How many hundreds of lives has she waited for a world like this? It is beautiful in an incredibly foreign way. Some places just speak to the soul. She has been born a thousand times before but never into a body made like this one. Her legs are long and slim, deceptively strong. She has been strong before, but this is a body built for war. Her lungs are a bellows, massive wells into which she can draw this worlds air in order to fuel the locomotion that this body seems to crave. Of all the shapes she has taken over the millennia this is immediately a favorite.
Perhaps she’ll stick in this one if she manages to earn herself another round.
As with every other time she comes into consciousness as an adult. Whatever she is, she assumes she is an ordinary one as this is the way it has always been. Sometimes she remains an ordinary whatever-she-is, and other times she doesn’t. That doesn’t effect the outcome, or it hasn’t yet.
Ausra arrives on the edge of a body of liquid that she finds to be water. Her body responds to the scent of bonded hydrogen and oxygen and she drinks from the stream to satisfy the urge before tentatively crossing through it. Finding that she does not melt or nearly get eaten by anything she can see she splashes up into the marshy grasses on the other side and heads toward the scent of salt. Crossing the isle she comes across a surprising structure and studies it for a long time. There are words, faded, but she cannot read them, only recognizes the shape of a language transcribed on an object that could not have been made by a being like her.
When the sea laps at her hooves she considers turning away to look for a creature like the one she now is. However the tide is low and she notices that one might make their way to the not too distant mainland if they swam and moved across the sandbars. Her experiences with oceans make her a little wary, waves and monsters are features of massive bodies of liquid in just about every world she has experienced. Ausra considers that she has only died on her first day twice and decides to risk the crossing.
Something swims nearby and Ausra keeps clear of it without getting too excited, reaching the mainland easily. This body is versatile. She does look back, blue eyes scanning the water for whatever had drawn close to her beneath the waves but there is no more to see than sea and the strange island. Satisfied that she has made the right decision in leaving the odd little island she proceeds with what is always her first task: finding another.
When she does, or is rather found herself, her body knows the tongue in which she must address the creature that is like enough to her that they must be the same and she asks (as she has so many times before) “What are we?”
i've had dreams of you in places i've not seen