Chương 1: Wrong

Cold came first, then the soft rasp of his breathing. When he opened his eyes, dim orange candlelight wobbled around a room he did not recognize. He was already standing, though his knees were bent and his spine was folded into an unfamiliar crouch his body seemed comfortable with. Questions were the first thoughts that entered his mind. Where was he? How did he get here? Most importantly, who was he? What surfaced first that wasn't a question was, absurdly, a protocol for amnesia.

Look at yourself and your surroundings and see if you can find someone or something in the environment which can anchor you. This sounded like good advice so he followed it, but looking only deepened his confusion. Why was he covered in red and bronze scales? The scales seemed wrong, even if he couldn't identify why exactly. He didn't always have scales, did he? At first, he understood the red-scaled limbs as arms only because they began at his shoulders and ended in hands.

They were narrow, jointed things, armored in overlapping plates. Most of the scales on his extremities were a deep brick red, though bronze ones appeared here and there. His chest and abdomen were mostly bronze, the color giving way to red along both sides. Candlelight caught the bronze and made it flash, as if bits of old metal had been worked into his skin. He tried to move one hand, and narrow scaled fingers flexed back at him, each capped with a short black claw.

The movement was immediate, which he accepted as proof the hand did in fact belong to him. When he leaned toward the nearest candle, its heat softened the cold. The warmth seemed to give his body permission to function. As the heat spread through his limbs, restless energy began to hum under the scales. Memories had been surfacing in pieces since his eyes opened, and none of them matched what he saw or felt.

He remembered a fleshy hand turning a page, a child sitting beside him, and a woman moving through a room lit by morning. They were not scaled or clawed or hunched into some low, unfamiliar posture. They were something his mind indicated was "human". With each fragment he felt closer to them, as if the memories were slowly teaching him what he was supposed to be. He did not know their names nor his own, but the memories made his body slowly feel less like a mystery and more like a contradiction.

He wanted the memories to be real with a desperation that frightened him, but wanting did not make the scales disappear. Perhaps this was just a strange dream? A dream would explain his situation, and they always ended. If this was a dream, there was nothing to fear. Five candles circled him at careful intervals, though one tilted precariously to the left, ready to fall if anything so much as brushed it. Chalk lines connected the candles in an even ring, broken by runes he did not recognize.

Smaller chalk marks branched inward from the ring, converging beneath his feet in a dense knot of runes and diagrams. Beneath his feet, dark red stains marred the chalk. Blood, his mind supplied, though he had no idea why he knew that. Once he had catalogued the circle, he forced himself to look beyond it. Paper and books had colonized every available surface, burying a desk, cascading off the dresser in uneven stacks, and claiming half a narrow bed shoved against a damp stone wall.

Shelves bowed under old books and glass tincture bottles. Everything was roughly twice the size it should have been, as though the dream had remembered the idea of a bedroom but misjudged the proportions. The architecture looked old enough to predate the concept of ventilation, which meant the room should have reeked, but no smell reached him. The absence comforted him more than anything else he had experienced so far.

Shouldn't this be proof he was in a dream if what he was seeing wasn't matching all of his other senses? A faint sound reached him from behind, a scratch of writing or some small creature moving. The thought of a small creature stirred hunger, and like everything else since he had awoken in this place it felt alien. More fragments of the woman in the morning-lit room returned.

He remembered her in a white dress beside a small pond, himself in a black suit, their friends and family gathered around them as they kissed. She was his wife. It comforted him to think that he would tell her about this dream once he woke up. He would explain the candles, the scales, the oversized furniture, and the absurd cold-blooded relief of leaning toward the flame. For now, he only had to stay calm, observe the dream, and just wait to wake up back in his own body and life.

He lowered his gaze again, meaning to check his feet before taking a step, and only then noticed the red obstruction at the bottom of his vision. It must have been there since he opened his eyes, jutting into the lower edge of sight, but his mind had dismissed it as a shadow. Before he could make sense of the shape, a thin dark flicker darted up through the lower edge of his sight, split at the tip and wet enough to catch the candlelight. It vanished so quickly that he jerked backward and nearly fell.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Balance, he was discovering, was precarious. Wanting to test a hypothesis, he leaned closer to the candlelight, opened his mouth, and deliberately stuck out his tongue. Just as he expected, the thin dark thing unfurled from his own snout, which was the red obstruction he had mistaken for shadow, and quickly retreated again.

This time his tongue settled against the roof of his palate, and every surface in the room announced its presence. Old stone arrived first, decades of damp winters pressed deep into its pores. Then tallow which was rendered months ago and still had a bit of animal scent underneath the burn. The candle wax layered over it, something sweeter and older beneath the smoke, the ghost of whatever blossoms the bees had worked before the wax was even harvested.

Paper came next, the specific vegetable fibers separating into distinct threads of data his brain had no prior framework to organize. Mildew followed in layered strains across the books, each one shouting its age and origin like a small and very insistent voice. Beneath him, the red stains announced that it truly was blood. The sensory onslaught did something to the fragments in his head. They stopped drifting as disconnected images and locked together into a life.

He remembered being an adult human with a wife, a daughter, work he valued, and years of training behind him. In none of the memories was he a scaled reptile, nor did he recall ever sensing the world as he just did. Human tongues did not do what his just did. This was a fully operational sense he had never possessed before and it was acting as if it had always belonged to him. From what he remembered dreams were not known for creating new biological sensory systems.

When the avalanche finally subsided, he found himself gripping a nearby chair hard enough for his claws to gouge the wood. He stared first at the damage, then at the hand that had made it. He had one dexterous thumb, but only three fingers. Which meant he had one missing digit his mind had previously failed to notice. Below, his feet ended in three red-scaled toes which were each tipped with a heavy claw. Two missing digits. His body finally decided to panic, which was at least a recognizable response.

There was no diagnostic category for waking up as a different species. Body dysmorphia did not begin to cover the feeling he was having right now, but a racing heart and shallow breathing were at least familiar territory. He had talked enough people through this exact cascade to recognize it as the beginnings of a panic attack. Thirty seconds of slow breathing and closed eyes blunted the worst of it. His racing heart eased, but the restless hum under his scales which had been activated by the warmth did not.

The room in front of him appeared empty, but he had the feeling of being watched. The feeling did not lessen when something scraped the stone behind him. He twisted toward the sound. A heavy, unfamiliar weight dragged at the base of his spine, and cold granite scraped against an appendage that was neither hand nor foot. Of course he had a tail. He had every other distinguishing feature of a reptilian beast so why would he not have a tail.

Logic and reason had always been more useful to him than panic, so he put his mind to work. Rather than accept that reality had simply broken and he had woken up as a lizard, what else could account for all of this? Stimulant intoxication was the obvious candidate. Someone could have drugged and kidnapped him; high doses could produce racing thoughts, restlessness, paranoia, and even psychosis with vivid tactile hallucinations.

That covered the energy, the racing mind, and perhaps even part of the visual distortion. It did not cover proprioception accurate enough to feel a tail dragging across stone, nor a chemical sensory apparatus that had just catalogued several strains of mildew by age and origin. Neurology had documented phantom limbs responding to virtual reality stimuli, but no case he knew of involved drugs conjuring an entirely new sensory system from nothing. That was not how any of this worked.

A narrow window revealed darkness outside. Moonlight filtered through with a strange greenish tint. His tongue flicked out without conscious thought, and the room delivered another flood of information. On the desk were three paperweights, barely visible in the dim candlelight, but from his new sense he identified them as amethyst, rose quartz, and obsidian. More important than the mineral composition of paperweights was that his tongue detected a young man in the room.

He knew the person was male and anxious with the same certainty he would have felt reading it from a chart. Some half-remembered fact about reptiles tasting chemicals in the air surfaced. Apparently he had just detected testosterone and cortisol and compiled a stranger's profile without laying eyes on him. A handy talent, presumably, but he would have traded it immediately to wake up in his own bed, human again. How would the man react to finding a walking lizard in his house?

Something moved at the far right edge of his vision, farther into the periphery than human sight should have reached. The motion was small and rhythmic, too far to identify without turning his head. Instincts fired to freeze, hide, and run. He overrode them with effort and stayed where he was. Before he could bring himself to turn around, he stared at the paperweights in front of him.

He was trying to accept the foreign concept that he could know rocks by scent when hunger slammed through him, though not hunger for food. Take them. Pile them. Keep them safe. Beautiful. Mine. Need… Those weren't his thoughts. When he turned his head to the right, his neck rotated farther than any human neck had a right to move. There was no pain which made it worse. His body just treated the impossible angle as ordinary.

His tail shifted behind him in automatic counterbalance, correcting for a spine that preferred a forward lean he had never chosen. When he tried to stand fully upright, the posture pulled unpleasantly through his back until he gave in and let the body fold him back into its natural slouch. Suddenly a voice came from directly behind him.

"A kobold? Three months of savings and all I created was a kobold too dim to know it should turn around? What a pity."