Chapter 3
The Stillness of Remembering

A part of me wanted to do a big dramatic yell, falling down on my knees in the snow next to the pile of magazines. The more sensible part told me the last thing I wanted was more snow on my legs. It was growing properly dark now, and I had no idea where I was, where I was supposed to go and, most importantly, what to do. 

Annoyed, I kicked the magazines. Listen, when alone with only a cat who seems to be a dog for a while, one is allowed a little bit of a petulant tantrum. Even in the dark, I noticed something under the magazines. I threw a couple more of them aside and uncovered what appeared to be, by touch, a leather bag. An old timey-one, too. I set it upright and opened it and began to root inside. There seemed to be multiple little glass and wood… things in there. A book or two. And something else. Something made of metal. Curious, more than anything, I pulled it out. 

“Ah,” I said, like I knew what it was. It was a little C-shaped piece of metal, with a little cord to what seemed to be a rock. It felt familiar, at the very least, even if I couldn’t quite place it yet. There had to be something… Thinking back to the magazines I’d leafed through, an itch at the back of my brain was trying to figure it out. “Hold on…”

There was a specific guide about old-fashioned wildlife, currently residing under my left armpit, that talked about ancient firestarting methods, with something that felt very similar to this. Pancakes poked me with his nose while I retrieved the uncomfortably-warm magazine from under my coat. “Blerp,” Pan said. 

“I know, buddy,” I said, absent-mindedly scratching him behind the ears. “I’m hungry too.” The light was fading fast, and I was having a lot of trouble making out the words as I flipped quickly through the pages. If only I had a light. Pan nudged me again, bumping me with his forehead, which had been cute when he used to do it as a cat. As a hundred-fifty pound wolf, he knocked me on my ass. “Alright,” I mumbled, and got up, stuffing the magazines and the device into the bag. Pancakes helped by batting at my hands every time I picked up one of the various books. With all the literature inside, the bag weighed quite a bit, but the body I’d landed in had little trouble carrying it. Heaving it onto my shoulder, I tapped Pan on the shoulder. “Come on,” I said. “We should keep moving, we can’t stay here.” 

We both looked up. I’d hoped for the moon to be visible, or at least give me enough light to read something, but it was barely visible through the cloud, like a flashlight through a glass of milk. 

Walking again, I tried not to give in to despair. This time, I went uphill, hoping that, if I kept going uphill, I’d at least find a place from where I’d be able to view my surroundings. Not that the terrain was working with me. What I’d originally guessed — and hoped — had been the side of a mountain of some kind had turned out to be one bump among many, although there were degrees of bumpiness. I definitely got the sense that I was always going up, at least. 

I remembered reading that the moon moves across the sky quite quickly, and I didn’t want to run the risk of going in a circle again by trying to follow it. Pancakes was meowing at me more consistently now, but I didn’t have any food to give him, and he seemed to realise it the longer we went on. Occasionally I ran my hands through his fur, for both our sakes. Not only did it clearly seem to comfort him, but it also kept my hands warm for a bit. And, well, sometimes squeezing a large animal can be good for the soul. 

The problem, of course, was that it was getting colder, I was getting consistently hungrier, and maybe worst of all, my mind was starting to wander. Much like my slowly growing desire to consider eating Pancakes, my mind was also slowly starting to cannibalise itself. Worries started to cloud my mind, and ganging up with my chronic depression and seasonal depression. 

“Don’t panic,” I whispered to myself. “This’ll work out. It’ll work out.” I’d repeated a mantra like that to myself before. Several times, in fact. Like the first time I’d been evicted for missing a rent payment a few years ago. I’d survived by falling asleep in train stations and hanging out in cafes or diners for a night, but eventually, I landed a job and things worked out. They always did. 

It had to work out. I had been sucked into a hole and spat out into another world in a body that wasn’t mine, and the thought of everything ending like that, without even knowing where I was, was existentially terrifying. I looked up. If I could see the stars, would they be the same ones as the ones I came from? Had I been thrown into the past? Or was this a different planet? Was home somewhere up there? 

Pancakes still walked dutifully next to me, although he seemed to be suffering a little bit too. The poor guy was hungry, and I didn’t have anything to offer him. I was still some ways removed from offering myself to him as food, although I had no illusions. Pancakes would absolutely eat me if he could. He just didn’t seem to realise he wasn’t a tiny cat. 

Which was weird too. I looked at my hands. They were long and slender. Even the nails seemed to have been trimmed, where I’d had a tendency to just bite them off when they got too long. Whose hands were these? Was someone else in my place back in my apartment? What kind of person was it?

I glanced down again, even though I was covered in thick clothes. Whoever he was, he was muscular, and took care of himself, in a way I’d never had. And he had fairly nice clothes, even if they were very… medieval. I tried to figure out what that might say about him. It wasn’t hard to detach myself from the body I was in. It was something I’d had a lot of experience with, after all. My own body had always just been a fuel-inefficient meat-mecha.

What would he think about me, when he was in it? My meagre apartment, my disappointing physique and appearance, even the croaky voice. 

“Hmm,” I said, as if to test the man’s voice again. I hadn’t really given it much thought before. Even that was melodic. Slightly higher than my own voice had been. “You know,” I said, “this isn’t so bad.” Still a lot of rumble and bass to it, reminding me of my old fart-in-a-trash-can voice, but it was easier to tune out. 

“Mwef?” Pancakes said. I rubbed him on the head, and he pushed against my hand. 

“It’s nothing. A— are you okay?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. Cold was starting to creep into my bones, and it was getting progressively more difficult to think. Rubbing my hands together, I set off again, losing all semblance of time. 

It was starting to snow. 

“Fuck,” I mumbled to myself, and put my hand on Pancakes’ shoulders. The last thing I wanted was to get separated from him. But my mind went darker places now. Lost in snowfall, at night? Everyone knows that’s… well, usually fatal. I didn’t need a survival guide to tell me that. But other than the trees around me, there was no real cover anywhere. The best thing I could do was keep moving. Even though I no longer had any sense if I was going up or down. I was just moving, almost on instinct. 

I felt like it was getting darker, and colder, although that could’ve just been my imagination. Maybe the freezing weather had seeped through my clothes and into my bones. Maybe my mind was just getting foggy. Or maybe there was so much snow in my eyes and eyelashes I couldn’t see anything else anymore. 

Pancakes’ whimpering, complaining meow was the only indication I got that something was wrong. I hadn’t even realised I’d fallen over. Strength had just sort of drained itself from my limbs without my knowledge. I felt his warm breath on my face, and the next thing I knew was a heavy weight falling on top of me. 

“Ughhh,” I mumbled through frozen lips. “Pan… you little bastard.” He licked my face as he tried to curl up against me. I wrapped an arm around him and buried my face in his fur. It was cold, matted with snow, but it was warmer than anything else around. “Thank you.”

Then it all went black, and the maelstrom of insanity I’d expected when I’d fallen through the cracks in the world finally showed itself. Like being eaten alive by a kaleidoscope, trees in every direction in every colour, singing lullabies to the moon. 

Dreams had never been my forte, but I was pretty sure this was one. It wasn’t quite a nightmare, but there was definitely a sense of powerlessness. Weightlessness. But there was also a sense of freedom. I had no body, and could fly around as I wished. I was a ghost on the wind, and I flew around on a purple snowflake for a while until I landed on a small cat’s nose. 

“Pan?” I said. Then Pan turned into a wolf, and then several wolves, and so did I, and I was carried by the scruff of my neck to what seemed to be a nest. “Hmm,” I said. “Woof.” Then all the wolves around me turned into towering figures and suddenly I was my old self again, curled up and vulnerable and exposed. 

Okay, so it was a nightmare. I felt vulnerable and visible and everyone around me, faces impossible to see or discern, were judging me, hating me for what I was and what I looked like. I was being mocked, and how couldn’t I be, I was revolting.

But I wasn’t, though! I was tall and presumably handsome now. I tried to stand up on legs that weren’t mine, and fell over, and went from dog to cat to nothing again, a little ghost to fly around. Okay, so not a nightmare again, then. 

I changed the world around me, made it a little more palatable. Warmer. I added some blankets, and a stove. If I was going to freeze to death dreaming in a snow-bank in the middle of nowhere on a deserted planet, I was at least going to be warm while doing it. 

Gosh, it really was getting warm. I tried to push Pancakes off of me, but he gave way surprisingly easily. My arms sank right through him, like he was empty. I panicked and bolted upright. 

“PANCAKES!” I shouted at the thick blanket in my arms. In front of the fire, Pancakes shot upright and immediately hissed at me. I blinked at him. He blinked and then glared at me, before curling up again and closing his eyes. I looked down at the blanket again. It was a thick, fluffy comforter. I looked around. I couldn’t still be dreaming, right? 

Dreams didn’t have this level of… fidelity, usually. And they didn’t tend to smell faintly of sheep. “Hello?” I heard, and I nearly screamed in startled confusion. Someone had walked into the room. It was a woman, with short, black hair. She was wearing something straight off of a ren faire, although with a bit more… effort put into it. It was period appropriate. “Did you say Pancakes?” she asked. She had an accent I couldn’t quite place, elongating vowels in places I hadn’t heard before. I nodded, and tried to speak.

“Ghg,” I said. Swallowing and trying again, I slowly found my voice. “I — I did,” I said, then pointed at Pan. “It’s his name.”

“Ah,” she said, “we were wondering about that. You’ve been mumbling it in your sleep. We figured you were just very, very hungry, but we couldn’t exactly feed you while you were asleep. I’m glad to see you’re up.” She put her hands on her hips and smiled a bit, looking at me. She had fiercely brown eyes, close to being orange in the light of the fire. Behind her, another woman walked in. 

“Octavia, knock that off. Don’t talk to ‘im like that.”

“How am I supposed to talk to him then, Ma?” The first woman, Octavia, turned around with a frown. “Clearly he’s not well and he deserves to know what’s wrong, doesn’t he?”

“Well, yes,” Octavia’s mother said, “but you know what kind of man he is!”

“Excuse me,” I said, pulling the covers away, realizing I was naked and immediately covering myself up again, “what kind of person am I?”

“Well, yer the witch from the other side of the mountain, aren’t you?” ‘Ma’ said, almost accusatory. “You ent been around these parts for a time, but we seen you skulking around. Must’ve hit your haed bad if you didn’t even use your tinderbox, with all that kindling you were carrying around.” Behind her, Octavia left the room and came back with a tin cup of something steaming. 

“Uh… yes,” I said, pretending like I knew what she was talking about. “Hit my head pretty bad. Could you remind me… where am I?”

“Oh, heavens,” the woman said with the voice of the tired and annoyed, and waved her hands in the air as she left the room. “Save me from men and witches alike.” 

Octavia stayed behind and gave me the cup. It smelled like heaven. “You’re in Condaire,” she said. “This is soup. You’re the Witch Of The Mountain. And, apparently, you have a wolf named Pancakes.”

“Apparently I do,” I said, took a sip, and burned my tongue quite badly.

Elamimax

:3c I hope you're all liking this one!