More vomiting.

It seemed an endless deluge of hemolymph, a yellow trail dripping from her mouth and down her chest, streaked by the sporadic rivulet of red, mixing in with chunks of necrosing tissue or the odd dead parasite.

She stumbled her way out of that cave, into the old mine shaft it connected to, out of which a vividly ice-cold stream ran, from whose waters she recalled drinking and in turn tainting them yellow. Then, amidst the haze, a brilliant moment of clarity.

Red could take herself back there, to the side of that stream amidst the trees, the water rushing past her feet, washing away the hemolymph from what had once been a chitin-encased sabaton of a right leg. It had become a malformed, scar-covered shape with uneven nails erupting from its toes, but it was a foot, a human leg, despite the misshapen mass of chitin that still clung to its upper portions.

In the water, her reflection - washed clean, curtains of black hair hanging down parted by those horrific crystalline spikes, the very things that facilitated this metamorphosis. She remembered the visage she’d grown familiar with, fond of even, that war mask which the lower half of her face had grown into.

Now, it only elicited disgust… And so she reached up, unceremoniously prying the plates from her face one by one, and they offered up no resistance. The bare flesh underneath was preferable still to that visage, which had more served as the face of her commanders than her own. That mask was not her own face - it was the vision of the very callous monsters that would so flagrantly treat a loyal subordinate as an object, it was the face of scum.

That memory burned ever so bright, for it was the first time in years that her mind had wandered to such places, that such open revulsion of who were still her rightful superiors was able to bubble up from the deep.

She recalled laughing as she sat by that creek, realizing that it must’ve always been there, kept beneath the surface by mental conditioning both arcane and mundane. It reminded her of an old folk tale; one that spoke of a loyal knight who had a priest seal away his heretical thoughts, only for a wrathful heretic to break that seal after a lifetime of service, and in doing so, cause the knight to transform into the very prophesied destroyer that the knight was to protect his lord from.

It was also at that point that she realized she couldn’t even remember her own name. Previous names assigned to her for assignments, those she remembered - all of them less conspicuous than the next, meticulously picked out to be generic enough, but not so generic as to become conspicuous. Moreover, a gaping hole sat where her childhood should’ve been, the only things left being vague faces without names or identities attached. An older woman, an older man, a small boy. Mother, father, brother, perhaps. None of it mattered, now.

Flesh churning, muscle writhing beneath the skin, and the excruciating resonance ever-present, a halo in every colour conceivable and beyond emanating from the crystals on her head, even her own eyes. It was just like the tales of ancient alchemists creating elixirs of life, but from the first-person perspective, it was not a thousandth as glamorous.

She knew not how long passed between that moment and when she next came to her senses, her memory of time’s passage muddled in a haze of metamorphic delirium. All she recalled was the shifting, the violent and rapid changes, the seizures that would have her collapsing on the spot and standing up surrounded by sloughed-off gore.

Red remembered the pain, the hunger - the hunger for blood and bones and meat. She remembered eating several whole deer and even a boar raw, shattering their bones and swallowing the pieces, tearing into livers, biting into and drinking from necks, even swallowing eyeballs whole.

The thumping heaviness as her bones returned to the density of a normal person’s, and grew denser still.

The constant, incessant shedding of chitin, the itching that drove her to rip off plates that were already in the process of falling off. It had left her a gaunt figure of one part stripped-raw pale flesh, one part bright-red chitin, trailing a yellow-red mixture of blood and hemolymph. She remembered even encountering hunters, her delirious self at that time spreading out ineffectual wings and sprinting headlong at them as her wings buzzed without effect.

Red didn’t remember what exactly had happened, only a pair of bullet wounds and the sound of terrified yelling fading into the distance. Her wings simply fell off soon after. Over time, the wrenching headache lessened in intensity, whilst spreading out through her entire body - when she had taken time to pull out the bullets, she noticed a nerve close to the wound, glistening in rainbow shades as if it too were crystal.

There was the bizarre mixture of tickling and ache that brought welcome respite in partially drowning out the everpresent resonant white-hot pain. It was the sensation that came with bone being moved and regrown, the procedural formation of what would become three symmetrical horns as uneven eruptions were slowly forced together and remoulded.

Indeed, she recalled not how long exactly the torturous metamorphosis lasted, but the distance she had traveled over its course told the tale. The first day that she remembered clearly after it had begun, she woke within sight of Rigport’s walls, already in the process of being reinforced by geomancers. A familiar, reassuring sight, belying the insufferable manchild she’d have to deal with soon.

Despite everything, Red was loyal to the Divine Maxims, to the Empire, to the Emperor - in that order.

But she would never again be a puppet.

Following Red’s escape from the dungeon and subsequent reassignment to the Rigport occupation initiative - officially referred to as the Third Wind of Eastern Seas - the Divine Emperor had made a cautious decision. He had ordered multiple subsequent scrying rituals of increasing depth and intensity to be carried out targeting Red.