The first thing I noticed was the sky.

  It wasn’t the thick, grey ceiling of London we were used to. This one shimmered—lavender fading into orange, with two suns hovering lazily above a crooked skyline. The buildings looked like someone tried to rebuild a medieval village using memories of Paris, sketches from a child's imagination, and leftover parts from a cathedral.

  The second thing I noticed was Sherlock.

  Still wearing his coat. Still scanning the surroundings like we were in Hyde Park and not… wherever this was.

  “Watson,” he said, his voice calm, crisp, and infuriatingly unmoved. “Would you agree that we are, at present, no longer in London?”

  I blinked. “Well, there’s a dragon circling that tower, so yes. I’d hazard a guess.”

  “Good. I’d have been concerned if you hadn’t noticed.”

  We were standing on a stone path that glowed faintly beneath our feet. The air smelled like cinnamon and rain. People—humanoid, but not quite human—moved past us, most giving Sherlock a wide berth. Not because he looked foreign. Because he looked… dangerous. That coat never helped.

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  “I was in the sitting room. Making tea,” I muttered. “You were arguing with the skull again.”

  “I was correcting it,” he replied, brushing dust off his coat. “And now we’re here.”

  “Any idea how?”

  “None.”

  “Any idea where?”

  He squinted toward a set of runes carved into a stone archway. “Somewhere with a primitive language structure, vaguely Latin-rooted, possibly merged with glyph-based semantics. Likely magical. Possibly post-cataclysmic.”

  “…So no.”

  “Not yet.”

  ---

  We were given directions by a child with antlers.

  Sherlock thanked her in Elvish, somehow. I didn’t ask.

  By sunset, we had walked through a floating marketplace, seen a talking squirrel try to barter for Sherlock’s scarf (he refused), and finally sat at a tavern named The Wandering Sigil. Inside, a notice board full of parchment posters caught his eye.

  “Bounties,” he murmured. “Crimes. Patterns.”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I already have,” he said, plucking a poster from the board. “Someone’s killing forest guardians. The wounds are cauterized with precision. Surgical.”

  “You’re suggesting a serial killer in a fantasy realm?”

  “Would it really surprise you?”

  Honestly, it didn’t.

  ---

  Later that night, he stood in our rented attic room, staring out at the twin moons.

  “I don’t know how we got here, John,” he said. “But I intend to solve this world as if it were a crime scene.”

  I laughed. “And I suppose I’ll be stitching up goblins now?”

  “Possibly.”

  He turned back toward me, eyes gleaming.

  “But wherever we are—this isn’t quit

  e Baker Street. Which means we’ll just have to build a new one.”