was sniffling and rubbing at his mandibles, so I guess it worked. 

                  My body, back then, was wonderful. Seven feet tall, with eight motility limbs, and four digestive limbs. Pure black, but with a sheen of green-blue iridescence. The Black Death, they called me. Or, at least, that’s what they should’ve called me. I exited that body with proper mournfulness, popping out an eyeball to crawl from the skull cavity. Thallium-201 scooped me up – me, who’d spent the last decade leering down at his five-foot frame! – and pushed me into a drilled hollow in the rock. Several more bodies squished down atop of me, writhing instinctively for warm flesh to inhabit, and then the hole was sealed.

Thallium-201 heated the asteroid first, to remove the air and prompt our hibernation cycle. I grew dozy before the launch, my tendrils already shrivelling. Our ejection into space, I felt only as a distant pressure.

                  Thank the light and stars, the humans found us! After a near-century of travel, in which our troop came nastily close to hibernation death, they sent a satellite to intersect our path. This satellite seized us in a robotic arm, and towed us into the Second International Space Station (SISS) for observation. What a shitty, bulky thing their station was, long and thin, with two projections scaled in panels, like lop-sided wings. The living quarters of SISS hosted three parties of astronauts: the Russians, the Americans, and the Canadians. Unfortunately for us, the Canadians inhabited the section closest to where our asteroid was held. When the warmth of machinery woke us, and we slid from our tomb, into the overhead wiring, and from there, into the sleeping quarters, then the nostrils, it was Canadian bodies we woke up in. Or two of us, anyway. The rest of us, flailing in zero gravity, were seized and shoved into pockets, like uncooperative gerbils (if gerbils were transparent and tentacled).

                  We would’ve greatly preferred the Russians or Americans, but luck being what it was, our domination of the Earth began in Canada. 

                  I’m recounting most of this second-hand as, being a larger and therefore less aerodynamic example of our kind, I proved a touch slower in the plundering of nostrils, and so had to spend our descent to Earth tucked inside an astronaut’s suit, above the section they use to go potty. 

                  Once on firmer ground, the astronauts expired in ways that made autopsy impossible (fireworks accident for one, eaten by grizzly bears for another. The bears turned up their noses at first, so in our second attempt, we slathered the body in kraft peanut butter and miniature marshmallows). 

                  Our new, more carefully chosen bodies were the following: first, a couple minor members of parliament. Then, the head of the liberal party. Then, the head of the conservative party (how’s that for playing both sides!) Following that, the immediate family and bodyguards of the four, to give us a buffer zone in case of behavioural slip-ups. This all transpired smoothly. Pull the candidate into a bathroom stall, hold them steady, pierce their transorbital bone with a sharp implement, pull one of us from a fanny pack, and it’s a done deal. And can I say, it’s so much easier when the seat of intelligence is confined to one organ. One of our great historical failures occurred on a planet where brains are dispersed among the organism’s seven limbs. This mean that a) we could attempt to control one-seventh of the alien, or b) we had to work in tandem with six of our peers which, frankly, proved more of a challenge. 

One brain is easy, in comparison. And the human brain has plenty of free space to attach oneself to – have you ever seen a rat collapse its ribcage to fit beneath a doorway? No? Well, we can do something similar, narrowing our body to a paper-thin sheet to exploit all the wrinkles and crevices. Once we’re attached, the first order of business is to find the short-term memory and disturb it, so that our host rubs the drop of blood from their eye, sits up, blinks a little, and goes about their business. It takes a couple weeks to fully incorporate, figuring out all the fiddly controls, and rerouting pathways through our lodged bodies.

I would’ve been so happy in a bodyguard. My skills include a fearlessness, a certain heroic aptitude, and a love of shooting projectiles that make heads explode. But, in what seemed like a deliberate vetoing of my talents, I was placed in the sixteen-year-old son of the liberal party leader.

And, by light and stars, I really hated my body.

“It’s so. . . limp,” I said over breakfast, allowing my feeble arm to flop, repeatedly, onto the dining room table. Silicon-29 paused, with her croissant halfway to her mouth. I mean, his mouth. Let’s not get confused.

Sexes in the human species follow a bimodal distribution of male and female, roughly equivalent, with a small percentage of subtypes. Though, other species found on Earth follow the more typical pattern of converting to female once they reach a certain size and age. Mostly, you see this in fish. In any case, Silicon-29, inhabiting the head of the liberal party, had the secondary sex characteristics of a human female. In public, I’d have to be careful to gender his body appropriately. 

“Why couldn’t you put me in someone with musculature,” I groaned, my arm dropping limply to the table. “I hate it.”

A siren tore through our dining room, as an ambulance raced by outside. We lived in a suburban pocket of Ottawa, close enough to a major road to suffer these intrusions. That’s not to mention the constant hammering of construction, as our neighbours sought to rectify their homes to properly display their class standing.

Our own home was top notch. We sat at the gleaming wood of a vintage table, with beige carpeted flooring and off-grey walls that signified a lack of any abnormal thought. Family photos hung along the wall, transitioning to black and white the deeper they travelled into our dynasty.

“Eat your eggs.” Silicon-29 tore at the croissant with his teeth, showering flakes onto his plate. “I made them over-easy. Just how you like.”

Just how my body liked. The boy who enjoyed over-easy eggs was now an extension of my tentacles, his nervous system wrapped and riddled with holes. I speared an egg with a fork and groaned in as the yolk burst to spread orange across my plate. Attempting to scrape this up with a fork brought more frustration. “I should’ve been a bodyguard,” I grumbled, between licks at my fork. “With muscles and a gun, like Yttrium-91. You should’ve put him in this pathetic little thing.”

Normally, such pettiness would be uncouth, but Silicon-29 was our troop co-ordinator. We could, and should, bare ourselves to him. Hidden feelings prevented him from utilizing us to our full potential.

Silicon-29 held up a finger. He’d stuffed his cheeks with croissant, robbing himself of the ability to speak. After much chewing and swallowing, he said, “You wanted to be a prince, in the next world.”

Alright, I might’ve said that. In the aftermath of a battle, a group of us had gotten loopy off packets of fermented wolf-beetle excrement (a luxury, in that world). I’d cherished my dark, beautiful body, loved the heft and height of it, and the curve of my tarsal claws, but the lack of patterning across my carapace signalled a lower social caste. And, try as we might, we can’t help but be affected by the brains we encircled. My spotted and striped comrades had laughed together, in a spasming of their mandibles, around a flaming heap of our enemies. And I, along with the other plain-shelled warriors, had hunkered about on the outskirts, refilling beverages.

We’d have abolished the caste system, after conquering the planet (if we hadn’t been rather violently repelled). But even still, I’d done some drunken moaning, with my forelimb draped across Silicon-29’s shoulder. Something that apparently, he remembered.

“Maybe I did say that.” I gave up on collecting yolk with my fork, instead mopping it up with a slice of brioche. “But how am I prince? You haven’t even won the election yet. And besides, leadership of this country doesn’t pass through bloodlines.”

“Tell that to the Trudeaus.”

I looked up from my orange-smeared plate. Silicon-29 had sounded pleased with his remark; indeed, he was humming as he adjusted his dangling pearl earrings. Politics well-suited him. 

Noticing my gaze, he flashed a smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling. He stood delicately (his chair not screeching, like mine always did), and served me a golden-brown triangle of toast from his plate. “Eat up, little prince,” he said, and tussled a wrinkled hand in my hair. “You could be a troop-coordinator, some day. But first, you need to mature in your sensibilities.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I said, feigning avoidance of his touch. It was hard; my body craved it, wanting to be held and cradled by its mother. I twisted in my chair, watching him exit. “Don’t go native!” I called.

He only laughed, waving off my concerns with a hand. It worried me, that he played into our bodies’ relationship. But it also told me something: that he didn’t consider emotional entanglement a problem, because he expected us to be in these bodies long-term.

Alone in the dining room, I analyzed my scrawny forelimbs, clenching and unclenching my fingers. Would I watch them grey and wrinkle? 

“I’d better get a growth spurt, at least," I moaned, rubbing my hair back into place. “Nothing greedy. Just an even six feet.”

In the meantime, I would continue shovelling carbs and protein down my gullet.

Silicon-29’s voice echoed down the hall. “It’s a school day. Don’t be late!”

“Okay, mo–” My teeth clicked shut. There was no need to speak that way, when it was just us. Still, swallowing the word caused a pit in this body’s stomach.

I brought my plate to the kitchen (screeching my chair as I stood) and place it in the sink. Then, I slumped to my bedroom, where I stripped from my plaid pyjamas, in favour of baggy clothing that hung like a rectangle. This was, apparently, the trend.

Into my backpack went my binders, and a loose handful of pens. Outside, a car growled; Silicon-29, pulling out the driveway in his Audi. From the window, I watched it cruise down the street. The back bumper had a sticker figure family; I caught a flash of the small boy meant to represent me, then the car turned a corner, disappearing behind the trees that provided shade for our boulevard.

On my way out, I passed the office where the man in the stick figure family sat before a computer, tapping out his latest academic paper. I didn’t let myself stiffen in his presence. Instead, I gave a cheery wave. “Bye dad! I’m off to school.”

“Hm,” he said, casting me a glance. His glasses glinted in the dark office, giving him eyeshine like an animal. It made me queasy. We didn’t have the numbers to convert him, not yet. But Terbium-149 had recently undergone the transition to female, and was ready to split, once a birthing pool was constructed. 

We’d have him, soon.

Perhaps I stood too long in the doorway. I heard him gulp, and then his chair squeaked as he rolled to face me fully. “Wish me luck,” I said, maintaining my grin. “I have a math test today.”

“Good. . . good luck,” he murmured. A bead of sweat ran down his cheek.

Another polite wave, and then I was off, humming a tune as I sprang out the front door, and hurried down the street. My knapsack thumped companionably against my back.

Lawn clippings and car exhaust flooded my nostrils. Our last world had been environmentally hostile, its occupants living under domes and in orbiting satellites. It refreshed me, to feel unfiltered sunlight on my skin. 

“Good morning, Mr. Sanderson!” I called to a neighbour, who was yanking out dandelions, leaving brown sores in his cropped lawn. He waved a lazy dismissal. Undeterred, I skipped along until the next conversational candidate appeared. “Good morning, Mrs. Chen!”

Her wave came much heartier. “Such a polite young boy!” she said, stashing a newspaper under her arm. “Not like you used to be.”

I only smiled, though her comment had my teeth clenching. We could mimic personality, using the neural tissue we wrapped around, and all its stored memories, but it wasn’t always perfect. I wasn’t always perfect.

With sparrows chirping in the hedges, I couldn’t brood for long. “What a lovely day,” I said, as I waited for the crosswalk light to flicker green, and then started across the intersection. “What a nice and friendly place!”

Something shot up my spine, a shiver of warning bells from the desiccated brain I wrapped. You didn’t look both ways, it whispered. Mom always taught me to look both ways.

I shook my head, though I paused in my crossing. “The light is green. I have a civilian’s right of wa–”

It was dark, and then it wasn’t.

I stood in a square chamber. The floor sparkled with rivulets of light, like reflections cast by water. I looked up. Gold stars shone in the round dome above me, set in radiating circles. At their center, a symbol wavered in my vision. I rubbed at my eyes. A gold cross – no, a set of mandibles – no, a moon and star, a wheel, a wolf-beetle, the dispersing fragments of a mother.

At that last symbol, I yelped and whirled, scanning the image-laden walls. How could they know about that? 

I braved another look at the dome. At its edges, four winged animals swam through the night sky. A bull, an eagle, a human, and a lion. They began to blur and shift, and I tore my eyes away, lest my stomach upend.

There was nowhere safe to look in this chamber, no wall that didn’t swim with mosaics. Each alcove held a tiny window, which issued a rectangular beam of light. The gold and glass mosaics bounced this light from wall to wall, to floor to ceiling, until everything sparkled in a cacophony.

Mosaic deer hunkered in archways, nibbling at vines. No; they were unicorns, pure white with spiral horns. No; mother-eaters, globular, sniping their tentacles at escaping fragments.

“Stop,” I moaned, and clapped hands over my eyes. A tingling started down my spine as I fought the urge to decouple from Axel’s brain. Incredible, that they’d activated my flight response using nothing but coloured tiles. 

Without my vision, all I could do was huff the stale air. The cold and damp of the room lingered on my lips. It tasted like incense. “Hello?” I called, my voice echoing under the dome. This felt like somewhere to be buried. Like a mausoleum, for royalty. “Is anyone here?”

I peeked through my fingers. The mosaics had stabilized. They showed human mythology, now, no more images from home, or past invasions. 

My footsteps reverberated through the chamber. Axel lacked an interest in history, so I couldn’t draw from him what these new images might signify. Monstrous serpents chased rabbits through the false sky above – perhaps this was Norse?  But as I stood before a mosaic man with the abdomen of a spider, I could only rub at my chin. The remnants of Axel’s brain pulsed out nauseous spikes of confusion.

“Hello?”  I called again.

The coloured squares of glass stuck out, slightly, having not been laid flat. Likely, so they could better catch the light. Dragging a teenager’s soft hands across these edges would eventually flay them, so I retracted my fingers, clutching my chest instead. 

I’d been hit by a truck. 

I recalled pain – sick and blinding. I had cried in heaving gulps, each inhalation bringing a swallow of blood-salt. And I’d fought the urge to detach and escape. The hazy form of the truck driver towered overhead, eclipsing the sun. He would see me if I fled. My last, confused recollection was of spitting at the trucker as he knelt by my side, calling him a mother-eater in a language ill-suited to a human tongue. 

My fingers curled into my shirt. “I died,” I said, so quiet that it failed to echo. Axel’s legs had folded over his ears. His organs had spread in a meaty burst across the asphalt. And inside him, I’d lost consciousness, his failing synapses sucking me down with them. “I really died.”

But that was ludicrous. Because I was here, and unharmed.

I circled the mausoleum, again. One alcove held a stone sarcophagus, its roughly hewn walls a contrast to the surrounding finery. An experimental push at the lid produced no results. Obviously; the slab must have equaled a rhinoceros in weight.

On my third circuit of the chamber, something screeched. Hairs rose across my arms. It continued, harsh, like stone on stone. I turned around slowly. “Hello?” 

The immense lid of the sarcophagus was moving. With each grinding inch, it exposed more of the dark interior, leaking an air that stank of spice and resin.

I raised my fists. And immediately dropped them again. What could I be expected to do, with these mid-pubescent twigs? The longing I felt for my previous body pulsed like a cavity. Its razor-edged tarsal claws had shredded my enemies with ease, bring them squirming to my mouthparts where I –

The THUD of the lid slamming into tiled flooring brought me back. The sarcophagus was open. 

Pale fingers surfaced from the dark, curling about the stone rim. A face rose, chin-first.

It was a smooth-shaven chin. Then, a bearded chin. The figure flickered, nauseatingly, just as the mosaics had. I glared around the chamber for the drones that might be responsible for this holographic light show. In my peripheral, the figure morphed from Jesus Christ, to Santa Claus, to the shining All-Beetle of our previous hosts, to, finally, a golden woman. 

Give me a break. Returning to the walls, I tapped along them, feeling for any feedback in sound that might imply a hidden control panel. Simultaneously, my fingertips hunted for divots where a drone might hide and spit projections.

“This can’t be virtual reality,” I said, as I worked. “It’s too. . . real. But, in case it is – and in case I have been mangled by a truck – I would like to request an immediate exit, so that I might assess my physical situation.” I managed to keep my voice level, with some difficulty. The last I remembered, my lungs had been on the outside of my body. And brain death occurs in just four minutes after loss of oxygen! I didn’t want to be attached to a necrotizing organ, its rot seeping into my tentacles, gluing them in place. That was serious! That killed people!

The thing in the sarcophagus did not reply. With a huff, I turned and gave it my attention.

Immediately, the golden woman split her face with a smile. “Welcome, prince.”

“Not a prince. That’s not how Canadian politics works. And I don’t want to hear it about the Trudeaus.”

The creature retained its glacial smile.

Its dialogue had me suspicious. To call me that. . . there were two possibilities. The first: whoever orchestrated this had been present in the aftermath of that battle, when I had draped tarsal claws over the shoulders of Silicon-29 and sobbed into his neck-chitin. The second possibility: they’d overheard our morning breakfast. Admittedly, we hadn’t been all that discreet.

(In fact, my troop-coordinator may have already given the game away by refusing to blow his supposed husband. Silicon-29 didn’t think it tasted good. Which meant his host body had also thought that, and had simply been less of a diva. There’s nothing like sexual frustration to fuel a discontentment, and Mr. Gauthier had since taken to prowling about the house like a hollow-faced ghoul. The sooner we converted him, the better.)

But back to the present. “Who are you?”

“I am the Goddess of the Resurrection,” she said, in a voice that was probably fluting and pleasant.

“Okay,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed. I put on a smile as well, and we smiled at each other for a good few seconds. “What species does the Goddess of the Resurrection belong to?”

“Humanity.”

“Ah.” I felt a driblet of sweat roll into my nostril (where it was promptly inhaled). “Great! That’s mine, too. I’m Axel Gauthier, son of the elected leader of the Canadian liberal party, and oh, you’re glowing.” I had only just noticed. Her radiance refracted across the mosaics, bouncing from tile to tile until the entire alcove simmered in a yellow light. 

This was good. I’d caught her in a slip-up. “I don’t think humans can glow. And they don’t come in that skin-tone, either, excepting in cases of liver failure.”

What an amateur. I rocked on my heels, waiting for her to grope for an excuse. She probably would claim to have liver failure. And radioactivity. Too bad, and too late! 

“As a goddess, my appearance reflects my divinity.” She widened her smile, exposing teeth that shone like yellow pearls.

I continued rocking, though with less pleasure. “But you were fully Santa Claus, before. At least for a second.”

“I was seeking the divine shape that you would find most familiar. The focus of your beliefs.” The woman crawled out of the sarcophagus and sat herself on the marble flooring. Each moment stirred the scent of incense into the stale air, such that I fought down a sneeze. “So.” She steepled her hands and took on a plainer voice. “You don’t seem to have any belief.”

“Belief in what?”

“The gods.”

“Oh yeah, I don’t have that.” I took the opportunity to scan, again, for any possible exit. The rectangular windows were tiny, incapable of issuing even my pathetic, twiggy body, and no doors existed, not even sealed ones. Although. . .

I crossed the mausoleum, my sneakers slapping against the stone. The goddess neglected to move, so I edged past her to peer into the sarcophagus. Disappointment bowed my shoulders. No hidden chamber, only a flat stone bottom.

But I wouldn’t give up that easy. I lifted a leg and hoisted myself onto the edge of the sarcophagus. As I did, the woman turned to stare at me with burning golden eyes. The stink of incense grew overwhelming. “It’s time you believed in gods. You’re speaking to one.”

“I don’t think so.” I dropped into the sarcophagus with a hollow thud. Disappointment, again! It sounded like solid stone. I ran fingers along the edges, feeling for a ridge, but found only roughly hewn rock.

The goddess continued to speak, though the stone between us muffled her. “Your mortal body was crushed by a truck, and your immortal soul was brought here, to the temple of resurrection.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think.” Her face appeared at the edge of the sarcophagus, sudden enough that I flinched, the back of my skull smacking against stone. I wasn’t good at differentiating human faces, but hers had a distinctly leonine set. Something predatory existed in the slanting of her eyes.

It would’ve turned Axel Gauthier to Jello. But I was not Axel Gauthier. “Listen, Mrs. Goddess, I need to be getting back.”

“Stand before me properly.”

“Huh?” 

A sense of queasy whipping through space, and then I was no longer in the sarcophagus. I stood in the center of the mausoleum, where I’d awakened. The stone lid had closed, somehow, and the goddess sat atop it.

I opened my mouth and let out a dribble of bile. 

 “Are you paying attention now?” One of her long, bare legs crossed over the other, and wagged in the air.

“I always was!” But even as I said it, I turned from her to continue my examination of the room.

“Proctactinium-231.”

At the sound of my name – my true name – I froze. It seemed to bounce across the tiled mosaics, much like the light: Proctactinium, protactinium, protactinium. I sputtered. “You can’t. . . you can’t know that!” 

Unlike our conversation over breakfast, our names could not be overheard. They were private, deeply private. Only in chemical transmissions, through the feathery tips our translucent tentacles, could they be communicated, and even then, only to our own kind. They were our first point of contact in a blind, deaf world, where only the faint memories of our spawn-mother gave us a sense of being. As we climbed out of our spawning pool into the dry world of adulthood, our troop-coordinator met us at the edge. Their greeting was the first physical touch that was not the violent consumption of sibling-fragments – and with that brush of tentacles, they bestowed on us a name. 

I stared at the goddess, assessing her now, instead of the chamber. My host body thought it was very interesting that she wasn’t wearing clothes. I wasn’t sure I agreed.

“Ahhhh.” I winked at her, shooting a finger gun. “I see!”

This could only be a member of my kind. Perhaps a pocket of us had survived on that last, ill-fated world, and had completed our conquest. They’d have had a century to advance technologically, while my troop floated uselessly in space. And then what, they’d come back for us? And set up this scenario, to do. . . what exactly? Was this a prank? Or a test, to judge my aptitude?

My disorientation seemed to please the goddess. She uncrossed her legs, and then recrossed them (something that, again, that my host body found interesting). “Now do you believe in divinity?”

Here it was, the test! I stood as tall as my lackluster body allowed, squaring my shoulders, barreling my chest. “I believe,” – and I heard the satisfaction in my own voice –“that sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from divinity to one unfamiliar with it.”

The goddess stopped smiling. Her lips parted, and those yellow-pearl teeth ground together. This lasted perhaps a minute, in which the light surrounding her increased to a blinding brilliance. I blinked spots from my eyes. When I could see again, her smile was back in place. “You, my prince, were chosen to be reborn into the world I govern. There, you will use my divine gift to defeat the demon lord.”

“But I’m really, really not a prince.”

Her smile didn’t falter, but twin gusts exited her nostrils. “Proctactinium-231 is the offspring fragment of Neon-32, a troop-leader comparable in her authority to a feudal Queen of Earth. Axel Gauthier is the son of the soon-to-be Prime Minister of Canada, a leader role replacing the former system of monarchy. You, and this boy you’ve hollowed out, are a pair of princes. Understood?”

“Okay.” I meant to leave it at that, but a bubble of discontent rose in my throat. “It’s only that, prince is a very specific title.”

“You also happened to have died at the exact moment of my summoning ritual. If you’d clung to life a second longer, I would have someone else here.”

“Okay.” 

“I would like to have someone else here.” The goddess of reincarnation exhaled again. She rubbed at her forehead with a golden hand. “Proctactinium-231. Before I grant you life in the next world, I will offer a gift. A single ability will be yours. You need only to name it.”

I paused before answering, and as my thoughts coalesced, the mosaics seemed to sparkle with extra zest. A laugh skittered from my throat like a spider. “It can be anything?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Okay.” A slow smile pulled across my face. “I want a way to summon our fleet. Our FULL fleet.”

The eyes of the goddess had already left me, drifting along the mausoleum walls. Her mouth flattened into a line. “Done,” she said, and twirled a finger.

It felt like I was buried in my own body. Blood rushed through my ears in a thump, thump, thump.

Voices whispered. These came into sharper focus as I shifted, worming into a more comfortable position. I might’ve been back in the asteroid again, for how little I wanted to wake.

“Aughhhh.” I wiped at my clammy cheeks. This was not a casual motion. My arm behaved like a piece of wood, falling to smack me in the eye. “AUGHH!” And my mouth tasted disgusting. Dry and vile, as though I’d withheld a mouthful of vomit and let it cake onto my tongue. 

The voices drew closer. Someone wept, or laughed, hard to say. Water dribbled through my lips. “Oh, fuck yes,” I murmured, and groped for the source, my eyes still glued with sleep. A hand at the back of my head helped me rise, and more water hit my teeth, spilling down my chin. Exhausted, I let my hands fall, and gulped at it, occasionally sputtering as it choked me. Like a baby bird.

So, the truck hadn’t killed me. My meeting with the goddess must have been a fever dream, spat out by panicking neurons.

“Hey,” I rasped, when the cup left my lips. “Give it back.” Footsteps against stone signaled the retreat of my water-bearer. Forcing myself to sit, I rubbed at the filth cementing my eyelids. Each motion punished me, my body screaming to be lowered back onto the slab.

The water-bearer returned. A cold cup clicked against my teeth and I seized it, my fingers curling over theirs. I gulped until my gut spasmed, and then vomited a stream of water and bile, refilling the cup. “Shit,” I coughed. My gorge rose again, and more liquid fountained through my mouth and nostrils. It felt thicker than water, and stank of rot. 

“My prince,” a voice said. Someone pried my fingers off the stem of the chalice. Wanting to glare at them, I cracked open my eyes, issuing an ice-pick of light. 

And then blinked at the room, squinting at the rainbow refractions of light. “Aw. Shit.”

It hadn’t been a dream.

I sat in a church with vaulted ceilings. The altar cloth beneath me cloaked the texture, but not the hardness of the stone slab. Further back, the church dissolved into a blur, as did the people crowding it, but in my immediate vicinity, a stain-glass depiction of the goddess towered above me, casting a rainbow across my skin.

My very pale skin.

I lifted a hand. Even at an arm’s length, my fingers blurred out of focus. Axel Gauthier had olive skin, tanned dark for the summer, and 20/20 vison. His skin was not milk-white, snaked through with blue and green veins. Axel’s fingers were awkward, thick at the knuckles, but they’d had potential for adult strength: for gripping an axe, or impacting a body. But these fingers. . . I wanted to puke as I curled them. They terminated in slim points, like a porcelain doll’s. 

Was I no longer male? I groped at my chest, which felt flat, then my groin, which did not. A hand lowered onto mine, gently guiding it off my crotch. 

That hand belonged to an older man, who smiled with rotting teeth. He hid his baldness beneath a cap of yellow silk, a colour that dominated his robes. “Welcome, prince.”

I inflated my lungs, ready to lecture about Canadian politics – but the air left me in a thin whistle. The people, when not dissolved into a blur by distance, dressed like a museum display. Gowns and cowls for some, tights and tunics for others, all coloured like a flock of parrots. The rainbow light refracting across them did nothing to harmonize this palette. I sighed, and dug with my tentacles to extract knowledge from this new brain.

Except that I didn’t. Nothing happened. 

The priest was speaking again, but I ignored him, pushing his face away with some force. I tried to lift my tentacles, to rearrange their neural connection with this brain.

I tried to lift my tentacles.

I tried to lift my tentacles.

Who was that screaming? The priest wrestled my nails away from my cheeks, his teeth no longer bared in a smile. More dark disgorgement ejected from my mouth, perhaps loosened by my throat’s vibrations. This splattered across his wide, white face. With my throat clear, that high shrieking resumed.

Where were my tentacles?

Distantly, it occurred to me that I ought to breath. But before I could force air into my convulsing body, black spots swallowed the arched ceiling of the church.

They put me in a soft bed.

Likely, it was the best they could offer, though feathers poked through the bedcovers, and everything stunk of lavender. 

Priests came, and servants, and the body’s mother. All of them smelled bad. What use were the bedcurtains draping from the ceiling on ropes, if anyone could push past them to access me at their ease?

The mother covered graying hair in a white cowl. Atop this, she balanced a crown, spiked, and bloody with rubies. To duck through my curtains, she lowered this crown at me like a rutting deer. 

“My boy was always weak,” she whispered, on one of these visits. Her wrinkled hand lowered to stroke at my cheek. If I shut my eyes, I could pretend it was Silicon-29.

The smell of armpits and lavender ruined it. At the second brush of her fingers, I rolled to face away. “So, you put me in an infirm body, with full intent.”

One refreshing aspect of this: no subterfuge required. They’d laid out their dead prince on the altar, praying for the Goddess of Resurrection to use him as a vessel. Very rarely did this work. From the history they spewed at me, I gathered it to be a once-a-century event. These ‘princes from another world’ paid key roles in their warfare – which made their offering of this body absurd! 

I sat up with a huff, crunching feathers, and pushed back my stiff, embroidered covers – and why was everything embroidered! They’d dressed me in a tunic that, to their credit, flowed like water. No complaints about its silkiness. But these weedy white arms made Axel Gauthier look like a titan. Only my occasional squat over a bedpan (into which I released both types of waste materials) convinced me this was the body of man, and not a doll. In contrast to the stinking apes that attended to me, this body didn’t even generate a smell; plunging my nose into my armpit brought only the faint whiff of lavender. 

“I’m going to be sick,” I muttered, after one too many sniffs.

For the remainder of that day, only servants bothered me. I stared at nothing until darkness fell, and my horrible human brain produced horrible human dreams. In my sleep, I sat in the Gauthier dining room. Silicon-29, at the head of the table, stirred his bowl of cornflakes, and gave instructions on how to stage the invasion.

Only, I couldn’t make out his words. Then I realized; he’d morphed into the squat, stripe-shelled noble from our last planet. And no matter how passionately he clacked his mouth-parts and spurted his chemicals, I couldn’t comprehend him. 

“Please,” I said, leaning across my own breakfast. “Just tell me what to do!”

But he never did. I woke with water leaking from both eyes.

After a flavourless breakfast of spoon-fed broth, the priest I’d vomited on had the bright idea to bring a mirror. He swept back my bed curtains, issuing sunlight. After tying up the curtains, and ignoring how I hissed and covered my eyes, he trotted over to offer a hand mirror, gesturing and smiling. I matched his wordlessness, and snatched it. 

Peering in the fogged, convex glass, I tilted my chin this way and that. “It’s like looking into the back of a spoon.”

The face that twisted about in mimicry of mine had strange eyes. Hopping from the bed, I ignored the priest’s huff of surprise, and moved to the grated window. Under a diamond-patterned wash of light, I continued my examination. The eyes were a dove-grey brimmed in red. White eyelashes overhung them. The eyebrows looked nearly transparent, while the hair floated in white waves, nearly too bright look at. This face wasn’t as young as I’d feared, but adulthood had failed to broaden its jaw, or texture its skin. 

I tapped at glass as though I could change the image. “He looks like a pretty little flower.”

“Yes!” the priest agreed – a touch too heartily. A glance back confirmed that he was showing off those rotten teeth again.

“It’s just awful.”

“Ye–” He caught himself mid nod. Evidently, he’d expected something different. “Prince Edelgard’s beauty was a source of pride for our kingdom.”

“I’m assuming his eyesight was not a source of pride. Or his physical feats. Or. . . oh never mind.” Suddenly annoyed by the mirror in my hands, I thrust it at the priest. As he took it, his papery fingers brushed mine, and I suppressed a hiss.

I didn’t want him here. 

What would Silicon-29 say? Something stern but warm, about how I’d wanted to be prince, and besides which, I couldn’t expect to be a 9-foot death machine on every plant. 

No. I couldn’t be anything else, ever again.

Breath, Protactinium. Deep breaths, now. Panic tingled down my spine, but I kept my gasping to a minimum. 

To grow, and consume, and spread. That was our life. But now, they’d locked me into a body that could only decay.

“Did he at least have anything for his eyes?” I asked the priest.

“Pardon?”

“His eyes! He’s lacking melanin.”

The priest’s mouth wormed around, before settling on the same word: “Pardon?”

“Albinism! It’s a congenital disorder. Where are my eyeglasses? Oh.” My gaze fell to the mirror in his hand. “What am I saying. You can’t even make reflective glass properly. And here I am, thinking you’re able to correct astigmatism.” I ended with a laugh that the priest could join in on, if he wanted. He declined to.

The priest left shortly after – to my relief, as he still carried the acid whiff of vomit. Daily bathing, it seemed, was not the norm.

Alone, I paced the small room. I tried to sit on a garishly painted chest, but leapt up as it creaked. Opposite me, a tapestry dominated a wall, overwhelming with its reds and greens. I half-expected it to shift like the mosaics as I stepped closer, but it remained static. A set of armoured knights charged on stallions. Quasi-men met them with bared teeth, all sporting sections of a human body. Some had serpent tails instead of legs, while others sprouted horns above twisted features. The figure that most caught my attention reared near the back, flaring eight chitinous legs, and holding a spear to be thrown. He was half man, and half spider. I ran a hand along the threads, tracing his corded arms, and shiny black abdomen. What a vastly superior body!

“Am I interrupting something?”

“Ahh!” I spun to see a woman in the room. Instinctively, I reached for memories to identify her, directing tentacles I no longer possessed. 

The lack of any response sickened me.

She stepped closer, and I realized why I hadn’t heard her enter. Her movements were soundless, with a warrior’s discipline of form. “You really don’t know me. Do you?”

She peered through hooded eyes that turned up at the corners, like a cat’s. Axel would’ve buckled his knees, felled by the pout of her lips, and the cling of her red gown, but my body had the good sense to remain unaffected.

Scooting past, I crawled back into my bed and deposited myself on the pillows. “The Goddess of the Resurrection didn’t see fit to provide me with his memories.” I then pulled up my blanket and waited for her to leave.

Stone screeched as she dragged a chair to my bedside. Absurdly, a finger poked at my back. “We’re on day two of you lying here, being spoon fed. Aren’t you embarrassed?”

“No.”

I heard a deep inhalation. “Edelgard–” 

“Not my name. I’m not pretending to be him, yes? My name is Proc –” I choked. Despite it no longer mattering, old instincts caught me about the throat. 

“Prock?” She frowned. “That’s hardly a suitable name. You really won’t go by Edelgard?” My silence served as her answer. “Then why not something sensible, like Proculo?”

That seemed an easy out. “Sure.”

“Alright. Prince Proculo.” She smiled with such a shyness that I found myself smiling back. Perhaps it was lucky of me, to have already found an ally.

“You’re right. I need to get up.” I threw back the covers, bouncing off the bed. “I suppose I’ll need to leave this room eventually. Show me around?” 

There wasn’t much purpose to a tour, or to my life in general, but my muscles twitched in need of motion.

The woman gasped so loudly that I glanced at her in alarm. She had hands clasped beneath her chin, and moist eyes. “I’d be so happy to. Yes.”

Squinting, I memorized this expression, so that I could pair it with ‘happiness’ in the future. Her red-gold hair made for near-translucent eyebrows, but otherwise, she twisted all the muscles of her face in blessedly readable dramatics. 

At the door, I hesitated. “Sleep clothes are no different from day clothes. Yes?”

The woman scrunched her brow. Having risen, she now towered over me. “Sleep clothes?”

No wonder everyone smelled. “Never mind.” Still, I stood at the doorway. In this room, my poor vision could easily be overcome. Outside, in the world of blurs and shadows, I’d be helpless.

“I’ll lead the way,” said the woman, brushing past me. Her breast grazed my shoulder – something that seemed deliberate. “Since I’m the guide, and all.” 

My flood of relief almost shamed me. Indecision had knotted my shoulders, the frantic need to plot, but to what end! Now, everything loosened. I could simply follow her.

Our footsteps clapped against the stone. Torches flickered along the walls, but did little to displace the cold dampness. “My name is Florine,” she said, after a time. “Since you didn’t ask.”

I nodded. What I didn’t say was, if you were one of us, I’d call you Flourine-19.  

Blurred figures appeared in the hall ahead of us. They ducked against the wall, bowing their heads. Servants, most like. I suppressed a chummy nod; that had been my life, before Axel Gauthier.

Florine took no note of them, though she raised her chin as we passed. “So, Prince Proculo. Tell me about yourself. Who is this, speaking from the mouth of my Edelgard?”

“Ahh. . . I was a warrior. Much larger than this. I fought in many battles.”

“Oh?” She half-turned to me. “A burly warrior? Did you win?”

“No. I mean, yes, in the early battles. But our numbers were too small when they discovered us. We couldn’t do anything against their full force.

“I’m sorry.” Her hand crept up my bicep, and I fought the urge to jerk away. “Really, that’s us with the demon lord’s army. They invade our land and breed like rats. It’s filthy.”

“Hhmm,” I grunted. Her fingers kneaded back and forth, twisting at my shirt sleeve. For the sake of maintaining this fresh alliance, I ignored it. “They really were hostile to us. Even after we lost – we very reasonably asked for ships to leave on, and food to support our bodies, and you know what they did? Thy ripped out our messenger, and strung him up like a hunting trophy! Just. . . completely unnecessary! After that, we –”

“You make his voice so nasal. Speak slower, and more carefully.” Florine’s grip on my arm tightened as she led me through branches of the hall. Hazy tapestries passed on either side.

“Ah.” My head still buzzed with old outrage. It was good that she’d interrupted; I was sharing too much. “But if I’m not pretending to be Edelgard, then why speak like him?”

“If you go around jabbering like a child, you’ll taint his legacy.” More twisting fingers. Our next turn took us into a tight set of spiral stairs. We separated to ascend in single file. As we did, she called down to me. “I don’t want people to change how they remember him.”

“His legacy keeps him immortal.” I nodded in understanding. “I don’t care about that, though.”

Florine looked back at me with such sharpness that I froze. We remained like that a moment, before she returned to mounting the steps, her pointed shoes tapping a furious beat. 

Damage had been caused. But before I could repair it, the clomp of an approaching man halted us. “My lady, forgive me,” he said in a gruff tone. Then with more surprise: “My prince.”

Florine’s answer was sharp. “May we pass?”

With murmured contrition, he pressed himself to the wall. Florine hardly bothered to twist, despite how her shoulders side-swept him. I stepped through next, and. . . oh! In the tight stairwell, the guard’s broad chest pressed briefly against mine. I inhaled something low and musky, my eyes passing over a bristling chin, and then I was past, the arteries in my neck skittering with my heart.

Realization hit like a stone between my eyes. The contrast in how this body reacted to Florine, versus the guard. . .

“Useless body. Doesn’t even want to produce offspring.” My low mutter drew a look from Florine.

Of course, those who didn’t reproduce still had their use. Thallium-201 had proved that, when he launched our asteroid. But horror underlaid that thought. If I couldn’t defeat a peer in a mating brawl and metamorphize into a female. . . if I couldn’t split into hundreds of fragments, each carrying a portion of my memories and ensuring my immortality. . . then what, I would just live, and die, and be gone?

The fear bubbling down my spine made me want to sit down and weep.

“We’re here,” Florine said.

A cold wind blew the tears from my eyes. Florine grabbed my hand, pulling me through a stone aperture, into the open air of the battlements, where I blinked at the empty expanse of blue. 

She didn’t relinquish me. “Come on.” Florine laughed as she tugged me to the edge. The rough cobblestones threatened to trip me, and I bared my teeth in concentration. “This is the most important stop in your tour. Look at all this.” With a sweep of her red sleeve, she gestured at the hazy mush of green and brown. “Your kingdom.”

“I. . . see it.” Even to my ears, I sounded unconvincing. The wind carried the stink of human and animal waste, though, so I could assume that a population lay beneath.

Florine sighed and leaned over the parapet, her slender chin propped in her hands. “I have so many memories here. With Edelgard. We were, well. . .” She laughed and moved from the wall, once again invading my space. “We were lovers,” she breathed.

I was only half listening. By narrowing my eyes and compressing the lens of my cornea, I could somewhat sharpen the landscape. “I don’t think that’s true. This body prefers men.”

Florine slapped me hard across the face. At first, I didn’t understand what happened, only that my head was now facing a new direction. “What –” I said, and then her hands bunched in my tunic, shoving me toward the parapet. The stone hit my back, then I was lifted up, and over. 

Here she held me, balanced on a precipice. “He loved me.” The shaking of her hands translated into an unsteady grip. “He made love to me. I will not have your filthy words tarnish his legacy.”

I began to tilt backward. 

“Stop!” The breeze brushed through my hair, and I shivered at the nothingness beneath me. “It was a joke! This body loves women, loves them!”

Another shove left me teetering, with only my legs keeping me from death. “I meant, it loves you, specifically! That’s what I meant to say!”

“You mean it?”

I found myself yanked back by the legs. My tailbone struck the stone walkway and I yelped, scuttling until my back hit a wall.

“Do you mean it. . . that your body still loves me? That. . . you’ll honour our betrothal?” Her eyes glinted as she leaned over me. I’d had enemy mandibles poised above me with a similar shine. 

I hadn’t said all that, but still I nodded. “Sure! Because, we, ah. . . . must respect his body! And you know it better than I! Correct?” There was a pause where she did nothing but bulge her eyes at me, so I added: “If that’s not correct, I can say something else.”

“It’s correct.”

“Okay,” I said, sinking back into the stones. 

“Even if you’re not him. . . I want to protect what’s left of him.”

“Right.”

“Then, I should announce our betrothal?”

“Ah,” I said. “Sure!”

She threw her body on top of mine and I squawked, finding myself unable to scramble away. I tensed for violence, but she only wrapped arms around my shoulders and compressed me. Rather than biting, she nuzzled her mouth into the crook of my neck. It left a wetness that could’ve been tears or saliva. “Edel. I’m so happy. So happy. Aren’t you happy?”

“So happy,” I cried. “Why, If I had a plasma rifle, I’d discharge it right between your eyes!”

She pulled back to blink at me wetly. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Florine’s guided tour had evidently consisted of a single stop, as she led me back to my room afterward, clinging to my arm and hopping with glee. Most of her talk related to preparations to come: the celebratory feast, which minstrels her mother might hire, who should and should not be invited, the number of children she wished to bear, and so on. I nodded, with the plastered smile I’d worn often as Axel Gauthier. When she released me into my room I stumbled, overcome by dizziness.

Once I was sure she’d left, I fell into a chair, its seat stiff with embroidered flowers, and stared into the flame of a beeswax candle. “What a horrible, nasty world. What a stupid world.” 

I moved my eyes to the tapestry, hoping to soothe myself with the spider-taur’s chitin – but at this distance, it remained an unfocused smear. “AUGHHH!” I smacked the candle to the ground, where it rolled, sputtering out. “Just – excellent! Nonfunctional eyes, on top of it all! Nonfunctional eyes, forever! You stupid, horrible goddess. You couldn’t at least give me glasses?” 

A clatter broke me from my ranting. On the chest, atop drips of dried candlewax, something silver glinted. 

My hand shook as I reached for it. Its shape clarified into spectacles, silver-framed, with round lenses. I slid them on, and the room sharpened into diamond precision. 

“Oh!” I jumped to my feet, rushing to the window. With my fingers curled into the grate, I laughed and laughed. Three rings of palisade walls swept across the valley, the closest enclosing a bustling city beneath the castle. I could see the tiny dots of men on horses, and peddlers with carts. Breathless, I fed on it all, tracking the tiny forms of children at play, and the swoop of a hawk beneath clouds.

Already been there~

Life After Life and Fuzzie sticker sheet available in my store now!

Horse breed of the day: Exmoor

Height: 11-12 hh

Common coat colors: Seal bay, dun and bay

can i blow ur mind real quick?

top left to bottom right

1) peacock appaloosa

2) reverse brindle

3) tetrarch

4) pintaloosa

5) silver dapple

Image source — Photo by Anna Babenko

Lacing is sometimes called reverse dapple, giraffe pattern, cobweb, or catbacked.

Another cool coat is chimera, I'm sure all of us are familiar with Stetson's Mr Blue; his photos have been going around the internet for years!

And so I grew from colt to stallion, as wild and as reckless as thunder over the land. Racing with the eagle, soaring with the wind. Flying? There were times I believed I could.