Chapter One: Between Breaths

  The streetlight turned amber.

  Kayla leaned into the curve of the quiet road, her bike tires humming against the asphalt. A fine mist hung in the air of the sleeping city. She had finished her shift two hours early—a rare mercy. She could almost taste the mint tea waiting at home, already imagining the hiss of the kettle, the warmth cradling her palms.

  A blink.

  Then white.

  Blinding.

  A roar, like the sky itself had split.

  Something hit—no, swallowed—her.

  Everything went silent.

  ***

  Firelight flickered across smoke-darkened thatch. The smell of burned wood and dried herbs pressed thick into her lungs. Her breath rattled, and she choked.

  Pain—raw and sprawling. Her skin throbbed. A weight like bruises made of stone pinned her to a straw mattress. The dull agony in her abdomen bloomed with every breath. Something sharp snagged when she tried to move her right leg. Her mouth was dry, but her tongue tasted metal.

  She opened her eyes.

  One eye burned as if the air itself scratched at it. Vision blurred before sharpening. A thatched ceiling above her. Smoke-worn rafters strung with bundles of drying leaves in shades of violet and deep plum. Somewhere, water dripped steadily into a bowl. Beneath that: crackling. A fire, maybe. Yes. She could feel the heat on her feet, though they were covered in something—furs? Animal hides? She breathed in and identified the smell of woodsmoke.

  A groan escaped her throat, thin and cracked. Her lips barely moved.

  Footsteps shuffled. A figure loomed into view—an old woman, skin like crumpled bark, eyes sharp and quick despite the gray fog of age. She carried a woven basket under one arm. Kayla flinched, and pain stabbed her ribs.

  The woman set the basket down and crouched beside her, touching Kayla's forehead with fingers rough as tree roots. Her touch was careful, practiced.

  "Hush, hush," she murmured in a voice like dry leaves.

  Kayla tried to speak. The word didn't come. Her mind reeled. The hospital. The truck. The light. Her breath hitched.

  This isn't a hospital. Shouldn't she be in a hospital?

  The ceiling was too low. The light too warm. The air too dense with unfamiliar things. She catalogued automatically, the way she did when assessing trauma patients: fractured ribs, bruised abdomen, probable internal bleeding. Torn tissue. The ache in her pelvis—deep, gnawing. Her skin prickled with sweat though the fire wasn't close. Her limbs refused to move right. Everything inside her screamed with a pain she didn't recognize as hers.

  What happened to me?

  "Relax," the old woman hushed, brushing damp hair from her brow. "I know it hurts, but I'm looking after you now."

  She paused, peering closer. Her breath caught.

  "Ah," she whispered. "One brown. One violet. The mark is clear. You crossed the veil."

  Kayla didn't understand. Her mind grasped at words she didn't know. But her chest heaved. Something had shifted. She remembered... dying. The screech of brakes. Her last, desperate thought: I don't want to die. Not yet.

  She slipped into unconsciousness like falling into a dark pool.

  ***

  When next she woke, the light had shifted.

  The fire had burned lower, a bed of glowing embers beneath a pot. The woman sat beside her, sorting dried roots with careful fingers. A bowl of something steamed nearby. Kayla groaned.

  This time, she could speak. "Where..." Her voice came out ragged.

  The woman looked up. "Drink this. Slowly."

  She helped her sit. Pain lanced through Kayla's body. Every nerve fired. She gritted her teeth and tried not to scream. The woman pressed a carved wooden cup to her lips. It tasted bitter. Herbal. Not unpleasant. Something in it made her limbs go heavy, less jagged.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "Slowly now," she said. "The body remembers pain before the soul finds its footing."

  Kayla winced at the bitterness but recognized the earthiness of willow bark—a natural pain reliever she sometimes used in her own tea blends. "Where... am I?"

  "My hut," the woman replied. "Edge of Deyel village. You've crossed the veil, child. The gods marked you—Seer-born, they say, when the eyes do not match. One violet, one brown."

  Kayla blinked. "I crossed... the veil?"

  The woman smiled faintly, smoothing Kayla's tangled hair. "You were dead. Now you are not. Do you remember anything from the other side?"

  Kayla opened her mouth, then closed it. What could she say? There had been a road. Lights. Machines. None of it fit here.

  "I... remember dying," she said slowly. "And before that... I was riding home. I work in a hospital." She faltered. "As a nurse."

  The old woman's brow furrowed. "Hos-pi-tal?" she echoed.

  Kayla shifted, grimacing. "Yes—a building where we provide medical care for the sick and injured. I'm one of the nurses. I'd just finished my shift."

  That made the woman pause. She tilted her head in thought. "Hmm. I do not understand some of your words. Perhaps they are new ones you are meant to bring us from beyond the veil."

  "I still don't understand," said Kayla helplessly.

  "Do you remember what happened to you, Chailey? Before you crossed the veil?" asked the woman.

  "Chailey?" asked Kayla. "What does Chailey mean?"

  The woman gasped. "Chailey is your name. Do you not remember your own name?"

  "No, my name is Kayla," she said, relief flooding her voice. At least she still had that.

  The woman leaned back slowly, studying her anew. "I thought you were Chailey come back, soul reborn into her own flesh. But you're not, are you?"

  Kayla's lips trembled. "I don't think so."

  The herbwoman exhaled slowly, her practiced hands going still as she considered this. "Another soul entirely. One not of this place. Brought here through the wound death left open."

  She reached out and touched Kayla's cheek. "Still, the mark remains. Violet and brown. You crossed the veil. But not as we know it."

  Tears spilled unbidden. Everything was wrong. Yet undeniably real. Through the small window, Kayla caught sight of something that made her breath catch—trees with leaves of deep violet swaying in the breeze. Not green. Purple.

  "I don't know how I got here," Kayla whispered, transfixed by the impossible color of the forest beyond.

  The woman studied her. "Then something stranger still walks the path. Not the girl who left. Not the girl who died. But another."

  "Why me?" she whispered.

  "Sometimes," the woman said, "the veil reaches back. And sometimes, perhaps, it reaches sideways."

  They sat in silence. Kayla let her head fall back against the hide-wrapped pillow. Her body ached. Her mind buzzed. But her heart beat strong. Alive. Again.

  She had another chance.

  Although she had no idea what that meant yet.

  Kayla dozed, her battered body demanding rest to heal. She drifted in and out of consciousness, fragments of dreams mixing with her new reality. The pain kept her tethered to this strange world, a constant reminder that whatever had happened was no illusion.

  She woke again as the herbwoman stoked the fire, shadows lengthening across the walls as night approached. The woman was grinding something in a stone bowl, the rhythmic scraping a soothing counterpoint to the crackling flames.

  Kayla tried to sit. Her body protested. She managed to rise onto one elbow.

  "May I ask your name?" she said, remembering her manners.

  "Anet," the woman replied, not looking up from her work. "I am this village's herbwoman. I mend what others cannot." Her hands moved with practiced efficiency, crushing something that smelled of mint and something sharper—unfamiliar.

  That, Kayla thought, sounded like a rural healer. The parallel to her own nursing background wasn't lost on her.

  "You said my—the girl—this body's name is Chailey?" Kayla fumbled, not sure how to refer to the previous owner of the body she found herself in.

  Anet hesitated. "The girl who wore this body was called that, yes. But you are not her."

  Kayla's gaze dropped. That ache deep inside her stirred again. A heaviness that had nothing to do with the body.

  "What happened to her?"

  The herbwoman didn't speak for a long time.

  "She was hurt," she said at last. "By one who took what he had no right to take. One of his men brought her to me, too late."

  Kayla swallowed hard. She didn't want to cry. But she felt it anyway. Her nurse's training told her enough about the brutality this body had endured.

  "Her soul left. You arrived."

  "I didn't mean to take anything from her."

  "You didn't. The body was empty. The gods, or fate, or something stranger still... saw fit to place you here."

  Kayla nodded, even if she didn't understand. She looked again at her hands. So small. Thin scars traced her wrists. Dirt beneath the nails. These were not her nurse's hands.

  But they were hers now.

  And she would not waste them.

  Anet offered a cup of water. As Kayla drank, she noticed more of the hut's details. Bundles of dried plants hung everywhere—not just the familiar herbs she might have grown in her apartment, but strange varieties with peculiar shapes and that pervasive violet hue. A small table held clay jars, each marked with symbols she couldn't read. Tools for grinding and cutting herbs were neatly arranged on a shelf, reminding her of her tea collection at home, but this one focused on the practice of healing.

  The herbwoman watched her with careful eyes. "You should rest. The body needs time."

  "Will you tell me where I am? Not just your hut, but... this place?" Kayla asked.

  "You are in the Ashvita Empire," Anet said, as if that should explain everything. "Near the border of Lord Veylen's lands."

  None of that meant anything to Kayla. She stored the information away.

  "And the trees outside—why are they purple?"

  Anet frowned. "The trees are as they have always been. What color should they be?"

  Kayla hesitated. "Where I'm from, leaves are green."

  The herbwoman's eyes widened slightly. "Green leaves? Like the rare underbrush that grows in the shadow places? How peculiar." She shook her head. "You have indeed come from far, Kayla."

  Outside, the trees stirred in a breeze she didn't know, their leaves a shade of violet that belonged to no forest on Earth. The sky beyond them had darkened to deep indigo, with the last crimson streaks of sunset painting the horizon like fresh blood on water.

  Wrapped in scratchy blankets, Kayla sat on the edge of a world that wasn't hers. The air smelled of smoke and crushed herbs. Somewhere, a bird called—a sound half-familiar, half-dream.

  She didn't know the rules here. But her heart beat. Her lungs ached. She was alive.

  These weren't her hands. This wasn't her name. But she'd been given this moment.

  She would not waste it.

  She would find a way to live.

  Even if it meant becoming someone new.