You cry out, feeling as though you are falling to your death, for you can no longer feel the ground beneath you as tumble through the bright tunnel which constitutes the portal. Eventually, though, you have time to become more curious than terrified, as though you were falling into a bottomless pit. You even have the presence of mind to be curious about the strange feelings from your body. You look at your feet and are quite surprised to see dark fur all over your legs and a pair of split hooves at the end of your feet. You run your hands through your new fur and touch your new hooves, trying to make sense of whether what you are seeing is real. You find now sensation to contradict the discovery that you seemingly have something like a pair of goat legs now.
Your clothes are intolerably uncomfortable on your shifting form, and you work your way out of them with some effort. The garments float away weightlessly and seemingly dissolve into the walls of the tunnel. Your fur changes color and texture on your abdomen, becoming browner and possibly more feline. There's also something dangling over your ass which confuses you. Gaining some control over whatever it is back there, you flex it around and manage to get it sticking out in front of you between your legs where you can see it. It's covered in scales rather than fur, and it takes you a second or two to realize that it's part of you, the same new appendage that your spine lengthened to give you over your butt. Grabbing it, you decide it looks and feels like a lizard's tail, but you aren't sure what to make of the hard, bony bulge at the end of your tail. A slit opens in the front of it, and you realize you can feel structures forming inside there. You get an urge to poke something out from within the slit, and almost instantly you see a black, forked snake tongue dart out and go back in. You realize with some trepidation that you can taste the air via your new appendage.
"What am I turning into?" you say out loud into the void. "And what are those?" you ask yourself about a some strange pits forming on your tail-bulge. Two of the holes open up into new nostrils, as you discover when you start taking small breaths with a second set of lungs deep inside your tail. Two of the pits become very sensitive to heat, and the radiation from your body starts to form a glowing image within your mind. Still other pits grow wider and form two orbs within them which look almost like snake eyes. A jolt up your spine and a flash of new vision within your consciousness reveals that the appearance is not deceiving: you're staring in opposite directions at once, making eye contact with yourself in a very bizarre way. It takes a moment for the motion sickness to wear off from this.
"I have a snake's head on my tail?!" you exclaim. You let go of your tail but have no trouble staying face-to-face with it using its own muscles. You felt something pointy on your scaly skin while you held it and want to know what's wrong with your fingers. You don't see anything at first, but flexing your hands a bit soon brings out a pair of retractable claws which you weren't expecting. You watch from both points of view as your claws come in and out, as though you are playing with them. Your tan fur has spread and become shaggier, but your (original) head still seems normal for now. All at once, though, you feel an uncomfortable stretching feeling in the middle of your face and your human field of view widens as though your eyes are getting pushed apart. You watch through your tail's head and see that your human head is indeed widening: soon your original field of vision goes dark and your original head stops breathing, until new eyes and nostrils have formed in the middle and the two sides of your head have split apart into identical human heads with identical human faces. Fresh air rushes in through your two human noses and you snap all four of your human eyes open.
At first, your human fields of vision are only subtly identifiable as different points of view: both your human heads are looking at your snake tail, one from left-of-center and the other from right-of-center. Slowly and cautiously, you turn your human heads to face each other, watching them both from your snake tail as you do so. Seeing your own human face with your own human eyes makes you feel as though you are looking in the mirror. Each face starts to look a little different, though, when your hair falls out and your head fur starts to grow in. One face starts to grow black fur, and the other starts to grow brown. Both of your human eyes become animal eyes, changing your color vision dramatically in two of your three fields of view. Interestingly, the pupils on the black face start to look straight lines, like goat eyes to match your new goat legs. Two spiral horns start growing out of that head, and you get to see its ears become floppy. Meanwhile, you can see your brown head gaining a very feline muzzle and you soon identify this head as that of a lion. Before you can make sense of what you have become, you feel yourself tumble out of the warmhole onto solid ground.
Oof! It takes you a moment to catch your breath from the impact and stumble to your feet. You never do get yourself upright, but you can at least make it to all fours. Your rear hooves clatter for purchase on the floor of the temple, and your front paws feel the hard stone underneath their pads. You look around yourself in all directions, a trivial task now that you have three heads. You're in a temple that looks just like the old one, but newer. In the distance you see a dragon(!) flying through the air to a mountain cave. You look back around at your own body from three different angles and try to understand how you have become part lion, part snake, and part goat in what felt like a few minutes but may have only been a matter of seconds. What should you do, now that you have arrived in what must be another reality, as a chimera?