Chapter 1: Tipping the Scales

Story-Complimentary Comic [1/12] Written by D.M. Rhodes Artwork by @5enketsu

[UK READERS CAN SEE THE COMIC HERE!]

The cold came first.

It was not the gentle chill of winter mornings or the bite of an autumn wind, but rather the deep, bone-soaking gnawing of old stone that hadn’t known the touch of warmth in many a year. It pressed against her skin, her cheek, and her bare legs. She became aware of the texture beneath her: rough, uneven. It was gritty with something that might have been sand or dust. The air smelt wrong. It was old and stale, with an undertone of dampness.

She opened her eyes.

Darkness swallowed everything except for a faint, sickly phosphorescence clinging to the ceiling far above. The glow was pale green, barely enough to see by, but it revealed the truth of where she lay. Bones surrounded her. Large ribcages arched overhead, skeletal fingers curled toward nothing, and odd skulls gaped with empty sockets that were far too large to be human. They filled the cavern floor in heaps and scattered piles, picked clean and bleached white by time. Some were small, child-sized. Others were huge and misshapen.

Her breath caught in her throat.

She sat up slowly, and her body felt strange. It was too light. Too small. Her arms were stick-thin and covered in something that caught the dim glow. Scales. The scales, tiny and overlapping in a dull charcoal grey, felt rough to the touch when she rubbed her palms together. Her hands ended in thin, clawish fingers, sharp but fragile-looking, and her fingers were longer than they should have been. She looked down at herself and found more scales covering her bare legs, her flat chest, and her narrow torso. A tail, thin and whip-like, curled against her thigh.

She wasn’t human anymore.

This realisation should have terrified her. Maybe it did, somewhere deep down, but the panic felt distant. Muted. She remembered dying. She remembered the screech of tires, the flash of headlights, and her sudden weightlessness after impact.

Then nothing.

Then this.

A soft chime rang in her mind, clear and melodic despite the oppressive silence of the cave.

Words appeared in the air before her once more, glowing faintly blue and hovering just at eye level. They formed neat lines, crisp and easy to read.

She stared at the words, her breath shallow. Barjuchne. The name felt heavy and unfamiliar, yet it settled into her mind without resistance. She didn’t feel like a dragon. She felt small and cold and surrounded by the remains of everyone who had tried before her. She was more like some kind of… lizard thing.

Four hundred thirty-six failures.

The words vanished, replaced by new ones that burnt brighter, outlined in harsh red.

What?

Her stomach dropped.

Twenty-four hours. She had twenty-four hours to find a princess, or she would die. Again. Her claws dug into the stone beneath her palms, scraping against bone fragments that crumbled under the pressure. The timer ticked down in the corner of her vision.

…Maybe dying again wouldn’t be so bad? She’d clearly died before and here she was now, right? The thought did little to ease her innate, natural panic. What if this reincarnation had been a fluke? What if she died for good this time? It was not something she was eager to test.

She forced herself to breathe slowly. Panic wouldn’t help. Panic would kill her faster than the timer would.

Think.

Where the hell is she going to find a princess, of all things? She’d never even seen a princess before, not even in her old life. They didn’t seem like something you could just grab at the next corner.

She was small. Weak. She found herself alone in a cave filled with corpses. She didn’t know where she was, what world this was, or how to find a princess in less than a day. But she had instincts now, didn’t she? Dragon instincts. She could feel them coiling in her chest, urging her to move, to hunt. She had a strange desire to… claim things, like a conqueror with a flag ready to be planted literally anywhere. Her stomach growled and the hunger was unlike anything she’d felt before. It wasn’t just food she craved.

She needed to hoard.

The thought came unbidden but most definitely certain. She needed treasure. She needed to take territory. She needed to grow.

And, of course, she needed a princess. At least one. Maybe a few. She would see how it went.

The dragon girl stood on unsteady legs, her tail lashing behind her for balance. With a slight grey glow leaking in from the outside, the cave entrance yawned ahead. Daylight. She stumbled toward it, her clawed feet scraping against stone and bone, and she emerged into a world she didn’t recognise.

She was near the top of a mountain plateau, the cave’s mouth looking out over a clearing below that she had to climb down toward.

Now, lower on the mountain’s terraced terrain, trees rose around her, tall and thick-trunked, their canopy blotting out most of the sky. The air was warmer here than in the cave, thick with the smell of moss and rotting leaves. Birds called in the distance. The forest stretched endlessly in every direction, dense and tangled and utterly alien.

She had no idea where to go.

So she ran at a light jog, deciding to set the pace.

Her legs carried her faster than she expected, her small body darting between trees with an ease that felt instinctive. She didn’t tire quickly. Her lungs burnt, but the ache was bearable, and her muscles responded without hesitation. She was built for this. She was designed to be mobile, to hunt, and to survive.

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A princess. The word conjured images of castles, gowns, and crowns—things she had no hope of finding in the middle of a forest, right? She needed civilisation. A town. A road. Anything that might lead her to people, to royalty, to someone she could kidnap before the timer ran out.

Regarding the actual matter of then kidnapping said princess with this strange, impish kobold’s body. Well. That would be a problem for when she got there.

But instead of traces of humanity, she found rocks.

Very, very pretty rocks. They were just normal rocks, yes. But they sparked a light inside of her tiny little draconic heart and, even with time pressing down on her, she just had to stop and collect at least a few of them. Her instincts drove her to do so, overpowering her sense of logic and rationality.

The first one caught her eye because it glittered. A shard of quartz, half-buried in the dirt near a stream, catching the dappled sunlight and throwing it back in pale rainbows. She stopped mid-stride, her gaze locking onto it. Her chest tightened. Her claws flexed.

She wanted it.

The urge was overwhelming, irrational. It was impossible to ignore. She dropped to her knees and dug the stone free, cradling it in her palms. It was smooth and cool and beautiful, and holding it made something inside her settle. Just a little. Just enough.

She tucked it into the crook of her arm and kept running.

More rocks followed. A chunk of granite streaked with gold veins. A smooth river stone, black and polished by water. A cluster of mica, flaking under her touch, shimmered too beautifully to be left behind. She gathered them all, clutching them against her chest, her arms growing heavier with each addition. The hunger of her heart didn’t fade, but it eased. Slightly.

As for her hunger, she managed to satiate it by catching a little river fish. It was easier than she expected. Her reflexes were fast and her claws, despite being little, were very sharp. She essentially just snatched a fish out of the riverbank and ate it like that.

She was surprised to find herself unfazed by the idea of eating raw fish. The lingering human remnant of her thought that she would be disgusted. But her animal side was stronger, and she tore through it without hesitation.

The sun climbed higher. The timer began to tick down, indicating that she had already used up nearly seven of her available hours, and there was still no princess in sight.

She had been running for hours, her arms full of rocks, and she still hadn’t seen a single person.

A low growl froze her in place.

The wolf emerged from the underbrush ahead, lean and grey and bristling with aggression. Its lips pulled back from yellowed teeth, ears flat against its skull. It was easily twice her size, muscled and scarred and clearly unafraid.

She stared at it.

It stared back.

Her mouth opened, and a sound came out that she didn’t recognise. She let out a low, guttural snarl that vibrated in her chest and rattled her teeth. Her lips pulled back from her own sharp fangs, her tail lashing behind her. She dropped into a crouch, her claws scraping the dirt, and the growl deepened. Her rocks scattered to the ground as she bared her teeth at it.

The wolf’s ears flicked. It whimpered. Then it turned and bolted into the trees, tail tucked, leaving her alone with her pile of rocks and her pounding heart.

She blinked.

That… worked?