Orphan is ecstatic.  Dark sorceresses are spoken of only in whispers, in her little village, but even the whispers are enough to make it clear that dark sorceresses get to have a lot more fun than peasants.

The seasons turn twice again and Orphan is dressed in the fine clothing of a merchantess whose last crime was to wear clothing that looked to be in Orphan's size.

Her sorcery is still instinctive, unlearned, only a little less crude than it was the day it first ripped forth from her, but she is powerful enough to shred through a fancy academy wizard's shields before he has time to scream.

The seasons turn, and Orphan has slain five barons and two counts.

Orphan wishes she knew how to take and hold their territory, not just their gold; but she has a sense there are unknown and mysterious arrangements you are supposed to make about that, if you don't want Dukes and Grand Dukes and maybe the Bleak Emperor himself arriving where you've conveniently set yourself up in a castle to be killed.

So in place of permanent territory Orphan has her own little bandit-army.  She doesn't really need them to win battles, but they're helpful at the rounding-up and the looting; and also she doesn't have much else on which to spend the loot; and also, how does anyone know you've come up in the world if you have no castle and also no army?

The seasons turn, and Orphan's story ends.

There hasn't been anyone powerful enough to contest Orphan head-to-head in all her experience.  But her sorcery is crude for all its power, and her shields don't extend through every dimension known to arcana.

Orphan runs out of gold one day, and her army rides to the nearest castle.

The baron there, in seeming folly, sends forth his own forces to meet her.

Orphan's first casually-tossed inferno disperses to the carefully prepared counterspell of a wizard, for such are the hazards of having a predictable signature spell.

The wizard doesn't survive for long.  Orphan is more powerful than he, by far.

But by then Orphan's army is already riddled by an archer's salvo, and the baron's elite knights have come to within a dozen paces of her.

And in the midst of those knights, a man who's skipped his dark robes today to clad himself in armor indistinguishable from the surrounding knights; a student of arts that some might call ill-advised, and powers that some might consider unnatural.

The baron's hired necromancer rips out her soul.

And right at that moment, in some totally other world, Opalyn Miller gets run over by a (subtly different) truck.

WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT AHHHHHHHHHHHH

You are in a new healthy body, with a brief lifetime of memories of peasant life followed by magical banditry.  Your first few attempts at accessing them will probably be confusing because your main self has not integrated any of the context.

You have some entirely new sensory percepts, related to magic.

There is a big stone castle in the background, and some pleasant-looking mountains in the distance.

You are in the middle of a fight with too many armored knights to subitize without deliberate counting.

One of them is swinging a mace at you right now.

a MACE --

Opalyn ducks, hard, with her whole body, and trips and lurches as she does so. She's a ball-shaped human scream and she's rolling into the shins of the man with the mace.

Huh.  He was kinda expecting to get ripped apart by the dark sorceress's magic, there.

But if he's getting presented with THAT much of a golden opportunity, then sure, he'll reflexively kick hard at her head with a metal-booted foot.

Opalyn will wake up some time later with a really really bad headache, in a rolling wagon, with chains of bitter dark metal clasped around her wrists.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow.

Her head is throbbing. The wagon lacks any sort of suspension, and she can feel every pebble and rut in the road.

She starts to shift her body into a new position but regrets it immediately as her muscles and nerves shriek with outrage.

Where is she?

She tries to reconstruct what happened, as best she can with her head pounding.

It was her friend's birthday. She was on the way to the bakery to pick up the cupcakes. It was raining. There weren't any good parking places. She pulled into a very sketchy half-spot that was probably not quite far enough from a fire hydrant, grabbed her purse, hopped out of the car, looked to the left, started to dart across the street...

Oh shit.

Opalyn died of stupidity. That's just great.

She passes out again.

When Opalyn wakes up again, she will no longer have a splitting headache, or any other visible sign of battle damage, and be in a fancier wagon with a better suspension.  She will also be chained in chains of more-ornamented bitter dark metal.

The absence of pain is almost palpable, the same way you really appreciate being able to breathe through your nose again after a long illness.

This time, when Opalyn tries to shift into a new position, her body doesn't complain about it, and the stretch actually feels good.

Can she see anything out of this wagon? Is it enclosed or is she basically just in the back of a rustic pick-up truck? What's the weather like? Can she see any other people? Are there guards or other prisoners?

There's a barred window, though it takes a bit of an uncomfortable stretch to see out of it.

Oh, wow, that's a big impressively wealthy-looking village they're randomly passing right now (according to Healthy-Orphan's memories).  And the town is right along a river!  She's looted fancier castles and passed through bigger towns, but her Oldoria memories have never seen fancier peasant dwellings.

(To Opalyn's Earth memories, it looks like a hundred or so crude-looking wooden log cabins.)

Weather:  Sunny.  No guards in immediate eyeshot, but she can hear the clopping of what... don't actually sound quite like horses.

Okay what is UP with having extra memories?

She looks at the village again, switching between the two sets of memories. It's like being at the optometrist. "Which one is clearer? One, or two? One, or two?"

Through Opalyn's memories: rural, poor, dirty, rustic, run-down.
Through Healthy-Orphan's memories: big, impressive, wealthy, investment, looting, grab, want, take

One: POVERTY
Two: WEALTH-GREED

One: DIRTY
Two: IMPRESSIVE

Ahhhhh. Opalyn squeezes her eyes shut and tries to take deep breaths, but her shoulders are shaking a bit.

With some effort, Opalyn shoves the Healthy-Orphan memories into a box and slams the lid shut.

Now she's just Opalyn. It's a dirty, poor town and there's nothing there that she wants.

She starts to cry, a little bit.

Where in the world IS she? What is happening? Did she die and go to a medieval afterlife?

Better than hell, probably?

The crying isn't helping, so she stops.

What do the not-horses sound like?

She opens the Healthy-Orphan memory box a tiny crack, ready to slam it shut again if it starts to make her feel crazy.

Oh, those sound like Hexapodes (her brain offers as a potential key insight), giant bugs that can be harnessed like horses!  They have six feet instead of four feet so they can travel 50% faster.  They're what medium-fancy nobles or very high merchants would use, if they had enough guards to not fear any bandits short of Healthy-Orphan herself.

Giant horse-bugs! Gahhh! Opalyn hugs herself, sort of, though the chains aren't helping.

This is not a standard medieval afterlife! So again, where IS she?

Does this weird extra memory bank have anything to say about that?

The largest region she's ever heard of is "Oldoria"?  Her mind offers no hint as to whether that's a country, a continent, a planet, or maybe even a galaxy for all Orphan knows any such difference.  It's ruled by the Bleak Emperor, a wizard said to be able to take any other wizard in a fight, and Orphan had never heard about any other Emperors.

"Wizard." Hmm. Opalyn wants to double-click on "wizard" but feels a strange sense of apprehension, like she's tried that before and it didn't go well, but that doesn't make any sense, nothing like this has ever happened to her before. She shakes it off.

"Wizard." Okay, memories, what is a wizard?

Somebody with SUPER MAGICAL POWERS who is AWESOME just like Healthy-Orphan herself!  Except wizards know more stuff because they go to SCHOOL, and are also (in her experience) WEAKER AND LESS AWESOME than ORPHAN, who can SET PEOPLE ON FIRE WITHOUT HAVING LEARNED ANYTHING ABOUT HOW.

The Bleak Emperor is said to be much scarier than the sort of wizards that Orphan used to crush, though.  Scary enough to rule Oldoria.  Orphan feels on a deep sense she never thought to think about in words that Orphan herself cannot possibly be THAT scary or awesome.