I forced myself to breathe, to focus. Dad’s voice, calm and reasoned, surfaced through the fog of panic: “When faced with the unknown, Orlagh, always look for the details. The small things will tell you the big story.”

I looked down at myself. Waterproof trousers, a fleece jacket, sturdy boots. Dad’s field journal was gone. His trowel, too. The excavation trench that had anchored me to reality, to routine and memory and grief was also gone.

It was quiet, unnaturally so. Not even the faintest drone of distant cars, and no electric hum. Just the rustle of unseen leaves and the murmuring of a river somewhere nearby.

I turned in a slow circle, absorbing the landscape. The ground beneath my feet was firm and springy, a patchwork of short, resilient grass and knotted clumps of heather. The scent of damp earth mingled with something sweet and faintly herbal. A low rise curved behind me, and just ahead half-shrouded by gorse and shadow there was a small, circular enclosure.

Cautiously, I approached. Rough-hewn stones, stacked without mortar, formed a low, ancient wall no higher than my hip. It enclosed a single standing stone, slender and silent. It rose smooth, dark, and dappled with moonlight toward the sky like a sentinel.

I stepped closer. Faint etchings clung to the surface. Circles, lines, and dots. Primitive, yet deliberate. Not decorative, but purposeful. These were not the intricate spirals of the trench stone. They were older. Simpler. A language of shapes meant to speak across millennia.

A megalithic site. A thin place.

I had just passed through it.

A tremor went through me. Not from cold, but from the gravity of knowing that Dad’s impossible theories had not been impossible at all. Thin places, he had whispered. Places where time collapsed, folded, thinned to a membrane one could pass through if the moment was right and the soul was willing.

I had always smiled when he spoke like that. Thought it romantic. Eccentric.

Now it was real. Terrifyingly, wondrously real.

My pulse surged with a fresh wave of panic. How far back have I come? Centuries? Millennia?

How do I get home?

Or… can I?

I looked up at the moon, seeking some kind of orientation but it was wrong. Familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Larger. Brighter. It cast a strange, silvery brilliance that made every shadow seem deeper. The sky was alive with stars—hundreds more than I had ever seen before—and not all of them belonged to the constellations I knew.

A breath of wind passed over the ridge, stirring the heather. The moment shifted. The silence changed.

A presence.

I froze.

There. At the treeline. A figure.

They stood at the very edge of the forest, where moonlight surrendered to shadow. Cloaked. Still. Watching me.

Every instinct screamed run, but my legs stayed rooted to the earth, bound by awe and fear and something deeper I could not name.

I was not alone. That truth was both a threat and a salvation.

The figure took a single step forward, and moonlight unveiled a glint of metal at their hip. A sword. My breath hitched, as my mouth turned dry.

My fingers curled into fists, grasping at courage I was not sure I had. “This is real,” I whispered to myself. “This is all real.”

“Always look for the soil that doesn’t belong,” Dad had said. And here, in this world, I was the soil that did not belong.

I forced my voice out, brittle and uncertain. “Hello?” The word barely broke the stillness.

The figure did not move for a heartbeat. Then, slowly, they raised a hand. Not in warning, but in acknowledgment.

A flicker of something warm stirred in my chest. Not safety, no, but possibility.

They were not running. Or charging. They were curious. Just like me.

The figure came closer. Each step was deliberate. Measured. Moving like someone used to being in the wilderness, distributing his weight with precision, like a hunter who knew how to listen to the land.

As he stepped into the moonlight, I saw him clearly. He was tall. Broad-shouldered. Cloaked in rough, dark wool, with the edges frayed from long use. Beneath it, leather armour caught the light. His hair was long, swept back from a sharply cut face—angular, weathered, striking. A jaw shaped by purpose, cheekbones carved by hardship, but it was his eyes that caught me. Dark. Intense. Unreadable. The kind of eyes that remembered things the world had tried to forget.

He stopped a dozen paces away from me. One hand rested on the hilt of his sword. The other hung loose at his side, fingers twitching slightly, as if unsure whether to draw or extend peace.

I realized how strange I must look to him in my modern fabric, zippers, and synthetic fleece.

“Who are you?” he asked. His voice was low and resonant. It carried the soft, lilting cadence of Old Gaelic.

I hesitated. What could I possibly say? Hi, I time-travelled here by accident, could you help? “My name is Orlagh,” I offered, choosing truth over explanation. “And… I’m lost.” The understatement echoed in the air, but it was the absolute truth.

He studied me. Not just my words, but my posture, my breathing, my boots. The way a wild animal might assess a foreign presence. Not immediately dangerous, but certainly unpredictable.

His eyes flicked to my jacket, to the seams and zippers, and then, to the spiral pendant I wore around my neck. It was the one Dad had given me, and it was a simple replica of the ancient triple spiral carved into the stones at Newgrange. As the moonlight caught it, the man’s expression changed. Not shock. Not recognition. Something deeper. Slowly, his gaze lifted to mine again. “You carry the mark,” he said.

I blinked. “What mark?”

He pointed to my pendant.

My heart thudded.

He stepped closer. Just one step. Close enough that I could smell the world he came from—leather, smoke, iron, pine, and something wilder, older. “I am Kael,” he said. “And you… do not belong to this time.”

I swallowed. “No. I don’t.”

We stood in the moonlight, two strangers from opposite ends of time, joined by a thread of myth and stone and fate.

His cloak stirred in the wind. The brooch at his shoulder caught the light. It was a spiral, nearly identical to the one on the threshold stone but older. Its edges were worn. Its curves were more organic, as though carved by hand from memory rather than design.

The sight of it sent a shiver through me. “I need answers,” I said softly. “I need to understand where… When… I am.”

Kael nodded once, his jaw tightening as though those answers came at a price. “You are not the first to come through the veil,” he said. “But you may be the last.”

I did not know what that meant but the way he said it made my pulse quicken. Somewhere behind him, the trees whispered. The ancient forest waited. The land itself seemed to hold its breath.

For the first time, I felt something deeper than fear. 

CONTINUE READING