The town had a name.
Selarion learned it the way he was beginning to suspect he would learn most things in this world — by accident, from a stranger, while standing somewhere he wasn't entirely sure he should be standing.
[Flashback — Approximately Two Hours Earlier]
The road leading away from the shore had been empty when he first found it. A dirt path, wide enough for a cart, cutting through a stretch of low grass that smelled like rain and something he couldn't name. He had followed it because it was the only option available to him — the shore offered nothing but salt water and questions, and Selarion had never been the type to sit still when movement was possible.
His clothes were still faintly damp. His boots squelched faintly with each step. He ignored both.
What he couldn't ignore was the man.
The figure materialized from a bend in the road ahead — hunched, shuffling, wrapped in a coat that had once been brown and was now something closer to the color of the road itself. He moved with the particular economy of someone who had learned long ago that energy was currency and spent it accordingly. A beggar. Or at minimum, a man who had endured enough of life to look like one.
Selarion hesitated for only a moment before approaching. He had no frame of reference for this world, no map, no money, no plan. What he did have was the capacity to ask questions, and there was a person walking toward him who might have answers.
"Excuse me," Selarion said.
The man stopped. Looked up. His eyes were sharp in a way his clothes weren't — pale grey, assessing, the eyes of someone who had learned to read strangers quickly because reading them slowly was occasionally fatal.
"Aye?" the man said.
Selarion blinked. English. Accented, clipped, vowels shaped differently than he was used to, but English. Understandable English. He filed that away — everyone here speaks English, apparently, which either means something significant about where exactly I am or is simply good fortune — and moved on.
"Is there a city nearby?" Selarion asked. "A town. Anywhere with... people. Shops. Somewhere I could find shelter."
The old man squinted at him. His gaze traveled from Selarion's face down to his damp clothes, across to his empty hands, and back up again. Whatever conclusion he arrived at, he kept it to himself.
"Hallowmere," the man said. "Follow the road east. Two hours walking, maybe less if your legs are worth anything." He paused. "You come off the water?"
"Something like that," Selarion said.
The man grunted. Nodded once. Then shuffled past him without another word, continuing in the direction Selarion had come from, apparently unbothered by whatever he had just encountered.
Selarion watched him go.
Hallowmere, he thought. Right. Hallowmere.
He turned east and walked.
[Present]
The city announced itself before it came into view.
First the smell — coal smoke and baked bread and horse and something chemical underneath it all, the particular cocktail of industry and habitation that no amount of gas lamps and cobblestone could fully conceal. Then the sound — the low, constant murmur of a place where too many people occupied too little space, undercut by the clatter of wheels on stone and the occasional sharp cry of a street vendor. Then, finally, cresting a long rise in the road, Hallowmere itself.
Selarion stopped at the top of the hill and looked down at it.
It was not a large city by any definition he had previously applied to the word. Perhaps thirty thousand people, he estimated — maybe forty. The buildings pressed together like books on an overfull shelf, stone and brick in various states of pride and decay, taller structures clustered at the center and shorter ones radiating outward until they dissolved into the outskirts where the road he stood on eventually became a proper street. A clocktower rose above the skyline near what appeared to be a market square, its face visible even from this distance, its hands reading quarter past three in the afternoon.
Gas lamps lined every street he could see from here, unlit in the daylight but present — rows of iron sentinels standing at attention along the cobbled roads. Horse-drawn carriages moved along the wider thoroughfares. People moved along the narrower ones, small from this distance, bundled against the grey afternoon air in layers of wool and cotton.
Victorian. Every architectural instinct he possessed confirmed it. The pitched roofs, the ornate ironwork on the balconies, the particular way the windows were proportioned, the church spires visible in three separate directions. If this world had a historical parallel to the one he'd come from, it was somewhere in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
Which means, Selarion thought, beginning his descent toward the city, no cars, no internet, no electricity in the conventional sense, no antibiotics, questionable plumbing, and a social structure that is going to be extremely inconvenient for a man with no papers, no history, and no explanation for his own existence.
He reached the city's edge.
The first thing he noticed was the stares.
Not hostile — not yet. Curious in the way that small cities are curious about anything that doesn't quite fit the established visual grammar of the place. His clothes were the obvious problem. Whatever he had been wearing on the night he walked past that alley — practical, modern, completely wrong for 1880-something or whenever this was — had survived the void and the ocean intact, which was either a miracle or an irrelevance depending on how you chose to look at it. Either way, the cut of his jacket, the style of his trousers, the particular construction of his boots — none of it matched anything the people around him were wearing.
People glanced. Then looked. Then, occasionally, outright stared with the unabashed thoroughness of people who hadn't yet developed the urban instinct for pretending not to notice things.
Selarion kept his expression neutral and kept walking.
Then the second thing hit him.
Money.
He had none. Not a single coin of whatever currency this city operated on. He didn't know the exchange rates, didn't know the denominations, didn't know if what he carried on his person constituted wealth or garbage in this economy. He had, he realized, walked two hours into a city he had never heard of in a world he didn't belong to with absolutely no financial foundation whatsoever.
Fantastic, he thought. Excellent planning.
He stopped walking and conducted a rapid, methodical inventory of his pockets. A folded piece of paper — a receipt from a shop back home, meaningless here. A small pocketknife — possibly useful, not sellable without raising questions. A key to an apartment that no longer existed in a world he could no longer access.
And the bag.
He had almost forgotten about it — the old habit of carrying it had kept it on his shoulder through the void, through the ocean, through two hours of walking without him consciously deciding to keep it. He swung it around and examined it properly for the first time since this entire disaster had begun.
It was a satchel. Leather — genuine leather, well-made, the kind of bag that had been built to last and had then proceeded to do exactly that for the better part of a decade. Brass buckles on the straps, slightly tarnished. Stitching still tight. It looked, he realized with a slow and dawning understanding, like exactly the kind of thing that someone in an antique market might look at with interest.
He checked inside. A notebook. A pen. A small flat case that held his work identification card and a photograph — he looked at both for a long moment, then set them aside. Nothing else of value. Nothing sellable. Just him and the bag and whatever 2.30 pounds was worth in Hallowmere.
He found an antique shop forty minutes later, down a side street off the main market road — the kind of establishment that had a deliberately cluttered window display and a hand-lettered sign above the door that read Thornfield & Sons, Purveyors of Curios, Antiquities & Sundry Curiosities. Exactly the kind of place that dealt in things with history, or at least the convincing appearance of history.
The bell above the door announced him.
Inside, the shop smelled of dust and wood polish and old paper. Shelves climbed every wall from floor to ceiling, loaded with an archaeology of accumulated objects — pocket watches, ceramic figurines, brass instruments, wooden boxes, glass bottles in various colors, paintings in various states of preservation. Behind a low counter at the far end of the shop, a man looked up from whatever he had been examining with a magnifying lens.
The shop owner was perhaps sixty. Broad in the shoulders, narrow in the expression, with reading spectacles pushed up onto his forehead and the hands of someone who had spent a lifetime handling things that required care. He looked at Selarion with the practiced, unhurried assessment of a man who had learned to value things accurately.
"Help you?" he said.
Selarion approached the counter and set the satchel down on it. "I'm looking to sell this," he said. "It's old. Good leather. The buckles are brass."
The shop owner picked it up without speaking. He turned it over in his hands, checking the stitching, pressing the leather between his fingers, examining the buckles with the close attention of a man conducting a proper evaluation. He set it down. He picked it up again. He held it at arm's length and looked at it from a slight distance as though assessing proportions.
Then he set it back on the counter.
"Two pounds," he said.
Selarion kept his face still.
Two pounds.
He had bought that bag for a hundred pounds, and that was before accounting for a century of inflation and whatever the inter-dimensional exchange rate worked out to. The bag was well-made. It was genuinely old now, in the sense that it came from a time that didn't exist yet in this world's chronology. It was, objectively, an antique. Two pounds felt like an insult dressed in the language of commerce.
But he had no position from which to conduct outrage. He had nothing else. Two pounds was, as far as he could establish, better than zero pounds, which was his current total.
"Two pounds ten shillings," Selarion said.
The shop owner looked at him over the rim of his spectacles. "Two pounds five."
"Two pounds thirty shillings," Selarion said. "The stitching is hand-done. The leather is from a tannery that doesn't cut corners. The brass hasn't corroded despite age. You'll sell it for four pounds in a fortnight and we both know it."
A silence.
The shop owner's expression shifted by approximately two millimeters — not enough to constitute a smile, but enough to indicate that he had revised his assessment of the person standing across his counter.
"Two pounds thirty shillings," he said. "Final."
Selarion nodded. "Done."
The coins that crossed the counter were real in a way that nothing had been real since he woke up on the shore — solid and cool and weighted with the genuine, irreducible reality of metal. He closed his hand around them and felt something in his chest unclench by a fraction.
He had money. Not much. But enough to begin.
He found the restaurant by smell.
It occupied the ground floor of a building on the market square — a wide-windowed establishment with cloth-covered tables visible through the glass and the kind of warm light inside that promised food prepared by people who took the task seriously. Selarion stood outside it for a moment and conducted a brief internal argument about priorities, expenditure, and the rational allocation of limited resources.
Then he went inside, because he had not eaten in one hundred years, and rationality had its limits.
He ordered without any particular strategy, pointing at items on the hand-written menu board that looked substantial and letting the waiter note them down with the carefully neutral expression of someone trained not to react to unusual customers. Soup — thick, dark, clearly meat-based. A full plate of roasted something with vegetables alongside. Bread. Butter. A pastry that he ordered because it was there and he was capable of ordering it.
He ate slowly, because his body wasn't sure yet whether to treat this as a celebration or a restoration, and he didn't want to discover which it was through painful experience.
The food cost ten shillings.
He paid without flinching, even though some part of his brain was tracking every coin with an accountant's anxiety. He left the restaurant two hours after he'd entered it — full, warm, sitting in a temporary peace that felt borrowed against a much larger debt of problems he hadn't yet solved.
Outside, the afternoon had moved toward evening. The gas lamps were being lit now, a lamplighter moving down the opposite side of the street with his long pole, touching flame to each one in turn. The city shifted in tone as the light changed — softer, more guarded, the bustle of commerce settling into the lower hum of evening activity.
Selarion found lodgings on his third attempt.
The first two establishments he tried were either beyond his means or required documentation he didn't possess. The third was a narrow building on a side street three blocks from the market square — a boarding house run by a woman of indeterminate middle age who assessed him with the same unsentimental thoroughness as the antique dealer and arrived at only slightly more favorable terms.
A room. Small. Clean enough, by the standards the era presumably applied to the concept. A bed with an iron frame and a mattress that had opinions about its own structure. A small table with a basin on it. A window that looked out onto a brick wall.
Fifteen shillings per week, paid in advance.
She required a name for her ledger. Selarion gave it without thinking — then realized that in a world where he did not exist, where no records of him could be checked or verified, his name was the only identity documentation he possessed and it would have to be sufficient.
She wrote it down without comment, took his coins, and showed him to the room.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after she left.
The room was quiet in a way that the void had never been quiet — the void had been nothing, and nothing and quiet were different things. This quiet had texture. He could hear the distant sound of the city settling into night, the occasional clatter of a carriage on cobblestones two streets over, the muffled sound of another lodger moving around somewhere above him. Real sounds. Evidence of a real world operating by real rules he could eventually learn.
He turned out his remaining money onto the bed and counted it.
After the satchel sale: two pounds thirty shillings.
After the meal: two pounds twenty shillings.
After the room: two pounds five shillings.
Two pounds and five shillings. That was the full extent of his existence in Hallowmere.
He lay back on the bed without undressing and stared at the ceiling.
How did I get here.
Not a question. He was past questions for the moment. It was a statement of the central absurdity of his situation, released into the quiet of the room where it could sit without requiring an answer.
A magic circle. Split between darkness and blood. In the same location where three people had been killed in ways that suggested something had needed parts of them for a purpose. He had been walking past. He had seen a light. He had made a decision that anyone with functional self-preservation instincts would classify as catastrophically poor.
And then a hundred years of darkness. And now this.
Is it the same world? he wondered. A different one entirely? Or the same one, just shifted — some parallel path where history took different turns?
The Victorian aesthetic suggested the latter. A world entirely unlike his own wouldn't necessarily default to a European industrial revolution aesthetic that he recognized from a hundred history lessons and period dramas. But a world that ran parallel to his, that had diverged somewhere in the more distant past and arrived at a similar point from a different direction — that would look like this. Familiar enough to navigate. Different enough to be dangerous.
And what does that mean for getting back?
He closed his eyes.
The magic circle. Obviously the magic circle was the axis on which everything turned. Something had opened it. Something had been using those three deaths — the missing head, the missing limbs, the excavated body — as components for whatever the circle required. He had blundered into the completion of it, or the activation of it, or possibly the malfunction of it. He didn't know enough to distinguish between those possibilities yet.
He knew nothing about magic. Had actively rejected the concept six hours ago on a pavement in a city that was now a century away from him. He was not, by any history or instinct, a person equipped to investigate supernatural events.
And yet here you are, he noted to himself, in a city called Hallowmere in what appears to be the nineteenth century, because a magic circle decided you were relevant.
He had worked twelve-hour shifts for years. He had dealt with difficult supervisors and longer hours and the particular grinding exhaustion of a life built on reliability rather than inspiration. He knew how to solve problems by showing up the next day and continuing.
Tomorrow, he thought. Find a job first. Money is infrastructure. Without it, I can't learn anything about this world, can't investigate anything, can't build any foundation from which to approach the larger question.
The larger question being: how does a man from the future get home after a hundred years in the dark?
One problem at a time.
He would find work. He would earn money. He would learn Hallowmere — its rhythms, its people, its history, its relationship to whatever had been happening in that alley and whatever had transported him here. Information first. Action second. That was the only sequence that made sense when you knew nothing.
He pulled the thin blanket over himself without bothering to work out the broader implications of a life lived in the wrong century.
Sleep came faster than he expected. His body, apparently, had not carried the hundred years — only this one exhausting day — and it collected its debt now with the efficiency of a creditor who had been patient long enough.
Outside, Hallowmere continued its evening without him — lamps burning, wheels turning, people moving through a city that had no idea it had just acquired a new resident from a time that hadn't happened yet.
Selarion slept.
And in the morning, the work of surviving somewhere impossible would begin.