[i]It all started two years ago, in the year of 2018.

I woke up as, not a human, but as a large white fox with nine tail is magnificent size. I was… freaked out, to say the least. I had no idea what was going on. But I wasn’t the only one.

I took me about an hour but I managed to change into the shape of my human self again… somehow. When I turned on to watch the morning news the first thing I saw was a clip of a bunch of soldiers surrounding what looked like a really large lizard. I would have believed it was only an overgrown komodo dragon had I been anyone else, but waking up the way I did I realised that it was anything but. I was both relieved and frightened to realise that it was an actual dragon, and though it was almost four metres tall and looked like the perfect killing machine… all I could see was the fear and confusion in its eyes. It shied away from the guns that the soldiers held, constantly looking back and forth for a way to escape. It didn’t even seem to realise that it had wings to fly with.

And just like that, it changed. One second it was a four metres tall dragon and the next it was a boy barely out of his teens. If I hadn’t been fully convinced before, I was convinced now: I wasn’t alone when it came to becoming something else.

I remember it as being one of the biggest shocks in the world, and what followed did not help in the slightest. The United States government took notice which, in hindsight, wasn’t much of a surprise. They saw the potential in that dragon boy that showed up on the TV and immediately sought him out and recruited him.

He was the first of many.

Over the next several months more and more of these creatures showed up; people capable of shapeshifting into anything from dragons to harpies. We became collectively known as ‘Shifters’, and numerous tests and gruelling training revealed that not only did Shifters possess the ability to change their physical shape, but they also had latent magical abilities. Magic… a strange word in a modern world. A fairy tail concept made real, and it frightened a lot of people. Protest groups arose, demanding that Shifters be put down or at least controlled and regulated; separating ‘Them’ from ‘Us’ was the demand. It never happened, though not for lack of trying.

Time went on and Shifters became core in many operations of war, be it spying or direct conflict. Dragons, as one might guess, were exceptionally good when it came to direct confrontations, given their tough scales and flaming breath. Others, like the Nymphs, were spies of top quality. A woman that can wrap any man around her little finger and get him to tell her anything she wants. What could be better?

It wasn’t so last, however, not even with more and more Shifters popping up every month. One day the entire world of the Shifters, and a small group of humans was turned on its head.

25th of April 2020, a group of a hundred Shifters and twenty humans woke up in a world that was not their own. Enormous forest on one side, empty plains on the other and a blue sky above was what greeted them as they awoke. Waking up as a Nine-tailed fox was a surprise in and of itself, but waking up in an entirely new world was far worse.

My name is Lily Strider, and this is the story of our survival in a new world.[/i]