Chapter Text
It mattered little that she did not want to die.
Within the last moments of her life, regrets pooled in her conscious mind. The lack of family. No friends. The self-imposed isolation that she had settled into - thought she had thrived in - and how deeply she wished for something other than the lonely existence she had inflicted upon herself.
It was only at that moment that she realised that she did not want to die. If she had been asked days ago, she might have said that it was a part of everyday life; there was nothing to fear, but perhaps it was not a goal to aim for. It’s different ‘in the moment’. She was dying in a world that she had contrived for herself. Losing herself somewhere no one would look - not that anyone would be searching - and with no control over how it happened.
The seat belt strapped across her chest may have saved her another day, but it was ultimately what trapped her in her wet demise.
Until she woke up.
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A bone-deep chill settled in her chest, the cold unnerving in its insistence, but comforting in its reality. The tangible feeling sent a shiver down her spine.
It was real.
And she was not dead?
The thought drove her to open her eyes.
Stone walls circled her, carved with the most beautiful figures that she had ever seen. Inlaid into the dark room were sculptures of gorgeous Tolkien-esque figures, each with pointed ears and the carved imitation of grace. Perhaps deities, perhaps leaders. The sight was startling in its extravagance compared to the dull grey of the rest of her surroundings. Each statue, however, was missing a face. Evidently destroyed rather than worn with time.
And her? She was swathed in beige cloth, lying in what seemed to be an open coffin. Behind her supposed resting place was an altar, a stone tablet placed in its centre.
The room itself was one painstakingly dug out of a cave front.
Moving her arms to the high sides of the coffin, she pulled herself out carefully. The energy that she had mustered for the task was sapped from her with the movement, her thin arms almost gaunt and wire-y in appearance.
It was a body that was dead in all manners but appearance, grotesque in the visibility of the muscle strands moving beneath the surface like a mass of exposed veins. A body that was certainly not hers, she considered. Where there used to be the fair smattering of dark body hair along her arms and legs, she now found the surfaces smooth. If the body she inhabited was left as long as she suspected, the hair would have grown back thick by now.
Her ring finger was smooth. The peeling calluses created from hours of transcription had been lost alongside her distinctive writer's bump.
There was no sign of her own life upon the body.
In a new body and a new place, she was not sure of what steps to take next. Everything from the clothing she wore to the metals and materials she was surrounded with was completely foreign, seeming more out of a fantasy world than anything that she would find on Earth.
String theory? A dream perhaps?
She sat on the edge of the dark coffin, fingers clenched white against the unrecognisable, unearthly material. Her arms and legs shook from the smallest of use, atrophied from what seemed like many years of disuse.
The atrophy was distinctly out of place in her memory. She had been driving from Brussels to Roscoff mere moments earlier, and now her muscles were decaying before her. Car accidents don’t cause this kind of damage. But nor does a car accident usually transport poor (and presumably innocent) linguists to a different universe. Perhaps the universe had been entangled and a point of connection had been established, but she figured that was highly unlikely. More than just her would have been displaced.
Lost in a place that she had no knowledge of, the only way was forward. With the grace of a baby deer, she stood upon the thin legs she had been gifted. Better to be less able than dead, she supposed. Though uncomfortable, the movement proved helpful in gaining back feeling in the numb, shaky appendages.
The entrance to the cavern seemed much further than it actually was using short, uncomfortable steps. Having made it to one of the walls on either side of her final resting place, she leaned her shoulder against the cold stone before shuffling forward. Her long fingers caught in the grooves of the carvings as she went, feeling every bump and nook that her hands could find.
The doors themselves were a mesh of wood and a steel-like metal ensconced cleverly into the stone walls as if they had simply sprouted from their surroundings.
It was, however, the feeling that caused her to pause for longer than she intended. The door, for whatever reason, just felt right to her. It exuded a soft buzzing. The subtle hissing of something bigger was deafening in the silence, the air becoming charged with unspent energy. The feeling bit into her skin, pulling and nipping at every fold and crease, but soothing its bite with the balm of belonging.
“Holy shit.”
It was the first words she had uttered, and contrary to the state of her body, her voice was assuredly the one that she had always known. As a linguist, it made her obscenely happy that the accent that had rolled off of her tongue was her own. A lilted English that sounded not quite like her mother tongue, but fluent nonetheless.
Set upon the doors were dozens of runes. They were not nordic in nature, or of any worldly language she might have recognised. The sight of the foreign symbols assured her that she was not in any part of the world, or world, that she knew. With buzzing doors, coffins for the living, and strange languages, she was no longer anywhere she knew.
Despite that, she understood the words written into the runes fluently.
She stretched out a painfully thin arm to the door, pressing a smooth palm against the lettering engraved in the dark wood of the looming door.
The electricity she had heard in the hissing of the door ran up her arm. Settling into her lungs, and knocking the air from her chest, the spark moved with her like a warm parasite beneath her organs. It settled comfortably somewhere above her diaphragm, leaving a pleasant pressure that fizzled slightly with each breath.
In her discomfort, the immediate realisation that the door had cracked itself open took longer than it should have. The cavern was bathed with a trickle of daylight, stemming from the direct opening to the outside world. She pushed the door further, finding it easy to swing despite its large size.
Skeletons.
They sat piled outside of the door, most with hands and arms seared beyond recognition, the bone having almost melted from their body. Though she did not know it at the time, the battalions of Tevinter soldiers that picked through the bones of the Elvhen empire had been reduced to ashes outside of her resting place.
It was a sickening sight, seeing so many dead. One that made her stomach churn and her chin burn with the bile that she expected would soon find a way out of her throat. They were not recent bodies, that was for sure.
Eyes adjusting to the harshness of the change in light, she looked beyond her immediate surroundings, looking past the skeleton army to the calm of the trees beyond. It was indeed a cave, evidently carved into the side of a mountain and forgotten about for far too many years.
Continuing her shaky steps into the world, she carefully sidestepped the crumbling bones of allies or enemies - she was not sure which they could have been yet - to make her escape for freedom. Despite the meticulous craftsmanship of the tomb, nobody had cared for the place in centuries. She was not entirely sure what to make of the fact that the bones outside her doors had started to crumble. Her coffin unopened for a millennium was a future detail she may eventually find upon herself to consider, but it was not an issue for the present.