Dawn had found several potentially unsettling features of her new body during the course of the st week. Her teeth, for example, were mostly human, but pointed and sharp. She had retractable, venomous fangs that extended over her canines. Her jaw could be unhinged, and her cheeks could split open to widen her bite even further, and that was hardly the end. All of her eyes had additional translucent lids that slid over them, presumably letting her see underwater, and her long, pointed ears could hear very well. When she - ahem - explored her body one evening, she found things to be more complex than they had once seemed. It all drew slight concerns from Dawn about the specifics of her biology.

  None of this compared to her ninth eye.

  Rejecting all sense, Dawn's face split right down the middle, opening to an eye that simply couldn't be there.

  With it, she could see what the engravings at the base of the tower were for. Energy suffused the text, flowing out and upward into the stonework. It held the building together, and was slowly mending parts of the building in small ways. Dust reconstituting eroded stone. She could see exactly what she had been hoping to learn. The tower was enchanted to help it stay standing.

  Dawn only looked with the ninth eye for a second or two. Opening it was panic inducing, and the flood of information it provided to her was startling. For an instant, she saw her face, from an eye on the back of a hand. Her split open skull was terrifying, but the eye itself only added to the fear.

  It was patterned like the central eye of the giant serpent. Not the same, but simir, like her own unique eye-print. A byrinthine, fractal iris gazed out from between her bisected face. Angles to nowhere and lines that were treacherous to follow. Looking upon her own madness inducing oculus set off all sorts of arms in Dawn's mind. She wasn't just some monster woman, her ninth eye was a terrifying orb channeling the eldritch nature of her progenitor.

  Dawn smmed all of her eyes closed, including her face, which snapped shut.

  It took several minutes to regute herself again. At some point she had coiled up and id on her side, torso on her tail. Her arms were crossed like she was holding herself together, and something about her new body felt truly wrong for the first time. The other features were those of a mere monster; something that she almost certainly was. The eye felt like something else, channeled through her.

  Finally opening her merely monstrous eyes again, Dawn looked up at the improbable spire. “What the fuck,” she excimed, startling herself with her own voice.

  Being a big monster woman might have a second drawback. The first was how anyone might react to her appearance, but the second was shaping up to be the terrifying giant eye in her skull. Is that her brain? Given a few minutes of carefully feeling and inspecting her face and head, Dawn realized that it probably wasn't her brain. It's like her head becomes an awful portal for an eye that is… somewhere?

  No need to try that again and find out. That's enough body horror for one afternoon.

  Well, maybe. She couldn't help but debate over it while climbing the tower. With the ninth eye, Dawn couldn't just see the magic holding the structure together, she could understand it, somehow. It was pin as day to her that the tower was in perfect condition from the effect. What else could she see like that? Fuck. She'll have to work up to finding out what exactly caused it to open.

  It took her about an hour to explore the spire. The contraptions and facilities within were beyond her immediate expertise, but she could tell that it was meant to house some number of people. The top was the thing she was most interested in, though. It would be an easy vantage point for her to see the terrain from.

  Partway up, she stopped at a balcony high enough to look down on the city, appreciating the overgrowth and recalling a fond memory.

  In her mysteriously disconnected past, Dawn had spent two weeks in Paris with her wife Rachel. They both had learned adequate French and they took it easy between the various touristy things they had pnned. Dawn and her wife had both loved the view over the city from the Eiffel tower. This wasn't quite the same; despite a respectable sprawl, the mountain city wasn't as big as Paris, but the view was from a simir height.

  Dawn - by another name - and Rachel, had joked about breaking into the upper deck access. They both thought it a funny idea, but certainly not worth it so early in the trip. God. She missed Rachel. Fuck, Dawn would probably never see her wife again, wouldn't she?

  Rachel was everything to the man Dawn had been. She couldn't even see her kids, now. Dawn was alone.

  Crying from eight eyes at once is a messy affair. She couldn't even wipe her face with the backs of her hands since they too were weeping. Eventually Dawn consigned herself to wiping off her hands and face on her robe, though it didn’t stain or anything. She id against a wall and tried to calm down, occasionally cleaning herself up on her clothes.

  God, she wished she had a photograph or anything with their faces. Dawn couldn’t see her wife , and it was something she desperately wanted. Just her own recollection of Rachel’s face felt inadequate. When their kids were born, when they went on dates, that day in Paris; all memories on the wind.

  If this was her life now, would it all fade?

  Would she forget William and Victoria?

  More tears.

  Dawn was alone, and she desperately needed to find someone. Find out about her world, and try to connect to people. At least see if civilization was just going to shun her very existence. These thoughts brought her back out of distress and back up the stairs of the grand spire. This pce really could have used a lift. It wasn't exactly the most disability minded magical tower.

  Dawn abandoned her thoughts about ancient tower accessibility as she reached the top, marveling at what she found. It was much like the top of a lighthouse. With a railed nding around a central beacon. She didn’t think it was actually a lighthouse, considering the locale, but the central device seemed at least partially functional.

  In the center was a rge sapphire-like crystal, surrounded in two circles by ft crystal gss panels that rotated in opposing directions. They weren’t rotating fast, but the panels were very smoothly joined at the edges, and it was kind of mesmerising. The crystal in the center popped out to her eyes like the enchantment runes at the base. The feeling wasn’t as intense as the runes had been, though Dawn couldn’t tell if that was because it was a bit farther away or that it was weaker. She could ever so slightly make out a glow in the crystal through the light of day.

  Probably magic, and probably not working? She imagined that this tower was built for some specific utility, but she wasn’t sure what. As she looked across the scenery, she got a bit of an idea, though. She could see down all three of the major routes out of the city, and near the horizon in all three directions, she could see a tower like this one. Some sort of network?

  The other towers were a good bet for more civilization, but they hardly narrowed down any new paths to take. Well, from here she could see that the river ran east to… is that a city on the coast? The southwest pass ran through rocky ridges out of the mountains towards that direction's tower, and the northwest pass seemed to run through partially forested foothills. Wait! She could see smoke coming up from below the northwestern tower. The bumpy scenery obscured its base so she couldn't see any signs of life on the ground from here.

  Shit! If only she could see-

  The eye opened again, and Dawn could see through the very earth. There were many things within the eye's sight, but she was focused upon the tower first. Many warm shapes spread around its base like orange and red dots, and if she concentrated, the differences between the cools and the colds made what she believed to be buildings. There were even shapes in the distant tower! That had to be the direction she should go. Then, she almost closed the eye.

  But there was more to see. Two more collections of warm dots were spread between her and the tower in the northwest. The nearest cluster was well hidden within the trees, and the further cluster simply on the wrong side of a hill. They must be settlements! The further one had a bigger popution, and the dots of the closer settlement were smaller. Children, maybe?

  Then Dawn passed out.

  She dreamed of the eye, and not her own.

  The Serpent's eye. It may have had many, but the one had been its core. A fundamental part of its being. It had whispered that knowledge and more to her as she consumed its secrets, all contained within its flesh. Dawn just had to remember them, and she could do so much. She could see whatever she wished.

  When she awoke, it was night. The unfamiliar stars were out. Two foreign moons that told her the same thing they had been telling her. This isn't the earth; you're not in Kansas anymore, Dawn.

  The crystal beacon was definitely glowing in the night, but it was far too dim to be seen at a real distance. The refractions through the crystal panels were mesmerising, though, and Dawn spent a long moment appreciating the magical conundrum.

  She had passed out, and she wasn't exactly sure why. The eye had become too much, maybe? It wasn't a risk she was excited to take again, even if she had wanted to look for people down the other two passes. Dawn couldn't see much to the east, where the coastal city had been. It was too dark, just like the northwestern pass. The southwestern pass was dark too, but on the horizon beyond, there was a glow. It was dim, and subtle, and a sickly yellow that shouldn't have carried in the night like this, but she could see the light in the distance, casting the delicate silhouette of the southern tower into view.

  It was the same as the eye. The same as the serpent's. The same as her eye. The glow was from something beyond the terrestrial reality of this world. She hated it, despised it, wanted it to be destroyed and- Something about it was pulling at Dawn's instincts in a worrying way, and she decided she should leave the city, for now.

  She had to go north, away from the glow.

  Worse - as Dawn descended the tower in the washed out grays of her night vision, she realized that for once, she was getting hungry. The stray fresh fruits of the city didn't seem like they would cut it, either.

  Dawn craved flesh. Which felt awfully dramatic, but she really was hungry for meat. She supposed she'd have to hunt something, which lent itself to her next pn of action. She hadn't missed the dots of warmth from wildlife between the settlements. She'd have to try and get a deer or something - it'd be awfully embarrassing if she couldn't manage that much, given her whole… deal.

  So she'd head to the northwest in the morning. Stop at a few of the fruit trees and snack, even if she was pretty sure that wouldn't satisfy her hunger. Then, into the wilderness, alone, with no equipment.

  What great prospects.

  What other choice did she have?