A/N: Keep in mind this is more a slice of life than an epic adventure saga, like most fics of this nature.

I pre-wrote this story up to chapter 25, intending for it to be a one-shot. Due to this, early chapters are more like single scenes and snippets. They get longer as the story goes on.

Finally, while there are plenty of happy and silly chapters, this fic will ruin your day if you go in expecting pure lightheartedness and comedy. Please don't be mad at me when things go south. :P

Enjoy~

When she woke up outside the Temple, her first thought was, I am alive.

This was before she opened her eyes, so she hadn't yet had a chance to see the sunset sky saturated with impossible colours that would make her take back that statement. Taking one slow breath after another and focusing on the glorious cool air flooding her lungs, something she had once taken for granted, she gently curled her fingers. Her palm was warm. So was the humid air.

That was familiar. Perhaps she was back home, on the ocean shores she had grown up on, where the summer air was as thick and wet as syrup.

But that was unlikely. Wherever she was, it probably wasn't home.

She thought about laying there forever and never finding out, but the bed of tree roots and thorny branches she had been unceremoniously deposited on didn't make for the most comfortable resting place. So she cracked open an eye.

Perhaps not, the girl thought then, slowly raising a heavy arm to reach for the sky. She blinked hard, but the illusion did not go away. The world blurred together like a watercolour picture, the edges soft and shapes imperfect and messy, an artist's hand. For a girl that had woken up every day to the dull, sharp shapes and colours of reality, waking up inside a painting was more than a little bit jarring.

And yet... It's beautiful. She let her hand drop and her eyes wander, drinking in the sights with ravenous eyes. The sunsets she knew were often boring, as if the world couldn't muster the strength to throw out even the slightest of red hues, but this... The sky was an absolute explosion of colour, streaks of green and red and pink and blue swirling together, bursting with an intensity her overstimulated eye cones didn't know was possible.

She thought she could stare at that sky forever, but eventually, as the colours began to swirl and fade towards the horizon, something compelled her to sit up. She did, stretching and picking leaves out of her dark hair, but as she opened her eyes, her breath caught in her throat.

She would have known it anywhere.

Of course, she'd grown far away from that little kid who refused to stop believing in dragons, and the game had become a distant memory. But she still could have easily recognized the building, even after all these years.

Well, she thought, gulping and staring down the titan architectural feat that was the Temple, I guess this is where you go when you die.