He stood on the road like a man startled awake from a dream he couldn't name, the breath caught in his chest, the walking stick braced against the dirt so hard his knuckles went white. The village spread beneath the curl of dark mountains — timber houses with steep roofs, a stone bridge arcing the river, a waterwheel turning steadily in the current. Smoke rose in thin gray lines from stovepipes and was swallowed by the same low clouds that had erased the sun all morning. Somewhere a dog barked once, answered by another farther off. A hammer rang. A woman's voice drifted, scolding or laughing; he couldn't tell.
Riverwood.
He didn't say the word aloud. He didn't need to. His body said it for him. The sudden looseness in his knees, the way the world tilted and then righted itself, the prickling at his scalp as his mind caught up to what his eyes had already decided. It was all here: the bridge, the mill, the strip of street with its worn threshold stones, the half-faded sign above a door that he would have sworn he had seen in poor lighting and low resolution once upon a time.
"Come," Lucan said, leaning harder into Michael's right side. "Almost there. The Trader's just up ahead."
Michael nodded, though it felt like someone else moving his head for him. His mouth was dry. He could taste woodsmoke and river spray. He could smell pine and wet wool, the iron of his own blood where his lip had cracked in the cold hours before dawn.
He walked because Lucan needed him to walk, because momentum was easier than stopping and letting everything crash down at once. Each step took them over textures his hands had touched through a keyboard for years but never felt underfoot: the gritty friction of sand on stone, the way damp dirt clumped to the edge of a shoe, the burr of a splinter when he brushed a fence post with his fingers to steady himself. The differences were small and constant and merciless. They didn't argue with him. They simply existed, patiently waiting for him to accept them.
He wanted to laugh. He wanted to be sick. Both emotions pressed at his ribs until the bruises there flared like hot wire.
"This way," Lucan said, and they left the road for the bridge.
The river was louder than he remembered. Not the looped hush of a sound file, but an argument with the world, water shoving at rock and winning by persistence. Cold mist caught in Michael's beard, licked at the raw corner of his mouth. He looked down and saw not a painted surface but layers: dark stones slick with moss, pale bubbles smashing themselves to froth, a stray length of wood skipping in the current and catching for a heartbeat in an eddy before being flung on.
He tried to push the thought away — the thought with capital letters, the one that would rearrange his entire life if he let it — and his mind simply slipped around it and went on thinking. This is Skyrim.
He didn't want to know how he knew. He didn't want to trace the road backwards to the bus aisle, the squeal of brakes, the sudden wrongness of space and self, the tearing feeling like a zipper yanked through his lungs and then nothing, not dark, not light, not anything human words could bite into. He had no name for that place. He didn't want a name for it. A nameless terror was easier to fold and put away for later. If he named it, it would be a door. He wasn't sure he could keep that door closed.
"Careful," Lucan said as Michael's boot slipped on the first slick stone of the bridge. "It ices here when the wind cuts from the mountain."
"Mm," Michael said. It was all he trusted his mouth to attempt.
They crossed. The wheel of the mill turned with the river, slapping once each rotation where a board had warped out of true. The dog barked again, closer. A child ran past them in a bundle of wool and leather, cheeks red from cold, a stick in one mittened hand. The child stared openly at Michael's clothes and grinned, not unkindly, as if travelers were a story he'd heard about and finally seen for himself.
NPC, Michael thought reflexively, the word arriving from a decade-old drawer in his brain and then dying on contact with the boy's bright eyes and ragged breath. Not a script. Not a scene. A boy with cold hands and scuffed boots and a life that would continue whether Michael watched or not.
He stumbled. Lucan's hand tightened on his shoulder.
"We're nearly there," Lucan said in a tone he might use for a skittish horse. "Sit by the fire. Bread and broth. You'll feel yourself again."
Michael didn't answer. His own thoughts were too loud now and too fast, a flock of birds that refused to be counted. Riverwood. Cyrodiil. The Imperial City. Lucan had dropped those as comfortably as a man saying Malmö or Stockholm. Names from an old obsession, a younger man's favorite escape. Names he had argued about on forums at two in the morning, lore threads spiraling into pedantry while he chewed chips over his keyboard and promised himself he would log off after one more post, one more comment, one more map someone had made in Photoshop to prove a point.
Lucan had said "Whiterun" earlier. Hadn't he? And "Solitude." And that other string of words — East Empire Company — which he remembered reading in some in-game book, the way he remembered a lot of in-game books: the gist, the color, none of the exact sentences but the weight of them in his imagination. He had wasted — no, spent — months there once, walking this world from a chair in his one-bedroom flat, a coffee gone cold beside him while dawn slid under the curtains. He had been younger, then, with knees that didn't complain and an easy laugh at dragons that clipped through mountains. He had gone away and come back twice to that old save file, comforted by the way the map never changed. He knew this place. He didn't know this place at all.
They reached the open space at the center of the village. To the right, the blacksmith's — anvil, bellows, the steady comet of a forge. To the left, a small yard where someone had left chopped rounds of pine stacked under a tarp. The tarp was patched with leather where it had torn. In the game, there had been no patch. Or if there had, he had never noticed it.
He dug his nails into the worn smoothness of the walking stick and inhaled through his mouth to keep from smelling too many things at once. Fat, hot from roasting somewhere. Damp wool drying. The sour tang of ale on someone's breath as a man passed by and nodded to Lucan.
"Valerius," the man said, then, seeing the way Lucan leaned, "By Shor, what happened to your leg?"
"Tree," Lucan said cheerfully. "But the tree underestimated how stubborn I am, and how strong my new friend is. I'll live."
The man's eyes flicked to Michael's hoodie, his jeans, his cheap wet trainers. They registered, puzzled, and moved on. The man didn't stare. He had a log to carry, a task to finish. Michael was just another oddity on a winter morning.
They reached a door with a sign that swayed slightly on its chain. The sign had once been carefully painted; now the flourishes were faded, the face of the wood silvering where weather had mastered varnish. The letters were still legible. Michael forced himself to read them:
He felt the words like a fingertip pressed into a bruise. He had taken so many quests in this room. He had sold so much junk on those counters. He had, at nineteen and very sure he was clever, stolen a cheese wheel from this very shelf by lifting it slowly and then dropping it into a barrel and then lifting the barrel, because the shopkeeper's sightline in the game hadn't been able to handle the trick and the AI had let him take his prize. He had laughed out loud, alone in his dark apartment, ridiculous and delighted with himself, and posted about it in a community that had delighted with him.
Lucan eased away to push the door. It swung inward on leather hinges. Warmth washed over Michael's face, the kind that came from fire and stew rather than a set thermostat, the kind that smelled of wood and herbs and too many feet and a lifetime of work polished into corners.
A woman looked up from behind the counter. Her hair was dark and tamed into a tail. She had sleeves rolled to the elbow and a smudge of something — flour? ash? — near her left wrist. Her gaze went first to Lucan's leg and narrowed in quick assessment.
"By the Nine, Lucan," she said, coming around the counter, her accent not quite like anything on Earth and exactly like a voice he had heard from tinny speakers years ago. "What did you do?"
"Lived," Lucan said happily, and gestured to Michael. "Thanks to him."
Her eyes cut to Michael, curious, cautious. He could see her fingers, slim and strong, go to her brother's elbow and squeeze without gentleness to test. Lucan hissed through his teeth and swatted her hand away.
"Not broken," he told her. "Twisted."
"Sit," she said, and then to Michael, "You too. Sit. You're white as chalk."
Michael had not made a plan for this moment. He had survived the bus, he had survived the cold forest, he had survived the sight of a village he recognized. He had not planned for someone to tell him to sit, and for his muscles to obey with gratitude. He found himself at the corner of the hearth on a stool polished glossy by countless backsides. He set the walking stick across his knees and watched his own hands shake.
He wanted to cry. He did not think he would be able to stop if he began.
Camilla — he could not not think of her by name now that he had seen her — ladled something into wooden bowls with the efficient rhythm of a woman who had done such things every day since she was a girl. She pushed one bowl into Lucan's hands, another into Michael's. The broth was thin and salty, with slices of leek floating like green coins and a few honest chunks of meat. It was better than anything he could remember eating in months. He sipped and burned his tongue and didn't care.
"There," Camilla said, satisfied when Lucan stopped wincing and started eating like a man. "Explain later. Eat now."
Lucan mumbled his gratitude around a mouthful. Michael tried to say thank you and discovered his voice didn't want to risk it. He nodded instead. Camilla nodded back as if that were enough, which it was.
Sound settled around him: the fire's pop, the outside world softened by walls into a low murmur, the clink of pottery as Camilla put the ladle aside. Lucan's voice resumed its gossip, trimmed of its earlier exuberance both by pain and the stern presence of his sister. Names tumbled out that Michael recognized and didn't, this farmer, that miller, whether there'd be a caravan before the pass iced completely, whether Hod had finally paid the tab for the nails. The world folded itself, as worlds do, around immediate needs and human pettiness. It was not a stage waiting for a protagonist. It was a place. The knowledge calmed him in one way and made his heart race in another.
He ate the broth. He let the heat move outward, soothing bruised muscle and cold bone. He looked, deliberately, at things in reach because small concrete facts were a bridge over panic. A crack in a clay cup repaired with pitch, the seam a ragged black scar. A shelf full of woven baskets, one mended where a spar had snapped, reed twined neatly around reed. A fish hook on a nail, its barb worn to a duller point, the shaft scratched with a mark someone had made to claim it as theirs. None of those things had ever been modeled on-screen. Someone had made them anyway.
The panic crept back not because he doubted what he was seeing but because he believed it, because this was not an overlay on his own life but a second life pressed right up against it, breathing against the same glass. And he was on the wrong side of the glass now, or the right one, and he had no idea how to move back.
He forced himself to think in sentences that did not gallop. This is a different world. I am here. I don't know how. I don't know if I can leave. Each period was a nail tacked through the hem of his wildness, pinning it so it fluttered less.
A small, treacherous thrill threaded through the fear. It embarrassed him even as he felt it, as if he were a child grinning at a funeral. I'm here. The boy who had walked these streets long after midnight while the cheap desk lamp made a halo on the carpet — that boy would have thought this a wish granted. He would have planned routes and exploits. He would have tried to break the edges just to see what happened. He would not have known that forty-three-year-old feet blister, that forty-three-year-old lungs wheeze in cold air, that forty-three-year-old minds know the exact weight of rent and lost friends and routines built to keep anxiety in its pen.
He held the bowl closer to his mouth so Camilla wouldn't see his eyes shine. He took another sip and tasted thyme. Tears retreated a fraction.
"Where are you from?" Camilla asked suddenly, startling him enough that he almost spilled. "Your accent, your clothes — you're not from here."
Lucan made a noise that could have been protest, could have been warning. Camilla ignored it.
Michael stared at the bowl for a heartbeat too long and then set it down because it felt cowardly to hide behind it. Lying about everything would be worse than telling a sliver of truth. He picked a sliver he could say out loud.
"Far," he said. His voice came out hoarse. "Very far. I… something happened. I don't understand what. One moment I was…" He stopped. He had promised himself not to open that door. He tried a smaller door. "Then I was in the forest. I don't know how I got there. I don't know where this is."
Camilla's gaze softened almost imperceptibly. She had that shopkeeper's way of looking at a person and taking his measure for practicality: how much he could carry, how much he could pay, whether he would break when prodded. She nodded, as if he had answered adequately.
"You're in Riverwood," she said. "In Skyrim."
The word fell with the quiet of a dropped coin and rolled in a circle on the wooden floor of his mind before settling. Skyrim. It did not echo — there were too many other sounds for echoes to form — but it glowed with a steady perihelion light. He said nothing. She must have read his face anyway because she added, gentler than he would have expected, "You'll be safe here, at least for now."
Safe. For now. He could have laughed again, but the urge passed. Safety in this place was as relative as anywhere. Bandits in the hills. Wolves in the timber. Men with causes. Gods with appetites. He knew this much from the old familiarity, and knowing it made the counterfact all the stranger: these dangers were real now, but so were warm broth and the way the fire had a voice.
Lucan set his bowl down with a sigh like a man surrendering and leaned back, his leg stretched, his hands folded on his stomach. "He's a good man," Lucan told his sister, as if Michael weren't in the room. "He saved me. We'll put him up for the night. Two, if he needs it. He can sleep in the storeroom if—"
"In the spare bed," Camilla said, almost without looking at Lucan. "He'll sleep in the spare bed. And you'll keep that leg up and not go anywhere today. I'll send Frodnar to fetch Alvor to look at it. If you go lame because you were too proud to rest, I'll sell the shop from under you and go to the Imperial City to be rid of you."
Lucan grinned, as if this were an old joke between them. "See what I endure?" he said to Michael. "All for the sake of family."
Michael found that a small corner of himself, the corner that was still operating like a functioning adult, could manage a smile. "She's right," he said. "You should rest."
"I will, I will," Lucan said, already shifting like a man who would be standing as soon as his sister turned her back. "But tomorrow I'll be at the counter again. A man loses more coin to idleness than to thieves. Speaking of which — tomorrow we'll talk stock and caravans. I have ideas I've been nursing. Camilla tells me I dream too grandly, but I say—"
"—you say that the coin will sprout legs and walk into your purse if you stare hard enough," Camilla finished dryly. "Eat the last of your broth, dreamer. We will talk of plans when you can cross the room without wincing."
It was domestic, fond, ordinary. It steadied Michael better than the soup had. He let himself look around again — truly look, without trying to catch every detail in a net. Camilla had a list scrawled on parchment tacked beside the counter; he could not read the handwriting from where he sat, but he recognized the rhythm of items and prices and check marks. A potted plant lived on the sill, leaves dusty from the fire and still reaching for the light. A string of drying herbs dangled above the hearth, their shadows more crisp than the herbs themselves.
He tried on a thought as carefully as a man fits another man's coat over sore shoulders. I can live here. Not thrive, not conquer. Just live. One day, then the next. He would need to find work. He would need to learn what year it was — whether the names in his head lined up with the calendar here or whether the story he thought he knew hadn't started yet or had ended already or had never been. He would need warmer clothes, proper boots. He would need to take his phone out into sun somewhere and coax a charge into it and then turn it off again because what would he even do with a glowing rectangle in a place without towers? He would need a map he could hold. He would need to start saying "septims" instead of "gold" if he wanted people to think him less odd.
He thought of dragons and felt his skin shiver. He thought of war banners, blue and red. He thought of mountain passes, and a city on a cliff beside a sea, and a palace shaped like a ship. He thought of the fact that in his memory the main road of this country ended in a headsman's block. He didn't know if any of that was true here. He didn't want to find out the way he had in the game: by sprinting straight to the story and grabbing it by the throat.
No, he told himself. Not yet. Eat. Sleep. Learn the names of people around you. Don't ask about dragons. Not today.
His hands steadied enough that he could finish the broth without slopping it down his chin. Camilla took his empty bowl wordlessly and replaced it later with tea — or what this world called tea, bitter and brown and revived by a spoonful of something that tasted like honey if honey had flirted with woodsmoke all its life. He let it sit on his knee and warm his thighs.
The pulse in his throat eased to a rhythm that made sense. The panic withdrew to the edges, not gone but caged for the moment by the small, practical things that made up decency: hot food given freely, a chair offered, a place by a fire shared with a stranger. If he looked up and to the right he could see the window and through it the line of the road; people moved past in ones and twos, bent to their own concerns. He watched them the way a new neighbour watches a street through sheer curiosity. A man with a sack of flour over his shoulder. A girl dragging a sled she had no right to be dragging when there was so little snow, just enough to make the runners hiss on patches of ice. A woman with a bundle of greens, her skirt hemmed so many times it was more patch than original cloth.
None of this explained how he had arrived. He had no explanation to give even himself. He had a hole where some memory should be, the space-after tearing that his mind refused to go into. He did not know if he ought to fear it more or the new world itself more. He felt a flicker of superstition — as childish and immediate as any he had mocked — that naming the mechanism would invite it back. He let the hole be a hole. He put a lid on it. He would not peer into it today.
Lucan, sated for now, began to plan aloud again. "Once the passes open, we'll send for oranges from the south," he told Camilla, ignoring her eyeroll. "People will pay for freshness. A crate of oranges set in the window — imagine it! All Riverwood would stop to stare. A taste of the Cyrodiilic sun."
"You'd ruin the margins selling them to Frodnar for throwing at his friends," Camilla said, and then, because her brother's dreaming was a weather system that could be deflected but not halted, "If — if — you're set on buying fruit from half a continent away, at least wait until you can walk to the privy without my help."
Lucan grinned at Michael again. "See? She thinks small until she sees proof otherwise. I will show her. You will see it, too, my friend. In a year, we'll be swimming in coin. In two, we'll be sending hired guards with our caravans. In five—"
"In five," Camilla said, "you will still be telling the same story and I will still be keeping the books that make it possible to keep the door open." She softened it with a sideways smile. "Unless, of course, you break your leg tomorrow and the entire village has to carry you in a chair wherever you go."
Michael breathed, and the laugh that made it out was small and real. The world had gravity again — not just the kind that pulled at an apple but the kind that kept a man from flying off into too much thinking.
When the tea was gone and Lucan's leg had been wrapped and propped and Camilla had bullied him into lying down in the small room behind the counter, she came back to the hearth, wiped her hands on a cloth, and looked at Michael without sharpness.
"We'll find you a bed," she said. "There's a spare in the loft. It's not much, but it's warm and the roof is sound." She paused, then added with practical kindness, "If you have need of clothes, we can find simple things. Your shoes aren't meant for our roads."
He glanced down at the sodden, salt-stained trainers and felt a wash of gratitude so fierce he had to look away. "Thank you," he said, and this time the words came steady. "I… thank you. I'll work. I can work."
Camilla tilted her head, assessing once more, and nodded. "We'll see about that when your hands stop shaking and your color returns," she said. "For now, sleep. Wake when you smell dinner."
He stood because she had told him to and because there was nothing else he could decently do. His legs remembered the road and wobbled. He kept his eyes on the floorboards as she led him toward a narrow set of stairs that hugged the back wall. Near the first step his gaze snagged on a little midden of things that had fallen from pockets: a button, a wooden bead, the metal end of a drawstring, a child's marble so scratched it had gone cloudy. None of his games had ever included such a pile. Life did.
At the top of the stairs the loft was a cramped triangle of space with a bed tucked beneath the eaves. The mattress was stuffed with something that crackled, reeds or straw, and a quilt lay folded at the foot. There was a small window with a shutter and a round knot-hole in the sill where someone had burned a candle too low years ago and the wax had sunk into the grain and taken soot with it. A peg on the wall waited for a coat. The air smelled like wood warmed all day and dust. He had slept in worse.
"Rest," Camilla said, and left him to it.
He sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his shoes. Blisters had blossomed on both heels like ugly pearls. He cleaned them with the corner of his shirt because there was nothing else to do and lay back and pulled the quilt up to his chin and stared at the rafters until the lines there stopped writhing and resolved into patterns he could follow: a knot like an eye, a split like a river delta, a seam where two boards didn't quite meet and someone had shoved felt between them to keep the wind out. His body shook once, hard, the way a dog shakes water from its coat. He breathed through it.
He hadn't prayed in years. He didn't start now. He said a few words anyway, not to anyone in particular. Let me not be stupid. Let me not be cruel. Let me not be seen as a fool by people who can hurt me. Let me not hurt anyone because I'm scared. Let me be useful. The words sounded childish even in his own head. That did not make them less urgent.
In his mind's eye he saw the map of this place: not the in-game parchment with its stylized ink but the real shape of valley and road that he had been walking since morning. He traced the river he had crossed, the path to the mill, the square where the dog had run, the door he had passed through. He marked the rooms he had seen — hearth, counter, stair, loft — and pinned the people to them like notes. Lucan — dreams big, hurts quietly. Camilla — says what's true, knows when to feed a man.
He had not put himself on the map yet. He wasn't sure where to draw the little X that meant you are here. He had no story beyond man appears in forest and man helps stranger. He was relieved, suddenly, by the smallness of that story. It fit inside an ordinary day. He had plenty of extraordinary days ahead if he wanted them. He could afford one ordinary one.
He let his eyes close. He expected, as he had every time he'd drifted since the crash, to jerk awake in terror at the memory of that in-between place, the not-dark not-light where his insides had been sieved into motifs he couldn't name. The memory hovered, politely this time, like a stray cat waiting to see if he had food. He turned his face away from it gently. Not today.
He slipped sideways into a sleep that was more abolition than rest, blank and heavy. He dreamed nothing he could keep.
When he woke, the light through the little shuttered window was warmer in tone, amber in a way the gray morning hadn't allowed. His mouth tasted of old tea. His back ached less; his ribs had found a new arrangement that offended him slightly less than before. He heard voices below, the low wave of Lucan's punctuated by Camilla's stones of practicality. He smelled onions and something savory that might be venison. He listened until the voices dissolved into the background hum of a place, the way you can listen to a refrigerator long enough that it becomes silence.
He turned his head on the lumpy pillow and looked at his phone where he had set it face down on the floor beside the bed. It was a small rectangular anchor to an ocean he no longer lived on. He picked it up. The battery icon's sliver was thinner than it had been. No bars. No time that meant anything. He turned it off because he didn't want to watch it die. He tucked it back into his pocket like a superstition.
He swung his feet to the floor. His heels bit. He stood anyway.
Downstairs, Camilla saw him and nodded in the way of someone who had counted on him appearing when the meal was ready because that was how civilized people behave. She put a bowl in his hands without asking, and he said "thank you" and meant the words twice over. Lucan tried to stand and winced and sat again, chastened for all of two minutes. The dog that had barked earlier nosed through the door and then thought better of it when Camilla snapped fingers. The fire spread the kind of heat that sank into joints.
Michael ate, and the solidity of the food helped pack his fear into manageable crates. When Lucan asked him for an opinion on whether river trade would open before the mountain passes in spring and if a man could make anything selling boat space on borrowed time, Michael found he could answer honestly: "I don't know. I need to see a map." When Camilla asked whether he could tell wheat from barley when buying sacks from a farmer who claimed his crop had not been damp, he found he could say, "If you teach me once, I'll remember." When Lucan launched into a list of towns along roads Michael could lay over the ghost of the game's map in his head, the names no longer made his stomach flip. They were weights on the world, not traps.
After the meal, when dusk spread the windows into rectangles of deepening blue and the hinges creaked as Camilla barred the door and the day set its tools down one by one, Michael found a moment alone by the hearth. He leaned forward and warmed his hands. The skin across his knuckles was cracked and white with strands of salt where sweat had dried. He rubbed thumb over knuckle and watched the value of that small friction enter him and settle.
He said the thing to himself, finally, fully, deliberately, like a man choosing a hard truth because any other would wiggle and bite later.
This is Skyrim. I'm in Skyrim. I don't know how. I don't know why. But I am here.
He waited for panic to brea k and flood him again. It didn't. The sentence made a shape he could stand inside. It wasn't comfortable, but it had a door and a window and a roof and room for a bed. He could live in it awhile. He would build it out with more facts as he got them. He would cut a second window when he needed the light.
Behind him, Lucan's voice rose and fell, already describing oranges again to a sister who would let him talk because talking was how he survived the space between what he had and what he hoped to have. Outside, the river argued with the rocks, and the wheel agreed with the river once a revolution that yes, the river was right to insist.
Michael listened. He let the sound settle under his ribs the way a good bass line settles under a song. He stood up when Camilla told him to, and he helped move a sack from one place to another, and he nodded when Lucan called him friend. When the night finally deepened and the shop was put to bed, he climbed to the loft again and lay down in the bed that belonged to no one until he put his body into it.
He didn't know how he had ended up here. He didn't know if there was a way back. The not-knowing was a room, too, echoing and colder, but he shut the door on that one for now. Tomorrow he would open it a crack and look. Tonight he put his hand on the rough quilt, felt its weight, and let it keep him.
Somewhere downriver a wolf howled. The sound lifted the hairs on his arms and then smoothed them again. This was a world where wolves howled and people answered with doors and fires and the simple courage of sleeping and waking to do it again.
He slept.