The man took another step toward me, slow and deliberate, his gaze locked on the small, spiral pendant that rested just above my collarbone. The chill of the night seemed to intensify, wrapping around me like a shroud. I could feel the thrum of ancient magic emanating from the standing stone behind me, the very air vibrating with a silent, unseen power. It was the same sensation that had accompanied my inexplicable journey through time, a hum that had settled deep in my bones.
“That mark,” he said, his voice a low, steady current, almost a rumble in the profound silence that surrounded us. “Do you know what it means?”
I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly dry. The simplicity of his question was disarming, devoid of the academic pretence I was used to. “It was… my dad’s,” I began. “A replica. From Newgrange. It’s ancient Irish, right? A symbol of life and time. The soul’s journey.” I rattled off the facts, a lifeline to the world I knew, hoping they would ground me, or perhaps, make sense to him.
His brow furrowed slightly at my words. Some of them were clearly unfamiliar, others hitting home with an unexpected resonance. “Newgrange,” he repeated slowly, tasting the word, letting it roll across his tongue as if it were a foreign, intriguing spice. “That is not a name I know but that mark… it is not worn by chance.” His dark eyes, which had seemed so unreadable moments before, now held a glimmer of something akin to recognition, or perhaps, a deep-seated memory.
A breeze, sharp and bracing, lifted the hem of his cloak, carrying with it the earthy, comforting scent of peat smoke, cold iron, and something else. Something wild and primal, like wet moss and pine needles. He stood so still, yet every line of his tall, lean body was wound tight.
“You’re not of this place,” he said finally, his gaze unwavering, cutting through the thin veil of my composure. “Nor of this time.”
My heart hammered against my ribs, and it felt like a frantic drum. This was it. The moment of truth. My impossible reality was laid bare. “You… you believe me?” I whispered, a desperate hope clinging to the question.
He did not answer right away. Instead, he studied my face, his gaze searching, like it held some intricate puzzle he had seen before but could not quite remember. It was a look that made me feel utterly exposed. “Not yet,” he said, a faint, almost imperceptible tremor in his deep voice. “But I’ve seen stranger things than you, girl in the strange cloths.”
I let out a shaky laugh. “Stranger than a girl falling out of nowhere in the middle of the night wearing waterproof trousers and a fleece?”
That almost—almost—made the corner of his mouth twitch. Not quite a smile, but close. A ghost of amusement flickered in his eyes, a momentary softening that made him seem less like a formidable warrior and more… human.
“What’s your name?” I asked, softly, trying to bridge the chasm between us with a simple inquiry.
He hesitated for a long moment, as if weighing the syllables, testing their weight in the air. Then, his voice steady once more, he said, “Kael.”
Kael. The name lodged in my chest like a small, smooth stone. Heavy. Familiar, though I could not place it. Maybe from one of Dad’s stories, a forgotten hero or a legendary king whispered about in old texts. The sound of it, spoken aloud in this ancient place, felt right, as if it had always belonged here, waiting to be found.
“Where am I?” I asked, clutching my arms tightly against the creeping chill, a futile attempt to comfort myself.
Kael looked past me, his gaze sweeping the megalithic ring behind us, then the distant, shadowed forest below. His eyes seemed to pierce the darkness, discerning details I could not.
“You’re in Isovar,” he said. The word itself was a whisper on the wind, carrying with it a sense of deep history and forgotten lore.
The name sent a fresh chill through me, one that had nothing to do with the wind. Isovar. That was not the name of any Irish kingdom I knew from textbooks or folklore. It sounded… close. Like a forgotten cousin of history, a half-remembered tune.
I mentally scrambled through Dad’s notes, bits of forgotten Celtic myth, old maps I had poured over. Iso—from the old root isó, meaning “equal” or “same.” Balance. Reflection. And var—possibly from varra, an archaic term I remembered from Dad’s field notes, meaning “watch” or “ward.” Guarded place. Realm under vigilance.
Isovar. The same ward. The land between. A threshold realm.
I swallowed hard, the implications settling like cold stones in my stomach. It sounded like the kind of place that existed in the space between life and death, past and future, between one heartbeat and the next. Not part of the known world but not entirely separate from it either. A thin place. Dad used to talk about those. Places where time buckled, where the veil wore thin, where reality itself frayed at the edges.
“I need to get back,” I said quickly, the panic rising again like a relentless tide inside me. The urgency was a physical ache, a desperate longing for the familiar, for the logical order of my own time. “I don’t belong here.”
Kael’s gaze snapped back to mine, sharp and direct. “No,” he agreed, his voice surprisingly gentle, lacking any judgment. “You don’t but you were brought here. That means something.”
“I didn’t ask to be brought anywhere.”
“No one ever does.” His voice was laced with a weary understanding.
We stood in silence for a long moment, the only sounds the rustle of the sparse grass and the distant sigh of the wind. The massive moon had shifted in the sky, making the standing stones behind me seem even more ancient and mysterious. Then, from deep in the ancient forest, a wolf called. Its howl was long, low, and profoundly lonely. It sounded exactly how I felt.
Finally, Kael lifted a hand, a silent gesture, and inclined his head for me to follow. “You’ll freeze out here before dawn,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion, purely practical. “And you don’t know what’s watching from the trees.” He turned, his dark cloak sweeping across the dewy grass, and started walking back toward the dark embrace of the forest.
I hesitated. Every rational part of me screamed that this was reckless. That I should not trust a sword-carrying stranger in an unfamiliar world. In a time, I did not recognize. My archaeological training, my urban upbringing, all screamed caution but what choice did I have? I could not survive alone in this place. The cold was already seeping into my bones, and the raw, untamed wilderness stretched endlessly around me. Some part of me, something deep in my chest, a primal, unexplainable instinct, pulled toward him like a magnet finding true north. It was not just fear driving me, or a desperate need for survival. It was something else. A whisper of recognition. A faint remembered memory that vibrated deep within my soul.
I followed.
