"Now what."
I said it out loud because the silence was starting to feel like a third person standing next to me. The clearing was empty — just the river, the tree, the cave behind me, and the open patch of dirt where the dragon had set me down.
(He said make a fire. I said I'd make a fire. So — fire.)
I turned in a slow circle, taking inventory. Rocks along the riverbank, smooth and flat, the kind that stack well. Fallen branches scattered under the trees at the edge of the clearing — some thick, some thin, all of them dry enough to snap when I stepped on one by accident.
(Okay. Fire pit. I've never built one. But I've seen it on TV, and TV has never steered me wrong.)
(That's a lie. TV has steered me wrong many times.)
I grabbed a thick branch and dragged it to the center of the clearing. Used the end of it to scratch a big circle in the dirt — maybe four feet across. Not perfect. More of an oval, honestly. But it was a boundary, and boundaries were a start.
Then the rocks.
I walked to the riverbank and picked up the first one. Heavy. Flat on two sides. I carried it back and set it on the edge of the circle. Then I went back for another. And another. And another.
Each trip was maybe thirty feet. Each rock weighed enough that my arms were burning by the fourth one. I placed them around the circle as neatly as I could — which wasn't very neat, but they stayed put and they formed a ring, and that was the point.
(I'm not a professional fire pit builder. But this is what I've got.)
By the time the ring was done, I was breathing hard and my shoulders ached. I sat down on the dirt next to my work and looked at it.
(Not bad, Heather. Not bad at all.)
Next — wood. I needed three things: something big enough to hold a structure over the fire for cooking, something medium for fuel, and something small and dry for kindling.
I found the big stuff first. Three large branches had fallen from the trees at the edge of the clearing — thick as my arm, long enough to work with. I dragged each one back to the fire pit, one at a time, because carrying them was out of the question. By the third one, my legs were shaking and my hands were raw from the bark.
(Ten-minute break. Non-negotiable.)
I sat under the tree by the river and drank from my canteen. The water was still cold. Still impossibly good. I let myself breathe for a while, watching the light shift across the clearing. The sky here didn't do sunset the way it did back home — the colors were slower, deeper, like the atmosphere was thicker and the light had to fight through more of it to reach the ground.
(Beautiful. Terrifying. Both at the same time. That seems to be the theme of this place.)
I got up and went back for the medium and small branches. Two trips out, two trips back, arms full each time. Sticks and twigs and a few pieces of bark that had peeled off in dry sheets — perfect for starting a fire.
I took one of the large branches and jammed it into the dirt inside the fire pit, packing the earth around the base until it stood upright. Did the same on the other side. Then I laid the third branch across the top, resting it in the forks where smaller branches split off from the main ones.
A frame. Rough, crooked, but functional. Something to hang a pot from, or lay meat across, or — whatever you did with fire and food in a world where your only kitchen experience was a microwave and a rice cooker.
My stomach growled.
(He said he'd bring dinner. I'll wait.)
I stacked the rest of the wood inside the pit — medium branches on the bottom, smaller ones on top, bark and dry leaves tucked into the gaps. I didn't light it yet. No point wasting fuel before there was something to cook.
I stepped back and looked at what I'd built.
A fire pit. A cooking frame. A pile of wood ready to burn. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't Instagram-worthy. But it was mine, and I'd made it with my hands in a world that wasn't mine, and something about that felt like the first real thing I'd done since I'd picked up that stupid rock.
(Okay. That's done.)
I walked back to the tree and sat down, leaning against the trunk. The bark was rough against my back, but the shade was cool and the sound of the river was steady and close, and my body was so tired that even discomfort felt like luxury.
The book was next to me. I'd set it down when I started working — propped against the roots of the tree, the black leather cover catching the late light. I picked it up and held it in my lap.
(I want to read this. I want to read this so badly my fingers are itching.)
I opened the cover. The pages were thick and cream-colored, and the text was that same slightly old-fashioned English — formal, precise, like a professor who'd been dead for a century was lecturing me from beyond the grave.
"The Summoning Square: A Practitioner's First Portal."
(A square. You summon it. You reach in. Things stay exactly as they were.)
I read the first paragraph. Then the second. The words were clear, but my eyes kept sliding off them — not because they were hard, but because my brain was shutting down. The letters blurred. The diagrams swam. I blinked, hard, and the page came back into focus for about three seconds before it started drifting again.
(I've been awake for over thirty hours. My body is done negotiating.)
I closed the book and set it in my lap. Leaned my head back against the tree trunk. The bark pressed into my skull, and I shifted until I found a spot that didn't hurt.
The sky was turning. Not dark yet — this world seemed to hold onto its light longer than Earth did — but the colors were deepening, the blues going heavy, the golds thickening at the edges of the clouds. The small dragons I'd seen earlier were gone from the sky. The birds — the ones with colors I couldn't name — had quieted down. Even the river sounded softer, like it knew the day was ending.
(First night in another world.)
(I built a fire pit. I explored a cave. I found a book about magic. I rode on a dragon's back.)
(And I tripped on my own alarm.)
I almost laughed. Almost. But my body was too heavy for laughing. Everything was too heavy — my arms, my legs, my eyelids, the book in my lap, the thoughts in my head.
(Jen would say I'm being dramatic. Naomi would already be asleep.)
The thought of them hit different now. Not the sharp panic from earlier — the "where are they, are they looking for me, do they think I'm dead" kind of panic. This was quieter. Duller. The kind of missing that sits in your chest like a stone and doesn't move.
(I hope they're okay. I hope Naomi's phone caught something — me disappearing, the circle, anything. I hope Jen didn't panic. I hope they went back to camp and called someone and didn't do anything stupid like step into the circle after me.)
(I hope they know I didn't leave on purpose.)
I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders. The temperature was dropping — not fast, not dangerously, but enough that the sweat on my skin was turning cold.
(Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll go back to the fairy ring and see if I can send a text. Tomorrow I'll read the book. Tomorrow I'll figure out what the migraines mean and why this cave has rooms with furniture and why one book in a library full of foreign text is written in English.)
(Tomorrow.)
My eyes closed. I didn't decide to close them — they just went, like a door swinging shut on its own hinges. The last thing I felt was the weight of the book in my lap and the bark of the tree against my back and the sound of the river saying something I was too tired to translate.
I slept.
And somewhere in the distance — far enough that it might have been a dream — I heard wings.