Buck dreamed.

He flew through a wooded tunnel, broken by windows pointing to the sky. The edges of his vision distorted into shadows. Ahead, lit up, the road stretched onwards. Split down the middle by a yellow line, and to each side the concrete fell away to grass and wood. Rain fell on a glass pane in front of him, swept away by little black arms. The trees broke away into an cloudy sky. There were words being spoken but the details escaped him, one voice, his, another, Ziva’s.

Gravity vanished. The road disappeared. He felt his heart fly up through his throat. A scream came out, he couldn’t tell who’s it was. The entire perception of his twisted, like a hook around his spine that dragged him against his will. Then everything stopped, ink black water flowing into his coffin. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breath, all he could do was look at the beautiful woman beside him.

“Dammit-!”

Buck started, threw himself up in his bed and nearly banged his head. Missing the rafters by a few inches, the man sat up straight and took deep breaths.

“Good God I'm dead,” he gasped out, the sudden memory of his life’s end coming back to him. The ephemeral sensation faded quickly enough, but it left him shaken. The office, the book, the conversatoin with Ziva flashed before his eyes. It overwhelmed him, and he scrambled to a window. Sick to his stomach, he threw the shutters open and took a heaving, deep breath of cool air. The twin moons in their red and gold glory shined down. It was a bright night. He felt bile rise from his empty stomach, and he spat something sour into the dirt. “God, why did I ever choose this place? Oh Lord, I’m dead and this is what I chose!”

He hissed. “Ziva, if you can hear me, you’re a real devil, ain’t ya? A real devil of a woman. You’re no goddess.”

His knuckles went white as he gripped the windowsill, his half-asleep, half-panicked mind free of any inhibitions. The wood creaked, and with how he shook and pulled he felt the entire barn tremble. He could barely restrain a scream, the valve in his gut that controlled his emotions about to burst. “I’m not in Heaven, I bleed, I hurt, I hunger, you really pulled the wool over my eyes!” He hissed to the sky. He felt a pang, the alien bodies hanging above him no replacement for the moon he knew. A brief string of curses flew from his mouth as he stared and wished beyond anything else to see a his moon again. The gray lunar seas smeared across the white face of the moon. “Can you even hear me? You haven’t said a word since I got here. C’mon, come on out and talk to me. You acted so sweet the first time we met, trying to be my friend. What gives?”

Silence stretched on. He steadied his breathing and looked out. He stayed in the tool shed, in the loft, it was the best place for him. He had enough room to stretch his legs in the loft of the shed. The bright light of the moonlit night cast shadows, shallow ones. It left the walls of Rodrick and Amelia’s home in stark relief. He honed in on the window to Alexandra’s section of the house, to the window she liked to sleep near. The man could hardly make out her dozing form.

“Christ, what am I saying?” He spoke to nobody, and threw himself back down on his makeshift bed. The whole barn creaked. Cold sweat turned his blanket and bedding into an uncomfortable mire. He wore thin undergarments to bed, tailored for him, and those were clinging to his legs. “Good God, pathetic. How could I forget what the road looked like? Has it been that long since I’ve seen concrete and thought about my old truck? I… Damn it. Damn you, Ziva, damn you.”

If only he could go back to sleep, maybe he would forget this night terror. Despite his best efforts he couldn’t sleep. No amount of screwing his eyes shut and no number of sheep counted could get him snoring again. He threw his blanket off, and tore the thin shirt from his chest. Even with the cool air rushing across him he couldn’t doze off. He’d been rudely awoken by a bad memory and now he’d suffer for it.

With a spate of profanities, he decided he needed to clear his head. With as much care as he could muster and the sparing moonlight, he made for the ladder down the loft. Buck worked on autopilot, grabbing a small lamp on his way down. At his touch, it erupted, the arcane mechanisms inside it firing up into a steady pale light. While weak, it let him see clearly enough to clamber down and grab his shoes. The thin leather covered his feet but let him feel every inch of the ground. He leaned against the ladder, thinking of what to do next. In the swirling morass of half-thoughts only one notion came to him clearly.

He needed to clear his head.

“Too much wine,” he murmured, still feeling the bite of it on his tongue, “maybe I need to cut back.”

It was true, he drank a little much. They didn’t have sodas here, and tea was a commodity. He drank water or he drank wine. His heart ached for some sweet iced tea, and he almost had a whim to go and raid the pantry of the house for the tea stocks. The thought vanished when he realized he’d have to ask Alexandra or one of the magicians in the town to chill some water into ice. Then he buried the idea, as he didn’t know where he’d find any decent sugar. “Dammit, need me some Lipton,” he muttered as he leaned against the wall. “I’ll even take some goddamn Lipton, ya hear me? Just gimme some sweet iced tea, that’s all I need.”

The moonlight washed the entire world in its orange glow. It wasn’t a thing like that of his own moon. It reminded him of an old dim street lamp casting warm tones over the land. He spied the garden and the crops, the barn where the livestock were stored, the wooden fence posts. The man could see clearly for a long ways, the air clear, hardly a single light on in the village. Off in the distance, many miles away, he spied plumes of smoke and fires like dim, distant match heads on the mountains. Those, he reckoned, were the lands of the giants. He had yet to see one of them, though they didn’t sound like very friendly people.

“Just gonna go for a little walk,” he spoke to nobody, and more so he spoke just to hear his own voice. As if he could reassure himself, how nonsensical. He took light steps, feeling the rough ground through his thin shoes. “Clear my head. Won’t be long, then I’ll be back in bed. It’ll be sweet dreams.”

Buck set off on a meandering course. He went slowly as not to draw attention to himself. The wooden gate of Rodrick and Amelia’s home creaked open, then clicked closed as he left. He passed by where Grandmother Willow’s wagon sat. The two tall stags, both as big as horses- and Buck mused, big enough for him to ride- barely reacted to his presence. He strode by, lantern in hand, more so for something to hold. He saw well enough in the moonlight.

He came upon the rode and looked, to one side was Brookheim, the town proper. It’d only be a few minutes walk into there, but he couldn’t stomach it. The stone buildings in their quaint construction reminded him of something out of a fairytale. They almost didn’t seem real to him, idyllic and peaceful. “I can’t believe it,” he spoke as he looked at the buildings in shadow, “that of the things I’d be missing, it’d be concrete and asphalt.” The tall spire of the church building pointed to the heavens, a monument to gods he didn’t believe in. After all, he believed in only one God, not this plethora of saints and myths they had here. He’d only attended their mass as a matter of politeness.

Perhaps he stood there for a moment too long before he turned his back and looked to the forest. In his evening strolls he’d found a bit of a game trail, and he’d followed a few deer there on a lark. About a half-hour of walking took him deep into the forest, to one of the ponds fed by Brookheim’s off shoots. There wasn’t much to see there, even the adventurous Adelaid had said it was simply a lifeless pond. He had never once gotten fish to bite there, and the boy and Buck figured it was because of the natural dam further up stream.

Compelled to go there, mostly by his own feet and his racing mind, he started off towards the pond. It had no name, so he thought up ones he could call it. “Allatoona, Lanier, Sweetwater,” he didn’t like the last one, as he knew not why Sweetwater was called Sweetwater. “They wouldn’t know what a single one of those meant.” He passed under the branches of trees he couldn’t name, and pushed aside plants he couldn’t recognize. Here the lamp proved more useful, as only rarely did the moons peek from between branches. The rays fell like curtains of light on his path.

Soon, he fell upon the pond. It wasn’t anything special, about fifty yards from end to end, fed at one end by the river, and emptying into a creek. The pond had a gradual slope to it, and he could walk almost to the center of it before his head was below water. The riverbed came raised on one side with great boulders lining the pond. They weren’t the worked stone of the salamander-fence on the main river. Those earthworks, erected many years ago, had probably blocked off this little pond from all but the smallest of salamanders. Rather they seemed natural in origin, placed there by the hand of God-

The hand of God, here? Buck pursed his lips. He believed fully that God worked in every corner of the universe, but with Ziva… he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps the more geologically inclined of his friends would point out that the boulders rolled down from the mountain over many years. He didn’t particularly care, as he circled the pond. Lamp in one hand, he climbed atop the stones and crawled over to a fallen tree. Its thin bark peeled, but the wood itself remained dry enough for him to rest comfortably against it and think.

“Good Lord, why am I here?” he stared to the sky he didn’t know. “I know I- I spoke with that woman, Ziva, and I took her offer up. Lord is this a test? She talked about Saint Peter, or how we, or I, called him that.” He relaxed against the log, placing his hands in his lap. “I don’t know what to do, God, I’m here, and I’m happy, but I’m still… here. Where I bleed, and I’m hungry and I have bad dreams. I don’t know what made me do it, I should never have said I’d look at that book of hers.”

He remembered sitting there for what felt like an eternity, reading over terms, conditions, the infinitely-long primer on Hesse and the folk here. He probably knew more about the people here than they did about their own country, yet… “I’ve got all of this knowledge, at the palm of my hand, and I’m just here, working on a farm. I’m- I was supposed to go in for a marketing degree,” he couldn’t stifle his laughter, “and Lord, God, look at me now! Jesus, I feel like some kind of… I don’t even know. I feel Bavarian. Oh I know the priests and the nuns and the bishops and all of it doesn’t matter a damn bit, I’m up to knees in work.”

All he heard were cicadas. They chirped in response. He chuckled quietly and stared down at the water. Bugs flitted across the surface, hardly disturbing it. The twin moons reflected in ripples. He reached around and find a thin, sharp stone, and on a whim he cast it into the pond. The gentle surface shattered as concentric rings flew out from the impact. The oblong reflections turned into colorful smears. He looked up at the sky. Both of the celestial bodies hanging above him seemed inscrutable. The red moon, the nearer of the two, seemed covered in a perpetual cloudy red dust. The yellow one, its sibling in a more distant orbit, just looked like a dull golden ball in the sky. He couldn’t deduce the lunar cycle here, he wasn’t an astronomer, yet the two things seemed inscrutable and peculiar to him.

“Two moons.” He bluntly observed, “two moons, I’m in a world of magic and elves and beasts, and the strangest thing is the two moons.”

Buck stared at the sky for a few moments longer. Then he broke his gaze and returned to tossing pebbles in the pond. He contented himself to watch the stones break the surface and sink to the bottom. It drove off the flitting insects, leaving him alone in the company of splashing water and singing bugs. He took every thought inside his head and threw it out of his mouth into the wind. Nobody could hear him, so he thought, so he might as well have vented.

“Maybe I should leave here,” he finally mused, “and wander. It’s nice. But I can’t just spend the rest of my days in a little village. God, I was put here for more than just working on a farm, wasn’t I?”

Buck sighed. “Or maybe… this is just some cosmically funny purgatory, aye?” He thought on the Codex, its vast pages of knowledge. He’d kept it beneath the notice of the people here, preferring to read it in his down time. The vast histories covered in its pages drew his interest, yet… he couldn’t find it in his heart to love it. A bemused smirk crossed his face as he stared at the oaks and willows, the edge of the pond, the rustling leaves. “Oh, that’s funny, aye? I’ve got a book of infinite history. I’m sitting here and I can’t physically finish it in my life. Yet all I’m experiencing is this tiny slice of land.”

He knew the customs. He’d read about them, and to keep up his farce as a stranger and an oddity he’d played into being a fool. They had odd dietary restrictions. This strange caste of women called the Golden, or Gilded, and Willow was one. Yet he hardly had any idea just what they were, just that they were important. There were monastic orders a plenty, a strong religion, and to his knowledge these little folks, elves, he reckoned them as- they weren’t the only race out here. There were the Chimera, off in their own enclaves and mountains, with their monstrous forms. The rocky-featured giants he had yet to see except on the horizon in their villages. An entire new continent, fresh for the exploring, yet…

“Here I am, Lord, farming.” He muttered, and then he felt shame. Didn’t he choose to come here? Of his own volition? The offer he got from Ziva- that two-faced, wicked beauty- he had to mull it over for just long enough to say “sure, but...” And then when he’d said that magic word he’d gotten a boot to the ass and his ass in the drink. “Chopping wood. That woman said they’d needed people like me, out here, but what for? I’m strong, God, but the people here are magical. They can move things with their mind, like- they’re magicians, wholesale. They’re all setting fire to things, and they can heal my wounds, and I swear they talk about charms and hexes and curses.’

Buck thought for a moment, growing quiet. “Is this what I get for rejecting Heaven? This life is pleasant but-” he choked, “-I don’t know what to say.”

Once more silence fell, as Buck’s thoughts raced. He didn’t feel any calmer. The isolation drew his mind inward, to his unfaithful heart. It felt like there was a chain around his chest and a weight drawing his gut down. Who was he, then? Was he Buck, the odd, big fellow of the village of Brookheim, or was he Jack the Georgia boy, dead in a truck crash? He felt his hands tremble as he looked down and remembered his white knuckle grip on the steering wheel. The very real notion he was in a dying dream flashed in his mind, and he quelled it. He hadn’t any proof one way or the other, so he laid the question to rest. His tongue ached for a taste of wine and his belly ached for one of Amelia’s hearty meals. In the absence of those comforts he had to feel his mouth turn dry like cotton and his stomach pang, seeking a base, primal form of relief.

“What a mess!” He broke into a laugh. “What a mess I am!”

“Good Lord!” He proclaimed in a fit, slamming his fist into the log he laid on.

“Good Lord!” He cried out suddenly, spider webs of pain spreading. He flung himself forward, and prostrated to the heavens. A maniacal spell came over him, and he knit his fingers together, closed his eyes and began a feverish prayer. Half remembered hymns and scripture flooded his head. He took a deep breath and steadied himself before speaking. ”My God, have mercy on me, do not look upon my sins, in choosing to walk away from You, and finding myself tempted by- that woman, Ziva. I have sinned, and I intend to do penance and sin no more and avoid whatever’ll lead me to sin, and I will do your work.”

He heard a rustling, quite like footsteps, and he quickly hushed.

“In Jesus’ name amen.” He finished his words swiftly then grabbed his lamp, standing up. With a shout he threw his arm forward, casting the feeble light further out. He suddenly felt like the smallest thing in the world. That could be the sound of anything, he thought, a wolf or bear or other nasty thing. In these parts he reckoned they roamed more freely, and the night time was their time. A thought raced in his head that it may be a more fantastic being, like the salamander he’d first seen, or he feared, one of the thuggish Chimera. “Hey, who’s there! C’mon, I ain’t afraid of you!”

A pause, silent, pregnant, then a woman’s laughter. “Buck? Is that where you’ve gone? Child, what are you doing out here.” He faintly recognized it as…

“W-Willow!?” Taken aback, he clutched his chest and sat back down. Thoughts of gnashing teeth and blood went away, replaced now by a profound embarrassment. “You, uh, y’all heard that, how much of that did- were you lookin’ for me?”

The woman stepped out from the shadows of the trees, and Buck felt relief. She wore more modest clothes, a very light jacket that clung tight so as not to be caught in branches, and a pair of trousers tucked into high boots. It wasn’t a get-up that simply got thrown on in a hurry, and he spied clumps of mud and grime on her knees and her shoes. She’d obviously been wandering around for a little while, foraging, perhaps. She had a basket in one hand, and he spied all sorts of interesting herbs and things in it. In the other was a long rod topped by a metallic hook and a simple mechanism, like an extended tong. “No, not at all, but you shouldn’t be out here so late at night.” She looked around. “I could’ve been a Chimera, they’re active around this time, you know.”

He swallowed a bit of saliva he didn’t know got into his mouth. “If ya say so. But what’re you doing out here so late?” The man looked at her basket. “Are ya gatherin’ somethin’?”

“I’ve got a particular potion that needs particular reagents, and it just so happens tonight is the best night to go foraging for them.” She stuck her chin up with pride and presented a faintly glowing mushroom. It had a fragile look to it, almost translucent. “When Ulfilas and Totilas are both in their phase like this, it makes for the easiest time picking these things! Were you in the middle of something, Bucky?”

He couldn’t help but grin and wipe his face with a hand. Her ears stuck proudly out, trained intently on him. It made him reach for his own and cup it with his palm. “I- I was just out here thinking to myself, ma’am, and I was, uh, praying.”

“I hadn’t taken you for a devotee of one of the lunar faiths.” She chuckled.

“I wasn’t praying to the moon.” Buck corrected her.

“Oh, oh that’s right!” She beamed, a sudden recollection apparent on her face. “You have your own… what did you call him, your lone god?”

“Just God.” He said, and he knew he shouldn’t have been ashamed of his faith, but the way she brazenly spoke made him think twice on his words. How in the world was he going to explain the Holy Trinity to people who had a god for every day of the week? “I was, uh, it’s- don’t worry about it, I just-”

Willow cocked her head to the side and circled around the pond. She took a long stride over the feeder creek, and came to look up at him from the boulder. As she drew close her face grew more worried. “You look sick. Are you troubled? I mistook the light here for a will o’ the wisp, you know, it’s so unusual for anyone let alone yourself to be out here so late.”

“I know, I know!” He turned away, and he saw his face in the pond’s reflection. There wasn’t an ounce of color left in him. “It were just a- I had a bad dream, couldn’t sleep, and I came out here to clear my mind. Ya scared the dickens outta me, ma’am, not ta’ be rude.”

The woman looked him up and down with pursed lips, motherly concern on her face. She seemed too youthful for how she acted, at once whimsical and the next nurturing. “Would you like to walk back with me, child? It’s late, you should really be in bed. I think I have the perfect thing to soothe you, if you say you can’t sleep.”

Buck shrugged. “Well- no. I think I’d like ta’ stay here for a little bit.” He practically fell onto the log with how he relaxed, looking down at Willow. She wore her hair in a tight ponytail, and held… she held her tools in her hands. He was so used to watching the people here move things about with their mind that the notion of somebody else using their hands struck him oddly. He looked at the moon again and sighed. “I’ll git back there when it’s time for me to git back there, you don’t need ta worry.”

“Oh, but I will!” Willow laughed. “You don’t think I’d worry when a guest in my daughter’s home is hurt, or ill, or burdened by something? What is it? If you’d like, I can help.”

“Well, well, it’s just the thing, you can’t help it.” He sighed, “not in any way that’d uh, matter, really. I’m homesick.”

She set her basket off to the side and leaned on her long rod. “I would be too, if I were from another world, as you said you are!”

Buck chuckled. “I am! And it’s a different world,” he wiped a bit of wetness from his eyes, “much different, too much to say. But it was mine, in spite of it all and in spite of it, ya get it? I’d had this notion that the place had gone mad and, maybe things wouldn’t get any better, but I didn’t think I’d miss it so badly now that I’m gone off it. I didn’t think I’d be bothered so much by the fact of, well, who I am and what I am, over here, y’know…”

“Would you mind telling me about it?” Willow asked, and with surprising agility she pushed herself up the rock face and sat atop the same log as Buck did. “If you don’t mind, child, I can tell you’ve clearly got something you need to get off your chest.”

“Oh that’s the thing!” He watched as she pulled a small pipe out of the case, preparing it, then offering it to Buck. He took it as a courtesy, and took a few puffs. The tobacco was a light, almost menthol-esque flavor. When he returned it to Willow she took a long, dignified drag and then exhaled through her nose. “Thanks for the smoke. That’s the thing, really, I don’t have anything ta’ get off my chest. I’m just bein’ bothered by a bad dream, I had, where I’d been reliving my death and I’d been thinkin’ about it, and what brought me here and how I failed my God.”

“Do tell,” Willow leaned in, and so Buck explained. Everything leading up to his death, his drive home, his picking up Ziva, and his death. He found himself giving quick explanations of things in boiled down terms to Willow. The woman took an almost academic interest in his story, leaning in close and listening intently. It was more intent than Alexandra or Adelaid had, and those two hardly believed him. He finished with the office of Ziva’s, and the book he’d been gifted.

After he’d given her the summary, she looked away, then back at him again, ears perked and listening intently. “And how would choosing to be resurrected in another world anger your God, if all things considered you were a good and moral fellow? Wouldn’t you be happy, and thus He be happy, if you lived again and, being that you’re alive again, you lived according to his principles?”

“Well, would it have been my place to choose?” He replied, “as far as I had known, I’d died, and normally when ya die yer judged and when yer judged yer sent where yer meant to go. Whether that was Heaven or that was Hell. Now you don’t get to make no choices after you die, as far as I’d come ta’ believe. What I’m a believer in is living a good and moral life so ya get into Heaven, but I’m afraid what I did was a sin. It’s hard ta’ wrap my head around it, but it feels like a sin, against God, to reject bein’ in Heaven and instead goin’ out and livin’ again.”

Willow crossed her arms. “I see. So you sinned?”

“I’d suppose so,” he sighed, “and I’m really kickin’ myself about it, but that’s just my nature. I’m human and humans are prone to sinnin’, and I feel like I committed a terrible sin, yet… I ain’t been punished. Y’all have been very hospitable to me, I’ll admit.”

“Has the thought of confession crossed your mind?”

Buck laughed and threw another stone in the water. “Confession to who, Father Friedrich? Yer church looks a lot like mine, but y’all don’t have the same faith at all. What’s yer conception of life after death, now, if ya got one.”

The woman looked amused at him. “I haven’t thought of such a thing, when one dies they’re cremated. As they say in the rites and hymns and such, one’s body is returned to fire and one’s soul is returned to the sky. There’s no living after that, your soul is simply reconstituted elsewhere.”

Buck thought about it. “Well that’s just it now, you and I don’t have the same idea of what’s life like after death, and I don’t share any faith with y’all and y’all don’t share faith with me. How am I supposed to confess if I know for a fact the priest ain’t even in the same ball park… er, same frame of mind as I am? It’d be like blowing hot air for all the good it’d do.”

“And all of this is because of a bad dream you had?”

“Well it was more of a memory of how I died, and how that Ziva lady took me here. I hadn’t thought much about it but- I guess tonight’s the night it comes back to me.” He took a deep breath of minty smoke from the pipe. “And I guess it came back because I’m drinking too much again.”

“Oh, child, if this is all because of the wine, then you’d best be drinking less.” Willow sat up straight, her tone like a mother scolding a young son. He figured, though, she had many years on him despite the oddity of her eternally-youthful visage. “You’re the finest young man in this village, we can’t have you all melancholic like this right before the festival.”

He chuckled. “Thank you for the flattery. Yer right. I ought to be lookin’ forward to the fun stuff, I suppose. I hear there’ll be drinkin’ and partyin’ a plenty. The, uh, church fellas, even agreed to let me lift stuff- like with my arms and stuff, not any magic now- and that’ll be fun. I know there’s gonna be a dance but I don’t know if I’m goin’, or who to go with.”

“You’re not nervous about dancing, are you?”

“No, no, it’s just that I’ve got nobody to go with!” He turned red. “Alexandra’s a- she’s probably already got somebody to go with her. She’s a beautiful woman. And I hardly spend enough time in the village to ask any of the other ladies out, especially not when there’s so little time left!”

For a moment Willow looked taken aback. “Well, I can only hope you figure this out, Buck.”

“Oh I hope so too.” He stared at the moons. “And now that I think about it, y’know, maybe it ain’t somethin’ to get so worked up about.”

“You’re right. Why don’t we get back before it gets too late, and before you get eaten by a salamander or molested by a chimera, yes?”

“I suppose that’s a good idea as any. Let’s git walkin’ back then.”

“Let’s,” and with that, the two clambered down the boulder and made towards home.