Another World
Chapter two
Icame back to consciousness the way you surface from falling asleep in the library. That lurching, disoriented return of someone who had not meant to go under and had one very immediate concern about what was currently visible on their laptop screen to anyone walking past.
Not that this had ever happened to me.
Okay, maybe it did.
The browser tab in question had nothing to do with my doctoral thesis on Roman military strategy. It had a great deal to do with content I would describe as unsuitable for a university library. A passing stranger would have used simpler terms.
That was not always the point. I had found, over years of empirical observation, that viewing this category of content functioned as a reliable anxiety-management tool. It was a straightforward break from thinking about dead Romans.
I was aware that I did not look like someone who spent a significant amount of time on porn websites.
I had been told, on more than one occasion, that I had a serious face.
I wore oval wire-frame glasses and owned several cardigans.
From the outside, I presented as a woman whose inner life consisted primarily of primary sources and grant applications.
This was not accurate.
My inner life was, in fact, extremely active in a direction unrelated to primary sources.
The ground beneath me was not the floor of a seminar room.
I knew this because the floor of a seminar room at the University of Pennsylvania was linoleum, and what my hands were currently pressing into was grass.
Actual grass. Damp, cool, with the give of soil underneath it that no synthetic surface had ever successfully replicated.
I opened my eyes.
The sky was wrong.
There was something in the quality of the light that wasn’t right. Too clear. The sharpness of air that had never, not once in its entire existence, shared space with a highway.
Data point one: Sky. Wrong.
I sat up slowly, which my caffeine-saturated cardiovascular system rewarded by immediately reminding me that I had consumed approximately nine hundred milligrams of stimulants in the last four hours, and my heart had not forgotten.
I pressed my palm flat against the grass and breathed until the spinning stopped.
Data point two: Smell. This was the thing that kept snagging my attention even as I was trying to establish more strategically important facts.
The air smelled extraordinary. Deep and fresh, almost impossibly clean.
It was like someone had taken the concept of outside and removed every compromise civilization had made with it.
No exhaust. No particulates. No ambient industrial process layering itself over everything.
In 21st-century cities, the contamination becomes invisible because it is always there.
You stop noticing it until you breathe air without it.
Data point three: My hands. Still holding the presentation notes I had printed at eleven the previous night. All forty-three pages, somewhat crumpled at the edges. The notes were here. I was here. These facts were, in a narrow and technically accurate sense, consistent with each other.
Data point four: Stars.
I looked up again. The sky was unmistakably day, the sun present and accounted for, hanging at an angle that suggested early morning, perhaps an hour past dawn.
And yet, there, between two clouds, was a star.
Then another. Then a small cluster, faint but definite, visible against the full blue as though they had not received the memo about how skies were supposed to behave.
I looked at this for several seconds.
What exactly was in that energy drink?
I stood slowly, taking inventory as I went. Jeans: present. Red sweater: present. Glasses: slightly skewed but present. White Adidas sneakers with pink stripes: present. iPhone 16e: present, but dark.
I pressed the power button. Nothing.
I pressed it again. Still nothing.
I checked my watch, the steel digital Casio A158W I had bought in my second year of grad school because it was reliable, inexpensive, paired well with most outfits, and supposedly equipped with a battery that would last at least seven years. Dead. Absolutely dead, for no reason I could identify.
I put the iPhone back in my pocket and looked at my surroundings properly for the first time.
Behind me: mountains. They were not mountains in any sense I had a reference for. They rose from the valley floor in shades of black and charcoal. The stone was dark enough to look wrong. The mountains seemed to drink the light.
At the peak of the tallest mountain, just visible through a layer of low cloud, stood a dark castle.
I used the word castle loosely because what I was looking at bore the same relationship to a castle that an aircraft carrier bears to a fishing boat.
Technically similar category. Emphatically different purpose.
It was enormous and angular, and it sat on that mountain patiently, permanently, as if it had been there for millennia.
I did not like looking at it.
Ahead of me: a fortification. A real one. This was a working military structure with stone walls thick enough to absorb significant impact. Arrow slits were positioned throughout the structure. The moat was not ornamental. There were gaps in the crenellation where something had hit it. Repeatedly.
The fortification sat on the valley floor with its back against a long, gradual rise in the land, positioned to give its watchtowers an unobstructed view across the open country beyond. It had the look of something that had been holding a position for a long time and expected to keep holding it.
My years studying military history made the tactical logic of its placement immediately legible. It sat between those mountains and the land beyond the rise. Whatever was in those mountains, this was where someone had decided to stop it.
I looked back at the mountains. At the castle.
I was standing in the middle ground.
I was in a valley. The outpost ahead. The mountains behind. Whatever those black mountains contained, I was in the space between them and the people trying to keep that thing contained.
Farther out in the field, toward the mountains, there were ruins.
It reminded me of Roman ruins seen in the early Middle Ages, long after the Empire had faded.
I had often wondered how those remains must have appeared to the people who lived among them, and what they imagined they were looking at—the wreckage of a fallen world, or simply ancient stones whose story had been forgotten.
It looked like the remnants of an arch, or the ghost of something once glorious. It was ancient. The uprights still stood, taller than they had any right to be, given their age, carved with a repeating geometric pattern I could not place within any tradition I had studied.
I looked at it for a long time. Two stone uprights framing empty air. Whatever they had once held was gone so completely that even the purpose of the frame felt erased.
It seemed as though something magnificent had once lived on this land and had long since faded over centuries, or perhaps millennia.
I checked my presentation notes again. This was, I recognized, not a rational response to the situation.
It was, however, my response. The notes were familiar.
The notes were from my life. They were complete with the coffee ring on page twelve, where I had set my mug down while reading the Polybius section for the fourteenth time.
I held onto the notes and assessed the situation.
Hypothesis one: Hallucination. Possible. I had consumed an amount of caffeine that a reasonable toxicologist would describe as inadvisable, and guarana in particular had effects that were not fully captured by its primary compound.
But hallucinations did not contain the multisensory, physically consistent texture of a real environment. I had studied enough accounts of battle-induced delirium to know what sensory distortion looked like, and it didn’t feel like this.
The grass was damp beneath me, the air cool with that first hint of autumn before the leaves began to turn. Shadows slid across the stone walls at sharp, believable angles.
Hypothesis two: Dream. I had enough familiarity with REM sleep research to know that dreams did not produce consistent, layered sensory data across all five channels simultaneously.
You did not feel cold air, smell woodsmoke, hear the distant sound of wind, or feel the weight of printed pages in your hands.
Dreams collapsed under that kind of scrutiny. This was not collapsing.
Hypothesis three: Death. Perhaps I was dead and this was the afterlife.
I had never been a particularly spiritual person.
I attended church mostly out of family obligation and had never managed to fully commit to the theology.
The concept of an afterlife had always seemed, to me personally, more comforting than certain.
Perhaps I had been wrong about that.
If so, the afterlife was nothing like the one I had been lectured about. There were no deceased relatives materializing to greet me. No inventory of my sins. No one reviewing my porn search history with a clipboard and a disappointed expression.
Hypothesis four: Another World. Somehow, I had crossed into an entirely different world. I had no follow-up analysis for hypothesis four.
I was still sitting with hypothesis four when I heard hoofbeats.
The rider came from the direction of the fortification. Fast. Purposeful.
As the distance closed, the details resolved into something more utilitarian than ceremonial.
The armor was dark steel: functional and visibly overused.
Dents had accumulated across the plates in ways that suggested repeated impact rather than neglect.
Rust had formed at the joints where moisture and friction collected.
Darker stains had settled into the seams. Dried blood, almost certainly.