One moment he was there, and the next he was simply –
Gone.
The world as he had known it, greying and ashen and dying, was gone.
There was nothing particularly exciting or special about his entrance into the world; there was a long moment stretching between the last breath and the next – and then he fell forward from nothing, from nowhere, slumping at the foot of an oak tree. The forest was silent and still above him, watching in the way a forest does as someone lingers at the edge of death. Unflinching, and without remorse.
But there was magic on him - from somewhere other. It was not his magic, and yet it helped him all the same. There in the deep and dark wending wood, he escaped a death that had been certain, that had been dealt, that had been pooling hot and thick around him. With every passing breath the magic-not-from-this-world knit his flesh together, and his death receded further. And with every passing sigh of the wind, that same magic bled away – slipping through his fingers, breathing against his lips.
A goodbye.
And then it too was gone.
The blood around him had long grown cold when he gave a rattling gasp.
Slowly he roused himself. He drew a shuddering, rattling breath, and then another. It was not long until he made to stand, his movements futile as he pitched sideways like a newborn colt. He caught himself on hands and knees, gasping once more as his armour bit into his shoulder and chest. He scrabbled furiously for the buckles of his plating, tearing at the metal. Every breath was agony, every movement jarring the breastplate until he could feel it bite into his skin, like teeth dragging into meat. With a single cry he wrenched it from his body. What straps were left holding his armour in place snapped under his last desperate burst of strength –
And he knelt there under the boughs of the oak tree, and breathed freely.
One.
Two.
Three.
The last breath stretched into the next.
He came back to himself slowly, plucking the blood soaked gloves from his hands, discarding his bent and twisted vambraces beside them. Last was his helm, as contorted and ruined as the rest; what once might have been a wolf with the curling horns of a ram was lifted away to reveal the dirtied, stained face of a broken man, his golden hair curling darkly with sweat. It fell from his fingertips without a pause for care, his eyes having found the breastplate some feet away.
It had been shattered, rent near in two. The left shoulder was gone, replaced instead by a gaping maw of ruined metal and blood.
And in that moment he remembered.
He could still feel the axe biting down into his shoulder, eating through bone and sinew as if he had been made of parchment. There had been enough left in him, despite the damage and the shock and the swift arrival death, to slip his sword beneath the other man's guard. And then they had both fallen, folding into one another even as desperate hands and desperate words had pulled at him to stay, stay, please oh gods please stay with me.
But he hadn't.
He had died.
And now, kneeling amongst the trees, he realized he hadn't died, but gone away.
There was an abstraction to the world he could only remember from his time in the old mines, when day and night were unseen. Even as night hung heavy in the sky, the rightness of the world felt tilted - as if the sun should have been where the moon now rose. But he knew, deep down to the bone, that the moon watching him was not the same one he had known.
Above him wheeled a thousand stars - unfamiliar faces in the inky canvas of a sky he had never seen.
"But where," he asked the quiet night, his voice deep with the death he had escaped, as if he had only just risen from a long and undisturbed sleep. "But where is here?"
And what did it cost to send me thus?
In the dark of the wood he knelt – surrounded by the broken remnants of another world, another life. And the forest watched, unflinching and without remorse.
