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Not all can be explained in this world. Yeah, she was starting to get that. A night sky full of constellations she didn't recognize, a body that was alien and unnatural, a family that wasn't hers and memories of a life she'd never lived. Talk of gods, mythology, possession. Topics that should be foreign to her but which felt as familiar as breathing.

Her head hurt. Her blood ran cold but her body burned, steam wafting up and around her face as she drew soft, desperate gasps of air into her lungs, one after another.

All her life, she'd believed mythology wasn't real. That gods were just antiquated explanations for things people didn't understand, that there would be nothing waiting for her when she died. After all, it was better than the alternative. That the gods were real, and simply choosing to ignore her. That they hated her, damned her to burn for all eternity for daring to believe the body she'd been given was the wrong one.

And yet the longer she spent in this world, the harder it was to ignore. She didn't belong here. She wasn't from here. She was something else, with hands, from somewhere else, in a house, in a city, with people who cared about her and others who thought she'd be better off dead and who she'd probably never get to see again. And every time she thought too hard or for too long about whatever had come before it felt like her head would split open and her insides would liquefy and drain out of every orifice of the body that WASN'T HERS.

Bragi grit her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut and, with effort, repeated, What is this place?