The last thing Marcus Chen remembered was the taste of copper in his mouth and the unbearable pressure in his chest, like an invisible hand squeezing his heart until it threatened to burst.
His final moments on Earth had been filled with betrayal and righteous fury—the kind of death that should have meant something, should have been remembered as heroic.
Instead, it would be recorded as just another workplace incident, another middle-aged man who couldn't handle the stress of modern life.
But death, it seemed, had other plans for him.Consciousness returned slowly, like morning fog reluctantly surrendering to the sun.
The first sensation was pain—a dull, throbbing ache that pulsed through his entire body with the rhythm of his heartbeat.
Then came the scraping sensation against his back, the feeling of being pulled across rough ground. His eyes fluttered open to a sky the color of old pewter, heavy with clouds that seemed to press down upon the world like a lid upon a boiling pot.
Marcus tried to move, but his limbs felt foreign, disconnected from his will.
The world swam in and out of focus as he was dragged along what appeared to be a dirt path, his body bouncing over stones and ruts.
The sound of horses' hooves clopped nearby, accompanied by the creak of leather and the jingle of metal—sounds that seemed both ancient and immediate.
"—still breathing," a voice said from somewhere above him, rough as gravel and twice as hard. "Though I can't say for how long."
"Does it matter?" Another voice, younger but equally harsh.
"The old man said to bring him alive, but he didn't say anything about him staying that way."
Marcus forced his head to turn, gravel and dirt grinding against his cheek.
Through blurred vision, he could make out the legs of horses moving beside him, their hooves raising small clouds of dust with each step.
His own ankle was bound with thick rope, the other end tied to the saddle of a rider who seemed utterly indifferent to the human being he was towing.
"Where—" Marcus tried to speak, but his throat felt like it had been lined with sandpaper.
The word came out as little more than a croak.
One of the riders noticed his movement.
"Looks like our sleeping beauty's awake," the man said with a cruel laugh.
He was broad-shouldered and weathered, with a face that looked like it had been carved from old oak.
Chainmail glinted beneath a worn leather surcoat bearing a symbol Marcus couldn't quite make out.
"You've got the devil's own luck, stranger. Most men don't survive a fall like that, let alone get dragged halfway across the Marches."
Marcus's mind reeled. The Marches? Chainmail? Horses? None of this made sense.
His last memory had been of fluorescent office lights and the sterile smell of corporate carpet, of Janet Morrison's tear-streaked face as she lied to HR about what she'd witnessed.
He remembered the security guards pulling him off Harrison Blake, the CEO's smug smile even as blood dripped from his broken nose.
He remembered the crushing pain in his chest as they escorted him from the building, the way his colleagues had avoided his eyes, complicit in their silence.
That should have been the end of his story—a forty-year-old data analyst dying of a heart attack in the parking garage of a company that had sucked away fifteen years of his life. A man who'd tried to do the right thing and paid the ultimate price for it.But this... this was something else entirely.
The riders continued their journey along what Marcus could now see was a winding path through rocky hills covered in scrub grass and stunted trees.
The landscape looked medieval, like something from one of those fantasy shows he used to binge-watch on weekends when he wasn't working overtime or scrolling through fanfiction forums.
But this wasn't television. The pain was too real, the air too cold, the smell of horse sweat and wet leather too pungent.
"Water," Marcus managed to gasp, his throat burning with thirst.
One of the riders—a younger man with a patchy beard and suspicious eyes—looked down at him with something approaching pity.
"Gareth, we should give him something to drink. If he dies before we reach the keep—""The old man wants him alive,"
Gareth, the apparent leader, interrupted. "But he didn't say we had to make him comfortable. This one fell from the sky itself, near broke the stone where he landed.
That's no natural thing, and I'll not be gentle with something that drops from the heavens like a thunderbolt.
"Fell from the sky? Marcus wanted to laugh, but he suspected it would come out as a scream.
He remembered the parking garage, the way the world had gone gray around the edges as his heart seized up.
There had been a moment of falling, yes, but it had been forward onto cold concrete, not from some impossible height onto stone.
The path wound upward through increasingly rocky terrain.
To Marcus's left, the land fell away into a valley shrouded in mist. To his right, cliffs rose like ancient walls, their faces scarred by time and weather.
Every bone in his body ached from being dragged, and he could feel blood trickling from numerous scrapes and cuts. His clothes—his office clothes, he realized with a start—were torn and filthy, his button-down shirt reduced to rags, his khakis shredded beyond recognition.
As they crested a hill, the riders finally stopped.
Marcus lay panting on the ground, his chest heaving as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. In the distance, he could see what could only be described as a castle—though not like any castle he'd ever seen in pictures or movies.
This structure seemed to grow from the mountain itself, its towers and walls carved from living stone.
Dark banners flew from its highest points, bearing symbols he couldn't quite make out but which filled him with an inexplicable dread.
"Welcome to your new home, stranger," Gareth said, dismounting with the fluid grace of someone who'd spent more time in a saddle than on his own feet.
He approached Marcus with measured steps, his hand resting casually on the pommel of a sword that hung at his hip. "The Lord of Shadowmere has taken an interest in you. Whether that's a blessing or a curse remains to be seen."
Shadowmere. The name sent a chill through Marcus that had nothing to do with the cold wind whipping across the hillside. There was something wrong about this place, something fundamentally broken in the way reality seemed to operate.
The sky was too close, the clouds too heavy, the very air too thick with possibilities that shouldn't exist.
"Please," Marcus whispered, his voice barely audible. "I don't understand. I was... I was in a parking garage. I had a heart attack. This isn't real. This can't be real."
Gareth's expression shifted slightly, a flicker of something that might have been sympathy crossing his weathered features.
"Real is what the old man says it is, stranger. And he's been waiting for someone like you for a long time. The stars have been wrong lately, moving in patterns that disturb the wise women and frighten the ravens. Then you fall from a clear sky like a stone cast by an angry god, wearing clothes that look like nothing from this world or any other, speaking in tongues none of us recognize."
The other riders had gathered around now, forming a loose circle that felt more like a cage than protection.
They studied him with the kind of wary fascination usually reserved for dangerous animals or natural disasters.
Marcus could see his own reflection in their eyes—not the middle-aged office worker who'd died defending a woman's honor, but something else, something alien and potentially threatening.
"Get him on his feet," Gareth commanded. "We'll walk him the rest of the way. If he's going to die, let him do it on his own two legs like a man."
Rough hands grabbed Marcus, hauling him upright with little regard for his injuries. His legs felt like rubber, his muscles responding sluggishly after being dragged for what felt like miles.
But somehow, he remained standing, swaying slightly as he tried to orient himself in this impossible new reality.
The castle—Shadowmere—loomed larger now, its dark towers seeming to pierce the heavy clouds. As they resumed their journey, Marcus caught sight of movement along the battlements: figures that might have been human but moved with a strange, fluid grace that made his skin crawl.
The very stones of the fortress seemed to pulse with a dim, inner light, as if the mountain itself was alive and watching their approach.
"What's going to happen to me?" Marcus asked, surprised by the steadiness of his own voice.
Gareth didn't look back as he answered. "That depends on what you are, stranger. And what you know. The old man has ways of finding things out, ways that would make the gods themselves weep. If you're lucky, you'll die quick and clean. If you're not..." He let the sentence hang unfinished, but the implications were clear enough to make Marcus's blood run cold.
As they descended toward the castle, the path grew steeper and more treacherous. Marcus stumbled several times, only to be roughly pulled back to his feet by his captors. But with each step, he felt something shifting inside him—a growing awareness that this wasn't just a dream or hallucination brought on by oxygen deprivation during his heart attack.
This was real, in whatever twisted way reality operated in this place.
The clouds began to spit cold rain as they reached the castle gates—massive iron-bound doors that groaned open at their approach like the mouth of some ancient beast.
Beyond lay a courtyard paved with dark stone, where more figures moved through the shadows, their faces hidden beneath hooded cloaks despite the growing storm.
The air itself seemed to thicken as they crossed the threshold, becoming heavy with the weight of secrets and possibilities.
Marcus Chen had died trying to be a hero in a world that didn't want saving. Now, it seemed, he would have to learn to survive in a world that operated by rules he couldn't begin to understand. The old life was gone—his apartment, his collection of fantasy novels, his carefully curated streaming subscriptions, his quiet evenings reading fanfiction about heroes who actually made a difference.
All of it had vanished the moment his heart stopped beating in that parking garage.
But as the gates of Shadowmere closed behind him with the sound of finality, Marcus couldn't shake the feeling that his real story was only just beginning.
Whatever forces had plucked him from death and dropped him into this medieval nightmare clearly had plans for him.
The question was whether he would prove to be a pawn in someone else's game, or find a way to become the hero he'd always dreamed of being.
The rain intensified, washing the blood and dirt from his face as his captors led him deeper into the castle's maze-like interior.
Somewhere in the distance, he could hear the sound of chanting—low, rhythmic voices speaking in a language that seemed to bypass his ears and resonate directly in his bones.
The old man was waiting, Gareth had said. And whatever the old man wanted with a dead data analyst from Earth, Marcus suspected he would find out soon enough.As they descended into the castle's depths, the last traces of his old life seemed to peel away like shed skin.
Marcus Chen was dead. What remained was something new, something forged in the crucible of injustice and reborn in a world where the impossible was simply Tuesday.
Whether that would prove to be salvation or damnation remained to be seen.
But for now, all he could do was walk forward into the darkness, one step at a time, and try to remember how to hope in a world that had taught him hope was for fools.