Somewhere, somewhen

His first thought was that he was dead. He was kneeling in a meadow where long grasses waved in a light breeze. The sky above was silver, and woven through with violet tendrils.

Closing his eyes, he inhaled. It was strange that, being dead, he could do that; the air filling his lungs felt real enough. It smelled sweet; there must be flowers concealed amongst the grass. But surely a disembodied soul had no need to breath?

"Lord Tyr, stand me by. Guard me in the darkness, raise me through pain to glory. For I am friendless, houseless, kinless. I can bide nowhere save with you. I have no hope except from you…"

He ran through the lines of the prayer he had learned when he first joined the Church, following the path of his aunt and grandfather. He felt nothing…but sometimes that was the nature of prayer. Sometimes the words were not sufficient to lift his spirit towards the divine.

Still, he was disquieted. Trying not to hurry, he pulled off the chain-and-plate gauntlet that protected his weapon hand, so that he could rest his bare palm against the bronze Eye of Tyr that he wore as a pendant.

Nothing. Nothing at all. He could not feel the presence of his god. Not even an echo of Him.

And if that were so then – where was he? Had Tyr rejected him? He had thought his sacrifice would be acceptable. But perhaps he had erred. Perhaps he had offended his deity by claiming the death he had long contemplated before it was ready for him. What had seemed right in the darkness of the portal was…less clear now that he was back under an open sky.

Someone might have carried him out of the palace if he had only lost consciousness, and not died as he had expected. And then brought him…here? By no feat of the imagination could this landscape of undulating grassland be the Mere of Dead Men.

He tried to stand up, and felt a vicious, stinging pain in his side. He looked down. The patch of chainmail above his left hip, unguarded by cuirass and backplate, was dark with blood. A hiss escaped his lips as he pressed his hand against it. One of the golems must have caught him; in the heat of the battle it was easy to overlook injuries.

This meant, though, that he was in all probability alive. Alive, and without his god.

"Elanee?" he called as loudly as he could, then winced as the movement of his diaphragm pulled at the wound. "Zhjaeve? Lila? Jerro?"

No one. Only the breeze over the seed-heads of the grasses, and the strange sky. It reminded him of the eyes of Nolaloth, the great dragon, when he had lowered his ghostly head near to Casavir's, and colour had momentarily seemed to flare in the translucent hollows.

Pressing his hand more firmly against his side, he rose to his feet. He shuddered, staggered, righted himself. The pain was bad, but not yet unbearable.

Moving around, careful not to twist his torso to the left or right, he took in the full wheel of his surroundings. Miles of grass and sparse trees like a hunting park. At his back, he discovered a long ridge with banks so even that it looked to have been built, rather than heaped up by the wind, or sculpted by the rain.

Seeing nothing else to do, no other feature that was worth aiming for, he set about climbing. The ridge was, he reckoned, about one thousandth of the height of Mount Galardrym, which he had once ascended in armour with a heavy pack. Still, he was trembling from the effort when reached the top.

A chalky track ran along its length. There were no wagon wheel ruts, or prints from cattle hooves to show why it existed. And yet it must go somewhere… There was nothing to recommend either direction: no signs, or towers in the distance, not even a tumble-down barn.

He turned right. One of his more eccentric instructors had insisted on it during his pupillage, as part of a convoluted theology of movement, morality, and being. Although his pupillage was long over, some of the behaviours absorbed during it had proved impossible to leave behind. They could be oddly comforting; a standard to cling to when everything else was in ruins.

The surface of the track stayed level, and proved easy enough to walk along, provided that he took small steps. Despite the uncanny beauty of the sky and the whispering grasses, he soon found the walk itself monotonous. It left too much space for the wrong sort of contemplation. Any attempt to pray here could only draw more of the emptiness in.

If he had brought any supplies with him, he could have cleaned and dressed his wound. But all the potions, bandages and supplies of clean water were far away – in the chamber, or with Sand, or Elanee, wherever they were now.

She had been cornered and terrified, and he had failed to help her. At least she was alive, and perhaps safer and happier without him. Still, he wished he could see her just as she had been on Marlside that one time, calling the falcons down from the clouds to stoop and sweep around her. Or else smiling one of her fleeting sly smiles.

Eventually he came to a crossroads of sorts. Another chalk track ran across the one he was currently following, one that was also raised on the back of an embankment winding through a green sea. Seeing no reason to change his course, he continued on his original path.

Once he lifted his hand, and found it covered in blood from the nails to the wrist. Disturbed, he renewed the pressure on his side. Though the flow was not strong, it was enough to be dangerous. He knew that Elanee would tell him to lie down, slow his breathing, and bind the wound with his undershirt. But if he lay down, would he ever rise again?

In another place, it would not have mattered if he did or not. He had put everything in order before the Battle of Highcliff. Had labelled his more valuable possessions, visited his sister, played with the nephews and nieces who would bear the family line onward.

Tyr had been with him in the Illefarn Palace. Shadows had fled and turned into smoke as he had raised the Eye aloft. Where was He now?

Another crossroads appeared at his feet, exactly like the first. Narrowing his eyes against the silvery light, he scanned the countryside. Long grasses and scattered trees, just as before. Elanee would have known more; what seemed like repetition to him might have spoken with a thousand tongues to her.

Bishop would have been more capable here too. Would have found tracks by now, and pointed the way to the nearest settlement. Casavir frowned. The ranger had decided that dying at the behest of Garius would suit him as little as loyalty to Neverwinter had, and slipped away into the darkness before the start of the fight. Could this all be some trick of his devising? But Bishop would be unlikely to construct an elaborate scheme when a knife in the back could serve as well.

After looking in all directions, and finding no answers, he drew a triskelion in the dust with the toe of his boot. The breeze would soon sweep it away, he realised, so he kicked three pebbles into position to mark each of the points.

To distract himself as he walked, he began counting in elvish. He had never been an apt scholar, and stumbled when he came to the eighties and nineties. By the time he reached three thousand, even Sand might have acknowledged his improved fluency.

The blood was trickling down his fauld. There was nothing he could do about it. He considered counting backwards, since counting forwards was no longer sufficient to occupy his mind.

The third set of crossroads appeared in the distance, and drew closer. There was a triskelion in the chalk dust. He regarded it dispassionately. So all his effort had brought him back to the same place. That was fitting.

"Turn around, young man, and let me look at you." The voice was crisp, commanding. He turned.

The first thing he saw was the horse, if horse it was. The long shape of the head was equine; yet that had to be balanced against hairless white skin that looked as hard as bone, and a mouth that opened to let out the tip of a forked tongue. Its body was higher and narrower than that of any animal he had seen in the Keep's stables, and its neck was longer, swan-like or – in less poetic terms – serpentine.

"You don't have a templar's face. There's no glow around the pupil, none of that raw sadism ill-contained. Good. Bodies are so hard to dispose of here."

The old woman mounted on the beast gazed down at him with a disdainful smile. A horned crown rested on her long silver hair, and her eyes were yellow, like a hawk's. A dangerous omen, in his experience.

"I am not a templar, lady, nor do I know what one is. My name is Casavir. I am a servant of Tyr, and a knight of Neverwinter."

"You seem poorly armed for a knight. Tell me, where are your sword and shield? Cast aside on the field of battle?" Her mouth formed a moue of pretend disappointment. "Surely not."

He watched her. He could tell that she was trying to anger him, but after two years of Bishop, it would take much worse than that to make him lose his temper.

"I threw my helmet away after a spell turned its outside to molten metal. I dropped my shield so that I could swing my warhammer with both hands. The hammer itself fractured as I struck the final blow." He drew himself up, despite the damage he felt he was doing to his side. "My lady, I won my last battle. Though I do not deny that I am lost now."

He met her eyes, and held his gaze steady until a lunge from the un-horse distracted him. She laughed.

"Well, at least you have some backbone. When I saw you limping along the Marchers' Way, I thought – there goes a puppet whose strings have been cut."

That remark cut him more keenly than anything said by a stranger should have been able to. Could she know what had happened? Was it so obvious that even his bearing announced his abandonment?

"You know my name," he said. "Will you do me the courtesy of telling me yours?"

The woman's eyes narrowed. Her features were regular, fine, possessed of a statue-like kind of perfection. In her youth she must have been a beauty, though an imperious one for sure.

"Who do you think I am?"

"A queen," he answered frankly, "or a warlock, or a mixture of the two. But as to what you are called, or what land you hail from, I do not know. You resemble no one I have heard of on the Sword Coast."

"Of course not! I have never set foot on your Sword Coast, or seen your Neverwinter, and if I had," she purred, "you would certainly have heard of me."

Casavir waited, but she only regarded him through her hawkish eyes, amused and silent. No name or country were forthcoming.

"I awoke here injured after a battle in the Mere of Dead Men. I do not know how I was brought here, and -"

" – and you have lost your god. How careless of you." He froze in shock. She reached down and fingered the pendant around his neck. "An eye. Let's see – your eyes look well enough, and were never mistreated in the past, so I doubt you were the disciple of a god of eye doctors. Your appalling earnestness means you would not revere a power that devoted itself to outward looks and the worship of ephemeral impressions…"

"Justice," he said. "My god is the guardian of justice."

"Of course he is…" she dropped the pendant. It bounced off his armour with a light tink. "Well, you would find many kindred spirits in my land. They are much practised in the business of misplacing their deities." She gave a sour smile.

"What land is that, lady?" He felt tremendously weary. It had been a mistake to rise from the grass when he first found himself in this strange country.

"Follow me, and I will take you there." Without waiting for a reply, she nudged her monstrous horse into a trot. "But stop pretending to be injured," she said over her shoulder. "Once we leave the Marchers' Way, your imaginary wound will become very real. And that will make you much less useful!"

She tugged the reins sharply to the left, and her steed followed their pull. Casavir brought his fingers to his nose, inhaling the unmistakable tang of blood. Where it had dried, it matched the colour of the old woman's pleated gown.

If he let her go, he would be alone again under the silver-violet sky. She looked much like the kind of being he was bound to oppose…a predator in human skin. Yet he did not want to be alone. The iron courage that had embraced him underneath the Mere had rusted all away.

Renewing the pressure on his side, he turned left, and walked after her.

The bone horse shook its tail, which was slender and fleshless like a rat's, and moved into a canter. He forced himself to jog. No easy matter in full armour with blood trickling down his leg. A few spear-lengths down the track, his lungs wheezed, and he coughed up blood-specked sputum.

Then the woman kicked the horse's flanks, and heighed it on. It galloped.

"Can you run, young man?" The mocking words floated to him across the hundred yards that separated them. She threw her head back and laughed.

He had not been a young man for years. Not since joining the dalefolk in the mountains. Nevertheless…

His heart thudding, the wound sinking its teeth into his flesh, he sped up. He reckoned he could keep going for a hundred yards. The weight of his armour became agonizing, and he slashed his estimate to thirty.

After two hundred yards, he could barely see for sweat. The horse was still ahead of him, the gap between them staying the same, despite its long legs and bounding gait. Two tall pines stood at either side of the track. He had barely registered that they existed, and that it was the first time pines had appeared in the unchanging scenery, before he was through, and past them, and lying on his face in the cold dirt.

He rolled onto his back. Lush foliage criss-crossed the sky above him. Branches of trees with diamond-shaped leaves, and others that were wrapped about with creepers. He turned his head to the side and coughed up more phlegm. When it had stopped being difficult too breath, the pale blue sky drew his attention. It was a normal shade of blue; no silver or violet shades were to be seen.

Slowly, one awkward movement after another, he got back to his feet. Wiped his face where the sweat was chilling his brow and cheeks, and no doubt left a bloody handprint behind. In a spasm of hope, he clutched his pendant. Since he had left the land of grass meadows, perhaps… Still, there was nothing.

There was no chalk track for him to follow, but a narrow trail of pressed earth threatened on all sides by undergrowth and briars did lead away through the trees. Here and there were the impressions of a horse's hoofprints. Low branches tangled in his hair as he moved along it; any attempt to weave or dodge them made the pain from the wound redouble. It was easier to let the thorns graze his skin, and the twigs snap against his shoulder guards.

The air, even sheltered among the trees, was much sharper than it would have been at harvestide in Neverwinter. He felt feverish. The temptation to crawl under the bushes and sleep grew stronger. But it was a temptation he was well-practised at resisting. The Sword Mountains had been a brutal tutor, in that respect.

Soon, the trees became shorter, and more widely spaced. Bushes receded, and a burn ran by the path, rattling over a bed of small, flat stones; the kind that he had hoarded as a child so that he could skip them across Ravenhall Bay. His sister had always managed to skip her stones more times than him. If they ever had a rematch, she would certainly win another resounding victory.

As the burn flowed into a reed-edged pool, he stopped, and realised that he was looking at a house. It blended so well into the landscape that he had failed to see it until he was almost upon it, for all that it extended over two floors, and had a high, sheer roof. The materials were homely ones: a mixture of timber struts and dried clay. Still, smoke rose from a simple metal pipe. The smell of a woodfire had always brought solace to him.

The girl next to the door looked much less welcoming. She was young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, and dressed in clothes that seemed designed for a much warmer climate. She had pale skin, dark hair, a small angry mouth, and was pointing a twisted black branch towards him in a manner she seemed to think was threatening.

He held up his hands. One was covered in blood, so might give the wrong impression, but the meaning of the gesture was clear enough to be understandable everywhere: he was unarmed; he posed no danger.

The girl waved the stick. A ball of white light and glittering flakes shot out, and struck him on the breastplate. Rime spread across the metal, then faded. He touched a finger cautiously against the point of impact, and raised it again, feeling a slight chill around the tip and nail. He had not been hit by an ice spell for some time.

"That was very impressive," he said politely, attempting to mitigate the dismay and anger that were written in her face. "I am sorry if I frightened you. That was not my intention. Would you fetch your parents, please?"

She stared at him blankly, then frowned. He thought she might be softening towards him, but then she snapped out a few words in a completely unfamiliar language. And then turned into a bear.

A moderately-sized black bear. That must mean the girl was a druid of some sort. It rose on its hind legs and roared at him.

Casavir considered what to do. If the bear charged, it would be easy to arrange matters so that they traded places; even in his current state, he could do that. But if he escaped into the house, there was every possibility that its other inhabitants would be just as ill-disposed towards strangers as the girl. Nor could he explain himself, not if their languages were alien to each other.

The bear roared again. He took a step back, not believing that it would alleviate the girl's temper, but ready to try. He did not want to hurt her under any circumstances. The memory of what he had been forced to do to Qara to make her stop…it was sickening. Rather than go through that again, he would die.

"Stop your foolery, girl." The old woman had appeared beside the house. On foot, and without her bone horse. "Can't you see he's not a templar? I certainly didn't bring you up to eat our guests. Not the interesting ones, at least."

The girl stepped out of the bear's shadow, which blanched into nothing. All sullen shuffling and pouting, she muttered something in her foreign tongue. He was sure that it meant: 'I don't see what's so interesting about him'.

"Go and make yourself useful. Make up a bed for him near the fire, and roast some bread and fat." When the girl had entered the house, letting the door slam noisily behind her, the old woman turned to him. "Well, young man, do you still think I'm a queen? What do you think of my palace and chamberlain?"

Her voice was the same. The lines of her face too were unchanged, as high and haughty as they had been at the crossroads. But the gown of burnt umber and the horned crown had vanished: in their place, she wore a peasant woman's dress, and her hair hung in uncombed strings around her thin cheeks.

"I like the palace better than any other I have seen," he answered with complete truthfulness. He had seen two palaces: one was in Neverwinter, and the other was the ancient demesne of the Guardian. "And of the chamberlains I have known, few would not have wished to be able to transform themselves into a fierce beast to deter visitors."

She raised her eyebrows. "A diplomatic answer. How disappointing."

"I was trained from boyhood to seek for diplomatic solutions to problems, lady."

"Ah, so I am a problem? Gratifying. To be a problem is always my preference. So much better than to be a footstool." Her yellow eyes blinked once. She folded her arms. "Yet the armour and over-sized shoulders do not speak to me of a life lived through diplomatic channels."

"They can add weight to discussions."

"Hmm. I'm sure. People are never so willing to agree on a peaceful solution than when they fear they will get the worst of an unpeaceful one." It did not matter if she wore a gown or homespun dress; he was sure she was a queen of some sort, in her nature if not in her rank. Whether she was a demonic power like Blooden, or a power broker like Ophala, he could not say.

"You still have not told me your name." Despite the pale blue sky and sunlight, he was beginning to feel very cold indeed. Colder than when the girl's little ice cantrip had struck him.

"Flemeth is my name. The Chasind and the town dwellers to the north call me the Witch of the Wilds. For that is where you are now, man of Neverwinter. You are in the Korcari Wilds, south of the Kingdom of Ferelden."

Casavir nodded, then swayed on his feet before his sense of balance could reassert itself. "I am in another world." He allowed no hint of a question into his tone. Nevertheless, he raised his eyes to hers, looking for the confirmation of his belief.

Flemeth's lips moved upwards. "You're not as slow as you look, are you? And how did you make this deduction?"

At that, Casavir wished Sand was with him. The alchemist's reflexive sarcasm rarely improved situations in the long-term; in the short-term, a choice remark about violet clouds and bone lizard rat horses would have been very welcome.

"I was schooled in all the known lands and regions of Toril." He had learned them, then forgotten them: most were merely the words on a page, never to be visited and of no consequence. "Ferelden was not among them. Nor was Korcari. I did not recognise the language the young woman spoke. More importantly, she did not seem to recognise the language I spoke, though it was the common tongue that is known across the world…across my world."

He could not say any more. His vision blurred. That meant –

All sense of what was up and what was down disappeared into a spiral of pulsing black lines. He collapsed.

"Stubborn boy," said the husky voice of Flemeth as the world went black. "I told you to leave your wound behind. Yet some people cling to their injuries like misers to gold."

Everything became very quiet. The sounds of battle clashed suddenly and violently in his ears, then died away. And he was cold, so cold, and blind. Soon the poisoned water of the Mere would rise up over him. "Elanee – I cannot –"

"Sleep," commanded Flemeth. "There will be work enough for you to do very soon."