The wind did not let go. It howled, not as air but as memory, dragging me through a corridor of sound and light that had no end, no beginning. My body had lost its shape; I was thought, pulse, echo. I reached out for something, anything, and felt only the shimmer of time itself, fluid and cold as water under moonlight.
They say falling is brief. But this, this fall stretched into eternity.
Flashes struck like lightning beneath my closed eyes: fragments of a world both familiar and alien. A battlefield cloaked in fog. Men shouting in tongues I half understood. A raven wheeling across a sky bloodied by dawn. Then, as if some unseen hand turned the pages faster, I saw other visions, too vivid to belong to the past.
A ship breaking against black waters.
A child with copper hair crying beneath the shadow of fire.
A tower, tall as judgment, crumbling into ruin.
A woman, her reflection blurred in shattered glass, whispering my name as if it were a prayer.
"Elara…"
It was not Claire's voice, nor anyone I knew. But it carried that same aching familiarity, as if I had known her once in another life, or would one day know her in another time.
The hum that began at the stones grew deafening, splitting into tones that tangled together, notes of joy and mourning, creation and undoing. And within them, I heard the murmur of the stones themselves. They spoke not in words, but in knowing.
You are the echo and the flame.
The watcher between breaths.
The choice unmade.
I tried to speak, to ask what it meant, but the wind stole the words from my tongue.
Then came the silence.
It fell like snow, soft and absolute. I opened my eyes, expecting nothingness. Instead, I found the world rebuilding itself around me, grain by grain, sound by sound: the hiss of the breeze, the damp scent of moss and earth, the low cry of a bird echoing over the glen.
I was lying on the ground, my cheek pressed against cold heather. The air was heavier here, thicker, older. When I breathed, it tasted of smoke and iron and something faintly sweet, like crushed gorse. My pulse thundered in my ears.
I sat up slowly.
The circle was still there, but altered. The stones looked younger, less eroded, their edges unsoftened by time. The grass around them was unbroken, wild. No remnants of paths or tourists or the modern world, only the unyielding stillness of nature untouched.
Panic bloomed quietly at first, then all at once. I reached for my satchel, gone. My notebook, gone. The watch on my wrist had stopped, its hands frozen at the exact moment the world had changed.
"Claire?" I whispered, the name falling out like instinct. The silence answered.
But then came something else, a rustle from the ridge below.
Voices.
Rough, urgent, foreign in cadence. Men's voices.
I rose to my feet, dizzy, clutching the nearest stone for balance. Figures appeared through the veil of mist, four, maybe five. Broad-shouldered, cloaked in tartan, rifles slung across their backs. The sight was so absurd that my mind rebelled against it, insisting it was reenactment, or dream, or madness.
"Who goes there?" one of them shouted, his voice thick with an accent I'd only ever read on the page.
I opened my mouth but nothing came out. My knees threatened to buckle.
Another stepped forward, a tall man, his hair dark and unkempt, his jaw shadowed by stubble. His eyes were flint, sharp and assessing. He spoke again, slower this time.
"You're no Sassenach spy, are ye?"
The words sliced through me. Sassenach. The very name that tethered Claire to her legend. Hearing it spoken, alive and unvarnished, sent a shiver through my chest.
"I…" I began, but the effort of sound broke into a sob. My voice felt foreign in my throat. "Please. I don't know where I am."
They exchanged looks, wary but not unkind. The one with the flint eyes stepped closer. His coat was frayed, his boots caked in mud. The scent of smoke clung to him.
"You're in the Highlands, lass," he said after a pause, as if humoring a frightened child. "Where else would ye be?"
The men laughed, a rough, unkind sound that tore through the mist, as though frightening a lost woman might send her running back to whatever strange stone had birthed her. But the circle was gone. The stone I had touched, the ground where I'd stood moments ago, both vanished, swallowed by a world that seemed to have rearranged itself in my absence.
Panic tightened my chest. I searched the horizon for a glint of reason, a landmark, a way home. Nothing. Only the ring of strangers and the weight of their eyes. I tried to speak, to plead—but no sound came. My throat burned with the effort, my voice lost somewhere between centuries, perhaps left suspended in the wind that had abandoned me.
Terror settled in, sharp and cold. My hands trembled uncontrollably; my palms slick with sweat, every breath shallow and frantic. Everything I touched slipped through my grasp, as though the world itself refused to hold me.
The edges of my vision quivered, the world bending like a mirage. The ground tilted beneath me, unsteady, treacherous. Through the ringing in my ears, a voice cut through, sharp, commanding. One of the men, broader than the rest, barked an order to the one with the crooked grin and yellowed teeth.
"Take her."
The words struck like a slap, final and cold, echoing through the fog as my knees gave way.
"Where are you taking me?" I gasped, my voice trembling as I fought against his grip. My limbs flailed in vain, strength slipping from me as my vision blurred into a haze of shadows and motion. The world spun, swallowing sound and light until only the echo of my own fear remained.
I saw, for a heartbeat, the same flash of blue light that had pulled me through, and behind it, a face.
Not Jamie Fraser. Not yet. But something told me he was near.
Like a scent carried by the wind before the storm arrives.
My last thought before darkness claimed me was not of fear, but of recognition.
The stones had not merely sent me backward.
They had sent me where I was needed.
And in that strange mercy of fate, I understood,
I was no longer the reader of the story.
I had become its unwritten page.