Even on that day, when I finally made it out, finally collapsed on the ground, the portal closing behind me… I knew I hadn’t really escaped.
Sure, the changes were reversing. The fur was receding, the paw pads fading, my ears shrinking and losing their pointy tips… but as I lay there, covered only in the torn garments that’d somehow miraculously managed to cling to my body through it all, I could tell that something still had its hold on me.
I began to notice strange things. By some probabilistic glitch, I always appeared to have a slight “glow” to me just because of the way the light was bouncing off of me. My nails would grow just a little too fast, and the color of my eyes was a bit too bright. And my dreams gradually changed… they became more memorable, more detailed, eventually tipping over into lucidity. Their color schemes, over time, leaned more and more towards a set of sickening, muted pastels.
A few times, I’ve seen another portal in my dreams. I always run away from it. When I look down and see the fur growing from my chest, I startle awake. The matching fur on my physical, waking body takes several seconds to recede once again.
I’ve tried to research this place, to no avail. I know it isn’t the Feywild, or at least, not as we know it. I can’t find a good match in any of the known realms, even among the most sparsely documented. It’s theorized that many unfortunate individuals have wound up in unknown realms through failed experiments, magical accidents, and the like… but none who have ever returned have ever spoken of one quite like this.
A few people have been disappearing lately, timed perfectly to the nights of my more vivid dreams. The color of the sunrise is wrong, and the clouds are oddly shaped. It must’ve let me escape on purpose, allowing me to be an agent of its influence. Can a realm have agency? Or a setting, desires? There could be an entire ecosystem of these “predatory worlds”. That world that I brought with me, that myself and those near me are slowly sinking into… it could just be some other place’s Feywild. Even if our strongest magic users manage to save us from it… I worry that our universe will have garnered much unwanted attention in the process.