Page 6 of Beds and Blades

I did not like looking at it.

Ahead of me: a fortification. A real one. This was a working military structure with stone walls thick enough to absorb significant impact. Arrow slits were positioned throughout the structure. The moat was not ornamental. There were gaps in the crenellation where something had hit it. Repeatedly.

The fortification sat on the valley floor with its back against a long, gradual rise in the land, positioned to give its watchtowers an unobstructed view across the open country beyond. It had the look of something that had been holding a position for a long time and expected to keep holding it.

My years studying military history made the tactical logic of its placement immediately legible. It sat between those mountains and the land beyond the rise. Whatever was in those mountains, this was where someone had decided to stop it.

I looked back at the mountains. At the castle.

I was standing in the middle ground.

I was in a valley. The outpost ahead. The mountains behind. Whatever those black mountains contained, I was in the space between them and the people trying to keep that thing contained.

Farther out in the field, toward the mountains, there were ruins.

It reminded me of Roman ruins seen in the early Middle Ages, long after the Empire had faded. I had often wondered how those remains must have appeared to the people who lived among them, and what they imagined they were looking at—the wreckage of a fallen world, or simply ancient stones whose story had been forgotten.

It looked like the remnants of an arch, or the ghost of something once glorious. It was ancient. The uprights still stood, taller than they had any right to be, given their age, carved with a repeating geometric pattern I could not place within any tradition I had studied.

I looked at it for a long time. Two stone uprights framing empty air. Whatever they had once held was gone so completely that even the purpose of the frame felt erased.

It seemed as though something magnificent had once lived on this land and had long since faded over centuries, or perhaps millennia.

I checked my presentation notes again. This was, I recognized, not a rational response to the situation. It was, however, my response. The notes were familiar. The notes were from my life. They were complete with the coffee ring on page twelve, where I had set my mug down while reading the Polybius section for the fourteenth time.

I held onto the notes and assessed the situation.

Hypothesis one: Hallucination. Possible. I had consumed an amount of caffeine that a reasonable toxicologist would describe as inadvisable, and guarana in particular had effects that were not fully captured by its primary compound.

But hallucinations did not contain the multisensory, physically consistent texture of a real environment. I had studied enough accounts of battle-induced delirium to know what sensory distortion looked like, and it didn’t feel like this.

The grass was damp beneath me, the air cool with that first hint of autumn before the leaves began to turn. Shadows slid across the stone walls at sharp, believable angles.

Hypothesis two: Dream. I had enough familiarity with REM sleep research to know that dreams did not produce consistent, layered sensory data across all five channels simultaneously. You did not feel cold air, smell woodsmoke, hear the distant sound of wind, or feel the weight of printed pages in your hands. Dreams collapsed under that kind of scrutiny. This was not collapsing.

Hypothesis three: Death. Perhaps I was dead and this was the afterlife. I had never been a particularly spiritual person. I attended church mostly out of family obligation and had never managed to fully commit to the theology. The concept of an afterlife had always seemed, to me personally, more comforting than certain.

Perhaps I had been wrong about that.

If so, the afterlife was nothing like the one I had been lectured about. There were no deceased relatives materializing to greet me. No inventory of my sins. No one reviewing my porn search history with a clipboard and a disappointed expression.

Hypothesis four: Another World. Somehow, I had crossed into an entirely different world. I had no follow-up analysis for hypothesis four.

I was still sitting with hypothesis four when I heard hoofbeats.

The rider came from the direction of the fortification. Fast. Purposeful.

As the distance closed, the details resolved into something more utilitarian than ceremonial. The armor was dark steel: functional and visibly overused. Dents had accumulated across the plates in ways that suggested repeated impact rather than neglect. Rust had formed at the joints where moisture and friction collected. Darker stains had settled into the seams. Dried blood, almost certainly.

The breastplate carried a single crest cast directly into the metal instead of painted onto it, which implied permanence. A flame. Stylized, but not abstract enough to obscure intent. Narrow at the base, widening as it rose. The surface had been worked unevenly so that light shifted across it with movement. The effect was subtle, deliberate, and old.

There was no other decoration on the armor. No gilding, no rank insignia, no attempt at intimidation beyond the practicality of the equipment itself. That made the crest stand out even more.

Its edges had been worn smooth by years of handling and repair. The plate had clearly survived long enough to be rebuilt several times rather than replaced. Whatever the symbol meant, it was worth more than the armor that carried it.

The sword came out when he was about thirty yards away.

I stayed where I was. This was less bravery than the paralysis of someone who had just run out of options and was defaulting to data collection. He was closing fast, his attention locked on me. I waited to find out what his assessment produced.