Author's Note: Hey guys! I hope you're all well! Just wanted to let you know, if you're confused about anything, let me know and I'll clarify it for ya and fix it in the story! Thanks so much for stopping by!

Mundie

The first thing Cheyanne notices about them is the long sword hanging from their belt and how their hand rests on the hilt. The next is the end of a bow poking out from behind one shoulder. They wear a dark and mud splattered tunic and cloak, with the hood drawn up shrouding the majority of their features in shadow. Cheyanne stiffens further, her fingers spasming on the tree branch, as the cloaked person slowly steps further into the clearing and stops about a yard away from her. They survey the clearing, head turning left and right, before their posture relaxes, hand slipping from the hilt of the sword to their side. Cheyanne's posture remains tight and defensive, nerves strung far too tightly to trust a stranger after what just happened to find her.

Cheyanne widens her stance a little. "Who are you? What do you want?"

The person reaches up and draws down their hood, revealing their face; It's a man, not too terribly older than Cheyanne in appearance with hair a few shades darker than hers that falls nearly to his shoulders. "It is alright," the man says as he abducts his arms, palms facing forward. "I mean you no harm." His voice is slightly lowered in a soothing manner. "Did you see any more of them?"

Cheyanne pauses, staring the man down, and after a few moments, her body slowly relaxes. "No, I didn't." She glances down at the nearest dead creature and cringes a little. "Did you kill them?" When the man nods, she lets the branch lower to her side, but she doesn't let it go. "Who are you?"

The man stoops down and pulls an arrow from the nearest monster's head with a squelch. "They call me Strider," he says as he moves on to the next. The arrowhead separates from the shaft when he pulls it out with a sharp crack and he tucks the damaged shaft into a sheath on his back Cheyanne didn't notice before. "I am a Ranger from the North." He takes a couple steps closer to her, scanning her with sharp eyes.

Cheyanne practically jumps back thanks to her fried nerves and her heel catches on something solid. She tumbles backward with a yelp, the branch falling from her hand as she lands roughly on her rear. Cheyanne's throat constricts when she looks down at her legs slung over the prone corpse of the monster that cut her face. She chokes on an exclamation and scrambles away from the body until her back bumps into a tree. Her stomach turns violently and, for a moment, she is sure she's going to be sick again. But she clenches her jaw and turns her face away from the corpse. The nausea passes after a moment and her jaw relaxes. Cheyanne then turns her head and side eyes Strider, sure she is going to see some form of judgment in his eyes. But when their gazes meet for a moment, she sees nothing of the sort there.

"I apologize," Strider says as he steps closer to the monster while also giving Cheyanne plenty of room. "I did not mean to frighten you." He crouches down by the body in such a way most of it is blocked from her sight and gently eases the arrow out without letting it make a sound. Before he stands back up, he turns the corpse onto its stomach, effectively hiding the grotesque face. Strider turns to face Cheyanne, still crouched down so their eyes are level. "I assure you, I will not harm you."

Cheyanne studies him for a moment in a new light. "You're sure going through a lot of trouble for a complete stranger." He looks like a rough, potentially threatening person, but the way he has acted so far contradicts his travel-worn and tough exterior. "Why save me? You don't know me from Timbuktu."

"I could not very well let those orcs kill you," Strider says as his brow furrows. "Whether I know you from "Timbuktu", as you say, or not."

Cheyanne stands shakily to her feet and looks down at Strider. "No one does anything for no reason," she says as she watches him rise fluidly from his crouching position. "The odds are ridiculously slim that you'd just happen upon me in time to save my neck. So why were you here?"

In the back of her mind, a small voice whispers to her that she's being awfully rude to someone who just saved her life. A little twinge of guilt for that causes Cheyanne to bite her lip and deflate. She breaks eye contact with Strider and dabs at the gently bleeding cut on her face. If he wanted to hurt her, he would have done it already.

"You have been through quite an ordeal," Strider says and the understanding tone in his voice causes Cheyanne to look back up at him. "It is not easy to trust a stranger, especially in times like these." He pauses breaking eye contact for a moment. "What is your name?"

Cheyanne almost makes a comment about how he hasn't really answered any of her questions, but she bites the sharp words back. "Cheyanne. My name's Cheyanne."

Strider repeats her name quietly as if testing the sound of it and seeing how it feels on his tongue. "A strange name- where do you come from? Surely nowhere in these parts?"

Cheyanne shifts her weight and bites her lip again. It is painfully obvious, thanks to her clothes especially, that she's not from around… wherever the heck she ended up. Should she be honest with him and just spit it out? Or should she hold her cards close to her chest as he seems to be doing? After all, the only straight answer she's gotten out of him is his name, if it even is his real name.

"I'll cut you a deal," she says. "If you answer my question truthfully, then I will answer yours truthfully, agreed?" Cheyanne sticks out her hand and waits as she looks at Strider with slightly raised eyebrows. He looks between her face and her offered hand, eyebrows furrowing in clear confusion and this causes Cheyanne to crack a little smile. "You're supposed to shake it if you agree to the deal."

With the same confused look on his face, Strider reaches out and awkwardly grasps the end of her fingers, in a similar way a gentleman would kiss a lady's hand, and gives them one decisive shake.

Cheyanne can't help how her smile widens. "Okay then, you've agreed." Her face grows more serious as she lets her arm go back to her side. "How'd you find me out here just in time like you did?"

Strider shifts his weight, clearly weighing his next words carefully. "I was asked to keep an eye out for someone matching your description in this area. Someone lost and clearly not from Middle Earth."

Cheyanne blanches. "Hold up. Did you just say 'Middle Earth'?" Strider merely nods, an enlightened look appearing on his face. "How'd whoever 'informed' you know I'd even be here? And the last time I looked, I was on Earth, in America. Are you telling me that's not the case?"

Strider nods again and digs around in his pack. "Yes, you are on Middle Earth near the outskirts of Fangorn Forest." He produces a worn cloth from his pack and offers it to her. "Here, for your face." Cheyanne absently accepts the rag and holds it to her cut, her mind reeling. "The fact you know not where you are proves you are who I was looking for. As for how I knew that, wizards are mysterious and rarely reveal their secrets."

Wizards, Middle Earth, Fangorn Forest?

Cheyanne's head spins with questions that probably don't have answers. The pain in her face and the all too vivid sights and smells around her tell her she is not dreaming. This is real.

Somehow and for no reason apparent to her, Cheyanne has been dumped into a world entirely different from her own, a world inhabited by things that were only fantasy to her an hour ago.

A gentle hand squeezing her shoulder causes Cheyanne to break from her whirling thoughts and emotions. She looks up at Strider, taking in the kind look in his eyes.

"I cannot begin to imagine how this must feel for you," he says before taking his hand away. "But Gandalf asked me, when I found you, to take you with me so that he may meet you and explain how and why you came to be here."

It takes several moments for Cheyanne to catch up with what Strider just told her and she takes the cloth away, numbly examining the blood stained material. She presses it back to her left cheek when she feels more blood begin to well.

What other choice does she have but to go with Strider? She'd die out here in days or less on her own. Besides, Strider's been nothing but kind to her. All his actions point to him being perfectly trustworthy.

Cheyanne lets a slow breath. "Alright, I'll go with you," she says. "Maybe this Gandalf you mentioned will know how to send me home."

"Perhaps," Strider says as he gestures with a hand for her to follow. "Come, it is a long journey."

Cheyanne follows him out of the clearing, casting a final glance over her shoulder and repressing a shudder. The trek back out of the forest is a relatively short one. Strider's steps are confident and he obviously knows where he's going. Cheyanne crunches along beside him, still keeping the rag held to her face, and taking the time to process everything that's happened to her. An indiscernible amount of time passes before Cheyanne looks up and sees a break in the trees ahead.

Moments later, Cheyanne and Strider step out of the tree line, Cheyanne raising her free hand to shield her eyes from the sudden brightness of the sun. She squints, eyes watering, and waits the necessary few moments for her vision to adjust. Then she brings the cloth from her face, her mouth dropping a little.

"Woah," she says as she looks around. Before her is the largest expanse of flat land she has ever seen, dotted here and there with distant rock formations. For a moment, she can almost hear a melody on the wind, high and soft. But when she strains her ears to hear more, the music fades. Huh, must have been her imagination.

The exposed sky has to be the clearest blue she has ever seen, completely unpolluted by smog. On her right looms a mountain range, distant mist coiling around its peaks just visible to the naked eye.

The sight of these mountains makes Cheyanne shiver a little and she quickly turns her head away from them, unnerved. "What is this place?"

"Rohan, the land of the horse lords," Strider says as he steps in front her. "May I?" He gestures to her face, indicating he wants to take a closer look. Cheyanne, touched by his politeness, merely nods and lets him step a bit closer to her and examine her cut. "The bleeding has stopped. But you will not be without a scar."

"Great-," Cheyanne says. "-because I was dying to have a souvenir to remember my warm welcome by."

For half a second, Strider eyes her with a profoundly confused expression on his face, then he cracks a little smile. "Then you are in luck."

Cheyanne returns his smile and, folding the cloth so he won't get any blood on him, hands it back to Strider. "Which way are we going?"

Strider tucks the cloth back into his bag and points to a break in the mountains to Cheyanne's right. "To the Gap of Rohan. We should reach it by tomorrow evening."

Cheyanne shades her eyes with her hand again and follows as Strider begins to walk. "It's not that far away, is it?"

"Do not let how close it looks deceive you," Strider says, setting a quick pace.

"And our final destination?"

"A town known as Bree." The tone of his voice indicates any conversation in that vein is not welcome.

Cheyanne decides not to press him about it and instead concentrates on lengthening her stride to keep up, stumbling a little on the uneven ground. "I see why they call you Strider now." He's not that much taller than Cheyanne, perhaps two inches or a bit more but, boy, does he use every inch of his height in his pace.

He merely glances at her and makes no comment, but not without the light of amusement in his eyes.

The rest of the day's travel is spent in relative silence, with splatters of conversation here and there. As it turns out, Strider isn't much of a talker and by the end of the first day of pretty much silent walking, she feels as if she could cut off her legs and she wouldn't know the difference. And thanks to the brisk pace Strider set, they made pretty good progress but at the expense of Cheyanne's muscles. She can't remember the last time she actually exercised. Between work and her senior year of college, she'd barely had time to breathe, let alone put aside time to work out. Between the sudden and pretty extreme change in activeness and the heat of the sun beating down on her, Cheyanne was more than ready to stop by the time they did just as the sun was beginning to set. They set up camp in the shadow of the mountains behind a large outcropping of rock Strider deemed enough cover to light a small fire. There they spent a quiet evening, an evening in which Cheyanne had her first taste of lembas bread. It filled her a heck of a lot more than she thought it would and when Strider informs her calmly that the bread is elvish, Cheyanne nearly choked on her last bite.

"Did you just say elvish bread?" Wizards and evil monsters? Yeah, sure, why not add elves in there too?

Strider looks up at her, dropping the stick he was using to poke at the fire. "Yes, are there not elves where you come from?"

Cheyanne shakes her head. "No. No wizards or- or those monsters from earlier either." She gestures with an incredulous hand. "The next thing you're gonna tell me is you have- dwarves too!"

There's a long moment of silence where Strider merely looks at her.

Cheyanne slumps back against the rock. "Of course you have dwarves." She throws up her hands. "That's it, I'm going to sleep. I've had enough of major, life changing discoveries for one day."

Strider merely shakes his head with a ghost of a smile and tosses her the cloak he shed near the start of their walk that day. "Here. The nights can be cold."

Cheyanne thanks him, wraps up in the cloak, and lays down on the hard ground. Before sleep takes her, she finds herself hoping the traveling time ahead of her won't be as rough as the first day was.