When I woke, the world smelled of smoke and rain. The earth was damp beneath me, coarse and grainy, and the sky above was no longer the pewter dome of Scotland I knew, it had shifted to a bruised violet that trembled on the edge of dawn. For a long moment I lay still, listening to the pulse of wind through the trees, the whisper of leaves moving like a breath too ancient for this age.
My palms stung, raw from dirt and stone. The air felt heavier, older. Somewhere nearby, a crow cried, its voice cleaving the silence like a blade, and that was when I saw him.
A man stood a few paces away, half-shadow, half-substance. His beard was rough, his plaid thrown across one shoulder, his eyes the color of riverstone after rain. He didn't move. Didn't speak. Just watched me with a look that unsettled me more than his sword at his hip. It was not suspicion I saw in his eyes, nor pity, but something else, recognition, as if a memory had stepped out of time to stare back at him.
"Ye're awake," he said at last, his voice low and graveled, like water dragging over rock.
I struggled to sit up, the world lurching beneath me. "Where… where am I?"
He didn't answer right away. Instead, he knelt beside me, his shadow falling across my hands as though to steady the earth itself. His gaze was keen and searching, tracing my face with a strange reverence, as though he were searching for someone who wasn't there.
"I might ask the same o' ye, lass," he murmured. "Ye fell out of the wind itself."
"The wind…" I echoed softly. The word trembled in my mouth, tasting of iron and stormlight.
He turned, nodding toward the hill behind us. There, silhouetted against the paling horizon, stood the stones, the ancient circle of Craigh na Dun, jagged and eternal. "It's a cruel place, that hill," he said. "But I've never known it to cast out the living."
I swallowed hard. "You saw me?"
"Aye." His eyes narrowed, though not unkindly. "Ye came tumblin' down like the sky had spit ye out. Thought at first ye were a bean nighe, or a spirit o' the glen. But then…" He hesitated, his tone softening. "No. There's life in ye. Warmth."
His words should have calmed me, but they only deepened the strange disquiet stirring in my chest. "I'm not a spirit," I managed. "I'm…"
"Lost," he finished for me, almost gently. "Aye, that much is plain."
He offered me his handrough, calloused, human, and when I took it, something shuddered through me. A flicker behind my ribs. A pulse that wasn't mine. For one breath, I saw him differently: the outline of another time, another version of this man. His hair shorter, his smile sadder. The same eyes, though, always those eyes, steady and kind and old as the wind.
I drew in a sharp breath. "What, what was that?"
He frowned slightly. "What was what?"
"Nothing." I pulled my hand back slowly, but the echo of that contact remained, warm against my palm like the ghost of a star.
"What's your name?" I asked, my voice softer now.
"Murtagh Fitzgibbons Fraser," he replied, rising to his full height. "And yers?"
"Elara," I said, though my name felt suddenly small beneath the weight of the world. "Elara Wyn de Roslin."
He tilted his head, the lines around his eyes deepening. "That's no name I've heard in these lands. Nor your garb." His gaze drifted over me, my torn coat, the strange stitching, the glint of metal on my sleeve. "Ye've the look of… elsewhere about ye."
Elsewhere. The word clung to the air like mist.
"I—" I began, then stopped. How could I tell him I was from another century? That the world I belonged to hadn't been born yet?
Murtagh seemed to read the struggle on my face. He looked toward the valley below, where smoke curled from unseen fires. "We'll talk later. For now, ye cannae stay here. The night's near done, and folk are wary of women who come from the stones."
"Who are you people?" I asked, rising unsteadily.
He smiled faintly, a fleeting crack of humor. "Wrong question, lass. The right one is, who'll believe ye?"
The ride down the valley was rough and jarring. I sat behind him on the horse, clinging to the worn leather of his belt as the Highlands unfolded around us, wild and raw, like the world before God finished making it. The scent of pine, peat, and rain pressed into me until I felt woven into the landscape itself.
When we reached the encampment, the air thickened with smoke and sweat and wary eyes. Men stopped what they were doing to stare. Some crossed themselves. Others spat into the dirt. I caught fragments of Gaelic, words that shimmered like threats: bean sìth, witch, omen.
"Found her at the stones," Murtagh said, his tone measured. "Alive."
A tall man approached, heavy-browed and broad-shouldered, Dougal MacKenzie, though I didn't yet know his name. He circled me like a wolf testing scent. "Alive, aye. But from where? No one touches the stones and draws breath after."
The men laughed uneasily, but their laughter held knives.
Murtagh stepped forward, just enough to place himself between me and them. "She's no witch, Dougal. Lost, aye, but flesh and bone like the rest o' us."
Dougal's eyes narrowed. "You defend her fast, old friend. Strange, for a man who trusts no one."
"Because I've eyes," Murtagh said. His voice shifted, quiet but weighted, almost reverent. "And I ken what I saw. There's somethin' about her. Somethin'... familiar."
It was then, when his gaze found mine again, that the world seemed to bend.
The firelight faltered. The murmurs dimmed. And for an instant, I wasn't standing in that Highland camp at all. I was somewhere else, somewhen else. A stone bridge. The smell of rain on moss. A man standing where Murtagh stood now, his hand reaching for mine, his lips forming my name, Roslin.
The image shattered as quickly as it came. I gasped, clutching my chest, dizzy with the weight of it.
He was staring at me, his expression unreadable. "Ye felt it too," he said quietly, though not as a question.
"I don't know," I whispered. "It's like…"
"Déjà vu," he finished.
I was surprised by the way he uttered the word déjà vu. The term should not have belonged to this century, yet somehow, he understood.
They say déjà vu is the soul's way of remembering what the mind cannot. A moment that has happened before, not in this life, perhaps, but in another. Some call it illusion, others, memory. I think it is the universe's small mercy: a reminder that time is not a line, but a circle.
And in that circle, we sometimes meet ourselves again, through the eyes of another.
Murtagh looked away first, breaking whatever fragile thread had bound us. "Keep her under watch," Dougal ordered, voice roughened. "If she brings trouble to the camp, it'll be your burden to bear."
Murtagh inclined his head. "Aye. My head, my burden."
The crowd dissolved, muttering still. Their suspicion hung in the air like smoke long after they had gone.
Murtagh guided me toward a small tent near the treeline, the flicker of the fire throwing amber light across his shoulders. "Ye'll rest here," he said. "The Laird'll want to see ye come dawn."
I hesitated at the flap. "Why are you helping me?"
He turned, the lamplight catching in his eyes. "Because once, years ago, there was a woman who vanished near those stones. Her name was Roslin."
My breath caught.
"She had a way of lookin' at the world,like it was always whisperin' secrets to her. The same way ye look now."
I wanted to ask more, but he only smiled, faint and haunted. "Sleep, Elara. The wind'll keep its own counsel till morning."
He left me then, fading into the hush of the camp.
I lay awake long after, the sound of the fire sighing through the night. My mind drifted to his words, to that inexplicable flicker of recognition between us. Had we met before? Or was this what it meant to be caught in time's undertow, to find echoes of other lives staring back through familiar eyes?
Outside, the stones of Craigh na Dun gleamed faintly under the moonlight, silver and patient. I thought of Claire Randall, and of how the wind had once carried her away. Now, it seemed, it had chosen me.
And as my eyelids grew heavy, I felt the faint hum of the stones again, steady, rhythmic, like a heartbeat pulsing through the centuries.