Sophie did not fall, not exactly. Or at least she did, but she did not fall down, but up.

The ground gave way unsteadily under her feet, and then it was all dark and gloom and the rustling of things with too many legs as they scuttled amid a black beyond shadows, and the air about her was rushing and roaring like the rattle of stars and then she surfaced, face first, from the soil, landing with a thud upon her feet.

It took her a moment to realise that she had landed outside her house - or, rather, outside the remnants of her house, after the destruction wreaked upon it. There was nothing left, not even ash, and the weeds were growing thickly within the pit of its former foundations.

Indeed, she wouldn’t have known it were it not for the trees around the slowly receding clearing, which she recognised from her youth, when she’d planted them with the aid of her father.

Strangely, however, the trees were not green, nor even the limpid shade of greenish brown they turned when they had too little water. They were orange, and yellow, and red, brilliant shades that were utterly unfitting the location, as they slowly fell off the trees and drifted into leafy carpets upon the earth.

It was autumn. Autumn. Autumn. The magnitude of this fact kept Sophie rooted to the spot like one of her trees, shaking like the boughs, for it had been the rainy season when she died and ought to have been the rainy still - yet it was autumn.

This was far beyond strange - the Captaincy of the Corduroy Coast, where Sophie lived, was only a little north of the equator, and should only have had a rainy season and a dry season, with little temperature change in between.

Certainly there should have been no trees losing their leaves to fall, and retreating into themselves to sleep away the winter months. There should have been no red leaves, and the incipient chill she felt - just barely - through the wind should have only blown atop the highest heights of the nation’s mountains, in towns like Ramo de Flores and Cerro Cero.

Nevertheless, it was fall, and all the signs of fall were about her - random miscellaneous pumpkins, gobbling turkeys, beautiful autumnal foliage growing on trees that ought to be green year round, and small rodents in cosy sweaters.

It was also distressingly empty. No sign of human activity could be seen anywhere down the road - normally bustling at this time of the day, unless her eye for sun positioning had greatly misled her - with the road itself choked out by weeds, pushing through the cracks of the concrete and wrapping across the ground from out the forest.

As Sophie watched a number of pumpkin spice-scented tumbleweeds blew past.

Shrugging, she put her hands in her coat pockets - feeling grateful that she had thought to sew a proper lining into the coat, when she was still a damsel in distress - and began to stroll down the road, heading in a meandering route towards the nearby small town of Wheridigg Bend.

There, she knew, she would find some answers about the changes wrought on her homeland, and whence they had come.

She had made it only a little way before she realised that the shifts she had witnessed were among the least of the marvels now walking through the Captaincy of the Corduroy Coast, and before long she had begun to wonder whether Sir Higgins’ remarks about the shifting nature of time between her world and Fairyland might work in more than one way. Surely such changes could not be effected in the space of a week.

For it was not only animals she saw as she walked through the woods - or, at least, not only the animals of the fields we know. Strange creatures with the body and head of a crow - albeit one made of leather - stalked the fields upon legs like poles, and more than once the grass would shimmer and shake and turn to look at her and Sophie would have to suppress a sudden urge to run.

She passed several talking animals, all of whom wished her a good day, and more than a few patchwork scarecrows of similarly amicable countenance. Inquiries from her were of little effect - most indicated they had only come here recently, identifying their original home as the Margraviate of Must in Fairyland, a kingdom the dragon had mentioned to her as being one of his favourite princess haunts.

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At last, she saw someone who looked human - if, irksomely, very familiar - and hurried up to him with a spring in her step, anxious and trying to keep it from verging into worry.

“Excuse me, Jack,” she said to the man in stereotypical farmer clothes (save for the Panama hat, which he must have imagined looked traditional but which was entirely inappropriate to the type of work he was supposedly engaged in), “could I bother you to provide me something of an explanation?”

The man looked at her in surprise, as he chewed inanely on a piece of straw. “Jack? Now now, my name ain’t Jack; it’s Ashlad. How can I help you, stranger?”

Sophie blinked. “Ashlad?”

“Of course. How could I be Jack? See how solid and inflexible my limbs are,” said the man, demonstrating that his arms and legs did indeed move in the manner required of human beings - an argument which would have worked wonderfully, had it been Sophie who brought up the gelatinous limbs, and not he who brought them up of his own accord.

Sophie sighed and decided she had more important things to do than argue with the man about who he was playing at being, which anyway was his own business. “Fine, Ashlad. Can you tell me what’s happened to the Captaincy of the Corduroy Coast? Why is it autumn?”

“Why is it autumn? Why is it autumn? Well gosh, aren’t we a traveller - or have you been living under a rock,” said the Man Who Wasn’t Jack, which Sophie thought was really very unfair as a mountain technically does count as a rock and yet she could hardly be blamed for being uninformed, what with being in Fairyland.

“Why,” said the Man Who Wasn’t Jack, continuing his spiel, “it’s been autumn for years. Shoot, next you’re going to tell me you don’t know about the Hunters, or about the Dungeons.”

“I don’t know about the Hunters, or about the Dungeons,” Sophie told him.

The Man Who Wasn’t Jack gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, then another couple of pats in further sympathy, making sure she knew just how pathetic he thought her. “Gosh golly, but that’s alright. Say, did you hear, before your vacation, something about the ‘rifts’?”

“Aye, that I did,” Sophie conceded, for as has been established she had heard tale of rifts, and monsters walking through the fields we know, and magic given into the hands of the grasping, but at the time she had dismissed them as fantastical rumours.

Time - and bombs, and monsters, and dragons - had convinced her that however fantastic it may be, the fantastic was real, and it was the real that was fantastic; as the dragon had told her (if mockingly), “Pfft. You don't seriously expect reality to follow logic, do you? Yes, yes, because people are so logical, so why shouldn't the world they live in be too.”

Consequently it was with only a single raised eyebrow that she accepted the implications of what the Man Who Wasn’t Jack had said, and instead of quizzing him further asked - “so what happened with them?”

The Man Who Wasn’t Jack grinned, and removed a stump of something or other from out his pockets, sticking it into dark and grimy teeth and noshing down on it. “Fast learner, now ain’t we? Good; I would expect nothing less from a freelance office assistant. Walk with me.”

And without arguing, they headed down the road, continuing on their way to Wheridigg Bend. As they did Sophie was surprised to see the crops struggling, looking bleak and withered; and yet the windmills, which had been outdated even before she died, had spread across the valley.

“Three years ago, when you went on vacation, a rift called the Cornucopia of Plenty opened in these parts. It was soft and easy, or so the story went, full of monsters which even the weakest could slay, and with many resources to loot, and so the Hunters - the rift touched, those who hunt monsters for fame and glory - came to it in ones, and twos, and threes, seeking no more than to profit from it and caring not what it did. As the Poet of Maldon said: ‘And then they did what they should not have done.’”

The wind howled down the roadways as he spoke, the trees bending over as if to listen to the travellers, and in the farmers’ fields Sophie could swear she saw the crow-men turn to face her, as if listening to their conversation. She shivered.

“A Dungeon is a doorway; a rift, a rite. And once that rite was completed it opened to its fullest with fire and brimstone, and that which was within came without, transforming the landscape into such as you see it now. Later, after the Hunters had expanded and grown - made organisations, sworn themselves to corporations, and suchlike - they tried to take the region back; an effort, alas, in which they were unsuccessful, for the Master of the Dungeon brought many Hunters under his own banner through the revelation of secrets for the cultivation of aether, and they turned on their colleagues.”

Sophie felt sick at this last sentence. “They turned on each other? For, what, the secrets of magic? Why?”

The Man Who Wasn’t Jack gave her a melancholic grin. “Why don’t you ask them?”

And before Sophie could ask what he meant, the raven men walked onto the road before her, stilts sinking into soft earth.