**A/N: Alright, we're switching things up a little bit. This is NOT a Hey Arnold! fanfic. In fact, it's kind of hard to even call it the Fable x Legend of Zelda crossover that it's listed as. This is basically a story heavily influenced by those two games, but I also have elements of InuYasha, Fushigi Yuugi, Vision of Escaflowne, and a sprinkling of a small handful of other shows.

This currently untitled story is what I'm working on for National Novel Writing Month (Nov 2012). It is a sloppy, quickly written, raw, unedited first draft. I may not complete the story by the end of November, and if that happens I'm not sure when I will finish the story, we'll just have to see.

So please feel free to give constructive criticism once you're done reading this chapter. Let me know what works for you and what doesn't - and preferably why - so if/when I go back and edit this tale I know what to keep and what to cut.

For those of you who have read my Hey Arnold story "What is Truly Meant to Be" I will be starting back up on writing the next chapter after I've conquered this challenge. Sorry about the long wait.**

Chapter 1

Natalie hummed along to Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" as she jogged down the same leaf covered path she had taken since she was ten. Her steps softly thudded on the dirt trail that laced through the tightly packed trees. As each well-known tree flew past her peripheral she fought an impulse to experiment with Parkour by leaping from trunk to trunk; they were woven close enough together to actually do it with enough momentum.

She blamed the compulsion on her jogging mix. Perhaps it wasn't the smartest idea to fill it with songs that felt like they belonged as the music bed under the opening credits of an action movie – just fast enough to get the audience pumped, but not so fast as to make the opening feel rushed. Those songs, such as "The Chemicals Between Us" by Bush and "I Hate Myself for Loving You" by Joan Jett, just seemed the perfect soundtrack for her runs.

She could picture the camera trucking beside her – perhaps some overhead shots – as she raced around town or through the woods. Opening credits in the corners of the fictitious screen. The audience getting excited and drawn in with the simple act of watching her exercise. Then she'd wonder what the rest of the movie would be about.

If the desire to attempt some Parkour moves was the downside to the jogging mix, the highlight of the playlist was Natalie's ability to just daydream while listening to it. She could get lost, and on occasion literally did. Her body would just click in to autopilot and wander while it allowed her mind to do the same.

She loved these woods the most for those mind-clearing days. She practically had every inch of them memorized. It's hard not to when she had played in them every summer since childhood. She never seemed to have school friends close enough to really hang out with over breaks, and so packing up and visiting her grandparents for the summer was the highlight of every year.

They were like a second set of parents. Mom and Dad were "school year" parents, and Nana and Poppy were "Summer Parents". It nearly killed her when they passed away two years ago. Nana had been sick for a while and as much as Natalie and her parents tried to help out, it was just too much for Poppy to emotionally handle. As Nana got worse and worse Poppy took less and less care of himself; spending all his time trying to nurse his ailing wife. When she finally died it broke him completely. He had given up, even when Natalie and her mother tried telling Poppy that he still had them to live for. Natalie couldn't bear to watch her grandfather waste away when he had nothing physically wrong with him.

As much as she hated him for giving up and leaving them unnecessarily, Natalie also cherished the idea that her grandparents were so much in love that they literally couldn't live without the other. She both desired and feared finding a love like that.

When she was willed the estate she was originally uneasy to live in a home that was filled with such sorrow. Then she remembered all the happiness that was originally in the house and in the surrounding woods. She couldn't imagine never spending another summer there and soon after moved out of her parents' and in to her new home.

The town was one of those sleepy little burbs that was mostly home to retirees and young families. There were Community Days where nearly the entire populous walked the town and enjoyed the company of their neighbor. There were cozy little parades, energetic Trick-or-Treating nights filled with excited young children, and filled football stadiums regardless of how bad the high school team actually was; no one wanted to admit they were really there for the award-winning marching band.

Natalie was quite content in her little house in her little town. Nothing terribly exciting really happened to her, and she was hard pressed to find a fellow unmarried twenty-something. Still, she had her woods and her hours jogging through them. She had her daydreams of finding a more fulfilling job than a clerk at the bookstore. She had her hope for some sort of companionship.

Natalie again hummed "White Rabbit" and half-realized her playlist had restarted a little while ago. Normally she'd be back at the house by the last song. She must have been daydreaming more intensely than usual. With a quick glance around she still couldn't even tell if she was heading back to the edge of the woods. With a huff she jogged to the best tree she could find to climb.

She was nowhere near her house. She could see it, but it was a lot farther than she intended. She wasn't sure if she was even on her property any longer. She did have to admit though that the view from that treetop was amazing. A decade of playing in these woods and it wasn't until two years ago did she finally see them in the beauty of autumn. If only her grandparents were still around, autumn may have become her favorite season.

Once firmly back on the ground, she angled herself back towards the house and began jogging again. She concentrated on her surroundings in order to ward off daydreaming and getting even more lost. The trees seemed packed tighter this far back. They were ancient, thick, tall, and untouched. Natalie prayed they'd stay that way.

The whole area seemed trapped in time. There were no longer dirt paths or low brush that was easy to jog through. Natalie wondered how she managed to jog through the undergrowth in the first place. She had to slow her pace as she stepped over thorned bushes, large rocks, and moss-covered fallen tree trunks. She then ducked under a few more trunks and wove her way through the canopy of a few wild rhododendrons. Every half-mile or so she would find another tree to climb in order to make sure she was still heading back home.

While up in her third tree to readjust her barrings, a clearing caught Natalie's eye. Just east of her the trees suddenly gapped in a near-perfect circle. Her growing weariness waned as curiosity tugged at her. With renewed purpose, she pushed her way through the scratching bushes, prickling brush, and rough low-branched trees.

The excitement of discovery bubbled as her legs quickened. Before she realized it, Natalie was in a full sprint; ignoring the scratches the plant life tried to ward her away with.

Breaking through the last of the rhododendron branches, she was greeted with a large stone platform. It was horribly weather worn and overgrown with moss and ivy. Ferns the size of small palm leaves skirted the base of the stone plate. Four thin pillars arched out of the base like stone scythe blades set at the cardinal directions. Even though the platform itself was about seven feet wide, the opening between the pillar peaks was only about two feet in diameter. There were etchings of what appeared to be runes all throughout the structure.

Natalie mindlessly stepped on to her finding and started pulling the weeds off of it, exposing as much stone as possible. She didn't take in the full construction; concentrating solely on the growth she was peeling off. Once done she turned off her iPod, hopped back off, and walked the perimeter, her fingers tracing the weather-worn writing. There was something familiar to them, as if she saw them in a text book once upon a time and her brain was scrambling to remember what they meant.

She gently tugged on a silver chain on her neck, pulling a smooth, vibrant pink gemstone charm out from under her shirt. Her grandfather had made the necklace as an anniversary gift. It was beautiful in its simplicity. A small silver casing held the top of the polished stone and another accent casing dangled from the bottom of the stone, creating an upside down teardrop. Natalie's mother didn't care for the necklace, and so Nana had instead presented the early inheritance to Natalie on her thirteenth birthday. As much as her grandmother loved the necklace it just didn't suit the older woman any longer and it pained her to have such a beautiful gem locked away in a jewelry box. Natalie proudly only removed the necklace while bathing and swimming; wearing it made her grandparents feel close.

"What on Earth is this, Poppy?" Natalie rubbed the stone with her thumb as she completed her pace around the platform. With a curious sigh Natalie again climbed on to the platform and sat dead center.

"I wish you could see this," she continued, "You'd get a kick out of something so weird."

A slow moment passed and Natalie became acutely aware that there wasn't a single sound. There were no bugs, no birds, no critters crunching on the fallen leaves, no planes flying overhead, no wind rustling the branches. A chill ran up her back and she tightly squeezed the charm of her necklace.

"Maybe I should finally head home." She stood up and took a step towards the edge of the platform. In an instant the carvings in the stone glowed purple, the light filling in the lines that were washed away with time. "What the?" A wave of soft blue light wrapped around her like dry water filling a glass she was stuck in. For a second she feared drowning. "Hey wait, what's going on here?" She mentally yelled for her legs to just sprint to her home, but dark blue laser-like beams began bursting out of the stone around her as if they were jets of water from a ground fountain. As the lasers hit her that body part began to tingle like the muscles were regaining feeling after falling asleep.

Within the span of seven seconds more and more lasers shot up from the floor, filling in all the space within the wall of liquid light filling up to the opening between the pillars. Natalie's body was completely numb and unresponsive to her mental pleas to move. A trail of blue flakes of light resembling the bursts from sparkler fireworks spiraled along the wall of light from the base of the northern pillar to the opening at the peak. As the sparks reached the top of the structure the blue light flashed, blinding her for a second.

When her eyesight returned, the trail of blue sparks descended down the same spiral path. The wall of blue liquid light drained as the sparks left the surface. Fewer and fewer beams shot from the platform until none were left. The tingling vanished from Natalie's body and she was again able to move, although she felt greatly weakened while attempting.

Around her the environment was drastically different than what she recalled. The trees were set much further back, instead creating a tree line instead of the platform being set in a small clearing, and they were dreary and dead looking. Instead, the ground was bare dirt, dismal and barren. Scattered throughout the tree line were stone skeletons of either a bunch of closely packed small structures or one large structure the size of Grand Central Station. In front of her were stone stairs that led to a dirt path that ran along the top of tall archways just to her right. The sky was dark and heavily clouded as if desiring to rain and just waiting on the okay to do so.

Even the platform she was standing on was different. A set of three stone stairs – each one increasing in length – descended from between each of the four pillars. The platform base was now easily eleven feet wide. The outer six feet of the platform were smooth and marbled, creating a decorative rim. The inner-most circle roughly five feet wide resembled thick, blue glass and glowed. The only places where there were still carvings in the stone were up each of the pillars – which now looked more like Celtic designs – and a small elevated circle that separated the blue center from the rest of the platform. The ring was an inch wide and contained a lot of the same runes that once covered the structure Natalie had climbed on to in the woods.

Natalie wasn't sure if it were sunlight or moonlight seeping through the thick clouds, but the only other source of light was coming from the platform itself. Along with the innermost circle that she was standing on, there were also basketball-sized gemstones set in to each of the pillars. Each stone's glow matched the pale blue from the base, and their light was concentrated in to beams angled at the center circle.

"What the hell?" Forcing her lungs to remember how to function, Natalie started stomping on the glowing center plate of the platform. "Bring me home, you stupid thing! What the hell are you? I want trees. I want the smell of autumn. I want my cozy house." She again squeezed her grandmother's pendant and shut her eyes. She started quickly tapping her heals together, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. God, I wish this would actually work."

A numbing sensation came over her right foot and left hand. She opened her eyes to see the lasers again shooting up from below her. The wall of liquid light began bubbling up the sides of the pillars. "Holy crap!" she shakily sighed, "that really worked?"

"Is the Ancient Cullis Gate actually working?" a gruff, British-sounding voice called out. Startled, Natalie quickly turned to a rickety wooden bridge behind her, feeling faint at the forced effort to move her body. A slender silhouette crossed the bridge, followed by a burly one almost a foot taller. At the sight of the two figures, the light died around the structure, leaving only the spotlighting from the glowing blue stones and the plate below her feet.

"Bloody hell! It did look like someone was trying to teleport, didn't it?" The larger figure's voice was deep and gravelly, but also had the British accent.

"Who cares about that?" a Scottish-sounding voice just as deep but somehow smoother than the other two came across the bridge. "Have you noticed that it's a woman who was just trying to activate it?" The two figures stepped to the side and the third figure stepped between them. He looked even larger than the second guy and he led them towards the stone platform Natalie was on.

The little one came in to view first. He was slender and slightly hunched. He had a black bandana and mask wrapped around his head. His black shirt was sleeveless with a long tear through the abdomen, his black pants were also a bit worse for wear, and the sole of his left black boot was starting to come undone. He had leather straps wrapped around each arm and bracers on each wrist. A large sword hung from his back. Every step the man took forward, Natalie took one back.

The second man became visible next. His chest was bare except for a strap that held a large ax against his back. He was heavily muscular and his muscles rippled as he rolled his shoulders and flexed his chest. The hems of his baggy shorts were shredded and the left leg was longer than the right. He was bald except for a small topknot-like ponytail. An ugly scar lined the side of his face.

"What's a pretty thing like you doing here?" the smaller man laughed, quickening his pace.

Natalie prayed for whatever it was that brought her to this place to send her back as she stepped further away from the men's advances. As soon as her feet left the blue center plate the glow turned off the platform, leaving the soft glow of the clouded sky her only light.

"What happened to the Cullis Gate?" The Scottish voice grumbled from the bridge. "Why did it turn off? What did that little witch do?"

"I didn't do anything," she called back, "Please, I'm just lost and want to go home. I didn't mean to cause any harm. Just- just please leave me alone."

"I want her," was the Scottish man's reply.

"Please, no!" Natalie spun around and sprinted down the steps of the platform and towards the dirt road that ran across the archways. The two men pursued with more speed than she'd envision them capable with those large weapons across their backs. Out of her peripheral she only barely noticed that the blue glow from the embedded gemstones and center plate didn't return when the men stepped on the stone platform.

Still tired from both her earlier jog and whatever it was that brought her to this place, Natalie struggled to push her legs faster. Just as she reached the top of the stone stairs the smaller man tackled her and pinned her to the ground.

"Stop! Get off of me! Help! Someone, please help me!"

"Man, this broad talks funny," the man said as he pinned her arms behind her.

"Yeah, she dresses weird too." The bigger man scooped her up and pressed her back firmly against his chest, keeping her arms securely pinned between them. His one arm wrapped tightly around her waist and his other pressed hard against her chest, his hand around her throat.

The men marched her back down the stairs and to the Scottish man. It was harder to know what he looked like with the dim lighting, plus it was hard to figure out where his armor ended and his own mass began. He was only an inch or two taller than the man who had her pinned, but the height difference seemed so much more intimidating with so much armor. His plate mail was thick and heavy with battle damage covering more of the metal than the war paint was. His boots had metal plates creating a steel toe protection, but it also worked as a weapon by way of a three-inch long spike coming out of the front of each of them. His shoulder pads and chest plate were all decorated with angered skulls, as were too the bases of his hammers which were dented and chipped through excessive use. He also wore a skull as a half-mask with his thick grey beard sticking out from underneath.

"Strange little witch," the Scottish man leaned in and stroked her chin. She tried to bite him, but he saw it coming and quickly walked away.

"I'm not a witch. I have no clue what you're talking about so you should just let me go."

"You hear that, Lads?" The Scottish man laughed, "I guess we should just let her go then, huh?"

"Yeah, you really should." A stern Irish-sounding voice came from on top of the archways. A man stood with his bow aimed at them. "The lady doesn't seem to want your company."

The Scottish man turned to the smallest and pointed to the archer, "kill him."

The little man took three steps before his neck was pierced by the Irishman's arrow. Natalie cried out as the man fell in a heap on the ground. She was silenced by the man holding her tightening his grip, crushing her against his chest.

"I can just have my man kill her now," the Scottish man called up, "Leave us alone now if you wish the witch's safety."

The Irishman notched another arrow, "Or I could just do this." Natalie clenched her eyes as the arrow whizzed past her and threw the eye of her captor. She didn't even realize he was dead until she felt his grip release and heard him thump on to the ground. She forced her weak knees to hold herself up as she ran away from the corpse.

"You son of a bitch!" The Scottish man reached out and grabbed Natalie firmly by the upper arm, pulling her against his rugged armor. She cried out in both surprise and pain as her back got scratched on the rough metal. "You just killed her you little wretch!" The two of them looked up at the Irishman's perch only to find it vacant. "Where are you, Hero?" The Scottish man growled.

"Right here you big oaf."

The Scottish man whipped the two of them around to see the archer now brandishing his sword and charging at them. Natalie cried out as her captor wrapped his heavy left arm around her waist, picked her off the ground by pinning her weight against him, and pulled out his own weapon.

"I'll see both of you dead, boy," he swung his hammer but his slow movements were easily dodged by the smaller man. Natalie struggled against the large man's arm, trying to use his attacks as distractions in his tight grip. Behind her she heard clanging of the young man's sword against the back of the thick armor. There were a few more test swings as the Scottish man attempted to knock the man with his hammer.

After a five minute battle the Irishman managed to find a weak spot in the back of the man's armor and drove his sword in to it. Natalie shrieked as the Scottish man coughed blood on to her and pulled her in closer.

"Duck," the Irish voice demanded and Natalie shrank herself as much as she could against the firm grip pinning her. A sickening whoosh rung in her ear before she was showered in more blood. As her feet touched the ground again the Irishman grabbed her and pulled her away from the corpse, the large man's head resting next to his heavily armored body.

Natalie attempted to thank her rescuer, but her eyes quickly lost focus when she tried to look at him. With a swift movement she put her hand on his chest to push away from him, collapsed to the ground, and vomited.

"Aw, shit!" The man knelt next to her, rubbing her back and checking to see what blood was hers. "Lady, are you alright?"

Natalie was never more grateful that she only drank protein shakes before jogging in the morning. Although she was still nauseous, her vomiting was relatively short. She wiped her mouth clean and again attempted to get a good look at her hero. Shaking, she fell in to his chest and sobbed, "I just want to go home," before fainting.

**A/N: I personally think this story should be fine for a T rating, but I'm not sure if the description of the decapitation and the arrow kill shots is too descriptive for T. Please, PLEASE let me know if I should bump this up to M.**