All of Our Undiscovered Countries

It is nearer to gloaming than twilight, with an impossibly huge Moon dominating the sky, wafts of dark-coloured clouds barely occluding it. Bolts of multi-coloured lightning streak horizontally through the air, in colours that shouldn’t exist.

I hoist myself up, still breathing hard, and the air feels empty, false somehow.

Devoid of everything that air should be.

The cobbles feel almost right under my bare feet.

But they’re not cold.

They’re not uncomfortable.

Just wrong.

Thunder rumbles, and I feel it rattle my bones.

I look up again and note a dazzling aurora beyond the impossibly huge Moon — another weaving of beautiful, unbelievable colour.

I realise I’m not cold.

And then I realise I’m naked.

“Bugger—”

I look down at myself, oddly perplexed that I still seem to be me. Two feet. Ten toes. Knobby knees. I run a hand over my belly, then up and across my chest.

I feel right, and the thought itself seems ridiculous. I put both hands to my face, my fingers desperately charting a familiar topography. I brush my hands through what feels like a scouring‑pad mass of curls, and I desperately wish for a mirror, so as to confirm that I might look as I should.

“Oh bother,” I murmur, one hand straying instinctively to my nethers as I glance about.

It takes a long moment to remember why I’m naked, and where my clothes must be.

At Corvinatch Keep.

Where I left my Ben.

“Oh, Ben. What have I done?”

I shiver, but not because I’m cold.

I glance up at the impossibly coloured lightning, at the oversized Moon that is clearly not the Moon.

“Think what to do, think what to do,” I mutter, my voice sounding like mine but somehow discordant, off‑kilter.

“Ben!” I call out, not expecting an answer. “Ben?” My voice quavers in a ghostly manner, as an echo twisted into something dark and pervasive.

Saying his name comforts me despite the spectral echo. Saying his name helps me remember him, to keep him close to me.

All is deathly quiet, save for the faint thrum and flutter — and the undulating impressions of voices and laughter I’d heard upon my arrival here.

But I’m not alone. I sense others nearby, lingering at the edges of my vision, though I cannot properly perceive them for some reason.

I look around once more, and my surroundings are vaguely familiar, though they have no right to be. I’m instantly comforted, even as logic insists I cannot possibly be on Monument Street, in Barking.

In my London.

I whirl around, and sure enough, the hulking form of Camwell School looms there, shadow upon shadow.

All so familiar, yet not.

I glance down Monument Street, and the cobbles look wrong, their pattern disjointed, misaligned. The buildings arch and lean at strange angles, the street and sidewalks curving in ways they never had.

In ways they shouldn’t.

The bells of Barking Abbey toll — jarring, disharmonious — and I cannot tell what hour they mark.

“Damn it, Ben, what is this place?”

Again, I remember I’m naked.

“Shite.”

I’ve no idea how to clothe myself, and it’s not as if there’s anyone about to notice or care a whit. And since I’m not physically uncomfortable, I simply decide to let it go for now. I’d been painfully modest in the past, but clinging to such notions seems quite absurd, given my current situation, whatever that is.

I study my surroundings, and the longer I stare, the more I sense shapes around me — shadowy forms, some mostly human, others not at all.

Most shimmer and waver, and the more I look, the least human-looking of them waver the most.

I glance upward, barely discerning a multitude of winged forms perched on rooftops, parapets, clocktowers. They observe me in silence, motionless as stone gargoyles, though I know in my gut they’re Harbingers.

I look at my hands — and gasp. I’m shimmering, just the slightest bit as well.

And that’s when fear finally settles in, threatening to overwhelm me. So I start walking, singularly focused on the notion that I know these streets.

I can find my way.

If I can get back to the wharf — to the Thames — perhaps I’ll find something there, in whatever version of it that exists here.

Someone who knows something.

Someone who can help.