Ember, Triune 🎶🔆🔥⚡️ @emanate@awoo.space

So who's left?

Phoenix, bright and fiery.
Kobold toy, soft and cuddly.
Otter, spark and lightning.

There's always going to be three, I think. But this feels better.

And... maybe I can move on away from that past, that hole, now that I've finished that Work. And start new ones.

I did the thing. I went through the songs, focusing on how they seemed to map to my history. I went through my past, as well.
The past, of course, where I was 'just' the dragon. I didn't realize that's what I was doing.

Towards the end, the next thing I know... the dragon is saying farewell. They... went through all this. They're tired. They just want to retire, not continue to run this life.

I accepted it. Moved on. Closed the music box on the final track.

The ritual:

Well okay, if I say it's mostly me getting a little stoned and then putting all my attention on the mix from start to finish, all 78 minutes of it, that sounds too simplified. It's more than that, of course, but it's hard to describe how or why.

Still, it involved a lot of the usual trappings as such. Ritual vestment (lab coat), special place in the house, candle in the fireplace, mood lighting. Music on speakers.

So... last week this kind of all hit me at once. The dragon, fading away. The otter, definitely wanting to step out more.

And that lingering feeling of closing out important things. Ending a cycle. Shutting the book to start a new volume. Whatever.

So I did a thing, and another thing happened alongside, and... I feel different and yet... good. Optimistic. Fresh.

Much of my woo, and much of my personality, and even to some degree my approach to my gender transition stuff, has all been informed heavily by mad science tropes.

Intense bursts of forward motion or creation, quiet periods of thought and tinkering, then more flashy changes suddenly.

And I had a character for that already. One of my oldest, one with the most story of all of them, and one who's changed the most over time.

An otter named Nikolai.

The phoenix is so bright and distracting that I've... spent most of the last year being mostly them, and otherwise being the kobold toy.

I thought the dragon was still /there/ but... it became increasingly hard to determine why. They were literally my old pre-transition self in many ways. It got a bit awkward.

Then something else came to the forefront of my thoughts, much like the phoenix initially popped back up and said "pay attention, this is important".

I remembered that I had other aspects of self that I still wanted to express. This came out in the story as "oops, there was an AI in the chassis still, now you're merged with it".

So that was a thing for a good while. Then the phoenix came back and, well. Suddenly I was three.

What was part merged, though, apparently didn't stop there. The dragon wasn't much of a person as-is, now fading to less of one. Becoming a toy.

From the start of me being furry, the dragon was only barely a character. They were me, orthocosm me, with a different skin. A self-insert, often enough, not a person with a story and history.

When I started to think about gender transition, that shifted my thoughts towards a narrative of the dragon completely uploading into a synthetic body (the kobold, though I didn't have the species then). Then it shifted a bit.