5. Welcome to Luttiron
“Reborn as the Evil Stepmother Doomed to Die!”
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?
Previously: The whole situation was the weirdest part…
As Lady Greyrage swept into the cold stone chamber, her towering figure cast an imposing shadow, silhouetted against the flickering torchlight. At a glance, one might think her beauty carved of marble—her hourglass form draped in silks and velvets, dark hair cascading in waves scented with the oils of distant lands. Yet her emerald eyes, flecked with venomous intent, betrayed a soul as pitiless as winter. Around her waist, coiled like a serpent awaiting release, hung her infamous whip, its magicked barbs gleaming with malevolent promise. Lesser men shuddered, for Lady Greyrage wielded it not with grace, but with ruthless precision and unrelenting cruelty.
~ Allisar Fireborn Chronicles, Book 1: Embers of Destiny
Teri slowly laid back down as the woman, who was likely some version of Lady Greyrage’s long-time companion, Lady Arnee Elisandar, wept over her.
She was in a coma, and apparently imagining a whole world to keep her brain active while she…recovered? Died? Lived on in a vegetative state? Although, as she thought about it, there really wasn’t any difference between those options for her. Whatever was happening to her body, in her mind she was stuck in the world of Allisar Fireborn Chronicles.
Of fucking course.
She had loved the first book, Embers of Destiny, when it came out in 1993 with an all-consuming obsession, and eagerly devoured every book as they were ever-so-slowly released because of the amazing cast of characters: Gervyn’s stubborn, hard-fighting sisters, the twins Aurguth and Vycett; their older brother, the quiet and soft-spoken Robern who died too early; Theodorian, the tragic lost prince of the Virendorian Empire; and of course, Valerontarius, the masked and enigmatic mage who was Gervyn’s mentor and, for half of the series until Gervyn came of age, the main foil for the evil Emperor Nikodosis. There was literally a cast of hundreds of side characters who made the world of Virendor vibrant and fascinating, despite the predictable “hero’s journey” plotline.
For all that everyone decried Fuckin’ Chad’s use of cliches and over-wrought prose, no one could deny that he had a gift for writing great characters.
Sadly enough, one of those great characters was the one everyone, including Teri, hated as much as they hated Emperor Nikodosis: Lady Bonarae Greyrage, the Venomous Whip of Luttiron.
She was one step beyond the typical, Disney-fied wicked step-mother, with her barbed cruelty and her actually-barbed whip that she used to punish, and often kill, servants and commoners. Not simply cruel, she was vicious with it, delighting in making the lives of the children in her care miserable. Universal opinion in the fandom was she had gotten off light with simply being strangled to death, and really should have been publicly humiliated and gruesomely executed.
Of the tens of thousands of fanfic written in the fandom, there were probably less than twenty that even bothered to give her a redemption arc. The very few fans who liked Lady Greyrage kept to themselves, and Teri had certainly never been one of them.
Overall, Lady Greyrage’s life and death was a minor plot point, as she had served her role as a pivotal negative influence in young Gervyn’s life with her cruelty and abuse.
Teri sat up again so fast she felt dizzy and her ribs contracted in pain. She stared at the fancy, brocaded bed drapes in sudden fear, stuck on the fact that, now, her death was a minor plot point in book two.
Had she “woken up” in a fantasy world just to die in it too? Was this her brain’s way of dealing with her inevitable death?
She took a deep breath, staving off a panic attack. She took another as she slowly laid back down, her right leg throbbing and her entire torso flaring in pain.
She had read and seen plenty of movies and shows where dying in your dream world meant dying in real life, and given the terrible accident she had been in, it made sense. She laid there, waiting for everything to dim out like an old CRT television being turned off.
Instead, her leg continued to throb in pain while Theo panted next to her.
As she waited, she considered what it meant for her to die. Theo was obviously dead, which at least meant her brothers wouldn’t dump him at the local kill shelter. Her brothers would have their hands full stepping up to take care of their mother one way or another, although they would probably do the human version of dumping her at the local kill shelter just to reduce any inconvenience for them. It was not as if they had not talked about putting her in a nursing home before. Teri wondered what would happen to her house and her belongings, and that was a dagger to her heart. She had worked hard to buy that house, and she had lived there for nearly twenty years.
But what did any of it matter if she was dead?
She continued to lie there, staring at the opulent drapery over the bed. Part of her just wanted it to be over.
But on the other hand…being alive? As the old ad campaign said: Priceless.
Teri was not too pleased with what her subconscious was saying about her, given that it put her into Lady Greyrage’s character and not, say, Aurguth. She would even have been up for some gender-bending in the form of the heroic yet mysterious Valerontarius.
But no, apparently, she had to live out coma-dreamtime as a minor villain who everyone hates. It was the worst version of a transmigration web comic: “Reborn as the Evil Stepmother Doomed to Die!”
On the other hand, her own mother treated Teri as a minor villain, so maybe it made sense.
The real problem, she realized quickly, was that Lady Greyrage was genuinely horrible: a narcissistic, abusive jerk with a cruel streak a mile wide. Fuckin’ Chad had never confirmed it, but the fandom as a whole just assumed she was a sadistic psychopath.
Teri considered herself to be curmudgeonly from the time she was ten years old, but she wasn’t willing to go that far.
Lady Elisandar was still weeping next to her, while Theo had shifted to sitting up as Teri’s brain worked overtime. He was staring at her with his too-intelligent eyes, and she thought if anything was off-script, it was the talking dead dog.
:I’m not dead! I’m right here!:
She huffed at him and looked around the room carefully, but nothing seemed to float unnaturally or otherwise break the laws of physics. Again, aside from Theo. The only animals that talked in the Allisar Fireborn Chronicles were the dragons, and that one butterfly in book four for some reason (was it really a clue about Valerontarius’ secret identity? Fandom was divided). Even the familiars of the powerful wizards only seemed to communicate via emotions. Theo just wasn’t normal.
:I am perfectly normal!:
“I’m sure you are,” she said, rolling her eyes at the projection of Theo—
:I AM NOT A DREAM DOG!:
“Okay! Fine!”
Lady Elisandar pulled away, wiped her face with the hem of a long sleeve to clear her tears, and looked askance at Theo. “Is he…is he bothering you, Milady?”
“No more than usual,” Teri said, without thinking.
Lady Elisandar nodded thoughtfully, edging away from Theo’s direction warily. “He is very…ah, new, I suppose.”
“New?”
“As a familiar.”
“As a familiar,” Teri repeated. “Wait, no. Lady Grey—uh, I’ve never had a familiar.”
She patted Teri’s hand gently, and either did not notice the slip up or thought it had something to do with her injuries.
“It was very surprising to us all! But you called out for him as you fell, and there he was! Fighting off the void howler that attacked you!”
:I fought hard! I used my teeth! It was very exciting!: His tail thumped against the covers. :It tasted terrible, though.:
Teri tried to look interested in what Lady Elisandar was saying, and not confused. The more she could keep Lady Elisandar talking before the doctor returned, the more she would learn.
The woman in question made a tutting noise. “Naming him after the lost prince, though,” she said, then paused, giving Teri a surprisingly fierce glare. “I expected you would know better than that.”
“Oh. Theodorian.” Teri tried not to grimace. “I’m sure I was, uh, thinking of honoring Our Great Emperor at the time of crisis.” She had been thinking at the time that Theo was a cute puppy.
:I was so cute! The cutest!:
Lady Elisandar frowned, her disbelief clear. “I would have thought you were thinking more about the void howler trying to eat you.”
Teri primly adjusted the sheets covering her. “Thinking of His Imperial Majesty’s grace and forbearance in his lost son’s name is quite appropriate, I would say.” She tried to sound as prissy and haughty as possible, but it just made her sound like her mother.
:You really do sound like her,: Theo said, looking up at her with big, limpid, apologetic eyes. Teri could not hold back the full body flinch.
“As you say, Milady,” Lady Elisandar said while arranging the top quilt around Teri like she was a child. “What’s done is done. You have a familiar at last!” She gave Teri a smile that was far more brittle than sincere. In fact, she did not sound too happy about the turn of events at all.
It took a moment for Teri to mentally screen through the entirety of AFC lore to remember why: Lady Greyrage was a witch who was only ever able to call on natural magic around her, and even then not reliably. She had never become magically balanced enough to manifest a familiar of her own. Her anger and frustration over that had led directly to a nearly obsessive hatred of familiars in general, strong enough to drive her to damage a few before she, herself, was summarily dispatched.
Would Lady Greyrage have been happy about finally getting a familiar?
Probably. But it would signify a major shift in her powers as a witch, and that would no doubt give everyone within arm’s reach of her pause. While familiars manifesting during a crisis was not unusual, it was not something a witch as mercurial as Lady Greyrage did very often. If Teri remembered correctly, familiars born out of discordance and not alignment usually signaled a lot of bad shit for everyone in the future.
Great.
Lady Greyrage whose powers as a witch were aligned and amplified by a familiar would have been a major villain in the story, not some sad-sack second-stringer who got strangled by her own lover before Gervyn even turned sixteen.
Teri’s thoughts came to a complete standstill. She looked, actually looked, at her hands.
There were no fine lines of age on the knuckles. The slight crepe-texture of her skin was gone as well, and her fingers were long and tapered like a pianist’s, ending in strong nails that were filed to look like claws. She inspected them closely, but they were not paste-on or acrylic or anything of the sort. She had worn gel nails for a time in her thirties, but she had usually kept them squared off.
They were the hands of a much younger woman.
She looked down at her chest and realized that part of the weight on her chest was, well, her own. Distantly, she thought that her days of shapeless jog bras were over. Her breasts were currently unsupported under her nightgown, and swayed as she moved. It was disconcerting.
Suddenly she felt her body in a way she had not when she had woken up expecting to be in her own body. She had always run to the lean side, although short, which was why she had done pretty well in gymnastics as a kid (not that it had translated to any useful adult skill set). But now she had breasts and hips and long legs and, it seemed, a long torso as well. Where was her center of gravity?
“This is fucked up,” she said, and Theo barked.
NEXT: The Doctor’s Opinion
Thank you for reading! 🎊 I’d love your comments and feedback! ☕
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