Transmigrated Teri is an ongoing isekai/portal fantasy series about Teri Graves, an embittered middle-age GenX office lady who gets into a massive car accident and wakes up in the world of the fantasy series she loves to hate, The Allisar Fireborn Chronicles. She knows the characters, she knows the plot, and she knows that its all a massive coma dream…except for how nothing is as it should be. Worse? She woke up in the body of the doomed evil stepmother! She escaped a pandemic for this?
Table of Contents
Previously: Teri broke new-old ground…
She materialized from the shadows of the ancient forest like a vision conjured from the dreams of men, her form both ethereal and commanding, a paradox made flesh. Her skin, dark as the fertile earth from which all life springs, seemed to drink in the dappled light of the sylvan glade, luminous with an inner radiance that spoke of power ancient and inscrutable. Her robes, layered in cascading silks of the palest rose, whispered secrets of forgotten magic as she moved, each step a benediction upon the trembling ground. And atop her noble brow, crowning her with unmistakable authority, sat her sharp wizarding hat, tapering to a perfect conical peak piercing the heavens like a declaration of divine intent, its brim sweeping wide as fate itself, the whole of it the precise and impossible pink of a rose petal at the exact moment of its most transcendent bloom.
None who looked upon Euxina Moonshadow could doubt what she was, or the power she commanded.
~ Allisar Fireborn Chronicles, Book 3: Blazing Heart
The chair by the window had been Teri’s reward for three days of increasingly aggressive physical therapy, and she was going to enjoy it if it killed her. Which, given her track record, was not entirely a figure of speech.
Robern was perched nearby on a footstool with a stack of books that had started the morning carefully organized in a tall pile and was now scattered around his feet. He had been reading aloud whenever he found something he thought might be helpful, but had realized a while back his research had not yielded much. He would summarize something and then look up at her with baleful, puppy dog eyes, because it was not enough. He knew it. She knew it. Theo knew it too, judging by the sympathetic thump of his tail.
“There’s one more text Maester Colwith mentioned,” Robern said, without much hope. “But he wasn’t sure it was still in the library. It might have been moved to the east archive when the old steward—” he stopped. “He’s looking for it.”
“You’ve done well,” Teri said, and it was a small compliment, but he brightened considerably, happy for any scrap of approval he could get. He smiled and looked back down at his books with renewed enthusiasm.
On the floor, Gervyn had given up all pretense of doing anything useful a while back and was now asleep with his head on Theo’s flank, one hand still loosely holding a wooden horse he had brought in for reasons unknown. Theo was blinking heavily, on the verge of sleep. Lady Elisandar had stopped commenting on the inappropriateness of Gervyn’s familiarity with Theo once she realized Teri was ignoring her.
Lady Sariat was sewing near the fire. The room was warm and quiet and felt, Teri thought, almost like something a person could get used to.
The door swung open.
No knock. No announcement. The door swung inward and a woman stepped confidently into the room. She was dark-skinned and layered in traveling clothes that were dusty and weathered, with a pale pink hat perched on her head that had a brim wide enough to be architectural and a crown that came to a point that left absolutely no room for ambiguity about who she was.
Teri’s brain screeched to a halt. The fucking hat, was her first thought. Oh shit, was her second.
Recognition hit her at the same moment Lady Elisandar was unsteadily on her feet, before Teri had fully registered anything else. “Guards! Someone fetch the guards!”
Gervyn jolted awake. Theo lifted his head. Robern was already up, stepping forward, putting himself between the stranger and Teri’s chair with his latest book still clutched to his chest. Gervyn scrambled up beside him, wooden horse raised threateningly in the air.
Euxina Moonshadow looked at them both. Then she looked at Theo.
Theo looked back at her, yawned enormously, and put his head back down.
:She can’t hurt you,: he said.
“The hell she can’t!” Teri exclaimed, then turned to the room in general. “It’s all right, it’s fine! Everyone calm down!”
Everyone looked at her. Euxina Moonshadow’s eyes sharpened, just slightly.
“Steward Roos sent me,” she said.
Lady Elisandar stopped mid-waddle toward the door. Robern and Gervyn did not move.
Well, Teri had asked him to find her an alchemist. She should have been more specific, but what was done was done. She just hoped this wasn’t the start of another murder.
“Lady Elisandar,” Teri said as calmly as possible. “Lady Sariat. Would you please take the boys and wait in the anteroom? Robern, take your research. We can pick up again later.” She hoped.
It took a few moments of Lady Elisandar’s elaborate objections, Robern’s reluctant retreat, and Gervyn being steered out still backwards and still holding the horse high in the air, ready to throw it, before the room was quiet again.
Euxina Moonshadow had not moved through any of it. She stood just inside the door, watching, and Teri had the distinct impression of being a specimen under glass.
“Euxina Moonshadow,” Teri said.
One eyebrow went up. “You know me.”
“I know of you, that’s not the same thing.” Teri nodded toward the chair across from her. “If you aren’t here to kill me, then close the door and have a seat.”
Euxina Moonshadow did not sit immediately. She took off the hat first, which turned out to be a whole operation—there were long pins involved, and a certain amount of careful attention to her braids underneath—and set it on the side table with deliberation. Then she sat, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at Teri.
“You’re not what I expected,” she said.
“I’ve been hearing that a lot lately,” Teri sighed, and shrugged. No one had said to her face, directly, but she had definitely heard it a lot.
“I imagine.” Her eyes moved around the room with quiet efficiency, taking in the books Robern had left behind, Theo spread across the hearthrug, the chair Teri was sitting in, the window next to them. “Steward Roos told me about the void howler attack. The familiar.” A pause. “He did not tell me about the children.”
“Probably because everyone knows about the children.” Teri squinted a little at her, trying to suss out what she was getting at.
“Hmm. Those boys put themselves in front of you, to protect you.” She spoke without inflection, just the facts, ma’am.
Teri shrugged again. “They can be a bit dramatic,” she offered, knowing it would not really answer the question. She did not even have much of an answer, other than that they were desperate to be loved.
Euxina’s gaze settled on Theo, who had not moved since the room cleared. He was sprawled over the hearth with magnificent indifference, his chin on his paws, his eyes half closed.
“That is your familiar?”
“For better or worse.” Teri chuckled.
:Hey! I’m a great familiar!: He raised his head just to glare at her.
“Yes, you are.”
Euxina watched them with faint alarm. “He didn’t react when I came in.”
“No,” Teri agreed. “He’s lazy like that.”
:Coiled. Ready for action!:
Teri snorted and rolled her eyes.
A beat of silence. Euxina looked at Theo, who put his head back down on his paws.
“Familiars react,” Euxina explained. “They react to unknown magic users, especially powerful ones. It’s reflexive.”
:She smells like flowers and old books,: Theo offered from the hearthrug. :I like her. She’s fine.:
“He finds you unthreatening,” Teri said, thinking that maybe he was not a great judge of character. “He says you smell like flowers and old books, which is one of the nicer things he’s said about anyone, honestly.”
Euxina’s expression did not change, but something behind her eyes flashed. “Is that what he said?”
“More or less.”
“You’re having a conversation with him.” It was not quite a question, as she looked back and forth between them.
“I’m not saying he’s a great conversationalist or anything.”
:Hey!:
“Oh hush, go back to sleep,” Teri said waved a hand at him.
Euxina looked at Theo for a long moment. Theo yawned, showing all of his teeth, and closed his eyes completely.
“That’s not possible,” Euxina said in a strange, awed tone.
“And yet, here we are.” Teri shrugged. Maybe an alchemist wasn’t going to be much help to her after all.
Euxina stared at her for a long moment. “What are you?”
Teri was quiet for a moment, which she had found was often more useful than answering quickly.
“That,” she finally said, “is an excellent question.”
Euxina waited. She was good at waiting, Teri noted. She did it the way confident people did, not impatiently, just a settled, watchful stillness that made it clear she had nowhere else to be and nothing to prove. Which she didn’t, given her reputation. But there was something that bothered her.
“You’re west of the Dorraps,” Teri said, keeping her voice neutral. “Which is not, as I understand it, where you usually are.” From what she remembered in the books, Euxina Moonshadow had never even left the main continent, much less ended up on the far eastern side of the Telsharden penninsula.
Something moved in Euxina’s eyes. Amusement, maybe. Or respect. “No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”
“So something brought you this direction already? Before Roos found you.”
She nodded slowly which was not much of an answer. Teri figured if she was here to kill her, though, she had plenty enough time to do that and skedaddle. So, maybe she really there to help.
Or something.
“The void howler attack resulted in an unexpected change in my magic,” Teri said, feeling silly about it. (Magic…what was her life????) “Something beyond the physical injuries. I woke up and things were different. I mean, I was different.” She paused, choosing the next words carefully. “I know things I didn’t know before. I see things differently. And my magic is doing things I don’t understand and can’t control.”
“What kind of things?”
“Shadows,” Teri said. “They move when I don’t ask them to. When I’m angry, or frightened. Theo helps anchor it but he can only do so much.”
Euxina’s eyes flicked to Theo, who had not moved. “Steward Roos said that you think the attack reversed the effects of an earlier void howler encounter, from your youth.”
“That’s our working theory.”
“Whose theory?”
“Mine, mostly. Lady Elisandar, who is familiar with the attack in my youth, agrees.” She pointed at the books. “Robern is more scholar than warrior, so I had him go dive into the book racks, but he isn’t finding anything helpful. Honestly I didn’t expect him too, but we’re covering all angles.”
Euxina’s expression conveyed, politely, what she thought of Lady Elisandar as a diagnostic resource. “And you contacted Steward Roos because?”
“Because he’s helping Lord Ota put on the spring gala, honestly. There was a lot of budget meetings. But more importantly, I needed someone who wasn’t going to run to my husband with whatever they found out.” Teri held her gaze. “I need help. I think whatever is happening to me is accelerating, and I don’t have the framework to understand it, let alone manage it.” She waggled her fingers, but that did nothing.
Euxina looked at her for a long moment. “You’re asking me to teach you.”
“I’m asking you to help me understand what I am now,” Teri said. “Teaching might be part of that.”
Theo snored from the hearthrug. Teri wasn’t convinced he was actually asleep.
Euxina looked at him again, and Teri could see her turning something over, reassessing, recalculating.
The corner of Euxina’s mouth moved. “You’re not what I expected,” she said again, but it meant something different this time.
“No,” Teri agreed. “I’m not.”
NEXT: Training Begins
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