The signal led us three days' hard travel south, toward a stretch of coastline considerably wilder and less populated than anywhere our coalition's diplomatic circuit had previously reached — rocky cliffs and dense scrub forest that Kai, who'd insisted on joining once he heard the news, identified as territory technically claimed by no kingdom currently represented in our coalition.
We found the impact site before we found the person — a scarred, blackened crater carved into the cliffside forest, trees flattened in a radius that suggested something had arrived with considerably more violent force than my own gentle, light-guided descent all those months earlier.
At the crater's center, curled against a boulder that had somehow survived the impact largely intact, we found a young woman, unconscious but breathing, dressed in clothes that were unmistakably, jarringly modern — a hospital gown, of all things, torn and scorched but recognizable.
I appraised her carefully, and the result gave me a fresh chill of recognition.
[ Name: Ivy Chen ]
[ Age: 19 ]
[ Titles: 'Someone From Another World (Incomplete Transfer)' ]
[ Notes: Status critically unstable. Recommend immediate stabilization. ]
"Incomplete transfer," Kai read over my shoulder, alarm evident in his voice. "That doesn't sound like anything either of our own arrivals experienced."
I knelt beside her, careful and gentle despite the urgency, and used every ounce of medical-adjacent knowledge my Crystal of Eldoria and trillion years of body-focused training had accumulated to stabilize her condition as best I could. Whatever "incomplete transfer" actually meant, her body seemed to be caught in some manner of ongoing, unstable transition — flickering, faint and barely perceptible, between forms, as though the world itself hadn't yet fully decided how to properly receive her.
I used a careful application of Magic Creation, guided more by instinct than any confident theory, to stabilize that flickering — anchoring her more firmly into this reality the same way I might have anchored a physical structure against collapse.
The flickering stopped. Her breathing steadied. And slowly, over the following hour, her eyes finally opened.
"Where—" she started, then stopped, taking in her unfamiliar surroundings with visible, escalating panic. "Where am I? What happened? I was in the hospital, there was an accident, I remember pain, and then—"
"You're safe," I said, as gently as I could manage. "My name is Lukas. This is Kai and Aria. I know this is going to sound impossible, but I think you and I have something very significant in common."
Ivy's panic didn't fully recede, but something in my careful, steady tone seemed to reach her enough to keep her from spiraling entirely. "Common how?"
"I died on Earth too," I said. "Car accident, about a year and a half ago by this world's reckoning, though it felt like considerably longer where I ended up first. Kai died hiking. I think, from what I felt reaching out to you the other night, that you might have died too, and ended up here instead of wherever the rest of us initially went."
Ivy was quiet for a long moment, processing that with the particular numbness of someone whose entire framework for reality had just been fundamentally, irreversibly altered. "I was in a car crash," she said finally, voice small. "Six months ago. I was in a coma. The doctors said there was maybe a chance I'd wake up, but—" She stopped, looking down at her own hands as though checking they were still real. "I don't understand. Am I dead? Is this some kind of afterlife?"
"I don't fully know how to answer that," I admitted honestly. "But I don't think you're dead, exactly. I think something happened during your coma that pulled you here directly, without the same kind of training-ground process Kai and I went through first. That might explain the 'incomplete transfer' my own abilities detected when we found you."
Kai knelt beside her, his own expression carrying the particular understanding of someone who remembered exactly how terrifying this specific kind of disorientation felt. "Whatever brought you here," he said gently, "you're not alone in it anymore. We've been through versions of exactly what you're feeling right now. We can help."
Ivy looked between the three of us, fear and desperate, cautious hope warring visibly across her young face. "Please," she said finally, echoing, almost exactly, the wordless plea I'd felt reaching across that vast, star-scattered dreamscape three nights earlier. "I don't understand any of this. I just want to understand what's happening to me."
"Then let's start there," I said. "Together."