Travelling through the woods was second nature to her. Setting your feet just so, feeling the wind, finding the path that winds between trees - most standing. Some fallen.

It felt so freeing honestly. Her host in Vladivostok had warned her that the trek was of "medium" difficulty, and that maybe someone as new as her to the wilds should start with something "Easy". But he didn't know about her second nature. That's how those things go of course: One feels their own potential as a glowing ember inside themselves, and then ventures out into the world to stoke that fire and ...

She trips, and falls forward, her sneaker coming lose and deciding to stay behind as her body tips forward. Dammit.

She gamely goes to fetch it and continues on her journey. Truly a journey of finding herself. Becoming herself. After years in school, another school, a college, a university. She is now returning to her roots to...

She was too lost in thought to notice she reached the end of the forest and was now at the edge of the cliff her host had warned her about. "Don't go climb!" he had said, "It's too dangerous!" he had said. But again, he doesn't know about her second nature. Her becoming of her true self. As a ... Hmmmm ... ok, we'll figure that out as we go.

She spots a small waterfall halfway down the cliff, with practically a path running to it. Clearly a path some people have used. Obviously a sign of where her own path now leads.

So she starts clambering down. Her heart hammering, but if an overactive imagination helps with one thing, it's being surprisingly fit from all the other times she made ill-advised trips to strange locations for entirely logical reasons. She's pretty good at it honestly.

Except when she's not.

The moment she slipped was the longest of her life. Though she fancies herself to have a more powerful imagination than most, the actual mind creates an actual experience of clarity and slowness when it is about to die that rivals any magic spell she could have invented. Her fingers slip along a root, her left kicks out as if through water, and even the moment a strand of hair crosses her vision as she tries to reach out to any branch, rock, or guardian angel in her path is visible as if she got it study it for 10 minutes straight.

But it made no difference. Except to allow her to view her entire life in a short film on the way down, an experience she thought was a fanciful story but reality again beat her to it and proved some of it's tricks were cooler than her imagination. She watched herself drink water from her father's cupped hands when she could barely reach the faucet, or that time her sister fell from her bike and there was blood everywhere, and then the time she performed in front of the whole school and had preplanned a stage dive with her friends and the crowd gasped when she jumped and the adrenaline shot through her veins as she was caught.

This time she fell again. But now only cold hard rocks catch her and everything turns black.

Only cold hard rocks… and a force that reaches through dimensions to cradle her soul. Aria’s body is left behind and she gets to experience the dizzying feeling of being pulled through a dozen or more universes. She can’t actually see anything while this happens and it doesn’t last very long either, but there is the sensation of her surroundings changing a few times before they finally settle.

Her body wraps back around her consciousness, uninjured, and, upon opening her eyes, she’ll be greeted by the sight of-

-a verdant forest, not that different from the one she left behind and-

-a very confused looking wolf with unnaturally blue eyes.

Did a woman just appear in front of him? Teleportation isn’t a thing —unless the mages have had some recent breakthrough despite their magic being unable to directly affect people— but the most obvious answer is that.

Anyway, he’ll pull himself away from wild theorising to say "Hello?"

She blinks for a moment, distantly noting the beauty, then a voice. She turns to the sound and...

"Aaaaah!" she scrambles back, staring at a wolf.

Her breathing is ragged, heart hammering in a chest.

Why would I survive to die again straight away?!

She slowly starts moving backward. Is this like with bears? You try to make yourself look bigger? Dogs can smell fear, right? So wolfs probably can too.

She gets up slowly, one hand in front of her in a calming gesture, "There, there," she whispers.

He would usually be offended at being addressed like an animal but that’s mainly because people can normally add 'unusually vibrant eye colour' and 'talking animal' together and arrive at the correct conclusion of 'the animal is a transformed shifter', so it’s intentionally rude. This woman, however, looks genuinely scared.

So, he turns back into human form. Fortunately for her possible sensibilities, clothes carry through  shifts (to the frustration of mages that insist they can’t possibly count as part of the person) and he’s now even carrying a bag that the wolf clearly wasn’t.

"That’s a rude way to talk to someone," he comments in a deliberately lighthearted tone. His voice is the one that greeted her a moment ago.

Aria's jaw drops so hard she momentarily loses the power of speech.

"Haaaa! ... uuuh .... whaaa .... yoooou ..." She closes her mouth and her eyes, and attempts the closest thing to a system reboot she has ever experienced. When she opens them again, she still sees a young man in front of her, "Wow, hi," she tries again, "Sorry, I thought for a moment you looked like a wolf," she smiles apologetically, "I think I fell on my head or something, I'm really sorry."

He sighs. Really? Where does she come from that she doesn’t even know that shifters exist?

"I don’t know if you fell on your head before appearing here—" at least that might explain how she has forgotten a basic fact like that "—but no, I was a wolf a moment ago." And to demonstrate that, he does the little party trick of changing only his ears.

She can feel her eyes widen in shock, "Your ... ears ..." is as far as she gets before losing track of all language again for a moment.

Did I die? I must have died... So then this is heaven? The afterlife? ... my  heaven or afterlife?!

A grin breaks out over her face, "Neat!" she gets up slowly, "Can I learn to do that? How come you are wolf instead of a deer or a tiger or a dragon?"

Said ears twitch amusedly before changing back to normal.

"Being a shifter is an inherited trait, well, except for every second and third Arrha, I guess. My mother is also one and so were my grandparents. Mages and angels work the same way."

"I could turn into a deer or a tiger, although it would be harder. I couldn’t turn into a dragon because it’s not a real animal. If your question is why are wolves easier to turn into, I think it mostly comes down to tradition. Young shifters turn into wolves because that’s what they’ve seen their parents do and practice makes shifting easier. I can manage an eagle pretty well but I’d need some more time for anything else."

"Wow, that's amazing!" The grin won't leave my face now, this afterlife is so cool! But wait ... if this is my afterlife, why don't I get cool powers too?

"Are you sure everyone is born with their powers from the start? No prophecies maybe? Artifacts? Trials?"

"I guess it’s theoretically possible, since the Arrha only gets one of their powers from birth and the rest come from the treaty, but no one has replicated that. Probably because it’d involve combining all three magic types." And people are stupidly bad about that! With how interested in research mages are, you’d expect them to be willing to collaborate with other species even if it were only for experiments, and instead the closest they come to that is a few crazed ones deciding to kidnap people.

I nod eagerly.

So I'm this "Arrha"? Probably some savior? Superhero? Foretold throughout time and legend. Super inspirational, powerful, uhm .... ok, we'll figure out the rest later. Man, this is the best afterlife ever. I should have died sooner.

A clenching feeling in my stomach, oh, shit, if this is the afterlife then I definitely died. What will my parents think? My brothers and sisters? Shit shit ...

I try to hide the realizations, but my grin slips for a moment. I take a deep breath. Focus, Aria ... Arrhia. Ha! Ok, yes, you got this! 

"How might I test which powers I have? And do any of the powers allow something like ... messaging other worlds?" I look at the man innocently. This is a perfectly normal question considering recent events, wolf man. Definitely, 100% normal.

All of her followup questions get a raised eyebrow. Apparently spontaneously appearing people in the woods don’t have any reasonable knowledge of the world? Despite speaking the local language? He probably shouldn’t let himself get distracted by this but, honestly, if he can just not deal with the whole Arrha issue because it resolves itself while he’s doing something else that caught his attention, he’d really prefer that. And, come on, it’s a spontaneously appearing person, it’s much more interesting than yet another village with no signs of pact-given magic.

"Other worlds? What do you even mean? But no, communications aren’t easy to do through magic. Speaking of which, where do you come from? Appearing out of nowhere is definitively not normal." The first question goes unaddressed because, well, mainly because he got distracted by the 'other worlds' part

I stare at him then blink slowly, oh shit. What if Earth has a bad name here? Or what if people from other worlds get disappeared? Or what if this is Intense Xenophobia World? But then why would my afterlife be like that? 

Images come to mind unbidden, like that time I helped a lost child find their mother, and that time I walked a little faster cause a strange man looked very sad and very much like he was going to tell me about it while I needed to get to class. Is my afterlife karma based? 

"Uhm, yeah, good question, super reasonable question," I'm fumbling for words and my heart tries to help by beating faster while my mind tries to help by volunteering images of what wolf jaws can do to flesh, and I end up feeling so tremendously helped and tremendously calm that my voice only barely shakes when I say "I am not sure ... it feels like I'm from another world, but I feel pretty confused and apparently, clearly, fell and blacked out. Could someone have drugged me or cast a magic spell on me that would make me feel like I'm from another world? My world has forests like these," I gesture to the trees, "but I can't remember shifters. Or mages. Or angels."

"They both don’t sound likely to me? But something definitely brought you here. A different world could have travel magic, do you remember anything like that?"

On the one hand, Lazus has no priors on the existence of other worlds, but this does mean he can imagine it fitting with an explanation for how the woman appeared, he’s used to different groups having different powers. On the other hand, memory editing does exist, even though it’s a carefully regulated angel skill and it wouldn’t explain the teleportation.

“I uhm, remember dying,”  the memory of the fall flashing back, both exhilarating and terrifying, “do people ever show up here after dying? You do, apparently, have angels, you know? In my world those live in heaven. That is where you go when you die,” some people believe. If you are good. Which I obviously was.

"Angels aren’t dead people! Except maybe if you believe in reincarnation…? But they definitely don’t appear out of thin air like you did. They’re born as babies, like humans, shifters and mages. And they get wings while they’re toddlers."

Wild ... but I guess maybe no more wild than a guy who can turn into a wolf.

"Gotcha. Of course," I nod, keeping my face perfectly and completely straight. I think.

"So we have people with wings, people who turn into animals, people who ... presumably cast spells? I ... don't know what that makes me," except I'm obviously, hopefully, the savior of your world that was long foretold, but a good savior doesn't know that and needs to wait for her Call to Adventure, "Were you, by any chance, on your way to solve a big problem somewhere? Somewhere I could tag along to possibly?" I cock my head to the side and pull out my most charming smile. The one that always (ok, nearly always) makes people forgot that I forgot something they care about but that's really not a big deal and we should really be moving on and focus on the bigger picture. That smile.

Well, the wings aren’t actually the most important part of angel magic, they’re just the most visually obvious, but sure, he can explain the details at some other time.

"I would expect you to be a plain human if you hadn’t appeared like that. But if you do come from another world, I also don’t know what that means." Except that it’s presumably important and he should tell someone, ugh.

"Nothing that isn’t being dealt with by other people too. You’re probably a bigger problem to deal with. We’re kind of in the middle of nowhere now, we can start walking towards civilisation? I don’t know how long it’ll take to get there in human form."

Plain human? Don't tell me I got the Magical Afterlife: NPC Edition?! 

I keep a straight face. I'm sure I kept a straight face. The extra blinking was just dust in my eyes.

"I'm happy to follow you," it beats falling off cliffs, "I'm a hiking expert. In my world, I mean."

Hiking expert feels like a weird wording to him but sure, that could be a thing. He’s not particularly well calibrated to human stamina or skill anyway, so he’ll take her word for it.

"Alright," he replies, nodding. Lazus gestures southward, "it’s towards there, let’s go."

I look in the direction he points and then wait for him to take the lead.

We walk in silence for a few minutes. Now I'm just hiking again, just like before. Like nothing happened. Like I didn't fall to my death and wake up to a shape shifting wolf man. I glance up from the ground where I was picking my footing, making sure not to trip and break my neck. It's best to only die once a day. Possibly only once a year or once a century! And study the man walking in front of me. He looks so normal.

"So uhm, what's it like being a wolf?"

Well, they walk in silence for a value of silence in which Lazus has been humming since immediately after he stopped talking.

"It’s different from being human but it’s also very natural to me, I’ve been shifting since I was a toddler, so I’m probably not going to explain it very well. Scents and hearing are more important, the wind feels different against fur, running on four legs is more fun and easier on uneven ground, and I get… some impression of wolf instincts, especially about body language."