The sky was blue, the color of a robin’s egg.
I saw a nest of them once, while climbing a neighbor’s tree. I was eight at the time and hunting for a stray frisbee. My brother, the jackass, had thrown it next door. I didn’t remember the reason why—that part was hazy—but I would never forget my surprise at finding the eggs. They sat in their nest like a handful of treasures.
That was fifty-six years ago, practically a lifetime.
As I watched, a smattering of clouds drifted across the sky. The wind up there must really be blowing for them to move like that. Down below, where I was, the breeze was gentle, swaying the grass around me.
I looked around and realized I was lying on my back on a hillside. In the distance, a line of trees marked the edge of a forest. Fields and crops stood in between, while farther up the hill was a tall wall, like the kind you’d find in a Miyazaki film. The stones were cartoonish in their size and placement. They reached up at least thirty feet though and seemed sturdy.
I couldn’t remember arriving at this place.
My last memory was of leaving the office. I worked as an office manager for a company making documentary films for the education market. We were called Southwind Productions, which was ironic for a company based in Portland, Oregon. The weather report had predicted freezing rain in the afternoon, so I’d cut out of work early to beat the bad weather and traffic. The next thing I knew I was on the hillside, with no sign of cold or rain. If anything, the air was balmy. The breeze felt good against my body.
I lifted my hands. They were smaller than they should have been, and held none of the scars a person naturally gathered over time. They were innocent hands, untouched by life, and the rest of my body matched.
I was no longer sixty-four years old, but a… child. If I had to guess, I was about nine or ten? Had I slipped and hit my head? Was I unconscious and dreaming?
The sky, the scent of the grass, and the way the hillside prodded my back—those all felt real. My thoughts and emotions were muffled though.
I recognized that something very wrong had taken place, but the alarm was distant, as if under a thick blanket of mild acceptance. Minutes passed. An hour or two. I didn’t wake up. Nothing happened besides the clouds continuing to shift across the sky.
More time passed. My body became hungry. There was an emptiness inside me, as if I’d been fasting for days. My distant mind registered that I should find food.
I stood. On my feet were woolen socks and a pair of leather shoes. I also wore thick woolen pants and shirt. They were simple clothes but well made. I peeked inside the pants. Still male. At least that hadn’t changed.
I walked uphill to follow the line of the wall. Where there were people, there would be food, and I found my first person after a short walk. A man stood at the gate to the town. He wore chainmail over a thick cloth jacket, and a spear rested on his shoulder.
I stood there amazed. Even my distant thoughts went silent. It had been a long time since I’d been to a Renaissance Faire, and I hadn’t expected to come across one so randomly.
The guard at the gate grew more and more uneasy as I stared at him. The spear went from resting on his shoulder to being held at the ready. His knuckles were white gripping the haft.
He yelled at me and brandished his spear. A woman dressed in mail came out to join him. They hurriedly exchanged words, but I understood none of them. The language sounded like nothing I’d heard before.
The woman also held a spear, and she joined in pointing it at me. Their faces were ugly with fear.
I wanted to move closer, to explain that they had nothing to worry about. This was a dream, after all, an artifact of dreaming or being unconscious. None of what I’d experienced since waking could be real.
The words wouldn’t come out though. My thoughts were smothered before they could coalesce by the strange feeling in my head. The result was that I just stood there, blank-faced. I knew the situation was wrong, but I wasn’t capable of addressing it. I might as well have been a mannequin or doll.
Eventually, a person in robes stepped through the gate. They wore a mask in the shape of a crow and carried a wooden hoop two feet across. More words were exchanged, and the two guards stepped back to give them space.
When the person in robes began to sing, the mask moved just as a real crow’s beak might.
It reminded me of early in my career, during the summer I’d helped build puppets on the set of The Meadow Princess. This was before computer-generated imagery, so the kid’s show relied heavily on costumes and puppetry for its effect. This mask was much better than anything we’d built though.
The space inside the hoop twisted. I was curious to see what would happen, so I shifted forward—but froze when a snake, mottled black and green, poked its head out from inside the hoop.
The snake’s glare snapped me from my daze and sent me running. Down the hill I went, and along the dirt road between fields, my feet stumbling on the uneven surface. Out of the corners of my eyes, I saw corn and tomatoes and oxen. A few people too, bobbing up and down as they worked the earth.
The feeling in my head spread out, throttling the panic coursing through me, but leaving behind an overwhelming need to find a place to hide. My eyes were drawn to the woods ahead, and I sprinted as fast as my legs would take me. I ran and ran, past the treeline and headlong into the forest, not paying attention to the brush and branches.
I don’t know how long I ran, but it felt endless. Slowly, the muffling of my thoughts eased enough that I could think and control myself again.
My feet skidded on the forest loam as I stopped running. My breath came in big, heaving gulps. Sweat drenched my shirt, and my hand held my side because of the stitch there. Worst of all, my shoes squelched from the burst blisters and blood inside them. These sensations—there’s no way this can be a dream. And then I had a second thought: If there’s a wall, there’s something to keep out.
Under normal circumstances that meant people, either bandits or invaders, but I’d just seen a crow-person pull a snake from a hoop. There might be things just as strange or dangerous in the woods. Maybe the forest won’t be the refuge I thought it would be.
Fear swelled within me, but the muffling came back to press it down. I stood helpless for an unknown amount of time before the pressure eased.
My thoughts were jumbled afterward, scattered, but I knew I couldn’t panic—not about my unbelievable circumstances or the danger. I had to keep a lid on my emotions, because whatever was afflicting me would do it for me if I didn’t. I couldn’t even worry about the source of the affliction, because even the fear of it would cause it to trigger.
The only thing I could think of to help was to stop thinking, which is what I forced myself to do. I had to put aside my worries and wait to freak out until after I’d found a safe place to rest.
Lost in the woods as I was, I needed to focus on finding shelter, water, and food. Those necessities I at least knew how to address. They’d been drummed into me by mi abuelito the first time he’d taken me hunting, by my experiences working for Southwind, and by the years of hiking with my wife and children.
I started looking for a safe place to camp. The trees were a mix of pine, cedar, hemlock, spruce, and maple—those were the familiar ones. There were some that I didn’t recognize though. One tree had black, furry bark and reddish pods hanging from its branches. Another was striped yellow, the leaves smelling like cardamom.
My heart beat fast when I spotted those trees. They were alien and unlike anything I’d seen as a backpacker and documentarian. As an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction, I knew exactly what those trees meant. Another world… this is another world. All I needed was a horned rabbit or a goblin to confirm it.
My head spun. I desperately wanted to sit, but I was afraid if I did I wouldn’t be able to get up again. My feet were on fire from the burst blisters; the pain was radiating into my legs and groin.
I also missed my adult body. Even as an older man, I’d been stronger than I was now. At least I was more nimble in this body—not that it helped reduce the cuts and scratches from my helter-skelter run through the forest. I’d been too focused on getting away from the town for that.
Apparently, I’d managed to trade an old man’s troubles for a child’s. Although, if this was a portal fantasy, maybe there was a way to quantify the changes?
“Status,” I said, but nothing happened. “No? Hmm. What about appraisal?”
There was no response to my commands—no blue screens or other tropes of the isekai genre—but that didn’t matter. My priorities hadn’t changed. I still needed to find shelter, water, and food.
“One step at a time,” I said, whispering to myself.
There were no obvious places to shelter nearby, so I started to explore the area. A few minutes later, I stopped—the pain in my feet made my eyes water. Maybe a short rest, I thought.
I was leaning against a maple when an animal chittered in the distance. Although, that was an assumption on my part. For all I knew, it could’ve been a giant spider or carnivorous plant. Whatever it was, it encouraged me to limp onward.
The going was slow—this part of the forest was thick with bushes and brambles. My clothes were covered with small tears, the cloth dotted red from the small cuts on my body.
I was considering my options, then a twig snapped behind me. I glanced back and spotted a baboon-like creature with a blue snout and reddish fur. He was broader across the chest than a baboon. Taller too. But what stood out most were the long, sharp teeth meant for eating meat.
The creature was stalking me.
Adrenaline flooded my system, and I ran. My feet be damned, I ran with all I could. My only advantage was that I was small. I kept the baboon at bay by weaving between the trees and slipping between brambles, but he was tenacious, screeching as he gave chase.
I knew it was physically impossible for me to outrun the baboon—he was stronger and faster—so I searched for anything that might change the dynamics of the chase.
To my right was a fallen tree, and beyond it the ground fell away toward a steep hillside. There was less cover, but I took the chance, ducking under the fallen tree to throw myself down the slope.
I slid on a mix of loose dirt and dry grasses. My hands were scratched and cut as I struggled to control the descent. Sticks jabbed at me, and I nearly went tumbling when I encountered an unexpected drop. I landed in a painful pile, coming just shy of losing an eye to a tree’s low-hanging branch. Meanwhile, the baboon overshot, continuing along the way I’d been going, before he swung around.
The slope continued, and I spotted a rock outcropping. I scrambled toward it, looking for another obstacle to put between me and the baboon. Instead, I found salvation—a fissure in the rocks just wide enough for a small child. My feet splashed through a rill of water as I squeezed myself inside.
The baboon arrived moments later. Furious, he pounded at the stones with his fists, and the small space reverberated with the impacts; that gave me even more reason to push myself further inside toward a small hollow at the back.
I curled up and waited, but the baboon didn’t relent. He found a branch and poked it into the hollow to get at me. I batted the branch aside, earning new scratches each time. When the first branch didn’t work, the baboon smashed it against the rocks and found another. When that didn’t work, he found a third and a fourth and a fifth. The baboon howled his frustration throughout until finally—finally—he departed after striking the rocks one last time.
My body shook from the adrenaline’s aftermath. A dim part of my mind worried about infection. That thought jolted through me, but I sagged back down immediately. The nearest antibiotics were a world away.
Water flowed through the hollow in a trickle, and I reached down for some, my hand trembling. It took two attempts to bring a handful to my mouth. The water tasted clean but rusty, probably from the blood on my hands. Normally I’d worry about contaminants, but my belly was empty and I was desperately thirsty.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
After drinking my fill, I stared at the rock around me. My thoughts were hung on the fact that I was in another world and all I could come up with to describe my predicament was an aphorism.
“I can do better than that,” I said, but then wondered if that too was an aphorism. I shook the muddy thought from my head. My survival would require focus. Panic, denial, and distraction would only lead to tragedy.
I crawled out of the fissure, careful to make sure the baboon was gone and that there were no other predators nearby. Once outside, I followed the water down the hillside. We meandered for a time, the rill and I, but eventually we were reunited with her big sister, a stream just wide enough for a man to throw a stone and barely miss the other side.
I expected to be more heartened by the sound of running water. It was, after all, one of my goals, but I hesitated and kept my distance. I needed to work up the courage to look into the water. When I finally did, I saw that my face was not my own. The shock rolled through me, waking the thing that muffled my emotions. Once again, a blanket spread over my thoughts.
Looking past the cuts and scabs, I distantly noted that I still looked half Hispanic, but now the other half was Chinese instead of white. The face I wore had prominent cheekbones, with dark eyes and—I could tell already—those are going to be some bushy eyebrows when I grow older. On top of it all was a shock of black hair.
I sat back and let the new face sink in. Eventually, the daze would pass, and then I’d head upstream. I heard the roar of a waterfall in the distance.
