Chapter 3: A Forest of Strange Stars (1)
The smell hit her first—earth and moss and something older than memory—and then the cold.
Seo-yeon gasped awake on damp ground, her lungs burning with air that tasted wrong. Too clean. Too wild. The kind of air that hadn't known factory smoke or exhaust fumes or the particular chemical tang of modern Seoul. She pushed herself up on trembling arms, and her palms sank into loamy soil studded with unfamiliar leaves.
"No. No, no, no."
Her voice echoed strangely in the twilight. She scrambled to her knees, head spinning, and took in her surroundings with the methodical panic of someone whose brain was screaming while her academic training insisted on documentation.
Ancient trees. Massive oaks that would take six people to circle, their trunks thick with moss patterns she'd only seen in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The canopy overhead filtered dying sunlight through leaves that seemed impossibly green, and the undergrowth was wild in a way that spoke of centuries without human cultivation.
Seo-yeon looked down at herself and her breath caught.
Her jeans were gone. Her comfortable sweater, her practical boots—all replaced by a rough woolen dress in a muddy brown color, the kind of homespun fabric she'd seen in museum exhibits labeled "common textile, circa 1500s." The bodice laced up the front with leather cord, and the sleeves were long and fitted. On her feet were leather shoes that looked hand-stitched, worn but serviceable.
"This isn't—" Her hands flew to her pockets. No phone. No wallet. No keys to an apartment that wouldn't exist for five hundred years.
But clutched in her right hand, fingers white-knuckled around it: the pocket watch.
Its gold surface caught the fading light, and the Astra royal seal seemed to pulse against her palm. The watch was warm, almost hot, and when she held it to her ear she heard it ticking backwards. Click-click-click, counting down through centuries.
A wave of dizziness crashed over her. The forest tilted sideways and sounds distorted—birdsong stretched into long, warbling notes, the rustle of leaves became a roar like ocean waves. Seo-yeon pressed her free hand against rough bark to steady herself, fighting the urge to vomit.
Temporal displacement, some detached part of her brain supplied. Classic symptoms if the phenomenon were actually real, which it isn't, which it can't be—
She forced her eyes open and looked up.
Two moons hung in the darkening sky.
Seo-yeon had studied astronomy as part of her historical research. She knew exactly how many moons Earth possessed. The answer was definitively one. But there, clear as crystal in the purpling twilight, were two crescents—one silver-white and familiar, the other smaller and faintly blue, rising in tandem like cosmic twins.
Her knees buckled.
"Okay," she whispered to the ancient trees. "Okay. Field research. Treat this like field research."
The words steadied her. She'd spent years in archives, ancient sites, reconstructing history from fragments. This was just... extremely aggressive field work. In the field of impossibility.
Seo-yeon made herself breathe. Made herself think.
She inventoried her situation with shaking hands: the watch still functional and warm, a leather pouch at her belt containing unfamiliar coins stamped with a sun sigil, no modern materials anywhere on her body. The dress felt real, the cold bit through the wool, the ground was solid beneath her knees.
Either she'd gone completely insane, or—
Through the trees, a glimmer of white.
Seo-yeon stood on wobbling legs and pushed through the underbrush. Branches caught at her skirts, and she had the absurd thought that at least her research had prepared her for moving in period clothing. She'd spent enough hours studying how medieval women navigated their world.
The trees thinned, and her breath stopped.
A city rose in the distance, limned in the last rays of sunset. Massive white walls, easily forty feet high, stretched across the valley. Blue-tiled roofs clustered within, and at the city's heart, a castle climbed toward the sky—all spires and battlements, with a central tower that caught the dying light like a lighthouse.
She knew those walls. Had seen them in paintings, manuscripts, archaeological surveys.
The capital Luminas. The City of Light.
Exactly as it had appeared five hundred years before modern Seoul rose from the ashes of history.
"Oh god." The words came out broken. "Oh god, it worked. The watch actually—"