The vintage was an aged Rubycrest wine, sweet and robust. It was Kaelen's favorite. That was his brother's first mistake—or rather, his masterpiece.
Kaelen remembered the sudden, agonizing fire in his throat, the way his silver goblet clattered against the marble floor of the throne room, and his brother's cruel, victorious smile looking down at him. Then, there was only a suffocating darkness.
So this is death, Kaelen thought. Quiet. Cramped. Smells like... rotting leaves?
Wait.
He tried to stretch his arms, but he couldn't feel them. Panic flared in his chest—a chest that felt strangely elongated. He pushed against the darkness surrounding him. It felt like a leathery wall. He pushed harder, using what felt like his head, until something tore.
Light pierced the gloom. Humid, suffocating air rushed in. Kaelen wriggled forward, tumbling out of his confinement and landing onto a bed of damp moss with a soft thwack.
He blinked against the glaring, emerald-tinted sunlight filtering through a canopy of impossibly massive trees.
"Guards!" Kaelen tried to shout. "Treason! My brother has—"
What came out of his mouth was a sharp, pathetic hiss.
Kaelen froze. He looked down. Where his silk robes and pale, frail human hands should have been, there was a long, twisting tube of vibrant green scales. He stared at the scales. The scales shifted as he panicked, his new, tubular body knotting itself in a confused tangle.
I... I am a snake. The realization hit him like a warhammer. The Crown Prince of Aethelgard, master of political theory and heir to the Sun Throne, was a worm with teeth. He looked back at the leathery eggshell he had just ruptured. There were dozens of others in the nest, all torn open, empty. He was the last to hatch, or perhaps the only survivor of some predator's snack.
Suddenly, a shadow eclipsed the sun.
Kaelen looked up. Descending from the canopy was a bird. To Kaelen's human mind, it looked like a sparrow. But to his current, pencil-thin body, the creature was the size of a dragon. Its beak was a jagged spear of bone, and its black eyes were locked dead onto his bright green scales.
It's diving. Kaelen's brilliant mind calculated the trajectory in a fraction of a second. If I stay here, I die. Again.
He didn't know how to slither properly. He just threw his weight to the side, thrashing his muscled body wildly. The giant beak slammed into the moss exactly where his head had been a millisecond prior, showering him in dirt.
Kaelen didn't wait for it to strike again. Instincts he didn't know he possessed took over. He darted forward, using the S-shaped motion of his body to propel himself into the dark, tangled roots of a massive oak tree. He squeezed into a narrow crevice just as the bird's talons scraped against the bark behind him.
He curled tightly in the dark, his tiny, cold-blooded heart hammering against his ribs. He had survived.
Suddenly, a translucent blue screen materialized in the darkness right before his eyes, accompanied by a chiming sound that echoed inside his skull.
[System Initialization Complete.] [Host Survival Confirmed. Welcome to the Verdant Labyrinth.] [Species:] Level 1 Emerald Grass Snake [Status:] Frail, Malnourished [Objective:] Consume biomass. Survive. Evolve.
Kaelen stared at the floating blue text. He flicked his tongue, tasting the damp air, feeling the vibrations of the frustrated bird stomping outside his root cave.
Slowly, the panic faded, replaced by the cold, calculating fury of a prince wronged. His brother had taken his throne. The gods had taken his humanity.
Very well, Kaelen thought, his slit pupils narrowing in the dark. If I must crawl through the dirt, I will. But I vow, I will not stay at the bottom for long.