Sarah opened her eyes and knew she wasn't awake.
She stood on what seemed to be an endless plain of shallow, ankle-depth water. There was simply nothing to the horizons around her.
Like most people, when finding they are in a dream, she tried to change it. She thought about being served steak and mashed potatoes by a young men's swim team. She imagined she would say something like, "come on in, boys. The water's fine." She was thinking hard of some sort of all-you-can-eat buffet with the most amazing foods, and an all-they-can-eat-you-out arrangement.
Nothing happened, and Sarah was struck by how lucid she felt. Something seemed bright in her peripheral vision, and she looked down at her hands, and saw that her skin was laced with gold. She turned her hands this way and that as she looked up her arms and at her torso and her legs. She realized it wasn't random. The gold shined like veins in rock all along the areas that she had sustained an injury and scarred over. Both hands had thin hairline gold seams back and forth across her palms, and a particularly wide band of gold across the inside of her fingers where she had once caught an axe coming for her head.
Her expression turned somber as she looked up the outside of her left arm. In regular intervals, like a prisoner marking the days, were short, horizontal razor thin gold lines from her shoulder down to her forearm.
There were lines across her shins, as well as irregular jagged gold incisions on her calves and thighs, and her torso had one or two particularly deep gouges along her ribs and through her left breast. She looked down at the water, and it was very still despite her movements. It was like a mirror below her. She got down onto her knees and looked at herself, all the while the water's reflective surface barely rippled. Her face had them too, the deepest band of gold beneath her hair on the left side - another axe blow that had concussed her and nearly killed her.
She met her own gaze in the water. Her body and her face had both been weathered and beaten, but it always healed. She wasn't a young woman anymore, and she wore her life's journey on her body; scars, yes, but also stretch marks along her hips and breasts - which hung lower than before, and wrinkles on the outside of her eyes when she smiled. It was still a powerful body though. She had changed it by her own will as well, with hard work and hard demands. Her muscles and sinews cut a very distinctive silhouette.
Sarah felt a presence and looked up at a woman she didn't recognize. She seemed familiar, but Sarah couldn't place why. She was young, barely a woman at all, with perky boobs that probably came in yesterday. Her skin was smooth, healthy, but without any sun damage. Her blonde hair shimmered, silky and thick with no split ends. Pretty in a way, but the nose was crooked at the bridge, and her lips were a bit thin. Her shoulders were too broad and her hips too narrow to be considered a real beauty.
"Hello, Sarah," she said, and her voice had that grating uncertainty of a teenage girl not used to speaking and actually being heard. "It's good to meet you. Yes, this is a dream, but it's the easiest way for someone like me to talk to you."
"Someone like you?" Sarah noted. "And who are you?"
"I am Chastia the Unloved. I'm a Goddess," she said, pointing at herself with a thumb and a smile.
"Ha, if you're a Goddess, why do you look like that?" Sarah asked.
The Goddess smiled sadly and shook her head, "oh, Sarah. I think this is a beautiful body."
Her face fell as Sarah took a step back, looking the figure over. Sarah observed her stance, her eyes, and thought about the voice. It became clear to her why she had such a negative reaction to seeing the woman. She shut her eyes, nodding to herself as she worked up to it. "You look exactly like me."
"Young and pure before the world hurt you and marked you. Before the world proved uncaring and cold. Before the spark of hope in your eyes were dulled," Chastia said. "When you were innocent and flawless."
Sarah would not consider herself a particularly vain woman considering how much the world forced vanity onto women as a survival skill, but looking at herself, so young and hopeful, and knowing what awaited her filled her heart with a longing. And anger. She looked herself in the eye, and had to marvel at how much a life lived had changed her. Sarah raised a shaking hand to her younger face, and the skin felt smooth and vibrant. Her own hands felt dessicated and rough in comparison. Sarah stared into her own younger eyes, which were the same shape and the same color, but seemed so utterly alien.
Chastia smiled with Sarah's face, and it looked incredibly genuine and happy. It was a smile that Sarah had forgotten how to do.
"I have much to ask of you," Chastia said. "And I want to work up to it, because it's not easy and not without cost. However, you must realize now that Jay is a threat to us all."
"He's..." Sarah began.
"I won't deny that he's naive. And gentle. And very silly," her younger self began to pace around her, arms behind her back. "And he just nearly killed you. Nearly broke you. And I don't just mean your, um, womanhood."
The way Chastia moved, acted, and spoke like Sarah's younger self was uncanny. The awkwardness with matters of sex seemed very accurate as well. Sarah felt an odd dripping sensation between her legs, and saw liquid gold splash into the water below from her vagina. It sunk into the water and settled on the bottom, the only thing to mar and pollute this pristine shallow lake.
"Succubi charm and enslave people with promises of sexual pleasure," Chastia went on. "And you're tougher than that. You're strong enough to resist that. You're just lucky your body was strong enough to withstand it too."
Sarah spread her lower lips and tried to peer up herself with the mirror surface.
"Yes," she said. "He stretched you, and hurt you there," Chastia had almost finished a complete revolution around her. "And while your body has been able to endure so far, there are worse fates within your destiny."
"How so?" Sarah looked up at Chastia, who had placed a hand on her chest between her breasts.
Suddenly, the woman's hand shove itself into Sarah's chest and sliced into her sternum as if it were a razor sharp edge. Sarah screamed out, paralyzed by the pain as Chastia used both hands and pried open her chest with wet popping sounds as her ribs dislocated and then torn. She sank to her knees as the Goddess reached into it and pulled out her beating heart.
With a pursing of her lips and a slight frown, Chastia showed it to her. "Look."
Red leaked out the corner of Sarah's lips as she gritted her bloody teeth. She forced herself to focus on the heart and saw that it too was touched with gold. Right down the middle was a giant seam of gold that bisected her heart. Smaller, but sizable cracks formed a web around the rest of it.
"Your heart has been broken before," Chastia said. "But you have never loved an incubus before. Being charmed and enslaved, like his kind have done for millennia is one thing, but to love one freely and completely as he loves you? I'm afraid that would have... consequences. It would upset the balance and have results beyond what you can imagine. There is more to say, but it looks like you're out of time."
Her younger self smiled and waved at her. "Until next time, Sarah."
She collapsed to one side, submerging half her face in the water, gasping for a breath that wouldn't come, as her vision filled with dark clouds of crimson.
And it was with a heavy heart that splashed down in front of her, throwing up a spray of water. As blackness took her, the gold breaks and cracks were the last thing to fade.
* * *
Sarah opened her eyes. She didn't know where she was, but she didn't panic. She was waking up from being absolutely helpless, so she reasoned that if anything bad was going to happen, it already occurred.
Trees drifted by her vision, and as she sat in her seat, staring through glass. She wasn't alone in the cabin, as across from her was Jay, sleeping with his arms crossed, slouched low in his seat. She checked herself and saw no golden scars. She was clothed, but her armor and sword were missing, probably checked into the baggage.
She stood up and walked over in front of him. While asleep, he looked even more innocent and blameless. She reached towards his head and lightly ran her fingers through his black hair and touched the two horns there. They were little more than two conical protrusions out of his skull.
As helpless as she was before him last she could remember, he was extremely vulnerable to her the rest of the time. Not just because he was physical weak and untrained in combat, but because he simply let his guard down around her. She could do anything to him. Snap his neck, cave in his skull, or anything really. Non-combatants were like brittle twigs in the hands of someone like Sarah.
She sighed and looked to the door. Sarah expected to feel weak or woozy, but instead, she felt absolutely rested. Like waking up on a lazy Sunday after sleeping in the exact correct amount of time, without interrupted sleep cycles. She was annoyed to find that she actually felt almost cheerful. She had expected to not feel pleasant, and her expectations had been upended.
She looked up and down the narrow aisle between cabins and saw the sign for food and drinks. Sarah noticed she didn't feel sore or anything. She felt different somehow. Changed. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that goddesses apparently visited her in dreams.
The dining cart was empty. She wondered what time it was, but she saw Lily seated at a table, a pot of tea and a cup in front of her. Knowing Lily, they were stone cold and had been ignored for hours. Lily looked different as well, or maybe it had simply been a while since she had last been back to normal.
She was dressed in her usual dapper fashion with pinstripe pants and a grey vest over her dress shirt. There was a carefully loose blue tie around her neck, the top button of her shirt unbuttoned as well. Lily was bent over some paper, writing quickly.
"Looks like you're no longer a bimbo," Sarah said, sitting down opposite her friend.
