The jungle was gone.

  Everything around him was light—soft, white, endless. A figure walked ahead of him. At first, he only saw her shape, but then—no, it was Lulu. He was sure of it. But her hair was longer than he remembered, tied high and trailing down her back. She wore strange robes, revealing but elegant, and they trailed behind her like mist. She moved with a focused calm, radiating strength. With every step, he heard a sharp click against an invisible floor, but he didn’t remember her wearing heels often.

  Maybe boots?

  The sound etched itself into his brain. Her hair swayed gently, and when she glanced back, he couldn’t see her face.

  “You didn’t hurt me,” she said. The words echoed all around him.

  Soren opened his mouth to answer but found no voice. His feet dragged as if the ground itself wanted to keep him there. The air felt thick and electric. He saw a faint shimmer clinging to her shoulders, caught in the hem of her coat. She stopped walking and inhaled, her back still to him, and the sound of that breath cracked something open in his chest.

  Soren woke with a start, his hand clutching dirt and moss.

  The jungle around him returned in fragments. Birdsong, damp heat, and the buzz of insects. The light filtered down through the canopy—late morning. He was on his side in a thicket just off a foot trail, the rifle still within reach.

  He slowly sat up, wincing. His back was stiff, his legs ached, but it was the echo of that breath that stayed with him. He didn’t know why it scared him more than the previous day’s fight.

  “Still losing it,” he muttered, brushing a leaf from his face. “Cool.”

  He crouched beside a mossy root, one knee on the ground. The quiet around him was unnerving, but he couldn’t say why. A broken branch nearby was scorched. Maybe from the earlier fight. Maybe not.

  He slung the rifle across his back and started down the trail, following the slant of the sun. His legs still felt sore from the night before, but… not painful. Not in the way they should’ve been.

  He slowed his pace and ran a hand across his abdomen where the bullet had struck. The coat was torn, but beneath the fabric, his skin was smooth. No scab. No wound. Just a faint bruise, barely darker than the rest of him.

  He stopped walking and felt his left shoulder, remembering the shotgun blast. It had slammed him sideways, but touching it now, it just felt like normal muscle—sore but whole.

  “What the hell…” he murmured.

  Adrenaline? Dumb luck? The pain felt very real, but maybe he misremembered.

  Or maybe something was really wrong. Soren kept walking, questions growing in his head faster than his anxiety.

  Hours passed as he wandered beneath the shifting green canopy, each mile peeling away his sense of orientation. The creatures of the jungle stayed distant. He heard growls, felt eyes on him, but nothing approached. The boots he’d taken from the camp weren’t a perfect fit, but they kept the forest floor from chewing his feet apart. His coat, torn and bloodstained, clung to him in the heat.

  Around mid-afternoon, the air turned strange. The light dimmed, the temperature dropped, and a silent fork of lightning curled backward through the air as if time were briefly reversed.

  Had he seen it wrong?

  There was no thunder. No wind. But a moment later, warm rain fell for all of five seconds followed by freezing hail pelting him in the sweltering heat. Then it all stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

  “Good to know the planet’s as stable as I am,” he sighed and kept moving.

  By late evening, the jungle began to thin. Through the trees ahead, he spotted a road—cobbled, maintained, and beyond that—a village. Low walls. Sparse lights.

  Civilization.

  He didn’t want to sneak up on it. The last group he met in the wild hadn’t exactly rolled out a welcome mat. He slung the rifle across his back and walked openly down the road toward the gate.

  As he approached, a guard stepped into view. It was a four-armed lizardlike creature, tall and broad with leathery yellow-green skin. Different from the one he fought, but close enough to raise his blood pressure. This one wore armor and stood with a rifle slung casually.

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  Soren stopped a few dozen feet back. “Hello?”

  The creature replied, but the words were gibberish.

  Soren tried again, slowly. “I don’t understand. What… are you?”

  The creature gave him a suspicious look, then held up a single finger, like it was telling him to hold on. It turned and walked through a doorway, closing it behind him.

  Soren was standing about 75 feet away from a wall maybe 15 feet high, which appeared to be the exterior border of the large village. From the other side he heard talking, movement, and hoofbeats that made a distinct click. He swallowed hard, his pulse climbing.

  The door reopened and the guard reappeared with a device in hand—a tablet. He gestured with the device in Soren's direction like he wanted to give it to him.

  Cautiously, he nodded yes.

  It walked forward and laid the tablet down on the ground, then backed up. Soren approached, picked it up, but didn’t back away. There was a program running on the screen, but he wasn't sure what it was meant for.

  “What is this?” he asked. Suddenly, words appeared on the screen that said ‘What is this’ in English.

  The lizard-man spoke his gibberish again. ‘It's a translator’ appeared on the screen of the tablet.

  “Oh, wonderful,” said Soren. He was genuinely surprised. “Can you understand me without a translator?”

  “Yes,” he responded, “you're speaking Terr-English, almost everyone knows that. Although some of your words seem very… old.”

  Soren finished reading the translation. “Terr-English? Is that different from regular English? Wait a second, what exactly are you? I've never seen or spoken to anything like you.”

  “You've never seen a lazarco before?”

  “What the hell is a lazarco?”

  “I am!” he exclaimed. “You're a human, correct?”

  “Well, yes,” Soren responded.

  “Have you ever spoken to any race besides a human?”

  “N-no…” Soren wasn't sure how much he should reveal about the earlier altercation he had at the campsite.

  The lazarco looked cautiously at Soren, like he was trying to determine if he was being lied to. “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Um, I was born on Earth?”

  The lazarco recoiled at that answer.

  The gate to the left of the door slid open and Soren heard hoofbeats approaching—heavy and distinct.

  Click.

  The sound made his stomach turn. He didn’t know why, but it was familiar in a way that made the hairs on his arms rise.

  He was wildly unprepared for what stepped through the gate.

  A large, gorgeous woman emerged, looking like she had been carved from myth. She stood slightly taller than Soren, bronze skin, auburn hair hanging long down her back, and elongated, animal-like ears that resembled a lamb or baby bovine. Her arms were thick with corded muscle and she wore flowy viridian robes that did little to hide her curved proportions. A gold chain ran around her waist holding up armored tassets inlaid with golden scrollwork.

  In her right hand she carried a massive greataxe with a double-edged blade that was at least three feet wide. The weapon’s handle extended back up behind her, taller than she was. He also figured out where that sound was coming from—she had hooves, not feet.

  Her figure was a contradiction of grace and gravity: wide-hipped, sculpted muscle, and impossibly full—as though the world had sculpted her for both war and worship.

  “No one has lived on Earth for thousands of years,” she said in a deep motherly voice. “What makes you think we’d believe such a thing?”

  He didn’t read the tablet. Didn’t even register the words at first. He was too busy trying to make sense of what stood in front of him that the breath caught in his throat.

  She stepped closer. “Answer me.” She spoke sternly. Her face was very attractive, but it wore an expression of anger and heavy suspicion. He picked up on her tone and looked at the screen.

  “Wait— What do you mean? How has no one lived there for several thousand years?”

  “Overpopulation, it's been completely drained of resources. It no longer sustains life,” she responded.

  He staggered back. “This can’t be happening. This isn’t real.”

  “You expect us to believe you grew up on a planet that’s been dead for thousands of years? And you just, what? Popped out of thin air onto our world?”

  “I don’t know what I expect!” His voice cracked. “I don’t know how I got here! I don’t know why I’m taller or stronger or why my hair is white or why I got shot multiple times and it didn’t even leave a scratch! I don’t even know if I’m alive! Maybe this is some— some coma hallucination where I’m getting yelled at by a sexy minotaur lady and her four-armed crocodile sidekick—”

  Soren was pacing in circles, mentally spiraling as he felt like his reality was falling apart.

  He suddenly stopped, realizing the massive woman was standing much closer than she had been. She glared daggers into him and said something in a tone so cold the hair stood up on the back of his neck.

  He looked down at the translator.

  It said, ‘Where did you get the rifle on your back?’

  He felt like gravity itself held his eyes on the tablet, and he had to put every ounce of willpower into looking at her again.

  The blood. The damaged coat. The gear from the camp.

  He tried to explain, but dread caused the words to catch in his throat.

  Her face contorted with rage as his silence answered for him. With a sudden inhale, she let the axe slide down into a new grip.

  He didn’t even have time to flinch before the blade hit his left ear and jaw.