The punch of the transition knocked the breath out of him. One moment he'd been slumped on his couch, traffic murmuring through the cracked window, a half-drunk coffee cooling on the table.
The next, he was flat on his back, straw prickling through a rough wool blanket with its coarse fibers catching on his skin like tiny barbs.
The air was thick with woodsmoke from a dying fire, mixing with damp earth and a metallic scent; maybe blood, maybe rust, he couldn't tell.
His head throbbed, a deep ache pressing outward like his skull was too small for his brain.
He blinked into the gloom, expecting his TV's glow but saw only dark timber beams overhead, scorched with soot and carved with crude serpents and runes. A dying fire threw faint, flickering light across the packed dirt floor.
This wasn't right. He bolted upright, it was too fast, and vertigo slammed him back with his head sinking into the straw-filled sack that served as a pillow with its musty smell in his nose.
His body didn't match his mind, he now has longer limbs, leaner frame and a coiled strength he didn't recognize.
He stared at his hands; they were broad, calloused and scarred across the knuckles, the skin toughened by labor and flecked with dirt under the nails.
They were not his. His were softer and marked by paper cuts, the fingers of a man who typed reports.
Sudden panic rose in his chest. His breath caught; it didn't feel like his chest at all, it's too broad and too unfamiliar.
He slapped his cheek hard hoping to wake up. Pain bloomed across rough stubble and a thin scar he didn't remember having.
Nothing changed. The room stayed exactly as it was; dim, cramped and real.
"Get it together," he whispered. Even his voice sounded wrong; it's lighter and younger. It echoed softly off the low walls around him.
He swung his legs over the edge of the pallet and his boots hit the dirt floor with a dull thud.
Standing felt strange, he was taller than he should've been and his balance was off, his knees brushing a low wooden frame that groaned beneath him.
He staggered toward a nearby table, steadying himself against its warped surface. The wood was sticky in places, stained with old mead rings and the wear of years. He gripped the edge until his knuckles went white.
A clay cup rested on the table with its rim chipped and water sloshed inside as he picked it up.
He drank, sputtering a little as the cold mineral-heavy water hit his throat.
It tasted real.
Dreams didn't come with bad water or the thick smell of sweat and damp hides.
In the corner, furs of wolf and deer, matted and heavy, were thrown over a wooden chest carved with tangled knotwork.
Then fragments clicked into place.
He was in Vikings.
The show he'd binged about Ragnar, Lagertha, Björn Ironside and many others.
He ran a hand over his face, his fingers finding a scar above his brow then moving up to touch straw-blond hair that's braided tight against his scalp. The braids were stiff with dried sweat.
Björn. He was in Björn's body, a 16-year-old Viking, less than a year before Lagertha's rebellion against Earl Sigvard in Hedeby.
But why? How? His old life of desk job, bills and takeout was slipping away, the noise of fluorescent lights replaced by the distant clank of a hammer on iron from somewhere outside.
He couldn't even grasp his name anymore, just the shape of who he'd been, a man who'd never known cold like this seeping through the walls' gaps.
The door creaked open on rusty hinges and a woman stepped in; Lagertha.
Her long blonde braid hung over one shoulder, laced with leather strips that caught the firelight.
Her leather tunic, dyed a deep brown and stitched with bone toggles hugged her frame, scuffed from use, a short sword sheathed at her hip in a scabbard embossed with swirling patterns.
A faint bruise shadowed her cheek purpling under the flicker of light, a silent mark of Sigvard's cruelty.
She wasn't some actress on a screen, she was real. A warrior.
Her eyes were sharp but tired, worry settling into lines no costume could fake.
He froze while staring and his breath caught in a throat that didn't feel like his own.
She was real, and she was staring at him like he belonged here, in this room of smoke.
"Björn," she said with a steady voice but edged with impatience, her breath misting slightly in the chill. "You're late. We train now."