Chapter 2: Chapter 2 – To Awaken In A New World

Hey you. You’re finally awake.

My eyes snapped open wide. The voice was mild, mirthful, and I instantly hated both it and whoever's voice it was.

“Really?” I scowled at the tree trunks just above me and their canopy of leaves far above me, and glared at the stunningly blue sky and its few gentle wisps of clouds. “Really? That’s what you go with?”

I approved of that game. It has a great deal of crafting, crafting which grants you great power if you use it well.

“Well, it got me awake, at least.” I started to get to my feet, hands down to split the weight until I was steady, when I noticed that I was up before my fingers brushed the ground. A few seconds later, right around when I realized that my balance was way off, I almost fell flat on my face between one step and the other; but I’d made it near enough to one of those titanic tree trunks that I could catch myself on it. “That’s weird. Am I concussed?”

My half-sister’s scales were not balanced. This has been redressed; you will acclimate in a matter of minutes.

My eyes went wide open, mind whirling. I took a deep breath in, reaching for the calm I’d made such a fundamental part of my personality, and found it ready and waiting; I breathed out, and I was centered enough to prioritize.

Step one: assess. I was, leaving aside useless alternative hypotheses, in a new world. The panic rose at that thought, but less than I thought; I was probably still riding the downswing of an altered state of consciousness from a mixture of work burnout, vacation hiking, and an encounter with a goddess in some sort of liminal space. Speaking of which, I was dressed; a crimson skirt that went down a bit past my knees over dark red leggings, cotton briefs underneath, a few layers of shirts of various thickness and cuts in a range of blues, and a gray open-fronted coat of what was unmistakably some kind of leather. Boots, barely distinguishable from my hiking boots aside from the cords being replaced by buckles; still steel-toed, still brown.

Experimentally, I did a spin. The skirt floated up splendidly, to my delight; all in all, it might have been the nicest practical outfit I’d ever worn.

No backpack. No pockets, but I had a pouch in that same bizarre gray leather; I spilled the contents on my palm, frowning at what they implied about this new world. The paper for the small notebook was rough, and I could feel little striations in it as though from a press of some sort; linen, if I had to guess. Pencils, three of them, sized appropriately for the little notebook, no erasers, and a tiny little knife that was obviously to sharpen them.

There were eleven coins. Seven small circular ones with a face—crowned, so monarchy was and might still be in play—in profile on both sides, three slightly bigger circular coins with a sword on one side and a crown on the other, and one rectangular coin with a city on one side and three entwined runes or glyphs of some sort on the other. No way to tell which was the obverse versus the reverse, and no way to read the writing around the edge. I was still moderately confident that the crowns, as I’d decided to call them, were the cheapest of the denominations—the other two had complex crenelations around the rim, suggesting that the crowns weren’t worth the cost of replication.

Well, that or there was magic preventing forgery, or the monetary system here worked completely differently, but I didn’t want to go down those paths quite yet.

No other pouches, no other pockets. I did a deep knee bend and then a squat, falling on my ass when my center of gravity turned out to be all wrong, and I started grinning like an absolute madwoman as I surged back to my feet in one smooth motion.

Nothing hurt. Nothing hurt, and I really wanted a mirror, and I had never been so flexible.

“This is phenomenal.” I didn’t know if I was talking to myself or to the strange voice. Well, not really a strange voice; a combination of process of elimination and his particular interests made it obvious who he was. I bent forwards, touching my toes with my palms; my belly still got in the way, since I hadn’t been magically transformed into someone skinny, but I could do it, could rest the heels of my hands on my feet, if I sucked in my gut.

Then you acknowledge that there is no debt between you and either myself or my sister.

There was a weight to that sentence, one that stole the flipness of my answer right out of my mouth as I shot up to standing. I didn’t respond immediately; my mind was whirling with trying to figure out why I’d be owed such a debt and why that would be bad. A moment later, that weight settled onto me like I was suffocating under the perception of some eldritch thing that could crush me just by the desire to do so.

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I’d always read that he was a minor god, barely a member of the core pantheon. Despite that, what I somehow knew to be the shadow of the shadow of his displeasure outshone Artemis’s full-on ire like a magnesium cook-off would have my lab’s Bunsen burner.

“Acknowledged,” I said hastily, waving my hands in emphasis. “No debts, we’re square.” The pressure lifted, and my shoulders slumped in relief. “Hey, uh, would it be appropriate to pour one out for you anyway? Like, no debts or anything, just some… grace? Or to, I don’t know. Would she like it if I—I’m not a hunter, really, but it’s not impossible I’ll wind up drawing a bow on a deer or something, I could dedicate my first arrow to her? And the first work of my hands to you?”

Mortals. There was a wry humor to the voice again. Grace given and grace returned is the essence of divinity. They will tell you more, where you go; it bears the name Kibosh.

And with that, the voice was gone, and the weird crystalline clarity that was keeping the emotions at bay left with it.

When I was done gibbering—at a guess, there’d been about half an hour of pure gibber, and then fifteen minutes of cleaning myself up and getting myself in hand again—I started a more thorough survey of the area.

Well, maybe I wasn’t entirely done gibbering. But I was alive, and I was present enough to notice the trees, and that was going to have to do for a while.

The trees in question were… impressive wasn’t exactly the right word. Stupefying was more accurate. I was utterly incapable of evaluating how tall they were; I could see the canopy of leaves, but the scale was all incomprehensible. Taller than the tallest redwood that I’d seen, I was pretty sure, which meant more than a hundred yards; but how much taller, well, I didn’t have a clinometer, and maybe what I’d need would be more like a sextant.

Their size wasn’t the only thing that drew my eye, though it would have been enough to be wondrous, since even their shorter cousins back home stunned me every time I saw them. These trees had this thing going with them where their leaves had just a little bit of space between them in a narrow ring, and there was something glinting up there. It was, it had to be, some sort of lensing effect. If I could see a ring of sky over a hundred yards away, no matter how narrow it was, it would have cast a much wider lack-of-shadow at the base of the tree than this did. The wood that it was lighting up was different, too; darker, rougher, and the heat came off of it in palpable waves when I brought my hand near.

It was magical, and I had absolutely no idea why it existed or how even to figure that out, short of… well.

Short of asking someone.

I dragged my eyes away from the forest. Away from the loam and bushes, from the bark and the beetle that catches my eye, iridescent and green. Away from what looked distinctly like a fern but smelled like spearmint, and that was only the first thing that caught my eye and nose.

I knew I’d be back soon enough, armed with more knowledge and armored against whatever dangers this part of this world had.

Besides, whatever town or city this Kibosh place was, a god was telling me to head there, and I didn’t think I was going to find it amidst the trees.

The forest edge was sharp, a knife-cut with a perfect delineation pruning all the leaves in what initially looked like a straight line but, when I looked again, was perceptibly a gentle arc. I’d been deposited just barely on the forest edge of the border, and had walked a few steps towards the nearest tree; determined to leave and find someone to ask my questions of, I made my way to the edge between the forest and the knee-height grass.

It wasn’t all knee-high. Bending down to study it more closely, I could tell that the grasses were in clusters, one tall stalk-top rising about six inches higher than the surrounding stalks, and another set of stalks around that which were another six inches shorter still. They didn’t seem to be razor-sharp or anything, and there was the expected smattering of bugs and grubs and larvae, and even though I didn’t recognize any of them in particular they all had more or less the expected bauplan. The only obviously magical thing was that when my hand cast a shadow over the grass, the grass would bristle and bend quite noticeably to get as much direct sunlight as possible.

The sheer magical mundanity of it was almost terrifying, and I realized that if I didn’t start moving, I’d be sitting down for another, probably longer gibber. Nothing for it, I told myself instead; time to step into the light.

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