"I'm... Black??"
It shot out of me unfiltered. I was in half awe, half panic and full bewilderment of a young man who just woke up in another tax bracket and ethnicity.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I had any issue with whatever this was... it was just different.
A change, and sometimes changes were good, I guess?
I loosened my robe and sneakingly peaked what was under the hood.
"Good."
Safe to say, my package was in all ways, the same as my previous body.
Heh.
It was nearly impossible to get an upgrade from that. Otherwise, it wouldn't have felt natural.
"So what now? Did I wake up as some heir of some noble or conglomerate family?"
I nearly shed a tear of happiness.
"Maybe this is heaven after all."
Looking around, I had to have come from money. And with it hopefully, I could buy happiness.
It seemed all my years of struggling to pay back all my student debt had paid off.
It brought me good Karma.
"But what about this guy's memories?"
As if it was a command given, something hit me like lightning straight through my spine.
I had already expected it to be painful, as I always read, but this was a whole other world of pain.
One moment, I was standing next to the mirror, and the next my body was buckling under a tidal wave of pain so intense and absolute that it almost short-circuited my brain.
Almost.
I fell on my knees, my hands digging into the floor which was confusing as I was not aware I had that much strength.
My breath caught, shallow and ragged. When I looked down, my fingers were terribly shaking. The skin around my arms was writhing and crawling.
Then I noticed it.
A dirt-grey, stone-like substance was creeping up my skin, oozing from my pores like molten rock made solid. It only added more to the pain I was already feeling.
It was not just coating my body, it was fusing with it, sinking in and twisting around every fibre of muscle.
"No, what the h—!"
I tried to stand up, but I couldn't, my legs were locked. The numbness spread across my body like frostbite. The stone raced upward, faster than I could react, up my shoulders, chest, curling around my throat.
At this point, I felt like I was drowning which was quite familiar. Only this time it wasn't water but tar.
Then it reached my face.
The last thing I saw through the mirror was my own eyes, wide with panic and glowing faintly as the stone spread across them.
I opened my mouth hoping to let out a scream, even a silent one, but my jaw froze in place.
Then everything went black.
But I didn't pass out.
I was still there. Awake. Aware and entombed.
It was like being buried alive or being baked. I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't scream.
All I could do was feel.
Beneath the shell, beneath the rock, I could feel something beating. Not my heart, not exactly.
Something older. A rhythm. A pulse. A... presence?
At first, I thought it was a second wave of pain, but no. It was pressure. Heat. Like Magma slowly curling around my bones. Reinforcing my feeling of being baked.
Every second it grew stronger, denser, hotter, until it wasn't just surrounding me. It was inside me.
I felt my bones shifting. No, that's too gentle.
They were breaking and remaking themselves, over and over. My ribs split and reformed, longer, stronger. My spine extended. My joints cracked like thunder under the strain of something being born inside me.
I wanted to scream. I tried to scream.
Nothing but silence.
And then the visions started. They weren't mine.
I couldn't make out most of them but I recognized something, no, someone.
Me... the new me.
I could feel that figure inside me, curled like a serpent around my soul. Waiting. Watching.
And then I heard the name.
"Fitzroy."
It echoed in the space behind my thoughts, like a whisper from my bones. It didn't sound like a word, but more like a birthright.
More pulses arrived. The energy was climbing now, cascading through me. It lit up the darkness of the chrysalis with veins of light blue and white cracks spreading across the stone like rivers of molten frost.
My blood burned cold.
My muscles rewove themselves with a strength I'd never known. I could feel my skin adapting, becoming tougher and harder. The stone wasn't a cage anymore.
It was a womb.
The stillness stopped being terrifying. It became sacred, almost comfortable.
Time didn't pass like it should. It stretched, looped, and vanished. All I knew was sensation. Currents of power surging through nerves, rearranging them.
The knowledge of languages I'd never studied embedded themselves into my mind.
I knew things now. Rituals. Runes. Combat patterns. I saw them as clearly as memory.
"Crack!"
And just as I began to settle into that weightless, timeless void the stone cracked.
A single line of light split open my chest like a wound in the dark. Then another along my arm. The fractures spread across the stone in a spiderweb of brilliant, glowing seams.
The thrum inside me surged. My pulse became faster.
I felt the world return.
Frost curled outward from my body. The ground hissed with the sudden drop in temperature.
"Boom!"
The cocoon exploded.
Shards of stone burst in every direction carried on a wave of mist and freezing air. The bed next to me was pushed away. The curtains fluttering. A ring of frost radiated from where I knelt, freezing the ground in a perfect circle.
And I... I stood.
Slowly. Unsteadily.
Naked, breathing and alive.
"Shit!"
I gave in to my urge and face-palmed.
I knew these memories. I had read them. I hated them.
I turned back to the mirror and I re-examined myself again.
"Bronze skin, silver hair and eyes. Why did I not recognize him earlier?"
I was Ronan Fitzroy.