The thing about dying alone in the wilderness is that nobody hears you scream.
Michelle had made peace with that fact approximately thirty seconds ago, right before the ground opened up beneath her feet and swallowed her whole.
One moment, she'd been standing on solid Colorado granite, watching storm clouds roll across the Rockies with the kind of satisfied solitude that came from three days of solo hiking. Three blissful days without a single committee meeting, without her thesis advisor's passive-aggressive emails, without anyone interrupting her thoughts to ask if she'd "considered the implications" of her sustainable energy framework. Out here, the only thing judging her was a particularly judgmental-looking marmot, and honestly, she could live with that.
The next moment, reality cracked open like a rotten egg.
Purple lightning split the sky. The air tasted like burning pennies and regret. And the universe in what Michelle could only describe as cosmically poor timing decided her peaceful existence was over.
She didn't even have time to drop her hiking poles.
The rift (because what else could you call a glowing purple tear in the fabric of space-time that pulled with the inexorable force of a cosmic vacuum cleaner) swallowed her whole. Wind screamed in her ears. Her stomach relocated to somewhere near her throat and filed for permanent residence. Colors that definitely weren't in the visible spectrum burned her retinas, which seemed like overkill, frankly.
The sensation of falling stretched into eternity. Her body tumbled through a kaleidoscope of impossible dimensions while her mind gibbered uselessly about physics violations and how she was going to die without finishing her thesis. A tragedy for both her and the world, really. That section on carbon-neutral grid integration was going to be revolutionary.
Also, she was pretty sure she'd left her oven on.
Michelle hit the ground with enough force to knock every thought—revolutionary or otherwise clean out of her head.
For one blank, merciful moment, there was nothing but pain and the taste of copper and dirt in her mouth. Then her engineer's brain kicked back in with its usual detached efficiency: Probable concussion. Definitely bruised ribs. Possibly broken nose. Assess situation. Get up. Move, Michelle.
She groaned and rolled onto her side, spitting blood and what she really hoped wasn't a tooth fragment. Her hiking pack had cushioned some of the fall, bless its overpriced North Face soul, but her left knee was staging a very vocal protest about the whole experience.
Michelle blinked, trying to focus her vision. Then blinked again, hoping the scenery would improve.
It did not.
An alien forest loomed around her trees wider than California redwoods with bark that shimmered like oil slicks under a gas station light. Bioluminescent fungi the size of dinner plates cast everything in shades of blue and violet. The canopy was so thick she couldn't tell if it was day or night, or if this godforsaken place even had a proper day-night cycle. For all she knew, this dimension ran on a 47-hour day powered by spite and poor life choices. ust kidding!
Wherever she was, it definitely wasn't Colorado anymore.
"Aghh...Okay, don't move" she said aloud, because hearing her own voice made the insanity slightly more manageable. "Okay. You fell through a wormhole. Or a dimensional rift. Or you hit your head really hard and you're currently bleeding out in a ravine while hallucinating. Any of those options would be..." She paused, taking in the glowing purple fungus. "...extremely inconvenient."
A roar split the air.
It wasn't a bear roar. It wasn't a mountain lion's scream. It was the kind of sound that made every primal instinct in her body slam the panic button labeled PREDATOR, RUN, HIDE, DIE QUIETLY AND DON'T MAKE IT WORSE.
Michelle's head snapped toward the noise. Through the bioluminescent gloom, something massive moved between the trees. Something with too many legs. Something with eyes that glowed red like hot coals in a forge. Something roughly the size of a city bus, covered in chitinous plates, with mandibles that looked like they could bite through steel.
"Oh, shit," Michelle breathed. "Shit, shit, shit."
Her engineering brain, even in crisis mode, couldn't help but catalog observations: Hexapedal locomotion. Exoskeleton suggests arthropod evolution. Those mandibles indicate a carnivorous diet. Conclusion: You are about to become a protein source.
The creature charged.
Michelle's body moved before her conscious mind caught up, pure adrenaline overriding the screaming pain in her knee. She scrambled behind the nearest tree, pressing herself flat against the oil-slick bark. Her hiking pole clattered from nerveless fingers, probably alerting everything in a five-mile radius to her location. Her breath came in sharp, too-loud gasps.
Brilliant survival strategy, Michelle. Why not just ring a dinner bell?
She clamped her hand over her mouth, pressing her fingers tight against her lips.
The monster crashed past her hiding spot, claws tearing furrows in the earth that looked deep enough to bury a coffin. It paused. Sniffed the air with a sound like a broken air conditioning unit. Its massive head—Jesus Christ, it had three-heads, she hadn't noticed the other two swiveled back toward her position with horrible, deliberate intelligence.
It knows exactly where I am.
Michelle's free hand closed around a fallen branch. It was utterly useless against something that size, about as effective as fighting a tank with a pool noodle, but humans were tool-users, damn it. She hadn't clawed her way through six years of engineering school to die in some nightmare dimension without at least trying to mathematically optimize her stick-based defense strategy.
The creature took one step toward her tree. Then another.
Michelle gripped her pathetic branch and thought about her unfinished thesis, her disappointed advisor, the marmot who'd judged her on the ridge that morning. She thought about how the last thing she'd eaten was a protein bar that tasted like cardboard and broken dreams.
What a stupid way to die.
The creature lunged—and something black and massive slammed into it from above with the force of a meteorite.
Michelle fell backward, her stick-weapon forgotten, her mind blue-screening as it tried to process what she was seeing.
A dragon.
There was a fucking dragon. Black as midnight with red highlights that shimmered like dying embers, scales that looked like they could deflect bullets, wings that could probably create their own weather system. It had locked onto the three-headed nightmare-beast with single-minded lethal purpose.
And it was winning.
The dragon moved with terrifying, beautiful grace and with all coiled power and calculated violence. Claws that could probably open a car like a can of tuna raked across the creature's chitinous hide. A tail like a spiked battering ram cracked through exoskeleton like it was made of graham crackers. When the dragon reared back and opened its jaws, black fire poured out—not red or orange but black, like flames made of pure shadow and concentrated bad decisions.
The three-headed monstrosity screamed once and collapsed into ash.
There was a moment of absolute silence.
Then the dragon turned toward Michelle.
Its eyes were shimmering gold. Bright and molten with slit pupils that tracked her with unnerving intelligence. Steam rose from its nostrils. Ash drifted around it like snow.
Michelle, still sitting on her ass in the alien dirt, still clutching her useless stick, looked up at the creature that had just saved her life and possibly planned to eat her for dessert.
Her engineering brain, that wonderful, terrible organ, supplied one final observation: Well. This is officially the weirdest Tuesday ever.
She was probably going to die anyway. Might as well commit to the bit.
"Thank you for not letting me die to the nightmare arthropod," Michelle said politely to the dragon. "I really appreciate it. Do you... do you eat humans? Just asking. For science-conscience."
The dragon tilted its massive head. And then impossibly and horrifyingl y it began to shimmer.
The scales rippled like black-water. The massive form contracted, folded in on itself in ways that made her eyes hurt. Light bent wrong around it. And then, standing where the dragon had been, there was a man.
A very tall, very naked man with black hair, golden eyes, and what appeared to be zero concerns about the whole "suddenly human" situation.
He looked at Michelle. Michelle looked at him. Both blinked and then she raised one finger. "I have got a question?."
"You," the man said, his voice like gravel and smoke, "should not be in the Feral Lands."
"The what lands?"
"Feral Lands. This is..." He gestured around at the nightmare forest with its glowing fungus and lurking death. "This is the worst place in all the realms to arrive. Most humans who fall through rifts at least have the courtesy to land in civilized territory."
"Well, excuse me for not having better dimensional travel etiquette," Michelle snapped, her fear metabolizing into irritation because that was apparently how she coped now. "I didn't exactly have a guidebook. There wasn't a 'Welcome to the Feral Lands' pamphlet waiting for me."
The corner of his mouth twitched. It might have been a smile. It might have been a prelude to eating her.
"You are injured," he observed. "And loud. And you smell like..." He sniffed. "Fear and something else. Strange magic."
"That's just my deodorant. It's 'Mountain Fresh.' Well, Earth mountain fresh, not..." She waved at the nightmare landscape. "...whatever this is."
He definitely smiled that time. "You have a death wish, human, speaking to a dragon with such disrespect."
"Look," Michelle said, leveraging herself upright with a wince, "I fell through a purple hell-portal, nearly got eaten by something that looked like it failed out of Nightmare Design School, and now I'm talking to a naked dragon-man in a place called the Feral Lands—which, by the way, sounds like a rejected Disney attraction. My give-a-damn is broken. So unless you're planning to eat me, maybe you could point me toward the exit?"
The dragon-man stared at her for a long moment.
Then he threw back his head and laughed—a deep, rolling sound that echoed through the forest and probably alerted every monster in a ten-mile radius.
"Oh," he said, gold eyes gleaming with what might have been amusement or hunger or both, "you are going to be interesting, little human."
Michelle, standing in an alien forest with a knee that might be fractured, facing a naked shapeshifter who'd just committed casual murder via black fire, made what was possibly the worst decision of her life.
"My name is Michelle," she said. "And I'm going to need you to put on some pants."