When I finally wake up, I feel like vomiting. My whole body is tingling with pain and my breath is hoarse. I can hear muted breathing beside me, though when I open my eyes, all I can see is a giant pelt below me. The sparkling white hair is coarse, like unicorn hair. For all I know, it could be unicorn hair. I can see something large and vaguely boxish as I peer out on the room, some sort of large green thing that follows my gaze as I look around.

"Sweet Verhamera, what is that..." I groan, and my voice is deeper than I remember it being. Reaching out a paw to touch it, I see three wickedly sharp and curved claws where my more demure paws would rather be. Is that my paw?

I realize that the large green thing might be my snout, which is quite a disturbing realization. I scramble to my feet only to fall back down, wings extending as I do so only to fall flat against my sides, leaving me spread out on the large pelt and vulnerable to attack.

Last I checked, I didn't have wings either.

Am I... a dragon?

Whatever this is, it can't be anything more than a dream, yet it feels so real.

"Aislyn?!" I call, ignoring how much my own voice disturbs me.

I struggle back up to my feet, my tail swinging dangerously. With a loud roar, I yell, "Aislyn!"

Another dragon approaches me, her scales a pale pink that almost looks whitish in the dim light of wherever we are. Looking up, I see a small hole covered by glass in the ceiling providing light to the rest of the room, with similar holes dotting the room.

The dragon waits for me to look back to her before asking, "Are you new here?"

"Yes. I have no idea how I got here and I demand an explanation." I try to match her icy tone, though the fear in my voice overpowers it.

She looks me up and down and her face twists into a contemptuous sneer. "You're with Little Bright Star. No wonder you look so awkward in your own skin, as if you had never worn it before. We knew she would be coming with companions, but we must say, we didn't think her guests would be so inexperienced with dimension travel. You are lucky to have her as a cloaker."

"We? Cloaker? Little Bright Star?" I ask.

"I will start from the beginning. My name is Vena. My companions are G'ren and Redwing. I have travelled exactly seventy three times, many of which were to quarantined worlds, and I was sent here to receive you when you came." she says calmly.

"That doesn't answer any of my questions." I say. "I have... no idea what most of that was, either."

"I doubt I'll be of much help then. I'll try to define some terms on the way out, regardless." She begins walking out, stepping neatly over what look to be other bodies. I wonder if any of them are my friends and feel something burn within me. My new nostrils flare as I try to take in their scent, but I can smell nothing but foreign nonsense. My hearing is similarly atrocious.

Dragons, for all their bulky grandeur, are terrible sensors.

"Companions," begins Vena, "are your companions on any given journey across dimensions. For example, yours would be Little Bright Star and the other three who are currently with her. My companions gave them about the same speech. Dragons can usually communicate telepathically with their companions and are generally bonded to them for life. When it comes to dimensions like Dreamland, dragons often take lesser species as their companions. Same thing. Travelling would be travelling across worlds. In any journey, a traveller must..."
Her voice trails off into many, many things I do not care about and are not relevant to the task at hand. I feel more like Vivian than myself in this newer, bulkier body, which might be another factor into why I don't care at all about the specifics of dragon society.

I'm sure it would be much more interesting if I wasn't confused and terrified.

As I walk the halls in the dark, only illuminated by torches, I see other dragons prowl the dimly lit corridors. I instinctively recognize them as fellow travellers from many different dimensions, and many of the dragons have vastly different shapes.

Where are you guys... I think, staring deep into their sinister and foreign faces.

Eventually, we come to an exit, the light shining in the distance, and I walk out onto a cliff ledge to find that I'm treelengths above the ground, on some high-up mountain and there's seemingly no way down. Anger boils up inside of me, but I push it down and decide to ask what we're doing as politely as possible.

"Where do we go now?" I ask.

"They're just at the bottom." Vena tells me. "We're going to fly down."

"No, there has to be a misunderstanding. I don't know what Aislyn told you, but..."
Vena looks at me disdainfully.

"I can't fly." I state.

With one swift movement, she kicks me off the cliff and I buckle forwards, tumbling straight down with the rocks not far below. My wings open, my draconic instincts once again saving me. Vena flies by, amused as I struggle to keep above the winds, and teases, "Can't fly?"

"H-h-hate you."

She lands quietly at the bottom of the mountain, and I fall klutzy by her side. The two of us walk into a large hole in the rock face, where four other familiar dragons wait boredly at what appears to be some sort of extraterrestrial bar. Other dragons down large amounts of liquid served by the barrel. They look insanely out of it, but I ignore them and race up to my friends.

"Aislyn, I swear to Verhamera. You need to explain to me right now where the hell we are and why I'm suddenly a dragon or I'll open my own portal and head home." I tell her, and the pale dragon's eyes widen.

"Quite the nasty friend you have there." Vena snaps, confirming that I'm right and this isn't just some random dragon.

"Hey! Shut your trap. All of us deserve some answers." Vivian says. "Well, we know already, but Nat shouldn't be left out here."

Vena snarls at all of us. "I am trying to be bureaucratic here. You can respect our culture and take it a little easier. If you're going to be rude to me, at least show some respect to the princess. You have no idea how much she outranks you by."

Aislyn takes a deep sigh. "I don't outrank anyone here. Elysium's the dragon hubworld. Dragons never really stay in one timeline. You're not supposed to interfere, but they love to let all the possible universes know how great they are." Aislyn explains. "This is a way more developed version of Elysium. In most of them, they're primarily tribal and Vena isn't born for thousands of years."

"Have they tried to fix those worlds too?" asks Lotus.

"They don't like interfering with their own progress." Aislyn explains.

"Alright, alright. Next point. Why am I a dragon?"

"I cloaked you. When you go to another world, you're supposed to take on the form of the dominant species out of respect. Makes communication way easier."

"Could you have bought me with you guys? Ditching me alone is a terrible group move." I ask.

"There was a battle," Aislyn explains. Though she looks unharmed, bright-red Vivian and my pale sister are clearly marked up. "Luckily, Lotus can still use her powers in this form. She managed to knock out an entire legion with natural sleeping gas."

"She was a total badass." Vivian sums it up.

Lotus lowers her head, revealing her sharp horns. "You're going to make me blush, if dragons can do that."

"We don't. Our blood vessels are far more efficient than yours." Vena says.

"So... why here in particular?" I ask Aislyn. "Do we need to do something here?"

Aislyn's eyes narrow, and she looks more like a dragon than the fluffy Canis I'm used to. "We need to find out where we're needed. Elysium is one of the major contenders in our side of the war."

"So you're telling me... we were chosen out of all the Canis in Dreamland and we're really just pulling backup?" Vivian says.

"You don't know that." Gash interjects.

"We're one of many sets of heroes. However, Dreamland and the Obsidians have been at each other's throats longer than any of these other worlds. They were born to be the mortal enemies of our gods. It's our destiny to destroy them. We were chosen for this. If we have the potential to be major players in the fight... we could save worlds. There are entire populations, entire sentient races possibly depending on us." Aislyn says, though she's beginning to look a lot less confident.

"What about our home? You know they're still coming for us."

"Like I said, we're going to end it. We just need to stop them in the areas where they're all out attacking first. Almalia is at home. As long as someone powerful as her is using Verhamera's power to protect Dreamland, we'll be fine." Her talons clasp around the crystal on her neck.

"No further questions. Let's head out." Vivian says, pushing away from the table. Lotus gets up as well.

"Phew. That was beginning to sound like an interrogation!" Gash says nervously, a deep rumble that might have been a laugh in the back of his throat.

"It was." Vivian answers plainly. "You might not realize this, Aislyn, but we're all pretty on edge right now. This is a lot to ask. I... I want to see home again. I don't want to die in someone else's body trying to save a world we know nothing about. It hurts that we're really just players in all this."

"I understand completely." Aislyn gets up too, her wings draped around her sides. "Just think of it like the forest. It'll be an adventure."

Lotus presses against my side, like she used to back home, and I miss the way her fur feels even after one day. As Aislyn leads us through corridors so much like those of the Queen's halls, I realize that we're back where we're started, and we've lost a whole other type of family in mere seconds.

Even with all of its flaws, I can't help but miss the garden.