Chapter 1: Awakening
[The Moors — Late Afternoon]
Moss against his cheek. Damp, cold, alive.
Nathan Cole dragged air into his lungs like a man surfacing from deep water. The breath came ragged, tearing through his chest, and for three full seconds he was back in the corridor on the fourth floor of Boston General—smoke so thick it had texture, the weight of ceiling plaster on his shoulders, someone screaming his name from behind a door he couldn't reach.
Then the screaming stopped. The smoke dissolved. And there was only green.
He pushed himself upright. Hands pressing into moss that gave like memory foam, fingers sinking into soil that smelled like rain and something sweeter underneath. His body ached in the deep, wrung-out way of a marathon's aftermath, but when he checked—arms, legs, chest, face—nothing was burned. No blistering. No smoke damage. His surgical scrubs were gone. In their place: a dark tunic of rough-woven fabric, trousers that fit well enough, boots that weren't his.
Nathan turned his hands over. Clean. No soot, no blood, no IV marks.
"Okay," he said. His voice sounded wrong in the silence—too human, too flat. "Okay."
The last thing he remembered was the ceiling giving way. The structural beam that had been groaning for twenty seconds finally surrendering to physics. He'd shoved two patients through the stairwell door. Then light, heat, pressure, and—
Nothing.
Then this.
He stood. The world tilted. He grabbed a tree trunk for balance and waited for the vertigo to pass. The bark was warm under his palm, which didn't make sense for late afternoon shade. The tree was massive—easily forty feet in circumference—with branches that spread overhead like a cathedral's vaulted ceiling. Light filtered through in gold-green shafts that looked almost liquid.
Nathan let go of the trunk and took three careful steps forward. The forest floor was carpeted in moss so thick his boots barely made sound. Ferns taller than his waist fringed the spaces between trees. Somewhere to his left, water moved over stones.
He took another step. His boot caught a root.
What happened next broke every law of physics Nathan had studied in his thirty-two years of life.
He pitched forward, arms windmilling, and his body stopped. Just stopped. Three inches above the moss, horizontal, suspended like a freeze-frame in a movie. Gravity hadn't caught him. Or rather—gravity had caught him and then changed its mind.
Panic hit like a defibrillator. He crashed to the ground, moss cushioning the impact, and rolled onto his back, staring up at the canopy.
"What the hell."
His heart hammered. He lay still for ten seconds, twenty, waiting for something to make sense. Nothing did. So he tried the only thing a scientist could do with an unexplained result: replicate it.
Nathan stood again. Planted his feet. Closed his eyes and thought about rising. Not jumping—rising. Like an elevator. Like the opposite of falling.
His stomach lurched. The ground left his feet.
When he opened his eyes, he was two feet off the moss, hovering in place, his boots dangling. The air beneath him shimmered faintly, like heat off summer pavement. No wires, no wings, no logical explanation.
"Oh," he said. Just that. Just oh.
He tried to go higher. The ascent was jerky—a foot, a stutter, another foot—like learning to drive stick shift in three dimensions. At eight feet, the tree canopy was close enough to touch. He reached up and his fingertips brushed a leaf. It curled at his touch, then uncurled, then pulsed with faint blue-green light.
The leaf was glowing. Because he'd touched it.
Nathan descended. The landing was ugly—too fast, knees buckling, one hand slamming into the moss. Something behind his eyes throbbed, a low pressure headache building from nowhere. Whatever this ability was, it had a cost. Good to know.
He started walking.
The forest told him things as he moved through it, though none of those things were things a forest should be able to say. Flowers turned to track his path, their petals swiveling like tiny satellite dishes. A cluster of mushrooms along a fallen log rearranged themselves as he passed—he was certain of it, because he looked back twice and they were in different positions both times.
Near the stream he'd been hearing, something moved in the water. Tiny shapes. Blue, luminous, roughly the size of dragonflies but shaped wrong. They had limbs. Faces. Miniature bodies that flickered between transparency and solid blue light. When Nathan crouched at the stream's edge, four of them broke the surface, hovered for a half-second, and vanished upstream in a streak of bioluminescence.
Water fairies. That was the only word that fit, and the fact that it fit terrified him more than the floating had.
Nathan cupped water in his hands. It tasted cold and impossibly clean—no chlorine, no mineral bite, no flavor at all beyond the pure fact of water. He drank until his stomach sloshed.
This wasn't Boston. This wasn't Massachusetts. This wasn't anywhere on Earth.
He knew this with a certainty that bypassed logic entirely. The air tasted different. The light moved different. The trees breathed, and the flowers watched, and tiny blue things lived in the streams, and Nathan Cole—trauma surgeon, dead man, apparent visitor—could fly.
He tested the flight three more times over the next hour. Results: reliable hover, sketchy forward movement, and one face-first collision with a bush that left him spitting leaves and swearing. The gravity manipulation—because that's what it was, he was becoming more certain with each attempt, not flight but gravity negation—responded to intention but not precision. Think "up" and he went up. Think "forward" and he went mostly forward, somewhat sideways, occasionally into things.
Every attempt deepened the headache. By the fifth, his vision blurred at the edges.
Stop. Rest. Don't burn through whatever fuel this runs on.
He was thinking like a doctor. Limited resources. Triage priorities. The body he was in—and this was his body, he was increasingly sure, not borrowed, not stolen, just... transported—needed food, water, shelter, in that order. He had water. Shelter required finding. Food—
His stomach cramped. Violent, insistent. He hadn't eaten since before the hospital fire, and whatever transmigration did to a body, it apparently didn't include a courtesy meal.
Nathan found berries growing along the stream bank. Purple-black, clustered like grapes but smaller. He had no way to test for toxicity. No lab, no reference guide, no goddamn phone. He picked three, held them in his palm, and considered the risk calculus. Unknown berries in an unknown forest in an unknown world.
He ate them.
Sweet. Almost aggressively sweet, with a tart finish that made his jaw tighten. He waited thirty seconds for nausea, cramping, tingling lips. Nothing. He ate six more. Small victory.
---
The light was failing. Wherever he was, the sun—or whatever passed for a sun—set in the same general westward direction. Gold bled into copper at the canopy line. Shadows stretched.
Nathan needed shelter before full dark.
He found it a quarter mile from the stream: a hollow beneath the roots of an oak so ancient its trunk had split into a natural shelter, a gap wide enough to sit in with his back against wood. The space was dry, carpeted in old leaves, and—most importantly—elevated enough to see anything approaching from ground level.
He settled against the bark. The wood was warm. Not the residual warmth of sunlight, but an active, low-grade heat, like the tree itself was alive in a way trees on Earth weren't. Which, given everything else, it probably was.
Nathan pulled his knees up. The headache had settled into a dull background noise. The berries sat in his stomach, inadequate but present. His body ached. His mind raced.
Dead. He had died. Ceiling beam, fire, impact. Dead.
And now not.
He'd process that later. Put it in the same box where he kept the faces of patients he'd lost, the ones who died on his table while his hands were still inside them. Box it, shelf it, survive.
Something moved at the edge of his vision.
Nathan's head snapped left. In the deepening shadows between two ferns, a pair of eyes caught the last light. Small. Round. Set close together above what might have been a trunk-like nose. The creature was the size of a large cat, bark-brown, utterly still.
Another pair of eyes appeared beside it. Then a third, higher up, perched on a root.
Not hostile. Nathan had enough ER experience to read body language across species. These postures were tense with curiosity, not aggression. Leaning forward, not coiling back.
He stayed motionless. The creatures stayed motionless. A standoff measured in heartbeats.
"I see you," Nathan said quietly. Not a threat. An acknowledgment.
The eyes blinked. One creature tilted its head. None of them ran.
Nathan let his own eyes close. If they wanted to kill him, three cat-sized things weren't the threat he needed to worry about in a forest where water had fairies in it.
The warmth of the tree seeped into his back. His breathing slowed. The eyes kept watching from the dark, patient and unblinking, as Nathan Cole—dead man, gravity-breaker, absolute stranger—fell asleep in a world that wasn't his.
Three more pairs of eyes appeared before he was fully under. The creatures crept closer, chittering to each other in frequencies barely above silence. One of them sniffed his boot.
The strange human didn't move. The watchers settled in for the night.