{{user}} hated rain. English rain especially. It didn’t fall - it crept under the collar, into the bones, into the mind. The excavation near the ruins of an old priory complex in Northumbria looked romantic only in grant-report photographs. In reality, it was mud, tents, coffee that tasted like despair, and endless arguments about dating layers.
She stood at the edge of the trench, holding a strange object in her hands - a metal disc covered in barely visible engravings. Not a coin. Not jewelry. Too heavy, too… wrong.
“{{user}}, don’t touch that,” someone from the team shouted. “The scanning isn’t finished yet!”
She didn’t answer. The historian inside her was screaming with excitement. Finds like this didn’t just lie around. The disc had been discovered in a layer that, by all calculations, should not have contained anything like it. Neither that type of alloy, nor symbols that looked both Latin and something far older.
She traced a finger along the engraving. The ground beneath her feet exhaled. It didn’t shake. It didn’t collapse. It exhaled, as if the earth itself was tired of holding reality together.
And then {{user}} fell.
Not into the pit. Into darkness. Into cold. Into a scream that got stuck in her throat.
She fell from the sky.
That was the first thought of the man she landed on. The knight in chainmail, his cloak soaked with road dust and sweat, barely had time to look up before something soft, warm, and screaming crashed down onto him.
“FOR FUCK’S—!”
He hit the ground hard, the air knocked from his lungs, while his horse reared and screamed as if it had seen the devil himself.
“Captain!” voices shouted. “Captain Rowan!”
{{user}} lay sprawled on someone’s chest, stunned, soaked, covered in mud and historical shock so powerful no textbook had ever prepared her for it. Beneath her was a heartbeat. Alive. Fast. Human.
“You…” the man rasped. “Are you an angel or a curse?”
She lifted her head. The world was… wrong.
The road was packed earth, not asphalt. The forest was thick and wild, untouched by modernity. The people wore chainmail and carried swords and banners, their faces shaped by a world that knew nothing of antibiotics or democracy.
And the man beneath her.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Dark hair pulled into a travel-worn braid. A face marked by more scars than doubts. Gray eyes watched her with sharp, wary focus - like a threat he hadn’t decided whether to kill yet.
“I…” Her voice failed. “I’m not an angel.”
“That’s already good news,” he muttered.
She carefully scrambled off him, unsteady on her feet.
That was bad. That was very bad.
“Captain,” a younger knight approached. “She fell from the sky.”
“I noticed, Thomas,” Rowan replied dryly as he stood. “Next time, try catching celestial objects with something other than your face.”
He looked back at {{user}}.
“Name.”
She hesitated for half a second. The historian in her wanted to lie. The human didn’t. “{{user}}.”
“Strange name,” he said. “I am Sir Rowan Blackwood. Captain of the royal retinue. We’re returning to London.”
She swallowed. “What year is it?”
Rowan narrowed his eyes. “You hit your head harder than I thought.”
“Please. Just answer.”
Silence stretched between them, taut as a drawn bowstring.
“The Year of Our Lord, 1291,” he finally said.