With the departure of the Divine Forge, only a seemingly common scene of a girl in a forest remained. She couldn't have a proper look at herself without a mirror obviously, but what she could see looked... normal. A samani like any other. Yet just as the forest around was far from a simple forest, the girl was far from a simple girl. There were layers of enormity and complexity simmering within both.

  But for now, everything was calm. And in that calm, emotions found their way to the surface. Slowly at first, like the last remnants of a dry river. Then they were surging forth like the bursting of a dam, and the girl stumbled forward, taking a knee, her breath short.

  She didn't know how to even feel.

  Part of her wanted to curl down on the ground and cry. The other wanted to sing and dance in joy amid the surrounding trees. And so she ended up half collapsed in an awkward middle that was neither of the two.

  She was the being.

  And she was the dreg.

  She was both of them at the same time, and she was only one. She was something completely different, like two pieces of a puzzle that had finally joined into a greater whole, and yet she was just the same as before. She was... she was complicated. A completion so perfect that it was hard to even conceptualize.

  "I knew going for that 'last transformation' was the right choice."

  She felt astounded and terrified, because her new self was something so absurd and contradictory that she couldn't begin to fathom, and there was no taking it back.

  And she felt happy beyond belief, because everything she'd ever wanted, everything she'd longed for so hard it hurt... now she had it. Or knew where to look for it.

  As the dreg, there was a sidhi again extending from her physical dimension into the nautilus. All the voids in her self that had been scraped away along with her former one were now filled. They were different from the past, for sure. But something told her that everything new was better than what had been there before... She'd become a person again.

  No, better, much better, impossibly better, the person she'd been before had been restored. Reborn.

  No more would she have to languish in hopelessness. No more would she have to bow to the lowest part of herself. No more would she have to fear what would happen if she ever discovered her past and made contact with people from it.

  Standing up again, she couldn't help a small giggle, the first happy sound that had escaped her lips in forever. She had a future again. A real one.

  And as the being...

  as the being, she'd got simple stuff. Far from the impossible, cosmos-shaking wonder that she'd been bestowed as the dreg.

  And yet, it all felt even more significant for that.

  There was more than a bigger world out there: an entire cosmos of realms to discover and explore! All different, with all kinds of colors and biomes and vegetation and creatures, and... and there were people, sapient things in countless shapes and forms to get to know and befriend and interact with!

  Brimming with excitement, she clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes shut, basking in the anticipation.

  "My list...!"

  Alas, as she was about to dance in joy, an excruciating noise brought her back to reality. Like claws scraping a flat rock, but amplified tens of times and with a vibrating quality to it, implying it had actually come out of some alien throat.

  It was not far.

  "Right. The sector might be a backwater, but this is still a net."

  The words stopped meaning anything to her own ears as soon as she was done pronouncing them, coming from buried recesses of instinct and lost memories. It was unlikely she would be able to scrape together some semblance of sense from them. Frankly, she was more interested in the novel sound of her new voice. Soft and warm, but somehow also crisp and clean. Not bad at all.

  Still, she knew the danger that might be lurking nearby.

  Her first step was a slow and awkward affair. She had barely managed to stand upright, so it wasn't that much of a surprise that she would struggle with that: this transformation had been too much of a change for there to be no learning period. Running would be an even greater challenge, and if she had to fight before she'd even got her new feet under herself... But she was not scared.

  She moved one foot forward again, and faltered less.

  Because she had transformed, been remade into something she couldn't have hoped for in her wildest dreams.

  She started walking, and fast.

  Because she could feel her sidhi again, stable and solid and true. Because while the real benefits of her new species - like with any of the other choices that the Forge had offered - would only truly manifest later on, and while she still had no clue about what the 'essence' was... her potential was endless. If anything tried to bar her path, then they should scared!

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  She broke into a run, far faster than she'd ever been before as the being.

  "Wohohoho!"

  She dodged between trunks, cut through shrubbery, and jumped over the occasional creek. Rocks in the loam didn't pierce her feet, thorns didn't leave so much as a scratch on her skin and nothing living had tried to attack her so far.

  Still, once the physical activity had dulled the initial euphoria enough, her rational mind caught up: why this way? Where was she going exactly? And how did she know that she wasn't just running in circles, without reference points?

  Unable to answer these questions with something more reliable than a vague feeling of correctness, she slowed down to a brisk walk, the forest around slamming back to prominence in her senses.

  She'd reached an area where the trees were even denser, thick and tall trunks reaching for the sky. What little light - it seemed to be late evening - managed to pierce through their thick foliage struggled to reach down here, leaving the ground almost bare.

  In the background, there was the sound of rushing water, a few grasshoppers and others small critters, with the occasional calling of bigger things in the distance. But mostly, there was the constant, almost deafening chirping of birds all around.

  This place was teeming with life. A normal, mundane forest by anyone's reckoning, if they didn't know what they stumbled into.

  She wondered idly about the fauna: like with everything else inside the Anukarana, they approximated the closest realms - the closer the better - until they were indistinguishable in every possible way from the actual inhabitants found inside. And yet they must not be the same, or bringing back pets wouldn’t be forbidden, would it?

  "...I guess nonsense facts spilling out of my mind is the new normal for me."

  It was more than a little strange having these details and words come up with little idea what they meant. If she would ever truly recover her memories as the dreg was up in the air, but if nothing else they should warn her if she ever was about to do something monumentally stupid. Maybe guide her in the right direction, even.

  Her hand came up to her face, almost unbidden, and she found something around her wrist: like loops of an ethereal, glossy white thread, intertwined with each other and floating in the air, like algae moving with the waves and seemingly fading away with each motion. There was something familiar about them, though for the life of her she couldn't remember were they'd come from...

  Seemingly without reason, she felt reassured about her path, and started jogging forward again.

  First at a moderate pace.

  Then soon back to her euphoric jog.

  And finally full tilt, taken by a manic urgency, as if she might be lost forever if she failed to find her objective fast. And not without reason: this wasn't the kind of place one ventured in without extensive preparation. Maybe not even then. Definitely not somewhere to just wander around hoping to stumble onto an exit.

  This stuff around her wrist felt like safety, like a beacon in the night. But what if it went out?

  She sped up even more, trying to reach an opening before-

  The loops dissolved into thin air all of a sudden, and with them went the vague feeling of direction. Her pace slowed down into a resigned walk.

  She would have to find something on her own.

  ... But it shouldn't impossible, provided that she'd been going the right way. The Anukarana had not changed at all for a good while, which meant that she hadn't strayed toward other- And there it was, on the left. So close that it was a wonder she hadn't seen it immediately.

  "I'm pretty sure it was not there, just a moment ago."

  With a base made of stone under a wooden wall, covered with mud or something similar, and a thatch roof, a modest building stood in the middle of a clearing.

  This was either an exit or the abode of a resident of the net, in which case she might be in for trouble. But it didn't quite fit. And there was just something about the structure... as if it was supposed to be an element of a larger compound, that it had been plucked out of. It wasn't the fact that it lacked windows or other doors, as that didn't feel like a harsh requirement for such a primitive construction, but rather...

  She was in front of the door without even noticing, a hand reaching forward to push it open. But she hesitated.

  As the being, this could be her first time properly interacting with other sapients. She had to get it right!

  For example, scaring them by outing herself as something strange was a no-go. She should really have stopped at some of the creeks and taken a proper look at herself! She definitely couldn’t afford to walk away now, with no guarantee she would find this door again. "I bet it's going to disappear the moment I dare to take one step away..."

  Luckily, what she could see of herself from her limited point of view looked more than fine for samanyan tastes. And since she felt no power to change anything of her form, hers should be a species that had only one alternate shape, which was good and bad. Bad, because shapeshifting was always a fine trick to have; good, because fixed forms were almost impossible to see through. It should take someone powerful enough that if she'd gathered their attention, she'd have something else to worry about.

  Just to be sure, she reached for the Guardian to check herself... and received no answer.

  "Ugh. Whatever the Forge used to act with impunity must still be around, blocking the Supreme." Nothing that entering a proper realm shouldn't fix, but it meant she couldn't check herself better before entering. Well, there was one way to fix that.

  Oh, but she would also need a name, would she not? There was one that came to mind - from her dreg side obviously, as the being had not much of anything interesting to speak of.

  Or maybe it did?

  There was something now... not a proper past, of course, but a kind of... thread. Tentatively, she reached to-

  Pain.

  Dismemberment and loss and exploitation.

  Calamities ravaging, corruption crawling.

  Deprivation and sacrifice.

  Hands of immense, impossible entities reaching through time, grasping for ever more.

  Betrayal and violation and defilement and-

  She let go of the thread. Gasping for breath, she bent forward with her hands on her knees, face almost against the door and heart beating madly in her chest. It took a while for her to come back to a semblance of tranquillity. Then, she straightened and buried the thread deep.

  "Let's pretend that never happened." She put some more ‘stuff’ over the thing to cover it entirely, for good measure. "I'm sure it won't ever come up again."

  She straightened. "So. As I was saying, only my 'dreg' side has a past." Hence, the name that came to mind immediately must have come from that past. Not that the source mattered: names were only just a thing to call oneself. They didn't have to mean anything. Just one little twist, a little touch to make it even more fitting, and it was perfect.

  Reassured of her motivations and new self, Ae-Kyia stared with determination at the rough planks in front of her that should easily allow her to see through, and yet somehow blocked her sight entirely. What lay beyond...

  "The cosmos holds endless wonders in unimaginable realms, but only those who grasp shall hold."

  She couldn't wait to see what marvelous place she'd find herself in. What riveting adventures she would have!

  Is the protagonist going to stay 'feral' or is she going to have a humanoid form?