Sam woke with a start surrounded by darkness, skin clammy and covered in sweat. His dreams had been filled with howls and shining fangs and horrible pain. His memories were a jumbled mess of fear and adrenaline, and it took him a moment to remember where he was, or rather to remember he didn’t know where he was. He’d been on the hill, he’d met Camille, Tasha, Kaisei, and then there had been…

Phantom pain suddenly throbbed in his left arm, and Sam’s breath caught with a strangle. His right hand shot to his side, dreading the absence it would find there… only to meet bare flesh. Sam started, brain struggling to catch up. He could feel his left arm. He could feel his hand on his left arm. He hadn’t lost the arm.

Relief flowed over him like a gentle cold shower, washing away the building panic that had been threatening to overwhelm him, and he clutched his arm until it started to hurt, as if the moment he let go reality would catch up and it would disappear.

He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in. He hadn’t lost the arm. But then what had happened? He hadn’t imagined the wolf’s attack, it had been far too real, too painful to be a delusion or a dream. However, there was no way he could have kept the limb after it had been crushed by the wolf’s powerful jaws. He flexed his fingers into a fist, then released them. His arm was intact, his nerves were functional all the way to the hand, and now that the memory of pain from the attack had passed, he didn’t feel so much as an ache.

“Ah, you’re awake,” came an unfamiliar voice from behind him. Sam turned with a start and saw a man standing in the doorway holding a candle. He was tall and heavyset with a wide gut, and his balding head was offset with a fierce and bushy beard. He wore a simple brown robe of some kind, like what a European Monk might wear in a movie. When he stepped into the room, it was with a heavy limping gait, and every other step made a clunking sound on the floor that wasn’t that of a shoe or foot.

“Who are you? Where am I? Where are the others who were with me?”

The man continued into the room with hobbling steps until the candle’s light fell on Sam, and he narrowed his eyes at him. “So, you’re not going to try to deny it like your friends, out there?”

Sam blinked, confused. “Uh, what?”

“You’re using High Speech, boy, in case you were still too out of it to notice.” He leaned forward, looming over Sam’s prone form on what he could now see in the candlelight was some sort of straw bed. “Were I a bit more diligent in my adherence to doctrine, I should smite you on the spot.”

Sam noticed for the first time that the large man was carrying a sword at his side, tucked away in some sort of black leather scabbard. He gulped. First a bow, now this? Why is he carrying a sword? And why is this maniac talking about smiting me? Is he going to stab me with this thing? And what the hell is High Speech supposed to be?

“Uh,” he began, hands raised in a placating gesture. “Look, sir, I have no idea what you want with me. I just woke up on a hill in the forest with some people I’d never seen before, and we got attacked by a wolf. I don’t know why you’d want to… smite me.”

The man regarded him with narrowed eyes for a few moments more, then turned to hobble to a corner of the small room. Now that he had light, Sam could see he was in a small bedroom with stone brick walls, bare save for the bed Sam lay on, a simple bedside table, and a chair, which the man picked up and placed next to the bed, setting his candle on the bedside table.

The man lowered himself carefully into the chair, and it creaked as he settled his weight onto it with a sigh. “What’s your name, boy?” he said, turning his attention back to Sam.

“Samson, sir, but everyone calls me Sam.”

The man made a face like he’d bitten into a lemon. “Gods, don’t call me sir. Reminds me of the decrepit relic I’ve become. If you must use an honorific, Father Mikhail will do.” He shifted in his chair, the wood groaning in protest, and seemed to consider him for a moment. “So tell me, Sam. Do you know where you are? What country you’re in, at least?”

“Uh, America, maybe? Or I guess we could be somewhere in Europe?” Sam replied, caught a bit off guard by the question.

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The large man stayed silent for a while, studying Sam without saying anything until it became uncomfortable. Suddenly he spoke up. “How’s your arm?”

Sam blinked at change in topic, and held it up to the candlelight. Save for a series of faded scars where the wolf had torn into his arm, there was no sign anything had ever happened to it. “It’s… fine. Intact,” Sam said. He hesitated. “That shouldn’t be possible. Everything I know about how the human body works tells me I should have lost the arm, and probably just died too.” He turned to Mikhail. “Why… How am I alive?”

“You got damned lucky is what happened. Edne and Alder stumbled upon you while checking on something for me, and Edne was in time to save the arm. She closed the wounds and repaired the bones, then brought you to me so I could mend your nerves.”

“But… That’s impossible! You can’t just repair bones and mend nerves!” Sam said, feeling agitated. “How?”

Father Mikhail regarded him with an inscrutable expression, hand stroking his huge beard. “With magic, of course.”

Sam felt a bucket of ice being trickled down his spine. “Where... are we, exactly?”

Mikhail grunted. “Finally, you think to ask the right questions.” removing his hand from his beard, he motioned around them. “You are in Bridge Vale, near the town of Broken Bridge, at the border between Vaiiadal and Norvich. It is the year 737 of the Third Age of Ascension, and you,” he leaned in towards Sam, eyes alight, “are a very long way from home, aren’t you?”

“This is insane!” Camille paced restlessly, then stopped again near the small group assembled near Sam’s bed. “You seriously expect me to believe that I just fell asleep and woke up in another world, just like that?”

“It’s actually the only explanation that makes sense,” Kaisei said, wiping his glasses on his shirt with a distant look on his face. “We’re in a country that none of us have heard about, the people here speak some weird language that doesn’t sound like anything we know of but that we can still understand, somehow, none of them have even heard about English before… And they can do magic.”

“Well, that… That’s got an explanation. A weird one, even! But that explanation can’t be ‘we’ve been taken to another world!’ Maybe they had some really advanced medicine and…”

“Camille,” Sam cut in. He was sitting on the bedside, having recovered his jacket from Tasha, his shirt too bloody and mangled to ever be worn again. “My arm was completely shredded, and now I can move my fingers around like nothing ever happened. I had to have multiple fractures on both of the bones of my forearm, severely shredded muscles, and a completely ravaged nervous system. Now I don’t even need a cast anymore. That’s not really advanced medicine, that’s just straight-up impossible.”

Camille looked from Sam to Kaisei several times in disbelief, before her eyes fell on Tasha, who’d been silent so far, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed. “The woman’s hands glowed when she touched his arm,” she said simply, “and then the flesh sewed itself back up and his bones popped back into place. Then she touched my shoulder and the pain was gone.” She shrugged demonstratively. “I can believe in magic, now.”

Camille stood there helplessly for a few seconds, looking at each of them in turn with a disbelieving expression, then she sighed, shoulders lumping in defeat. “Alright, suppose – and I can’t believe I’m going to say this – that we’re in a different world. What do we do about it?”

“Well,” Kaisei said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, “we need more information, I guess. They have magic here, so maybe they know about traveling between worlds. Besides, we’ve met one person who speaks a language from our world. That can’t be a coincidence. I guess we should ask…”

Kaisei trailed off, and the group glanced to Father Mikhail who sat in the corner next to the small room’s window, away from their little huddle. The candle’s light didn’t reach that far, but his face was illuminated by the embers of the smoking pipe in his mouth, glowing brighter whenever he took a puff.

“No, no way, absolutely not.” Camille huffed, lowering her voice. “Sam just said that man wanted to ‘smite’ him! Can we really trust him?”

“I can still hear you,” Mikhail spoke from his corner of the room. “I don’t mind your suspicion. In a way, I’m just as suspicious of you as you are of me. But I’ve made my decision.” He took a long draw from his pipe, then expelled a cloud of smoke that drifted lazily over the glowing embers, casting strange shadows over his face. “I am ready to take the risk. I will talk to you, should you want to. If not, I will give you supplies and the Lady's blessing, and point you in the direction of another town.”

The group stayed silent for a few moments before Sam spoke up. “I don’t think we have much of a choice. It doesn’t look like we’re going to casually find anyone else here who speaks English, and Kaisei’s right, we need to know more about this place, and our situation. He can tell us.”

Kaisei and Tasha’s eyes turned to Camille, who stared at her feet, struggling with the decision. Finally, she sighed. “Alright. Fine. We talk to the crazy guy with the sword. I hope you know what you’re doing, Sam.”

Sam nodded, trying to look more certain than he felt. He looked at the old priest sitting in the darkness, and glanced at the long sword in the scabbard at his hip.

So do I, Camille, he thought. So do I.