[color=f7941d][h2][center]Sidney Malcolm[/center][/h2][/color]

Sidney was subdued as she followed the others into the city. She didn’t speak or join in with the conversations with the others as they trailed Eckehart through the crowds that parted for them, nor did she engage with the strange and varied revellers that they passed along the way, sticking close to the centre of the group. Her head was still swimming with everything that was happening, the lake coming to life and snatching them up, waking up in this place with their bodies transformed and being pulled along by this Eckehart guy to… somewhere, to meet this ‘True Voice’ of his, before she had time to even come to terms with the fact that there was a dragon, a [i]dragon[/i] right over there.

All the while the song continued in the back of her mind.

What Sidney did do as she walked was look. Her head swung from side to side constantly, trying to see anything and everything all at once, from the crowds of people swarming around them, no two of which seemed to look alike, with their feathered heads, scaled skin and gleaming eyes, to the clothes and jewellery they were wearing and items they were carryings, the stalls selling wares and the buildings they stood in front of or hung out of the windows to see their passage. Even the members of their own group, her friends and familiar figures from New Hope; majestic antlers and raven black feathers and skin like parchment. Everything she saw, no matter where she looked or how she turned her head, looked unreal and yet so vividly, perfectly [i]real[/i] at the same time. Sidney had seen art before, she had sometimes spent hours of the day looking at hundreds of paintings and illustrations of worlds and people and things that didn’t exist; whole fantasy worlds brought to life by the imaginations of incredibly talented people she could only dream of one day being as good as. But nothing she had ever seen captured in inks or paints or digital could match the [i]depth[/i] of what she was seeing now. The reality of it all.

And that was before she  even looked up at the sky.

[color=f7941d]“I wish I had a camera.”[/color]

She spent almost as much time looking at herself as she did everything else; her eyes, drifting every which way, always came back to the every-shifting canvas of her own skin. Her sleeve was still rolled up, her left forearm exposed as she idly ran the fingers of her other hand over the little butterfly she had drawn there. It felt smooth. Smoother than skin with supposed to be; not bumpy with goose bumps from the chill that still clung to her from waking up in a pool of water, not coated in little hairs from follicles that now seemed to be absent. Smooth like a lizards scales, maybe. When she looked closer, she could see that the surface of her skin was broken up into little, tiny plates; kind of like the scales of a reptile, except unnaturally uniform in shape and size, or maybe, given her shifting pigmentation, maybe like pixels on a computer screen.

Though yellow had been the dominant colour of her palette before, as Sidney walked through the city, as she saw more sights and began to feel calmer, the colours changed; yellow gave way to pinks and oranges or various hues, darker and more vibrant in places, muted in others. Tracing the edge of a pattern with one finger, Sidney wondered what it was that caused the changes, what decided the colours, and watched as a lilac hue spread across her skin amidst the rest, followed soon after by more yellow and a splash of red as she pulled her hand away.

[color=f7941d]“Weird.”[/color]

Dropping her arms to her sides and allowing her sleeve to fall back into place, Sidney looked up in time to see their group about to cross over a huge bridge; as wide as a highway and ornate in its construction, covered with vines and flowers that looked hand-crafted in how perfectly placed they were. Then her eyes dropped to the reliefs beneath their feet, and Sidney couldn’t help but to finally stop and stare at what she saw.

Because of course, if everything here was beautiful, why wouldn’t the art be amazing as well? Why wouldn’t they use some of the most detailed carvings she had ever seen to [i]pave their roads[/i]? Were they even allowed to walk on those? It felt like blasphemy.

[color=f7941d]“Who carved these?”[/color]

Eckehart had brought them to a stop at the end of this bridge, across which sat a giant palace, the place they were to meet a princess; was the princess also the Voice, was she the one singing the sound that still rang inside her head? She probably should have paid more attention to what everyone was saying. Freyja was ready to move forward, to jump straight into things, but Sidney very much felt unprepared at the moment.

[color=f7941d]“Wait! We’re meeting a princess right? Isn’t there any, like, etiquette we need to be aware of? What do we call her? Do we bow?”[/color]