Chapter 1: Execution

Rain poured down just as it had all morning, soaking through Koda’s shirt and trailing down the wooden scaffold in thin, steady streams.

In the sea of faces below, every spectator screamed for his blood with genuine conviction, as if they’d known him their entire life. But they hadn’t... Nobody in that crowd knew him well enough to demand his head.

"Koda Locke." The official reading the charges possessed a voice custom-built for such occasions. "You stand condemned of high treason against the Crown. Of conspiracy resulting in the deaths of eleven persons, among them two members of the nobility. Of heresy against the sanctioned faith. Of..."

The list went on and on and on... Koda tuned out at one point. Not out of apathy, but because he’d already survived this exact recitation during the tribunal. It had been mouthed then by the same tier of men who’d decided his guilt long before he’d been given a chance to speak.

In one version of this story, he was a hideous monster. But in the true version, he’d simply been standing in the wrong doorway when someone with power and connections needed a fall guy for a crime he didn’t commit.

Nobody in the square cared for the true version, though. Truth didn’t sell tickets to the gallows.

Rain dripped off the tip of his nose. Behind his back, his wrists were bound with rope that had grown slick and swollen from the downpour. His knees had long passed the point of aching, settling into a numb throb.

Over the roar of the crowd, he could hear the heavy gallows platform creaking under the weight of the spectators; hundreds of people packed shoulder to shoulder, eager to watch a man be beheaded.

’Funny,’ he thought. ’All this over someone else’s mess.’

He didn’t feel like screaming, nor did he feel like begging. Sitting there with his knees bleeding through his trousers, Koda mostly just felt tired; mentally and physically drained. He was tired of explaining himself to people who had stopped listening the second the word traitor was attached to his name. Tired of a system that had written his ending before he could even tell his story.

The executioner stepped forward. He was a massive man, his hood pulled low, an axe resting casually over one shoulder as if he were hauling a sack of grain rather than an instrument of death.

Koda couldn’t help but notice the man’s mismatched footwear; one boot buckled, the other laced, and a stance that was all weirdly funny.

"Any last words?" the executioner asked. His voice was gruff and bored, as if he’d repeated the phrase a hundred times already that week.

Koda looked up, wiping rain from his eyes. He forced a small, crooked smile, though the effort cost him dearly.

"Yeah, actually." A dry cough rattled in his chest, carrying a faint, dark laugh with it. "Terrible boots to wear for an execution. And your stance is garbage... plant like that, and the swing’s going to pull right instead of down. You might need two tries to chop off my head. Hehehe..."

A man in the front row let out a startled bark of laughter before catching himself. Beneath the dark hood, the executioner’s jaw tightened. It clearly wasn’t the response he’d intended to provoke, nor was it what anyone else on the platform expected; least of all the official, who fumbled with his parchment in stunned silence.

’Good,’ Koda thought. ’If I’m going down, I won’t be going out weeping in front of a crowd that had already treated me as a corpse.’

The axe swung upward.

For a strange, suspended moment, Koda watched the rain slice through the gray air where the blade was destined to pass. He thought about how terrifyingly fragile human life was... how easily it could be erased in a whim by someone’s order, a well-placed lie, or an axe wielded by a man in terrible boots.

Then the blade fell, and everything stopped.

---

There was no light here. Yet it wasn’t darkness, either... darkness at least implied an absence, a shape that light could eventually fill. This was an endless, edgeless expanse. No up, no down, no solid ground beneath his drifting form, because he no longer had feet to speak of.

Koda existed as a paradox: smaller than anything he’d ever known, yet simultaneously sprawling across the entire sky. Neither concept truly fit.

He simply drifted.

Time dissolved entirely. Seconds could have been centuries stacked upon one another. There was only the suffocating pressure of the void pressing in from every direction. Beneath it all, a sensation he couldn’t describe took hold: unseen hands reaching into the very core of his being and pulling, unforgivingly.

He was peeled apart layer by layer, like bark stripped from a green branch. His memories dissolved first. They weren’t just forgotten; they were violently excised, cast off into the nothingness until the man named Koda Locke ceased to exist.

What remained was smaller and far more primitive: a raw, burning instinct to survive, stripped of everything else.

Still, the pulling persisted, tearing and twisting at his core until even that primal impulse began to fray...

Koda’s body violently convulsed as he choked up a mouthful of black dirt.

Air rushed into his lungs in desperate gasps, his chest heaving on pure reflex before his mind even registered that he finally had a body to breathe with.

But the air around him was weirdly hot, sulfurous and thick with the stench of scorched stone, burning down his throat like liquid fire. He doubled over, retching onto ground that felt alien beneath his palms: warm, gritty, and cracked like dried mud.

’Breathe. Just breathe. You’re alive.’

Yet as his vision cleared, "alive" felt like the wrong word entirely.

His hands were no longer human.

The fingers were thick, stubby, and covered in gray scales, tipped with needle-black claws that dug small crescents into the cracked rock beneath him. He flexed them in disbelief, watching with mounting horror as the claws responded perfectly to his thoughts.

They were unmistakably his.

A sudden movement behind him made him spin too quickly, throwing off his balance in this new and unfamiliar body that didn’t move like his old one.

That was when he saw a thick tail narrowing to an arrow-shaped point, dragging across the dirt in a slow arc. It moved when he moved, as it was attached to him.

’No. No, this can’t be...’

Scrambling on all fours, he stumbled toward a shallow pool of oily, black water nearby. The liquid remained dead still despite the hot wind blowing through the wasteland. He dreaded looking at what he had become, but a stubborn urge demanded proof of identity.

The reflection looking back was small, far smaller than a grown man, and covered in dull, gray-black scales. It possessed a narrow, reptilian face and two glowing, ember-red eyes that cut through the dark water. Nothing about it was human.

Koda tried to scream, but his throat couldn’t form the sound. Instead, it produced a broken, sharp hiss that terrified him just as much as his reflection.

’This isn’t real. It can’t be...’

As he struggled to accept his current fate, high above in the black, sunless sky; where a bruised red hue spread through thick plumes of smoke, something shrieked.

The sound was a high, agonizing cry of a creature in pain.

’Someone needs help.’ he thought.

His body was already moving toward the sound.

It was a foolish, human instinct, carried over from his past life. It impelled him around a towering black rock formation before his new, feral instincts could warn him to stop.

He froze at the sight in front of him.

A pack of five or six dog-sized beasts, featuring too many joints in their legs and hides resembling cracked volcanic glass, were tearing into a massive carcass.

Whatever the creature had been, it was now just scattered flesh and bone, steam rising from its wounds into the sweltering air. The scavengers fed with violent frenzy, snapping their jaws and snarling at one another over every bite.

Then, one of them stopped.

It raised its dark, slick jaw from the kill and turned three milky, lidless eyes straight toward Koda.

One by one, the rest of the pack went still. The only sound remaining was the wind howling through the rocks and the heavy silence of a pack making a collective decision.

They weren’t afraid of him. Koda arrived at the conclusion instantly in his gut. They were sizing him up, like a butcher towards a piece of meat.

The largest beast, broader across the shoulders, with a scarred face and one clouded eye; stepped away from the carcass. It took a slow step forward, its claws scraping against the stone as a low growl vibrated in its chest.

Koda instinctively tried to back away, but human reflexes failed him in this strange new body. His tail dragged awkwardly against the ground, throwing him off balance. His foot slipped on a patch of black stone, sending him crashing down hard.

He scraped his palms as he fell, his unfamiliar claws scratching uselessly against the rock.

The creature’s jaw split open in a grotesque imitation of a grin, exposing two rows of jagged, yellowed teeth.

It let out a raspy sound, speaking in demon tongue that Koda oddly understood. "Weak."