As far as he could tell, he was alive. Tom wasn't sure if it was the tea; or the aromatic smoke that, despite the hole in the top of the tent, filled the space; or just the whole situation that was dripping with so much implied symbolism that he half-expected to find Sigmund Freud in an armchair puffing on a cigar and muttering "so, tell me about your mother".

But he had full command of all of his limbs. He still had all of his kit, his sleeping bag, his ammo, his ration packs and every other little essential that made up any soldier's personal collection of gubbins. Even the tiny glass bottle of tabasco sauce was safe in its little foam-padded compartment. His coffee, in its thermos, was still lukewarm from when he had made it just before sunset the night before.

Yagan had already left the tent, a waft of cold air piercing the smoky gloom as she pushed through the flaps, and Solak watched him warily as Tom went through his bergen, unpacked and repacked his webbing and gave both the Cyclone and the Glock a quick field-strip and clean.

By the time he slid the parts of the Cyclone back together, he was certain that, not only was he alive, but he also wasn't mad. At least, not in any way that mattered. And Solak didn't seem to be mad, for that matter. If anything, he seemed... embarrassed.

The only feature of the whole experience that was undeniably dreamlike was the way he found himself speaking a different language when he opened his mouth than he had done when he woke up that morning. His thoughts were still in English. At least, he thought they were. They felt like they were English. But when he went to try and articulate something, he found unfamiliar metaphors and figures of speech coming to mind. Why did he slide the Cyclone's bolt into place with its usual satisfying 'whoomph' and think it was "smooth as imblin"? What the fuck was imblin and why did he instinctively know it was a kind of leather made from the hide of a vicious sea animal that tanned to a soft, strong finish despite being light as fairy-weft?

And what the fuck was "fairy weft"?

'Elephant,' said Tom, out loud. 'Particle physics. Thermobaric chamber. Lambourghini Gallardo.'

'What?' said Solak, nervously.

'Did you understand anything I just said?'

'An elephant is a creature I have seen in the almanack. They say it is the size of a small house and has a penis on its face.'

Tom snorted through his nose in surprise before letting himself laugh out loud at Solak's description.

'The rest,' said Solak, visibly confused, 'meant nothing to me. Some sort of room?'

Tom grunted, put the sling of the Cyclone around his shoulders and hefted his bergen.

'OK, fine,' he said, standing up as far as the tent would let him. 'Show me this world of yours. I'm not dead. I'm not dreaming. And you don't sound insane. So whatever the fuck is going on, I suppose we'd better get on with it. More data and all that.'

Hastily, Solak joined him on his feet and ducked towards the closed flaps where Yagan had left, pushing through first then holding the flap aside for Tom. The soldier ducked through, having to drop to all fours to squeeze his bergen through as well, and so took in the needle-strewn earth and soft green moss first. As his head came up and his focus shifted, he saw the timber framework - gnarled and ancient - that supported what he realized was, despite being covered in moss and pine needles, a wide platform, perhaps twenty feet in diameter and, he saw as he stood and turned, roughly circular. And on every side of him, as far as he could see, the massive trunks of towering trees ascended into a distant canopy. As turned to look behind him at the rough exterior of the tent and beyond it, he saw the nearest tree: the one to which the platform was apparently attached with timber and ropes as green as the moss.

Tom had never seen the American redwood except in photographs, but he had once been to the Natural History Museum in London and seen the cross section of what he had thought then had been the largest tree ever. But he immediately concluded that this tree was wider still than even that.

'Holy shit,' he breathed as his brain began to process what it was seeing. The trees around him were all as large as the one he was standing beside. Moreover, he realized with just a couple of hesitant steps forward, the trees plunged at least as far down as they did up. And finally, as he adjusted his expectations along with his sense of scale and focus, he realized that the trees themselves were punctuated by buildings, pathways and people all over the place. 'Have I landed in Star Wars?'

Solak stood close beside him, revealing himself to be a few inches shorter than Tom.

'This is Dan Damion, a village of the Tree People that some call the False Elves,' he said. 'I've heard that, three days' journey from here, they have a city ten times the size of this place. But outsiders are not allowed within a day of its borders - especially in these dark times. Even Dan Damion would be forbidden to most outsiders. I am lucky that my great-grandmother is of the Tree People and still remembers her family in the outer lands.'

'Your great-grandmother?' asked Tom, his mind immediately turning to his family or, at least, to his Mum and his little brother. Shit. What would Craig think about his big brother dying in Afghanistan? Was there a body to send home? Or had he just evaporated into nothing? Mum would be cut up, for sure. But if there was no body, she'd just convince herself he was still alive and deal with it like that. But Craig? Stupid bastard would probably join the Army. Again.

'Lady Yagan is the mother of my grandfather, Yalas,' said Solak. 'His son was born far from here and took the name Solak then passed it on to me before he did me the great favour of dying.'

'Do they have beer here?' asked Tom, pleased to hear the word resolve itself as something local when he asked, which at least implied its existence.

'The Tree People are renowned for their beer,' replied Solak, looking uncertainly at Tom.

'Well, in my humble opinion, Solak, I think you owe me a beer to accompany your explanation of what the fuck I'm doing here and how you did it.'

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

*

Tom peered at the cloudy liquid in the wooden cup with great suspicion.

They had walked a good distance from Yagan's tent or wherever it was they had pulled him into this world. And as vertiginous as the pathways had been, they had been secure under his feet and he had soon found his bearings even as his neck had been on a swivel, taking in the extraordinary sights of Dan Damion. Part of him recognized that they weren't all that extraordinary. Small houses. Simple roads. People in home-made clothing going about their daily business. It was, in its own way, no more extraordinary than conducting a patrol through an Afghani village. Except for the fact that it was ALL IN FUCKING TREES! - as his brain continuously had to remind him.

Eventually, they reached a level close enough to the ground that Tom thought he'd probably survive a fall albeit with a broken limb or two. There, a house was built into the tree - literally. The body of the trunk had been artfully carved - or possibly grown - in such a way as to allow people to walk and sit inside it. The physics of it baffled him, because the rest of the tree still towered up and over them, hundreds of feet into the sky, and this was far from the only such structure within it.

'How does it not all collapse?' he asked himself out loud, as he swirled the "renowned" beer around in the mug. The mug, like the tavern itself, was carved from a single piece of wood. It was simple, unadorned and unvarnished. Its round bottom meant you couldn't put it down on the table in front of them without it falling over, so they had been given by the host little tripod-footed rings in which to lay down the cups. Why they did it like that instead of just carving a flat base into the cup, Tom had no idea.

They sat undisturbed at a low table near the outer edge of what was evidently a tavern, beside a glassless window. Despite the open structure and lack of windows, the whole room was surprisingly warm and comfortable, despite that there were only a handful of patrons. The sun was still up and, even in the twilight beneath the dense forest canopy, the day was still bright.

'That is the nature of the sarindas,' said Solak. 'The trees. It is said that the True Elves made them so. In the laws of the Tree People, they are tenants of these spaces. They gather wood from the forest floor only. They will never lay a blade to the living wood of the sarindas.'

'Right,' said Tom, only half-listening despite his fascination. Tentatively, he sipped at the beer.

It was... certainly beer. It was like a particularly aromatic craft from some indie brewery too up itself to serve on draft. No head to speak of, looking more like a traditional cider at first glance. But the smell was closer to stout and the taste was... fine. Quite nice. Better than John Smiths. Quite drinkable.

'Yeah,' he said, smacking his lips and leaning back in his chair. His bergen was on the floor next to him, with the Cyclone. His webbing was strapped around the bergen. His Glock was still on his hip. 'That'll do. Right. Time for talk, Solak.'

'What do you want to know?'

'How did you bring me here?'

Solak hesitated, then lifted his own cup to take a drink.

'If I try to explain that first, I will end up having to explain many other things and all in the wrong order to make sense to you, World Walker.'

'My name's Tom,' said Tom. 'Corporal Thomas Elgar.'

And even as he said his name, he heard his brain translate "Elgar" into exactly what Solak had said. This place, wherever it was, was "El". And "gar" was the active noun for "gya" - to walk. His name was, literally, "Worldwalker". He sighed and took another drink.

'Truly?' asked Solak, eyebrows twitching upwards.

'Apparently,' agreed Tom. 'Just call me Tom. Please. And start where you need to. I'll keep my questions to the end.'

'I am Solak, as I told you,' he began. 'Solak, son of Solak the Drunkard, of the third degree of the Order of the Azure Field, and probably the last of that Order or, at least, the last senior enough to call himself a Mage. Which, I suppose, would technically make me the Archmage, Grandmaster of the Order. Which would be nice if my office of state were not currently scattered into rubble at the periphery of a burning crater.

'Eight summers ago, Aquitan was invaded. We had long anticipated an attack from our enemies in Goramist, on our northern border. He had even considered the possibility of an attack from the Caltians in the south or the Imbeni from the south east. We had armies. We had war mages. We had generations of our nobility trained and honed to a fine edge by the many knightly orders - not the same as the magical orders, by the way. It is confusing even to those born to it, so I apologize in advance.'

'We thought we were ready to face any attack, but our invaders were none of those we had expected. They came, instead, from the north west - from across the Ocean. Even today, no one knows what land was their first home, nor why they came. My best guess is that some terrible force drove them to flee and they landed upon our shores intending to make themselves a new home by carving it out from ours. And at first, it seemed like they would be easily repelled.

'They had no cavalry, no heavy armour. Their weapons were wielded with impressive skill, but we had the advantage of numbers and there was truly no way they could prevail. Until they revealed magic of a kind we had never before seen.

'They summoned creatures to the battlefield like things from nightmares. At first, they were monstrous vermin, the size of large dogs. Frightening and numerous, but not insurmountable. Then they called forth gargantuan spiders, bats and snakes, all of which seemed to be actively compelled to attack us against all reasonable animal nature. Soon other things followed: bull-headed men; a single beast with the head of three others; a panther with wings; twisted giants with too many eyes or arms - or too few!

'By this point, the war was at a stalemate. They had suffered terrible losses, but their creatures were terrorizing our nation, killing and destroying without restraint or humanity. The knightly orders and mage orders alike had paid a price in blood to defeat the monsters. But we were poised to drive the last of the invaders back into the sea when they performed one last summoning.

'From what nightmare they ripped her, I don't know. But when she came, darkness fell across the land beneath her mighty wings. We burned where she breathed. And where she fought, we died.

'We learned her name quickly, because she told it to us: Zygmor Dragonqueen.

'The invaders made their final gambit. I don't know whether they think it paid off for them because Zygmor was never their creature. She slew them with the same ease and glee with which she slew us. A handful of the invaders remain as her most loyal and obedient slaves. They worship her, now, as a god, and she makes her foul nest in the shattered ruins of the city that was once the gleaming heart of our kingdom. Our rulers are dead. Our armies are broken. Our people are scattered.

'But we refuse to give up hope. Those of us who still live, still fight - against Zygmor's monsters, even when we cannot fight her directly. And we have searched tirelessly for the last two years for a weapon or a ruse or some desperate straw at which to clutch that might offer hope that somehow, one day, Zygmor might be felled.'

Tom looked at him for a long time.

'Did you rehearse that?' he asked eventually, after another long pull on the cup that was nearly empty. 'Because it sounded like you rehearsed that.'

Solak bristled at the suggested.

' I... Well...' he blustered, unsuccessfully. 'Yes. Fine. Well, of course I did. If you were going to snatch someone from their home and drag them across time and space only to ask if they wouldn't mind, please, helping us to kill an unkillable, immortal dragon, you'd probably rehearse the pitch too!'

'OK,' said Tom. 'Well, I can see that a lot of it is bollocks. Nowhere's as perfect as you try to make out. I bet your lovely Aquitan was built on the sweat of slaves and peasants more than it ever was knights and mages. And no enemy is ever as bad as their enemies try to paint them. I reckon there were probably a few atrocities on both sides of your little spat before these "invaders" started summoning giant rats. But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that I'm on board with the idea of a bit of dragon killing before breakfast, you need to get to the point where you explain why me, how and what you think I'm going to do.'