WE’RE BACK, BABY!!!! Welcome to the end of hiatus, or whatever we’re calling it. A year later, this story is rolling! I have the first whole arc, about 100k words, drafted out. Buckle up!
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: “Reborn as the evil stepmother doomed to die!!!!”…
Lady Arnee Elisandar shuffled into the chamber, her hunched frame stooped beneath the weight of years that bent her back but never bowed her spirit. Her wizened face, withered and etched like an ancient relic, once cherubic, now sagged beneath cascades of wrinkles and nearly transparent skin. Her beady, watery eyes gleamed with the curiosity of the perpetually meddlesome, darting around the room with practiced vigilance. Short in stature and plump in the way of the well-fed elder nobility, she scuttled next to Lady Greyrage, clucking softly, her voice a faint rasp. To others, she was a nuisance; to Greyrage, strangely irreplaceable.
~ Allisar Fireborn Chronicles, Book 1: Embers of Destiny
While her thoughts tumbled through her head and Lady Elisandar continued fussing over her, Teri tried to grab onto a plan of action. Any plan of action would do. She stared up at the bed’s ostentatious canopy, which was thick, gathered burgundy silk. It seemed like such an odd detail for a coma-dream to have. Not to mention the talking dog.
:I am not a dream dog!:
“You mentioned that already,” Teri mumbled.
Theo finally turned around, then padded across the bed to flop down next to her.
:Then stop thinking it. I’m your familiar!:
She paused, then tried thinking at him instead of talking. :You’re Mom’s dog.:
:Which mom?: He sounded confused.
:Mom. You know, the deranged person living in my house who hates me?: She frowned. :How many mothers do you think I have?:
:The one there, and the one here!:
:Wait, you know about Lady Greyrage’s mother?:
He nodded his head.
:How?:
:Because I live here!:
That could only make sense in a coma-dream, Teri decided, and dropped the subject. Theo looked at her in confusion for a moment, before his shallow mind cleared and he flopped down again completely.
Which was fine with her.
She had watched enough isekai anime to know that playing the “amnesia trope” card was her best short-term solution, but losing “her” memory would not entirely explain a complete change in personality. She needed a better excuse, and she needed it to be one that she could play out for the long-term if necessary. Who knew how long she’d be in a coma, or what her subconscious would do if she didn’t play along? She’d seen Inception too, after all.
She lay still and closed her eyes, drifting back through pages and pages of the book series and everything she knew about Lady Greyrage, who was not a character she had ever put much thought into before. Like most fans, she hated her, but not to the point of obsessiveness. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much for her to remember, because Fuckin’ Chad had simply never brought up much of her back story. Either he didn’t care or was holding out on purpose. With him, it was always a crapshoot.
What was definitively canon was that Lady Greyrage had been born weak in magic and subsequently developed a major, psychotic chip on her shoulder about it. Collectively, the fandom assumed it was the reason she hated the Allisar children in her care, since they were all fairly powerful in their own ways—especially, of course, Gervyn. Her hatred of familiars was just an offshoot of it. Or so everyone assumed.
While she eventually became powerful enough to be dangerous, when she was a girl she had never been expected to amount to anything more than a moderately powerful witch, with some control over the external magic she connected with. There were a few obscure references in the series to a disastrous shadow hunt in her youth that somehow resulted in her powers being damaged by a void howler, although naturally Fuckin’ Chad never actually explained it... Teri’s thoughts came to a screeching halt.
One of her favorite fanfics had speculated about that event and mixed up some other lore to suggest that Lady Greyrage’s still nascent powers had somehow been made discordant by the foul magic that had commanded the void howler demon she had been hunting. The fanfic writer’s premise was that the discordance had never been properly balanced, leading to her becoming a warped and cruel adult. Teri realized it might just be her way out of her current predicament... at least in regards to tricking her own brain.
“Lady Elisandar,” she said, looking thoughtfully at the canopy again while she tried to pull her ideas together into a coherent plan. “I find that the doctor is right, there are some lapses in my memory. You said it was a void howler we were hunting?”
“Yes, so I was told.”
“And it grabbed ahold of me. By my leg, I presume?” She flexed her right foot, feeling the pain radiate up her leg harshly enough to make her wince.
“Yes, Milady. Until your familiar appeared to fight it off, the demon had the upper hand.” She shuddered dramatically. “Ser Brorwyn said that if your familiar had not joined the fray, you would have likely lost your leg, if not your life.” Her voice trembled a little.
“I doubt it. Void howlers are not blood-eaters, for all that they are related to wolverines.” She squinted, trying to recall anything she had read in the bestiary section of Robern’s Library, a.k.a. the long-running fan wiki. She had been part of the ad hoc emergency team to move it to wikia when geocities was being shut down in 2009, and her obsessive meticulousness about it had earned her no friends, but it meant that she spent months in her happy place: neck deep in AFC lore.
“That is true,” Lady Elisandar said, looking perplexed.
Her plan started to take shape.
:Oh! A game?: Theo lifted his head.
:What?:
:We are going to play tricksies! Like when Mother pretends to throw the ball but doesn’t!:
:Don’t you hate that?: Teri looked over at him.
:I do! I HATE it! Argh!: He barked in annoyance. :But it makes her laugh. That! Makes me happy!:
:Yeah, sounds like Mom.: Teri nodded, turning her mind back to her just-maybe-possible plan. As the idea of what she would need to do started to form in her head, the door swung open and Doctor Dourwin entered, trailing three other bearded men in ostentatious burgundy and pink robes. It looked like an ad hoc meeting of Pretentious-Dudes-R-Us.
“Ah. Milady. Lady Greyrage.” The doctor bowed shallowly and then popped back up, giving Theo a subtle side-eye. “I have brought my colleagues.” He held out an arm, and Teri got the impression that he was getting ready to list off names, ranks, and credentials. She had been to one too many university conferences in life to have to deal with that bullshit in death...or coma, whatever, didn’t matter.
“No,” she said loudly and held up her hand in a “stop now” motion. His mouth clacked shut.
Lady Elisandar was no longer able to hold back her excitement and plucked at the doctor’s sleeve. “Milady remembers!”
He gave the elderly woman a tight smile and gestured to one of his minions to lead her back to the overly-upholstered chair.
“Is that so, Milady?”
Teri reached down to find her most annoying white-lady-speaking-to-the-manager attitude, which wasn’t very far down given the circumstances.
“I remember who I am. I remember where I come from. I remember experiences of my youth, and I remember Lady Elisandar.”
There was a pleased murmuring from her audience.
“But I do not know where I am, who you are, or what year of our emperor’s reign it is.” Which, after all, was true enough. She could tell that the body she currently had was younger than she was, but that was about all. Were they at the start of the book series? Later? Earlier? Not that it would make much difference in the long run, but she wanted to know.
She waved a hand at Lady Elisandar, who had started crying loudly again.
“She looks much older than I expected, which is why I did not recognize her at first.”
This time, the murmuring was dismayed.
Doctor Dourwin, though, was not one of the ones murmuring. He studied her with a critical eye before folding his hands in front of himself.
:This is exciting! What if he doesn’t believe you?:
:Theo, please just lay down and shut up for a minute.:
:Rude!: He spun in place for a moment and flopped back down in a huff. Everyone by the bed flinched, but continued to ignore him.
“And before you ask, no, I do not remember how I got into this situation at all. Lady Elisandar mentioned that I was on a shadow hunt for a void howler?”
Doctor Dourwin’s face turned sour like curdled milk. “Indeed.” He rolled his shoulders.
She just stared back at him, hoping she looked imperious and demanding, and not constipated.
“What imperial year do you last remember?” he asked.
Well, she knew she had forgotten something. She gnawed at her cheek for a moment, trying to do math and figure out when Lady Greyrage was actually about thirteen. There was a reason she wasn’t in the accounting or financial aid departments.
The first novel started in the 250th year of Nikodosis’s reign, when Gervyn was fifteen, and Lady Greyrage was assumed to be thirty-five. She was killed by Rustad two years later when she was about thirty-seven? Or thereabouts. She subtracted thirty-seven from 252, but that was confusing, so she thought about subtracting thirty-five from 250, no, twenty-five from fifty was twenty-five, plus ten? Minus ten?
:228! You were thirteen in 228!: Theo grumbled at her.
“Two hundred and twenty eight? Nine?” She did not have any problem looking confused and just hoped her dog--who was a dog--was good at math.
Lady Elisandar paused in her crying jag long enough to gasp loudly.
“That is a while ago. You would have been about...a girl.” Doctor Dourwin apparently was as good at math as Teri was.
“Thirteen! She was thirteen! It was when!” Lady Elisandar cut herself off and covered her mouth with a handkerchief, eyes wide.
“When, what?” He glanced over at her.
“When her courses started,” Lady Elisandar said through the material. “They started early due to her fight with a void howler!”
Everyone looked shocked by the revelation.
Bingo, Teri thought with triumph. Her plan was coming together.
:It’s not a plan, it’s a badly thrown ball.:
:Close enough!: She glared at Theo. :I have to tell them something or they will think I’m possessed!: She was not looking to get burned at the stake, even in a coma dream.
“You are not behaving like a thirteen-year-old maiden,” Doctor Dourwin said critically.
“When I woke up, I somehow knew that I was not that same girl. I’m just saying that is where my memories get cut off.” She huffed and resettled the bedcovers around her. “It’s like being in two places at once,” she offered, which was not a lie, at least.
“Hmm,” he said cryptically, eyeing her.
:He’s not catching the ball.:
:I know that!: She pointed at him. :Stop distracting me.:
The damn dog actually rolled his eyes at her.
Doctor Dourwin and his minions watched the byplay with interest, so she straightened up and focused back on the matter at hand: making headcanon her reality.
“Do you remember anything about your current life?” Dourwin finally asked.
It was a valid question, but she debated what to say. She did not remember anything about Lady Greyrage being injured on a shadow hunt while mistress of Luttiron Castle, but it hardly mattered to the inciting incident of Robern finally dying, which provoked Gervyn’s rebellion against his father.
So many terrible fathers in the Allisar Fireborn Chronicles, she mused. Not that mother figures got off much better.
No, ignorance was her best bet.
“Things look familiar, but I don’t know why. I know I am not actually thirteen years old. I can tell we are not in my rooms back in Zyphyrehon, but I am not expecting my mother to visit me.”
Everyone, including Theo and Lady Elisandar, cringed.
“Indeed,” Doctor Dourwin said after clearing his throat.
“But I’m also sure I have never borne a child.” She put a hand over her abdomen like a delicate Victorian heroine insisting she wasn’t with child. Which she knew full well Lady Greyrage had not, since her infertility was yet another contributing factor to her hatred of her stepchildren. “Yet, you mentioned children earlier.”
He opened his mouth to respond, at which point the large, heavy door to the room burst open as several of the aforementioned children tumbled in, yelling loudly and tangled up together like a ball of knotted rope, with two castle guards trying to yank them apart.
NEXT: The Wildings Appear
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