Wrong. Everything was wrong.
The darkness pressed in like a physical weight, thick and absolute. Legolas gasped—no, not Legolas, that wasn't his name, his name was Ivan, Ivan Evans from Seattle, who wrote code for a living and had been crossing Fifth Avenue when the delivery truck—
The memories crashed together like two waves hitting from opposite directions.
Cubicles. Fluorescent lights. The taste of cold brew coffee.
Starlight through silver leaves. The weight of centuries. His father's face, hard as carved stone.
Ivan's hand flew to his chest. Wrong shape. Too narrow. The fingers were too long, the joints too elegant. He brought them to his face and couldn't see them in the dark but he could feel the wrongness—no stubble, no familiar scars, skin smoother than anything he'd touched before.
His heart hammered. Too slow. The rhythm was wrong—a steady, measured beat that should have been racing but refused to speed up no matter how his thoughts spun.
He tried to sit up and cracked his head against something wooden. A bed frame. He was in a bed—not his bed, not his IKEA queen with the broken slat—something narrower, longer, draped in fabric that slid like water under his palms.
Get up. Move. Figure out where you are.
The programmer's voice in his head. Debug the problem. Gather data. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and his feet hit cold stone. Too far down. His legs were too long, extending past where his body expected the floor to be.
Ivan stood. Stumbled. Caught himself on a bedpost carved in shapes his fingertips recognized but his brain couldn't place—leaves, maybe. Branches.
His eyes adjusted.
That was wrong too. The darkness resolved into shades of grey and faint green, picking out shapes no human eye should see without light. Furniture emerged from the black: a wardrobe, a desk, a window showing nothing but more darkness beyond.
No, not darkness. Trees.
Massive trees pressing close, their branches interlocking overhead like fingers gripping each other for support. Somewhere below—far below, he realized, because he was high, this room was built into one of those massive trees—he caught the glint of water and distant torches.
The view slotted into place with a memory that wasn't his own.
Mirkwood. The Woodland Realm.
Ivan's—Legolas's—his breath caught.
He knew this place. Not from living in it, but from watching it on a screen, from reading about it in books his mother had loved, from hours of Wikipedia rabbit holes when he should have been sleeping.
He knew where he was.
He had no idea how.
The door to the room had a strange outline, curved at the top in an arch that followed no straight lines. Ivan pressed his palm against it. The wood was warm under his touch, almost alive, and something inside him recognized the grain pattern, knew exactly how to find the hidden latch without looking.
His hand moved before his brain caught up. The door swung open.
The corridor beyond was carved from living wood, the walls still growing, branches and roots woven together in patterns that hurt his human sensibilities but made perfect sense to the other part of him—the part that remembered walking these halls for centuries.
Centuries.
Ivan braced himself against the doorframe. The doubled memories kept crashing: turning left meant the stairs to the lower galleries, where there were guards on rotation and his father's study three levels down. Turning right led to the eastern terrace where the light was best at dawn.
He knew this the way he knew his childhood home. Except he'd never been here in his life.
Not your life. His life. The person whose body you're wearing.
A cold sweat broke across his borrowed skin.
Ivan stumbled into the corridor, moving toward light—real light, not whatever enhanced vision his eyes now possessed. The filtered green glow of distant torches pulled him forward. He passed doors he could name without trying: the weapons storage, the private library, the bathing chamber where—
He shut that memory down hard.
The corridor opened onto a walkway suspended between trees. Rope bridges stretched in three directions. Below, far below, firelight moved in patterns that his doubled mind identified as patrol routes. The Woodland Realm's guards, walking their eternal circuits.
And the trees.
God, the trees.
They were twisted. Not dead—they pulsed with stubborn life, leaves still clinging to branches that bent at wrong angles—but corrupted. Diseased. The bark had darkened in patches, and where the torchlight caught the undersides of leaves, he saw threads of something black spreading through the veins.
Mirkwood. Not Greenwood anymore. The corruption had spread further than any movie had shown.
Ivan leaned on the railing and breathed. The air tasted of rot and growing things, decay and desperate survival intertwined. The forest was dying, and it was taking centuries to do it.
He knew what waited in that darkness. Spiders the size of horses. Shadows that whispered with voices not their own. And deeper, at the heart of the sickness—
Dol Guldur.
The name surfaced with a ripple of inherited fear. Legolas had never been there, but he'd lost soldiers to its influence. He'd watched the corruption spread year after year, unstoppable, while his father retreated deeper into the realm's heart and pretended the outside world could be walled away.
"I died," Ivan said aloud.
The voice that came out wasn't his. It was lighter, musical, with resonances his throat had never produced before. An Elf's voice.
He said it again, just to hear it: "I died."
The truck had come out of nowhere. Or maybe he just hadn't been looking—checking his phone, probably, because he was always checking his phone. The impact had been instant. He remembered a flash of pain, then nothing.
Then this.
Ivan pushed off from the railing and walked. His feet knew the way even as his mind screamed that this was impossible. Back through corridors he'd never seen, past doors he'd never opened, until he stood before a mirror of polished silver mounted in a frame of carved wood.
The face that looked back at him was too beautiful to be real.
High cheekbones. Sharp features softened by an almost feminine elegance. Eyes blue as glacial ice, rimmed with pale lashes. Hair so blonde it was almost white, falling past shoulders that moved with inhuman grace.
Legolas Greenleaf stared back at him from the mirror.
Ivan reached up. The reflection moved with him, perfect synchronicity. His fingertips touched the glass—cold, smooth, utterly solid—and the Elf in the mirror touched his own.
"This isn't real," he whispered.
The voice was Legolas's. The face was Legolas's. The body, the memories, the centuries of accumulated experience pressing against the inside of his skull like they were trying to break out—
All of it belonged to someone else.
Someone whose body Ivan was wearing like an ill-fitting coat.
He stood there until the light outside began to change. Not brightening—dawn in Mirkwood came filtered and sickly—but shifting, the darkness receding a few degrees from absolute to merely oppressive. Through the chamber window, he could see the canopy above, and the light that reached through it had the greenish tint of something being slowly strangled.
A knock came at the door.
Ivan spun. His body dropped into a defensive stance he'd never learned—weight forward, hands loose at his sides, perfectly balanced for movement in any direction. Legolas's body remembered fighting, remembered centuries of patrol routes and spider hunts and the occasional Orc incursion.
Ivan Evans had never thrown a punch in his life.
"My prince?" A voice through the wood. Male, tentative. "The King requests your presence at council."
The King. Thranduil. His father, in this borrowed life.
Ivan's—Legolas's—their shared stomach dropped.
He opened his mouth to respond and had no idea what to say. What did Legolas sound like when he answered servants? What was the proper form of address? The memories were there, somewhere, but sorting through centuries of context to find the right social protocol—
"My prince? Are you well?"
No. He was very much not well. He was a dead software developer from Seattle who'd woken up in a fantasy world inside someone else's body, and in about thirty seconds that door was going to open whether he answered or not.
Ivan swallowed hard. Pushed the panic down. This was a problem—a very, very large problem—but it was still a problem, which meant it could be analyzed. Broken into components. Debugged.
Step one: Buy time.
He cleared his throat. Let Legolas's voice come naturally, drawing on inherited instinct: "A moment. I am... unwell."
The silence stretched. Then: "Shall I summon the healer?"
"No." Too fast. More carefully: "Not yet. Tell my father I will attend him when I am able. I require... rest."
A pause. He could hear shuffling on the other side—feet moving, uncertainty. Legolas never claimed illness. Legolas was always ready, always perfect, always exactly what his father expected.
That was about to change.
"As you wish, my prince. The King will not be pleased."
"I know."
Footsteps receded down the corridor. Ivan let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding and sank against the wall, sliding down until he sat with his too-long legs stretched across unfamiliar stone.
He had maybe hours before someone came to check on him. Maybe less. Thranduil wasn't a patient man—wasn't a patient Elf, and did Elves even have a concept of patience the same way humans did?—and he wouldn't accept excuses for long.
But for now, Ivan had space. Silence. Room to think.
He closed his eyes and let the doubled memories wash over him. Cubicles and code gave way to forests and starlight. A cramped apartment in Seattle dissolved into centuries of walking beneath trees that remembered the world before the sun rose.
Somewhere in all of that—in the collision of two lives that should never have intersected—there had to be answers.
He just had to find them before anyone realized the prince they were dealing with wasn't a prince at all.
The morning light crept across the floor, sickly green and fading fast. Outside, the forest whispered in a language Ivan found he could understand, if he let himself listen.
It was whispering warnings.
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