Dawn had quite a bit of introspection to do. Luckily, even slithering along the canyon for most of the morning, her journey back to the nest seemed endless. The serpentine skeleton and the river lining the canyon went on and on, with no signs of stopping, even as small amounts of vegetation cropped up to feed on the moisture.

  How big was this creature? and where had she put all of that? She had cleaned it to the bone! It had to be miles long! How had she been that hungry?

  That doesn't even touch on the weird, consensual filial cannibalism part of it either! Or that her strange and animalistic consumption was somehow not even bothering her that much. She didn't feel hungry again so far, and Dawn was pretty sure that she wouldn't need to eat for a long while.

  No, Dawn's real worries had more to do with her identity and her new body.

  She had been a married man, with children, and a boring administrative assistant job. Her life had been okay, if ckluster, and she had plenty of good memories of it. Dawn could even remember her old name!

  But

  Should she use it? Was she going to accept the identity that may or may not be attached to the reincarnation of her very soul? It didn't feel right to. This was a new beginning for her. A new Dawn, if you will. Calling this version of herself by that name felt incorrect. She had just chosen this name hours ago but it was hers, damn it!

  It'd have had her navel gazing if her damn tits weren't so distracting. Which led her to her worries about her body. She was some sort of terrifying monster woman now, with too many arms, no legs, and far too many eyes. It was hard to tell in her current environment, but she thought she might be as big as an eight foot tall human. Her tail was maybe 20 feet long. Dawn thought it should be a horrifying change, at least to the man she had once been.

  It wasn't, though.

  Her features were striking, and she felt powerful. She could hold four things at once if she wanted! She felt comfortable like this. Better than her past life, even. Her psyche wasn't screaming out in denial or panic. Dawn even felt that she was hot, to the right kind of person. Which was apparently also her.

  Was she trans now? Had she been trans? Could she have been so cking in introspection during the course of a merely acceptable life?

  She shelved it for ter.

  Dawn wanted to think about who she was going to be from now on, instead. “Who will I be?” She asked, speaking her first words aloud. Her voice was airy, high in pitch, and pleasing to her own ears.

  It turned out, though, that she had plenty of time to ruminate on her new self and all of its minutiae.

  Dawn's journey took two more nights - sleeping curled in on herself to sleep when it got cold - to find something notable other than the river or the skeleton. Sleeping comfortably on her tail was an unexpected bonus of her new body, and she felt mostly unaffected by the elements, but got tired in the cold.

  By then, Dawn had concluded that she wanted to try all sorts of things as a woman, which was not a very masculine thought. In retrospect, she’d certainly wished for some suspect things in her past life that suggested she might not be so cis after all. That past self was aware of trans people, but he had been very certain he wasn't anywhere on the spectrum of queer identities. “He” had always thought of herself as a bog standard straight cis dude. The occasional fantasy about being nonbinary or trying out womanhood for a day changed nothing about that.

  At least until she found herself making womanade with the lemons of her new life.

  The canyon bottom had been getting more and more lush on the second day, and she stopped for the night in view of a treeline that separated the wilderness of the canyon from some sort of grand courtyard. The path inward was hogged by the skeleton of her serp-arent. Its mass had only half crushed a small, minimalistic riverside sanctuary outside of the gap in the trees. Over the trees, Dawn could see the top of a rge building walling off the bottom of the canyon.

  The next morning, she got a handle on her own size, comparing herself to the simple benches that had been pced next to the river. She was definitely tall for the furniture, and her tail was about the length of two of the benches.

  The area beyond the trees left her unsettled when she went in, crawling inside of the skeleton to follow the riverside path. The river was diverted into a number of channels running throughout a rge beautiful garden. Something told her it shouldn't be so pristinely arranged with its plots of flowers and other decorative greenery. It was the sort of thing that she knew would take tons of people and work to maintain. No one was around, though.

  It was an impressive sight. An immacute garden with lines of blood red and sky blue flowers running all the way from the trees to the temple, with symmetrical features pced all around the grounds. It was even more imposing with the massive serpentine bones dominating the space.

  “Hello!” She called out, to no response.

  There were even pnts growing up between the ribs which should have wilted or been crushed by the serpent's body, but they grew around it, seeming to correct into a proper position on their own. The skeletal coil still stood tall in the center of the garden, around her egg.

  A sizable shrine of bones surrounded the nest made from out-of-pce sand that held her discarded eggshell. It was a big egg, but it was concerning in its retive size since she was five or six times the volume that the egg would have held. Dawn had definitely grown in size during her devouring rampage. As far as she could tell otherwise, it was just a big dried out snake egg shell.

  While she was there, Dawn took a little time to inspect the skull of the serpent. It was definitely that of a snake, though heavily remodeled to allow the absolute mess of eyes that had adorned its body. She could fit into the socket for its massive central eye, and she might have tried it as a gag if some part of her didn't feel as if that was a terrible idea. It had been the most dangerous and clearly supernatural thing that she encountered so far.

  Moving on, the temple itself reinforced Dawn's certainty that she was a rather rge woman. It was a simply designed and richly adorned building, standing seven or eight stories tall, filling the whole canyon, and made of light grey masonry. There was a set of wide doors in the middle that led into an immense sanctuary, and the walls was dotted with smaller doors and gratings for the river channels. The single person doors were all small enough that she would have to stoop herself to fit through.

  Dawn skipped investigating fully, as she wanted to finally be out of this canyon. There were mountains on either side, and she felt boxed in the entire way. The sanctuary seemed to be her best bet, so there she went.

  It felt like a big stone megachurch. The only furniture was stone benches and pews, covering all three levels of the seating. It had two balcony levels! A central aisle led up to where she entered from, the doors opening to a low stage behind the pulpit. Sliding up the center aisle, she supposed the design gave an impressive view of the gardens if the doors were left open.

  The scenery might be a little altered from the giant snake bones, though.

  The doors in the back of the sanctuary seating led to a rge lobby space. Dawn guessed the room was necessary for staging events in the immense auditorium. She noted a couple of stairways on the sides that likely led to the balcony levels while passing through. On the other side, she finally found what she had been searching for.

  Several sets of double doors led into the lobby from outside, and when Dawn got out, she finally saw the city. The temple was pced at the end of the canyon, looking over all as the river threaded down through a mountain valley. Its diverted channels turned into several manmade riverways that spidered the low grounds of the valley. There were a couple of lower hills between the mountains that were built up, and the waters all converged at a ke that peaked out from behind the hill on Dawn's right. The far hill to her left had a tower rising from it, which she thought might have been as tall as the Eiffel tower from this distance.

  The city was big; she recalled visiting Athens and this pce seemed simir in size. It was also overgrown, and in disrepair. Just outside the temple ramps and steps was what she thought was a park of some kind, at first. Coming down from the impressively maintained masonry of the grand temple, Dawn found the difference in the rest of the city to be jarring. She realized that none of the trees in the “park” were pnned like the garden and temple had been. Some were growing up and through pathways that had been there before, and the cobblestones were broken. It seemed like a sort of fair or festival grounds that had become overgrown.

  So she explored.

  Over the course of a week, Dawn found the city to have long been empty. There weren’t even many wild animals. Wood supports in many of the buildings had long rotted away, leaving them to crumble. Lichens and pnt life had overgrown most things they could find purchase upon, and containers for food and produce held only dust. No one was there, and many pces seemed to be cking items like there had been an evacuation.

  Dawn briefly wondered why people would have abandoned a perfectly good city like this, then admonished herself because the answer was pretty clear.

  Big snake.

  Biiiiiiiig snake.

  Then she ughed, realizing that she also counted as a retively big snake, too. Maybe nobody will come back? The city will remain empty until Saint Patrick arrives and drives away all the snakes!

  Dawn occasionally felt thirsty and drank from the river, but in the ten or so days since finishing her feast, she hadn't really felt hungry. It would be strange and concerning if she wasn't so cking in the food she would have needed. There were some fruit bearing trees scattered around the city and in the temple garden, but that was basically it for her food sources unless she tried to go fishing.

  The only clothing she found were a number of unadorned red robes that had been in the mysteriously pristine temple quarters. They were a bit small, and she had to tie a cord to keep them closed on the sides. It took her the better part of an hour to get them to sit in a way that seemed right. Extra arms made it even more complicated, but she thought she looked okay when she inspected herself with her hand-eyes. Like a big snake priestess.

  Dawn started to feel like she was going insane.

  Not from the sudden transition to monster woman, or the strange circumstances of the world around her. Dawn was just alone. She had no interaction with others.

  Her best bets to leave were either the river outlet from the ke leading east or one of the two western passes that led out of the valley. One pass went more to the north, away from the temple, and the other followed a winding ridge to the south.

  Dawn postponed further exploration outward to pn. The hills gave her enough vantage to see down the passes, which were both awash with vegetation, but she could see a lot farther at the top of the tower. Climbing it was risky, though. She had no idea how old the city was, but it was not young. The building could colpse on her!

  Upon closer inspection of the stone skyscraper, she found something unexpected. There was text composed of unknown letters engraved into stones at the foundations of the tower. It seemed to pop out to her eyes, as if she saw the engravings in some additional way. When she ran a hand over the carvings, she felt a dull buzz, like the air around it was vibrating.

  What did they mean?

  After a long moment where Dawn stared down the markings, all but demanding their secrets become clear to her, her body did something rather disturbing.

  Her ninth eye opened.