When I fell into the Darkness, I didn't withdraw back into my mind. The last time, I was gently disconnected and then deposited onto the arrival platform, but this time, it was different. I still felt spread out, my awareness dimly registering a deafening blackness around me as I struggled to find my body again.

Did it take so long coming down?

Eventually, I managed to find all the parts of my consciousness once more, coalescing them back into something resembling myself, but there was still nothing for it to latch on to.

Was I dead?

It took a while, but stretching out my perception, my senses became aware of the silence and darkness around me. mentally "squinting", I managed to make out shapes, concentrations of infinitesimally lighter and darker shades, but nothing concrete.

Where was my body?

Stretching out a tendril of mind outward, I encountered some resistance. Pushing through, the mental probe immediately froze, and I lost awareness of it. Exploring this "barrier" took time, but I eventually managed to divine a rough outline.

Could this be it?

Pulling inwards, I was surprised when my mind didn't coalesce into the center of the sphere, but rather in a circle around it. Probing the center proved far more difficult than anticipated, and when I broke through, I immediately became aware of my body.

There it is!

There was a slight thread punching through the inner barrier, linking my disconnected awareness to my unmoving body's forehead, and I followed alongside it, dragging my entire self out of the miniscule space between the two bubbles. With a gasp, I opened my eyes, and could see once more.

***

Not that there was much to see. I was still sitting on the dais, as though my butt was glued to the stone, but the entire thing was... not anywhere. Erci and Raven, as well as Ref's mirror shard and all our stuff was lying by my feet, apparently dragged along with me. Further away, the stone suddenly stopped, revealing jagged edges, and beyond that, only a thin, swirling membrane of dim light, with a deep darkness beyond.

"Erci" I managed to croak out. Back in my body, I'd become aware that I was concentrating on something.

Through a strand of my auburn hair, floating in front of my face like in zero gravity, I made out a slight movement of the Fey's head, but nothing more. Even then, I didn't know if it was really him doing the moving, or one of the turbulences our little bubble thing was experiencing.

Instead, I tried to puzzle out what exactly I was concentrating on. I knew it was there, and I knew it was incredibly important, but I didn't know what it was. Or maybe I did, on some level? With difficulty, I managed to think back to some more recent memories, like entering a blacksmith shop, seeing a pattern of swirling lights, piercing yellow eyes - I mentally frowned.

There was something missing. How did I know the Fey's name was Erci? Did we talk? I thought of the memory again and again, trying to find what was beyond the sight of those eyes, and slowly, very, very slowly, another memory coalesced, this one of him talking. I examined the memory, which was so very slowly fading into view, and thought along it. It was coming from... somewhere.

Closing my eyes, I concentrated on the memory, and tried to push instead of pull it. It began to fade away, but at the last second, I delved in and recalled the memory of remembering the currently fading one, and something broke down. I felt as though I was someone else, but also myself, thinking a sentence with a slight delay twice over, at the same time. Then, my head split open and my real hands pressed into my temples, and I remembered.

The swirling darkness, collapsing the circle, saving Erci, descending into a void - all these memories slammed into me and broke any sort of concentration I could have mustered. I hunched over on the dais, and the thin membrane of light flickered once before collapsing, the darkness rushing inwards, fingers stretched out for me, almost touching-

And then there was Light. With a deafening explosion, REALITY reasserted itself, taking back its own, and the slab we were clambered on tore itself apart. I must have flown at least twenty feet before hitting something unforgivingly hard. It felt like my entire body was squashed under a firetruck.

Then, something small, hard and fast hit my head, and I knew no more.

***

Waking up is certainly a unique experience. Most days, it is peaceful and kind, and you can't remember the exact moment.

This however, was not most days. Indeed, it might have been the most un-most day I'd ever experienced thus far. Therefore, I awoke to a killer headache, and some very strange sounds. It sounded like I was hearing everything through a pillow, and there was a strong overtone of something very high. If I'd been familiar with Tinnitus, I may have described it as such. Coupled with this, standing up was hard, as was being able to see more than blurry shapes.

After some time of stumbling around on legs made of jello, I spotted something glittering not far from me, and shambled over, relieved to have found a small pond. Plunging my entire head in, the cold water cleared my thoughts, and I took the opportunity to take a few gulps of the water. It was a bit earthy, but otherwise alright. No fishes. Why was I so light-headed?

Vision thusly restored, I stumbled away from the pond, and beheld a scene of absolute destruction.

I was stood in a small "clearing", but that word is used sparingly, because I was pretty sure that there wasn't a clearing there this morning. At its center was a large crater which all the nearby trees (and their remains) were bent away from, as well as some strangely symmetrical boulders. Squinting, I made out that one of the boulders had something black on it, and saw that there were norse runes scribbled onto it as I shuffled closer. 'Coal', I thought, rubbing some between my fingers.

The stones in the center apparently hadn't survived the blast, as evidenced by all the small rocks and stone dust arrayed tastefully over everything, but I was surprised to see a small piece of perfectly white rock in the exact center of the crater.

There was something else glinting on the opposite side of the clearing, and I felt something in my eye, so I wiped it away. probably some stone dust.

At the end of a furrow, there lay a body clad entirely in metal, which I realized must be Erci, the mysterious elf, and I quickly checked for a pulse, relieved when I found it. It was strange, though - three beats instead of two. Maybe that's normal?

Suddenly, I felt something land on my head, and winced - reaching up, my hand brushed against something smooth, and I heard some soft noises close to my ear. My hand frozen in the air, the whatever-it-was jumped onto it, and I lifted it in front of my face, beholding a bird.

I stared dumbly for a second, before remembering, and held the bird close to my chest.

"You made it, you made it, you made it..."

I began to murmur under my breath, holding the raven close, until she extracted herself and glid over to the armored body on the ground, cawing expectantly.

Letting out a breath, I began to drag the prone elf back into the clearing. fucking heavy he was, though.

***

"And then I found you, unmoving on the ground," I finished, my eyes glancing up from the fire into the worried yellow eyes of my companion.

I found him awake in the late evening, just as I was returning from the last combing action into the scene of destruction. I managed to recover most of our things, but some I couldn't find or were too badly damaged. His bow was one of those. My jacket, too, was slightly singed on its left sleeve, but I didn't really care. It was my only one.

He gasped when he saw me, and I wiped the weirdly persistent bit of dust from my eye, and then plunked down.

'Are you alright?' he'd asked.

'Of course I am, why wouldn't I be'? I'd responded.

'Because you're bleeding... stop that! You'll get it infected!'

I didn't know what he was talking about, but I paused my hand halfway in the motions of wiping the dust away, and looked at him perplexed.

After that, he made me sit down, boiled some water, and set out to dress the gaping wound on my brow.

And now, I was sitting opposite him on a small boulder fragment, a sterile-smelling bandage adorning my head, looking at his face. He looked older in the firelight, but there were things that even the fire couldn't account for. There were laugh lines on his eyes, and his forehead held wrinkles I was sure weren't there before, and the armor lying nearby didn't seem as shiny as it was back when I first found him. Even cleaned of dust and dirt, there was something missing, like an intensity of the light or a refraction in the air. It was weird.

Ref was mostly busy poring over the stolen reflection of an old atlas, trying to find out where we were based on nearby mountains and landmarks, but it was most likely a fool's errand. A quick discussion with Erci revealed that, while the anchor stones could be used for transportation, and were one of the only ways to get to the human world from below, using them was usually a more involved affair. It was unheard of for a single Fey, let alone a Human, to use it successfully.

Well.

Successfully, as in "not dying in the process".

That night, I fell asleep pondering our incredible luck.

***

We began to move in the morning. Ref was reasonably sure that we'd made it to Europe, and was even more reasonably sure that the visible mountain range was in fact the northern edge of the Alps, putting us somewhere in Germany. Or France, really. Hell, even Austria had part of the northern edge.

Apparently, we landed in relative seclusion, and wandered for some hours until stumbling across a road in the woods, which was sadly completely deserted. My legs would really have appreciated a car right then.

But no, the car would stay denied to us until the next day, when we came upon a town called "Mühlenbach", which narrowed things down. Ref found our location that night - Germany's Black Forest.

Erci, Ref and I grew sick of the silence after about an hour of walking, and so, he began to teach us elven marching songs he'd learned during his time in their military. Let me tell you, you haven't lived until you've wandered a deep, dark forest to the songs "Crushed Helms", "Snapped Swords" or "Broken Bones" sung in the very high-strung elven language. Erci nearly died of laughter when I tried to repeat one of the songs in a jolly tone without understanding the words, the dissonance too much for him. Wasn't my fault that I thought his funeral-march-like tone didn't match the ethereal words.

***

Once we stocked up on food and fresh water in the local grocer, we departed Mühlenbach in our barely-used and freshly refueled car, and Ref steered us toward the Rhine river in the west, Erci marvelling at the car itself, alternatively craning his head down to listen to the engine, and hanging his head out the window, in awe at the speed.

We passed through a few more empty towns, and the growing layers of dust, as well as the occasional house cleft in two spurned me to push the car to its limit. I didn't know what became of the monster during our departure, but I didn't count on it being killed unless I saw it die in front of me. It already escaped one apparently inescapable trap, I didn't dare assume it would die in another, even if it was a lot more brutal.

Erci silently mourned his world in the evenings, and a shadow graced his face that even the fire couldn't dispel when he thought of it then. I knew that he'd lost someone important to him, perhaps a wife, but I didn't want to press further, just as he didn't. We both grieved our loved ones in our own time.

***

The Rhine was a beautiful river, and even if though was artificially channeled and straightened, it still glittered in the sun. We stole a small motor yacht from one of the many, many private docks, and travelled northward, up the river.

Driving a boat was peaceful, tranquil even, if only there weren't the constant gnawing fear of something terrible happening upon us. I remembered the rampaging darkness, tearing apart buildings and entire continents, and subconsciously pushed the throttle even further.

Ref spent most of her time writing into the stolen reflection of her notebook, and Erci was simply existing in a meditative state somewhere out of the way. None of us said much, and I drove the boat through the night, until we reached the Rhine's delta.

We made a few stops on the way, one of Strasbourg to raid a photography store and extract a few lenses on Ref's urging, as well as a handyman supply shop and grabbing ourselves some canisters of unleaded white paint, and another in Cologne to acquire some sewing supplies, which I used to patch a troublesome tear in my jacket.

The cities were decayed, broken and crumbling, and I stood in one or the other square for a while, just looking at the scorched, ruinous cities. How far we’d fallen.

***

The cliffs of Dover were just as spectacular as they looked in all those photographs, even though one had a cleft in it which I didn't remember from the postcards.

Erci was fascinated by the open ocean, and requested we stop somewhere on the silent expanse for a swim, which I gladly obliged, Raven watching with a critical eye and then stalking back into the cabin at the slight of splashing water.

It turns out that Fey learn to swim in their equivalent of primary school, which usually takes up their entire childhood, but are never given much opportunity to do so, because while it did rain in their world, there were very few lakes and no oceans; and most of their water was condensed from the cloudy sky instead.

We eventually abandoned the boat in Southampton, running aground in the shallow and wading the rest of the way. Erci set up camp for the night, while Ref guided me across town into the general hospital, where we broke into the pharmacy using the percussive force of a small rock, and looted all the painkillers we found.

I diagnosed myself with a mild concussion some time during our first wandering through the forest, noting my sluggish movements and dizziness, and I'd come down with a severe migraine while in the Rhine's delta, but at that point we'd already reached the open water. So I diligently took my headache meds, felt light for a while, then fell asleep to the soft crackling of the fire.

***

And awoke with a pounding headache. It was as though the entire weight of yesterday's prevented pain hit my head at once, and I stumbled over toward my shoulder bag, dug through it, and took some more of yesterday's painkillers.

Some time later, I slowly relaxed as the pain dissolved.

The medical student in me knew that worsening head pain after a concussion was a SERIOUSLY bad sign, but we couldn't do anything but carry on. I direly wished to have a look see up there, to watch what’s going down inside my head, but it was not to be. Ref had become ever more manic, latching onto Erci's reflection by locking her legs around his neck and hanging off his back - It was a funny image, and I laughed. Erci looked at me strangely, he probably thought my concussion was getting worse (which it was), and I didn't share the image. It was mine to cherish.

She was constantly scribbling into her by now frayed notebook, alternating furious writing, mouthed curses and staring off into space, her lips moving in a silent sequence of numbers, by the minute.

We eventually nabbed another car, this one more of an SUV because I wanted the climatronic, and drove through the temperate english countryside.

There actually were clouds overhead, and during one of our rest-stops I looked at one, only to notice that it was completely, and utterly, frozen. Not one wisp of it was moving, shifting, dissolving or growing, it was simply stiff and silent in the sky, as though waiting for something. Just looking at something gave me a sense of foreboding, and I looked away.

I didn't look at the clouds after that.

***

Come late afternoon, our tucked-out SUV finally ran out of gas, and we left it by the wayside. I did cut out patches from the tires using my sword, fastening them around my elbows and knees, because I'd started to stumble and was scared of falling down and breaking them.

The countryside was agreeable enough, even though we had to make frequent pauses when my migraine got too bad. I fell a few times, and the knee protectors did their duty, though in the back of my mind I sort of wished I would have cut out pauldrons for my shoulders too, if only to complete the look.

We passed through some more small towns, and by lone farmer’s abodes, but the eerie silence only became worse. Erci eventually began whistling tunelessly, and I joined in, because everything was just getting bleaker and bleaker with every new step.

And then, a few hours later, we eventually reached it. There, in the distance, crested on top of a hill was our goal, our final destination, our "way out". Ref looked absolutely giddy, Erci looked at it thoughtfully, and I let out a slow breath.

"We're finally here.'