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.