... Her old world was gone. The museum, the cramped apartment, the streets that smelled of pollution and rat piss—all ashes. There was no more Earth for her. The truth was, she felt little pull to it. No grief for a life lost. The connections that should have anchored her—family, friends—had long since been severed. Her existence there had been a long, slow process of detachment. She had been a ghost long before the police bullets made it official.
And now she was in a new world, in a body that felt no pain, with a mind that was finally, blessedly quiet. She had no mission, no understanding of what she was supposed to be, and certainly no desire to pick up Virgil's mantle.
The questions of 'how' and 'why' were vast knots she currently lacked the energy or care to truly answer.
A deep, primal urge rose to the surface, eclipsing all else. It was a desire so simple, so pure, it felt like the only true thing in this new reality.
She was tired. Not in her body, which hummed with silent vitality, and not in her mind, which was clearer than it had ever been. It was her soul that was weary. She wanted to sleep.
The opposite of the fraught, restrained unconsciousness of her former life, haunted by blood rituals and the disdain of living as a tyrant. True, deep, untroubled sleep. The kind she hadn't known since she was a child. She hasn't had a good night's sleep in ages.
A sigh escaped her, a soft sound lost in the vast, serene landscape. The lingering questions of her transmigration could wait. The answers could wait. The potential of the power sleeping within her should just age itself into non-existence.
She closed her eyes, the faint, galactic light of the river and the gentle glow of the living organisms painting the backdrop.
"Fuck it," she whispered to the uncaring stars. And for the first time in over two decades, Serena fell into a sleep that was simply her own. There was no struggle at the border of consciousness, only a gentle yielding. The scent of alien pollen and cool grass melted away, replaced by a familiar, sun-warmed dryness.
———
A weight settled on her legs, a warm, grounding pressure. She looked down. Curled in a perfect circle of fuzzy fur was the old tabby, Jujube. His belly rose and fell in a steady rhythm, a silent engine of contentment. A bar of afternoon light, thick with dancing dust motes, fell across the worn brown of the couch and over them both. She could feel the sun's warmth through her pajamas.
She was home. The living room in Queens, with its low murmur of the television—a constant, background hum to her childhood. On the coffee table sat a small plate, holding only the crumbling ghost of a cheesecake slice, its richness still a memory on her tongue. Her hands, small and smooth, rested on the cat's flank. This was it. A perfect, unclaimed afternoon. The world was quiet, and it asked nothing of her.
This was the shape of her life then. A comfortable solitude punctuated by the distant, reliable rhythm of her parents' comings and goings. Their presence was a fact, like the furniture; they provided the structure of her world, but the space within it was hers alone to fill. And she filled it quietly—with books, with pictures of outfits from magazines, with the simple, warm company of a lazy cat.
The dream shifted. She was standing in a brightly lit classroom, the walls plastered with colourful posters of the solar system and cursive alphabets. The air smelled of chalk and old wood. Her teacher, Mrs. Bright, was placing a piece of paper on her desk, her voice a pleased murmur meant for her. "Another perfect score, Serena."
She was the one with the hand always up, the one whose book reports were read aloud as examples. It was a role that fit her neatly, a clear, defined box she could occupy without having to explain herself. The expectations were a comfortable weight, a path laid out before her that required only her mind to follow.
That path, she would later understand, was the reason she could double-major years later. She had considered further study, of diving deeper into those subjects that mapped the intricate patterns of human societies. But a different kind of fog had slowly crept in, a static that made sustained thought a chore, that turned passionate focus into exhausting labor. She had learned to conserve her energy, to choose the manageable path, to find a job that required curation—not creation.
The classroom scene softened, the voices fading into a pleasant buzz. The feeling of the sun on the couch returned, the purr of the cat a vibration deep in her bones. Hours passed like this, until she was breathing a different air.
Her eyes opened to the star-veiled sky. The serenity of the dream clung to her, a soft afterglow. For a long while, she simply lay there, the memory of that simple, sun-drenched apartment more vivid than the luminous trees before her. She rose eventually, moving through the tranquil landscape without purpose. She walked to the edge of a nearby glowing river. Unlike the canal, it was real water—not some mysterious substance. She waded in, the water a silken embrace, and let it hold her.
Time was a flat circle here. There was no sun to mark the hours, only the perpetual, gentle twilight. The world was a diorama of perfect, unanswered peace.
And always, the pull would return. A gentle, irresistible tug back to that inner world. She would find a soft patch of grass and close her eyes, and the transition was as smooth as a sigh.
She was walking home from school, a backpack heavy with books bumping against her spine. She kicked a cascade of crimson leaves, enjoying the crunch under her sneakers, perfectly content in her own company.
She was organizing her colored pencils, lining them up in a perfect spectrum from burgundy to midnight blue.
She was lying on her bedroom floor, reading a book about ancient Egypt, the world outside her window forgotten.
These moments unspooled one after another, not as a frantic replay, but as a quiet revisitation. She was walking through the galleries of her own past, pausing before the exhibits of a life that was, for a time, uncomplicatedly her own.
She would surface now and then into the calm of the alien glade, to breathe its increasingly familiar, mana-rich air and feel the cool grass beneath her. But these waking moments grew shorter, the intervals between them longer. The need to sleep was a deep, placid current pulling her into a calm and gentle reliving.
Under the endless, star-dusted sky, in a body that knew no weariness, she slept. Her dreams were no longer a battleground, but a sanctuary.