Whoever the hell said life is as hard as you make it, had a fucking easy godamn life.

Imagine some poor kid born into a poor family in the middle of a war-torn nation. It doesn't really matter what kind of war but I like to imagine a civil war as those tend to be rife with cruelty. It also doesn't matter where in the world you imagine this child either. Though most first world nations like to pretend like the ‘civilized world’ doesn't, and never has had their bloody internal power struggles the truth of the matter is they do and have.

Alright, so now we got this kid, yeah, he can be black, white, Asian, whatever, that part doesn't matter. Now imagine his parents die at a very young age, he gets no education, no extended family is left, and now she's starving on the street and only barely able to speak. Now imagine he spends years in that existence, eeking out a living scrounging what she can find discarded by those who are not struggling quite as much as this child is.

Now imagine he's drafted as a child soldier, brainwashed, drugged, and tossed into a war zone with a weapon she can't even name. Forced into a situation where it's kill or be killed, the child kills their first opponent only to be killed by the second. Now imagine that child goes to hell for the crime of murder and then tell me that's justice.

What's the point of all this hyperbole you might ask? Well, it's simple, where were the kid's options? At no point did they ever receive a chance to do much of anything other than decide to live or die. The only meaningful decision they were ever capable of was choosing to let themself waste away or continue to struggle.

What I’m trying to say is, sometimes life just shits on you, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Justice is a nice concept, but in reality, it's arbitrary, wielded by the powerful, and thus corrupted by that same wielder. We like to think that justice is beyond such things, but if you could see me, and thus look me in the eye, I doubt you would be able to tell me that the rich don't have it easier.

That the powerful, don't have an easier life than us peons.

I’m getting off track though. My point is, that life can sometimes shit on you for no other reason than you happen to exist. That's it, no rhyme, reason, karmic or otherwise, just one day your life is great, and the next, it sucks.

That's me, that's the story of my life.

I was young when the aneurysm hit me.

It was a few days after my twenty-fifth birthday in fact, and I had even just bought an engagement ring and was preparing to ask my boyfriend to marry me.

Then, I just dropped and though I didn't hit my head on anything, I was deemed ‘lucky’ because at least I wasn't driving or having a bath at the time. If you can't already tell, I disagree with being labeled lucky, as I much rather would have drowned, or drove into a wall and at least died quickly.

But no, life had other plans.

After that things blurred together for a while, as I slipped in and out of consciousness, either forcefully due to the drugs they pumped me full of, or just because my brain was fucked. When finally I came to and was able to take stock of my surroundings, I was met with the sound of yelling.

Like a lot of yelling.

Turns out the nurse that had supposed to be watching me had left me in the hands of her replacement without checking if her replacement had shown up. Something that I later discovered was not only against hospital policy but was also illegal, as I was a high-risk patient.

Sure enough, I apparently had a heart attack, and no one found out about it until an hour later. After that, I had received a hasty operation, which the surgeon decided to rush because he wanted to buy Christmas presents for his kids. As you can probably already guess, that didn't end well for me either, and I was paralyzed from the very tippity top of my head down to my goddamn toes.

I was a prisoner in my own body, and oh sure the case they had against the hospital was cut and dry, but for a reason that should be obvious to you, the fact that my family was going to get rich off my suffering didn't exactly help me much. The long and short of it was there was not a goddamn thing they could do that would help me at this point. There were a few experimental treatments, sure, but they either did nothing or made my already agonizing existence somehow even worse.

I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say I wasted away.

My boyfriend stopped visiting first, and I couldn't really blame him, I already considered myself dead at this point anyway. He deserved to be happy after all, no matter how much his tear-filled goodbye made me want to die for real. Then the family stopped showing up one by one until all that was left was my dad, who turned out to be the one who made the decision to pull the plug on my undead ass.

And just like that, I went from a member of the less than walking dead, to just the dead part.

Oh and before you go start feeling too bad for me, let me just say that I wasn't a saint by any stretch of the imagination. I drank a little too much on the weekends, didn't save money, was generally not very good with said money, and was a bit of a dick when I was younger. I also volunteered at a shelter three times a month and donated one pay cheque a year to charity. There were more good things I did, and more bad things too, but suffice it to say I was neither a good person nor a bad person.

I also certainly didn't deserve to have all that shit happen to me.

This is about the part of the story where you would expect me to say something inspirational huh?

Like; Despite my suffering, I always held on to hope, and never gave up, and in the end, death is just a part of life. Or, my time may have been short, but I lived by my own creed, and that I regret nothing.

But that isn't me, and that wasn't how I felt.

The moment I got briefed on what happened to me, I knew I was dead, and that there was nothing I could do about it. I was an unmoving corpse with the mind of a twenty-five-year-old man who knew his end was coming. I was a zombie, an undead abomination kept alive only through the good graces of modern science. I never once considered the possibility of living anything close to a normal life after that very first one-way conversation.

All I wanted, all I hoped for, was for my family to let me die and for them to move on.

They were alive, and deserved to stay living, and have the chance to be happy, I thought. I was a corpse and had no feelings, no future, and no hope. I was deadweight, both literally and metaphorically, and should have been cast off far earlier than when I had been.

So, obviously, this isn't the end of my story, as not only would it be depressing, but also pretty damn boring. Something I wouldn't fucking read, that's for damn sure.

But, just like how this isn't the end of my story, it wasn't the end of me either.

You see, there was something after death, not heaven, or hell, or anything between, just a void where you floated endlessly in. I was shocked that there was anything at all, as I was kinda hoping I would just stop existing entirely, and being an atheist, I kinda assumed that was what was going to happen to me.

But there I was, floating in an endless nothing, neither existing nor not existing.

I know what your thinking, that sounds like hell to me, but it really wasn't. I wasn't truly aware of anything, as time itself didn't seem to exist. Unbound from the laws of the universe, and the trappings of flesh, I had no thoughts, feelings, or experiences, just, nothing. Even now I struggle to remember what happened in that space between, as all that remains of that time is a long darkness.

As you can probably imagine I didn't remain in that void forever, and after a small eternity, or no time at all, something tore through the walls of my prison and grabbed me. A literal hand now held what must have been my soul tight in its grip, before retreating back from wherever it came from, me in tow.

I would have been elated if I was capable of feeling such a thing, unfortunately, that was quite beyond me, however, and all I could do was float there. Until the hand, and with it, me, breached the walls of the void and I returned to reality once more. After that, my ability to perceive things grew a little fuzzy and hard to properly explain.

Even more so than usual, that is.

It was like being blind, deaf, and standing in the middle of a pool while people swam all around you. I could feel the ripples coming through the water, and even felt someone brush against me from time to time, while also not being like that at all. I know, I’m not exactly explaining this very well, but it's not exactly a situation that you can put into words very easily. I had not only lost all my old senses but gained new ones, new ones that were so unlike anything that it's hard to describe a point of reference.

Let me try again.

I could feel the ripples in the water, but as soon as they hit ‘me’ I could also sense where they had been, and where they originated from both backward, and forwards through time. Now, do you get how hard it is to explain all this? It's like describing the color red to someone who’s never seen the color red and has been blind since birth for that matter.

So, after going from existing within a zero-dimensional space, to a fourth-dimensional one, I was rather perplexed, or rather I would have been had I some sort of biological ability to feel things. Without a brain to process emotions, and thoughts I just sort of was.

Regardless of all that, I was then thrust into something that felt oddly cold, thus signaling the return of at least one of my senses. This also heralded the loss of my weird new senses and the return of the rest of my old ones, and to say the switch was jarring would be an understatement. All at once I was a biological thing again, or at least I had the capability of experiencing emotions and constructing thoughts anyway, I didn't know if I truly was a biological thing at all.

Which again, would be nice if my previous existences had not been so divorced from any kind of reference point as to ascend beyond any notion of pleasant, or unpleasant for that matter.

Now when I said my senses returned, you might think such an event would be an orderly one, with my senses returning one by one, but that was not the case. They came back all at once, overloading my new mind with a synesthesia of light, sound, color, touch, and taste. Everything blurred together, to the point that even the very ability to sense where my body parts were in relation to one another was mixed up with a million other things.

Eventually, my mind began to force order on chaos, and sort out my experiences into something I could actually make sense of. One experience became untangled from another until eventually the mass that was my existence was sorted out.

I blinked, and looked around, finding myself in what looked like a cave of some kind.

Water dripped somewhere nearby, and though I saw no light sources, I could see just fine. Stalactites and stalagmites littered the area, though the immediate space around me had been cleared and leveled, allowing for a sort of ritual circle to be constructed beneath me.

Looking closer, I realized that it was some sort of mana confluence point with a few dozen other enchantments placed around it, though how I knew that was a mystery. Instead of being repulsed by this new knowledge, I indulged in it, plumbing the depths of my new, and altogether foreign mind.

I learned that the mana that had been directed into the circle was further refined by the enchantments which bled off bits and pieces of the mana until seemingly nothing was left. Yet I knew that shouldn't be possible, as there was power further down the line and ending at me. I recalled that this process was usually used to create a specific type of mana that was aligned with one of the various schools of magic.

The one confusing part was how the array seemed to strip away all colors, effectively leaving nothing behind only for that not to be true, as something was coming out the end. It was colorless, yet not grey, as grey is a color, and this was the very absence of color itself. Once more, I find myself struggling to describe what was happening as it was neither grey, nor clear, nor any other description I can imagine. It was simply the reverse of color, confusing, I know.

Regardless, I shook my head and looked away from the channels of mana carved into the cave floor, and looked down upon myself. I was in the body of what looked like a dragon of some kind if a dragon had oddly cartoonish proportions. Spyro sprung to mind first, only for that image to be quickly quashed as I was bipedal, which was nice.

I decided to start with my hands, as that seemed like an important place to begin at. They were large, both in comparison to the rest of my body and my old body. Which made sense, as they had short claws on the end of each one of my digits. They were also covered in dark purple scales which struck me as odd for some reason, but why I felt that way was not readily apparent.

Moving on, I glanced down at my torso and found that I had a strip of slightly thicker dark green scales running down from my neck and ending at my crotch. Though I couldn't find my junk at the moment, I knew that it was there, somewhere, not like I wanted to think about that right now mind you but it was nice to know I didn't change genders or was neutered somehow. The thicker, wider scales along my stomach also seemed odd and discolored somehow, but again, I couldn't make heads or tails of why that was.

The rest of my body was more or less as you’d expect. I had big, clawed feet to support my large body, with legs that were straight, and sporting traditional knees, which meant I was indeed supposed to walk upright. My tail was also fairly long, at least half the length of the rest of my body, while also sporting deep green spines all the way down to the spade-shaped tip. I also had a pair of wings on my back, but the interior of them seemed to have been damaged at some point as they were absolutely shredded, with little flesh left to even stretch between them.

It was all rather confusing, but I was just glad to be in a male’s body, and to walk upright, never mind the addition of having wings. I could even move them with relative ease, though a quick test flap revealed that they were as useless as they appeared. Still, that at least meant I had a chance of flying under my own power, something I dreamt of constantly in my old life. With all that in mind, I was fairly unbothered by my change in species, as I at least had all the important parts of my old one, plus magic was real apparently, and I knew a lot about it, which was pretty damn awesome.

Remembering that I had yet to look at my face, I searched around for a mirror, or at least a pool of water and after finding the source of the dripping sound from earlier, near the back of the cave, stared into it. Only to be shocked by what I found, though I suppose in hindsight it explained why everything was cold, and my sense of touch was so dulled. I was dead, a fact made obvious due to the fact that I was missing an eye and a good chunk of my face.

My left eyeball and the space around it were completely gone, as well as the portion of my skull that was behind it. There was no brian left within, though I did still seem to have muscle and tendons which lay exposed to the open air. Prodding the inside of my head made me uncomfortable, so I quickly stopped that, and continued the visual inspection of my face.

I had a firm, square jaw and a mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth as well as a long serpentine tongue. The interior of my mouth was black, no doubt due to the fact that this body was dead. The spines I saw along my back went all the way up my skull and stopped just above my brow line, growing longer and more dominant after reaching my neck. I also had a small trio of frill-like extensions that jutted from the side of my face that was still fully intact.

Taking a step back, I frowned, and pondered my fate, only to facepalm when I realized the irony of my situation.

I went from a non-literal undead to a literal undead. Fate had a rather twisted sense of humor, I thought to myself.

Putting that gripe aside, for now, I stared back into my reflection and took stock of my one remaining eye. Though glassy, I could still see the bright green iris within as well as the vertical, draconic pupil. Other then that I had a row of scales just above my eyes that resembled eyebrows, which was odd, but not the strangest thing I’ve seen today.

Stepping away from the puddle I began to pace and truly take stock of my situation.

I didn't seem to lack depth perception, and my one remaining eye was no doubt blind, meaning I didn't see due to any traditional means. I figured that most of my senses had a sort of magical equivalent as my skull was quite empty, never mind the hole going right through my head. I also didn't seem to feel any pain, though it did feel unpleasant when I touched the inside of my skull.

I remembered that dragons breathed fire, lightning, or other elementally oriented things depending on their race and after breathing deeply, I exhaled only for nothing to happen. Frowning, I came to the conclusion that whatever organ that allowed a dragon unleash elemental destruction was no doubt gone or was otherwise too damaged to function. With a sigh, I scratched breathing fire off the list of cool things this body could do and decided to test its strength, as dragons were supposed to be strong.

Gripping a stalactite, I tried to rip it off the ceiling only to crush the stone into iddy biddy pieces before I could get that far. Winding up, I then punched the wall, and ended up making the whole cave shake and bringing a grin to my face. I was strong, very strong, stronger than a dragon my size should be, I quickly remembered.

I could already tell that this weird memory of mine was going to come in handy, as I sure as shit didn't want to have to learn how to talk again. Or do something needlessly pedantic like relearning what a chair was or the cultural norms of whatever the prevailing society was.

Nodding to myself, I turned and began to walk out of the cave, happy to find that my legs knew what they were doing without me having to think about it. After a few feet, however, the cave became far less flat, and turned sharply to the right, while also rising a few feet. Thankfully it didn't narrow much, and after taking the turn I noticed light coming from the end of the tunnel.

More importantly, there was a small camp established at the mouth of the cave, which had also received extensive modification. The room was square, perfectly so, with a wall of wood covering the opening almost completely. A small door sat in the center of the rather haphazard wall which seemed to be pieced together from driftwood, and what had once been a cart. I could tell because the axles of the cart had been cut and used as a frame for the wooden door.

The area itself seemed to be a primitive base of some kind, with a bed just about as long as I was placed against one side while the other was dominated by a stove, and a small pile of wood. A few crates and chests littered the area as well, in addition to a sharing space with a drying rack of some kind. As well as a primitive workstation devoted to the construction of potions and other arcane items.

All in all, it looked like the camp of a mage of some kind, which would explain where the crazy powerful circle I woke up on, came from. I searched around for any pictures of some kind, hoping to find anything that would help me figure out who or what had brought me back. I was almost about ready to give up when I noticed the glint of something metallic poking out from beneath a pillow.

Pulling it out revealed a picture frame containing an aged photograph. The edges had begun to curl, but all the detail was still visible, thankfully, allowing me a good look at the various strange beings found within. The centermost creature was an abnormally tall humanoid with long pointed ears, and a wide, genuine smile. Her hair was primarily a deep sapphire blue with a strip of purple and pink running through about the middle of her head.

Her features were sharp, and elven in a way, though that might have just been the ears talking more than anything else. She also had violet eyes, and a sparkling smile, in addition to a long flowing magenta robe. It looked like the vestments of a sorcerer, though more practical, as it had numerous pockets all over it. Her name was Twilight Sparkle, I recalled, and looking at her made me smile for some reason, her own grin being strangely infectious.

A woman to her right had similar elven features, with long pointed ears, and sharper, more pointed eyes. But while this Twilight person appeared to be a sorcerer, this next one seemed to be some sort of model, or perhaps a rich business owner. The dress she wore looked incredibly expensive, the long flowing purple and white dress cascading over her generous curves without drawing too much attention to them. The outfit looked like something someone would wear if they wanted to stand out from the crowd, without appearing like that was their intent.

She was classy and wore more makeup than Twilight had, making her lips pop, and her eyes really stand out. Her hair was also exquisitely done, and curled to absolute perfection, making me stop and stare even longer than I had planned on

After shaking my head, I quickly looked at the rest of the people in the picture at a more rapid-fire pace.

A short, scruffy-haired woman flew just behind Twilight Sparkle, wearing what looked like a flight jacket and a pair of jeans. Her hair was every color of the rainbow, and her wings were surprisingly short considering that she could apparently fly with them. Other than that she wore a cocky expression and a large, bulky ring on one of her fingers. Her name was Rainbow Dash, I realized, and she was a wonder bolt, whatever that was.

Beside the white person, whom I realized was named Rarity, was another of the winged, and round-eared people, only this one didn't fly and was much taller than Rainbow Dash. Her name was Fluttershy, a voice reminded me, and her long pink hair nearly obscured her sparkling teal eyes. She wore a long brown and green denim dress, the kind I imagined a gardener would wear in the summer.

To Twilight’s left was a round-eared person who lacked wings, though she more than made up for it in sheer bulk. Larger than nearly everyone in the picture, this person appeared to be a weightlifter at first glance. Only for me to realize that they must have been a farmer, given the plaid shirt, dirty jeans, large boots, and a stetson that contained her straw-colored hair. Applejack was her name, and she had one arm around Twilight Sparkle, and one arm around a pink-haired woman who stood next to her.

Whose name I recalled was Pinkie Pie. She too lacked any wings and had more rounded ears as well as a generally larger body. Though she had a little chub on her and was a little shorter than most of her friends, she also appeared to have the hidden strength one might see in a weightlifter. True strength came from the core after all, which meant a truly strong person may not readily appear as such, something this person had in spades. Her outfit was as whimsical as her cotton candy hair, as her blouse and skirt combo had splotches of glitter as well as seemingly random buttons all over it.

Last but not least was what looked like a younger version of myself, or at least whoever’s body I was now residing within anyway. Though only half the height of my current form, the resemblance was uncanny, and he wore only a black sweatshirt and a wide smile.

I put the picture frame back down and was ready to walk outside when I heard the doorknob turn. I considered bracing myself for a potentially hostile situation but found myself disarmed by the pleasant humming I heard.

Then, Twilight Sparkle walked in with a bundle of logs in her arms. Though the air caste woman appeared older than she had in the picture, I knew she didn't actually age, and that this change must have been brought about due to extreme stress.

When our gazes met, the woman dropped her load of firewood and stopped the tune she had been humming. “Spike?”

The unnamed returned. 4 Colorless, legendary creature- Zombie. Tap, one target land you control and one target land your opponent controls both lose all abilities and gain, tap, add one colorless mana to your mana pool. ⅔

Inverse Mana Confluence. 3 white 3 blue 3 black 3 red 3 green. At the beginning of your first main phase, add 9 colorless mana to your mana pool. All colorless creatures have +4+4 and gain “If this creature would die or be put into exile, return it to its owner’s hand.”

Author's Note

This is part of the 12 days of christmas, head over here to keep track of all the cool stuff coming down the pipes. If you want to ensure I can afford to keep doing stuff like this, consider backing me over on Subscribestar or Patreon.