[ the world is ending, or so it seems: there is fire and even the king's men have abandoned their posts to flee, creatures that shouldn't exist rising from the sea and others trampling the land, smashing houses underneath their feet. elania runs — into the woods first and then on instinct into a river that she's never seen, shimmering in a way she associates with the forbidden art. (it's not much of an art, she's found.)

she's dragged under and when she fights her way back to the surface, when she breaks through gasping for air, the world is quiet, or at least more quiet than it was before: no more creatures, no more death and destruction — or less of it, anyway, though there are people around her gasping for air, looking confused, some shouting for help.

elania doesn't stick around to pull anyone from a wreckage: she heads to the shore and then inland, hair and dress dripping wet, her shoulders curled inward and her gaze suspicious. ]

[ even with vines growing over buildings, the city is cleaner and more beautiful than any elania has seen in her life so far. there's no stink of rotten fruit or piss in the streets. the houses are impossibly tall.

elania finds shelter in an empty house. there's a bed on the ground floor, a kitchen that she cannot make sense of. it's all right: she can make a fire on the ground and she's brought along some dead rabbits she'd caught in the wood, some mushrooms she'd collected. the fox who calls himself sharid and has been telling her about this world curls up by her feet.

it's almost peaceful — until someone stumbles into the shelter she's chosen for herself and elania gets to her feet, hands going for a knife she lost somewhere in transitioning from one world to another. ] What do you want?

[ she's not sharing her food unless you've got something to offer in return. ]

[ elania doesn't know how to write — not on parchment and certainly not on a holographic keyboard. her first network post is, consequently, the result of an attempt at swiping away that holographic thing: ] aersdfghkm

[ at some point, after she's renamed sharid ardeniad because it pays to remember whence you came, especially when there is so much about her heritage that elania just doesn't know, she figures out how to take a video. so here is a blurry shot of a young woman in a dark dress made from coarse material that looks like it's ripped and been patched up repeatedly. ]

Who is king here and what are the laws against magic? [ she hates having to ask even this much, but — she'd rather know just how careful she'll need to be to survive. ]