Chapter Text
‘Cold, I’m so cold,’ was the first thing that crossed my mind as I woke up.
I sat up, my hands pressing against muddy dirt. I cleaned my glasses from the filth of the locker in the less-stained part of my hoodie, looked around.
A field of a tall, unfamiliar crop surrounded me, blocked my view, and when I looked up—it was night, the moon almost full and bigger than I thought should have been possible, the sky cleaner and fuller of stars than I had ever seen it before.
“Where am I?” I muttered under my breath.
I remembered the rotten smell, a push against my back, the laughs, and the door of the locker pressing against my back. I remembered my breathing becoming more and more uneven, screaming as my elbows dug into my sides, my legs going numb after standing for what felt like hours, the stench of blood and shit left to ferment together filling my lungs, insects crawling all over me.
I remembered feeling alone and hopeless, wishing for someone, anyone, to help me, and crushing despair when no one answered.
Then… darkness? Yes. Darkness and silence, and then…
Something big? Massive, more like. A living, breathing cathedral, except orders of magnitude larger, built entirely out of interlocking crystals, and It reaching out to me before—
[INTERFERENCE]
A light, so bright and so hot that it was as if everything had been set aflame, including me.
And now I was here. Alone.
“Hello?!” I called, my voice hoarse, but all I could hear in response was the wind.
Was I hallucinating? Had a cape teleported me here? If so, why?
Or maybe… maybe I had teleported myself here, wherever here actually was.
I shivered. The cold bit my exposed face and hands, seeped deeply into my blood-soaked hoodie.
Not for the first time that day, I cursed my lack of a phone to try to reach Dad.
I hugged myself, shook my head, and tried to slow down my racing thoughts. Find shelter first, Taylor, then you can try to figure out how you got here.
My legs were still numb, and I felt as if ants were crawling through my veins, but I managed to stand up.
There was nothing and no one near, but out in the distance I could see lights, a dirt path leading from ‘here’ to ‘there.’
With nowhere else to go, I started walking towards the light.
I walked for five, ten, twenty minutes, and as I drew closer, the path beneath my feet transitioned to cobblestone, and the lights that I had spied from afar resolved into lamps affixed to the outside of buildings taken straight out out of the pages of a fantasy novel, though perhaps a better comparison would have been an account of medieval Europe: stone foundations, walls built out of wattle and daub, painted white and with exposed timber frames, all of them safely guarded behind a wall about thrice my height, and with a bell tower built to the side of what I assumed was the main gate.
The sight was strange, but a sliver of hope nonetheless blossomed within my chest. If there were buildings, then there were people, and maybe, just maybe, they would be decent enough not to let me freeze to death.
I picked up the pace, energized by the idea of somewhere warm to stop and think. When I finally got closer to the town, I saw two men amidst the darkness. They were standing guard at the sides of the road, clad in metal armor just as outdated as the buildings in the town behind them. It also looked like they had noticed me, too, because not a moment after I saw them, they raised their voices.
Then the bell started ringing.
The two guards started running at me as they unsheathed their swords.
Panic took hold of me as I saw their weapons. The closest I had been to a weapon like those had been Armsmaster’s halberd years ago, during one of his public appearances at the Mall; at the time, it had been one of the coolest things ever. Now, with two adult men charging at me, swords in hand, and yelling in a language I didn’t understand, fear was all I felt.
“W-wait, please!” I yelped, holding my hands up and lowering my head, trying to look as pathetic and non-threatening as I felt.
Thankfully, it worked, and as the charging guards reached me, they did not immediately lop my head off, instead just pointing their swords toward me.
One of them, the younger one, kept yelling at me, the sounds a strange mix of German and some other language I could not recognize.
“I-I’m sorry, I don’t understand you! D-do you speak English? Uh, chotto nihongo o ha-hanashi?”
The guard who had been yelling at me ignored me, while the other, who appeared to be older and calmer, at least seemed to comprehend what I was trying to communicate, if not my exact words, because he lowered his weapon, talked to the other guard, and got him to lower his as well.
Before I could relax, however, he pointed to the ground and barked something else, and while I didn’t understand the words, the meaning was clear enough.
I immediately dropped to the ground, putting my hands behind my head as I had seen people do in movies and TV shows.
“I-I don’t even know how I got here, I just need a phone or- or to talk to someone who understands English. I just want to go home,” I tried to explain, but they ignored me completely.
The older guard walked around me, forced my hands behind my back, and put them in some sort of handcuffs.
They kept arguing even as my breath hitched and my clothes and face got smeared with mud, a heated exchange in a language that still sounded so alien, but some of the words they used jumped out at me like embers out of a fire, and I latched onto them with all I had, desperately trying to use them as a way to decipher the rest of what they said.
“Just…girl… Can…so young?”
“...stench…blood…hers?”
“Should...inside…walls?”
At some point, they must have reached an agreement, because one of them grabbed me by the shoulders and put me back on my feet. Then, with one still holding his unsheathed sword and the other holding me by the back of my neck, they ushered me inside the town.
They yelled something as we stepped past the wall, and the ringing of the bell cut abruptly. When I looked up, I was able to see that there was another guard, maybe as old as me or even younger, standing inside the belltower.
“Should I…Cleric…?” The third guard asked as he hurriedly came down from the tower using a ladder. He couldn’t have been any older than me.
My escorts didn't answer out loud, and I couldn't turn around to see if they had nodded, but the young man took off running, cutting ahead of us and continuing down what appeared to be the main street of the small town.
As my escorts pushed me down the street, I could see faces peeking out of windows, people standing at their doors, whispering amongst themselves, and looking at me as if I were some sort of demon, sneers so evident that they were obvious to me even as I focused on not hyperventilating.
“Go…inside!” Commanded one of the guards pushing me from behind, but the people ignored him, and he just scoffed, as if he already expected the reaction.
We walked until we reached a building that stood out from the others: entirely made of stone, and twice the height of the surrounding houses, a wooden, white ring the size of my torso affixed over its double doors.
There was already a woman waiting for us, with honey colored hair and clad in brown and white clothes embroidered with fine, complicated patterns. A neat cloth belt held up her long, layered white skirt, and a hooded shawl fastened with an ornamental chain rested over her shoulders. Her features were severe, tired.
As she laid eyes on me, a deep scowl settled on her face.
“Clodia! We…outside…” said one of the guards. “Can she...dead? Call…Knight…wait for…?” My head hurt trying to keep up with every new word they used, but I still tried to focus and make sense of what was happening.
Instead of listening, the woman—Clodia, I thought—took hold of me by the front of my hoodie and led me inside the building like a dog on a leash. The interior was illuminated by dozens of candles, causing the shadows to stretch this way and that as the flames flickered; the building looked like some of the churches I had seen when attending weddings and funerals, if much more old-fashioned and slightly… off.
Rows of wooden benches without backrests looked towards the farthest wall, where a stone table rested over a raised platform, and in the back, where there usually would be a crucifix, there was instead a relief depicting a crowned, elderly man, standing tall and proud, with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other, a great halo behind his back.
Clodia led me to one of the benches and forced me to sit, my restrained arms bending uncomfortably behind my back. She extended a hand to one side and, without question, one of the guards handed her a small knife from his belt, which she promptly pressed against my chest.
My blood went cold, my entire body went rigid, and I could feel each drop of sweat running down my face. I tried to move away from her, but the guards moved closer and held me down by my shoulders.
“Please, I haven’t done anything! I-I don’t even know where I am!”
I closed my eyes, waiting for the bite of metal in my flesh.
However, the pain never came, and I heard the sound of cloth being cut.
After a few seconds, I dared to open my eyes again.
Clodia was holding onto my hoodie and the shirt underneath with her free hand; she had cut a long, straight line down the middle with the knife, exposing the center of my chest.
There was a ring branded right over my heart, the size of my fist, the interior dark like spilled ink, and impossibly deep, as if I was looking at a bottomless well. The skin around the brand was scarred and twisted, almost like the roots of a tree, reaching outwards to the rest of my body.
“Undead…” I heard the older guard mutter behind me
I couldn’t even try to ask what that meant. All the air had left my lungs.
I heard a gasp from the entrance of the building, and when I turned towards the gate, the young guard from the belltower was there, a frightened look on his face. A moment later, a huge hand settled on his shoulder and pushed him aside. A man who towered above all of the people I had seen in the town, clad in heavy armor that made him look almost twice the size of the gate guards, entered the church and looked straight at the brand in my chest.
Without breaking his stride, the enormous knight unhooked a mace the size of my head from his belt and raised it high.
“W-wait, please! Please! Can someone at least talk to me! I don’t—”
The mace came down, and all I knew was darkness.