I tumbled through nothingness, a void of swirling cobalt that stretched and compressed around me like a living liquid. It’s difficult to describe what this was like, but it wasn’t pleasant. My scream died in my throat, smothered by the sensation of being pulled in every direction at once.

  Then, abruptly, solid ground.

  I landed hard on my side, the impact forcing the air from my lungs. For several moments, I simply lay there, eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the vertigo to subside.

  The first thing I noticed was the clean, salt-laden air. No stifling dust clogged my lungs; no darkness pressed against my eyelids.

  Instead, warmth bathed my face. Warmth and light.

  I cracked one eye open, then immediately shut it against the assault of brightness. Sunlight? Impossible. I’d been buried under tons of concrete and twisted metal.

  Slowly, I tried again, shielding my face with one trembling hand.

  Azure sky stretched overhead, not a single cloud marring its perfect expanse. The sound of waves lapping against rocks reached my ears from the distance, accompanied by the plaintive cries of seagulls.

  I pushed myself to my knees, then my feet, swaying slightly. The earthquake-induced rubble was gone. Instead, I stood on a sun-drenched cliff overlooking a vast, glittering sea. The water stretched to the horizon, its surface shifting between deep sapphire and turquoise where it met the white sand beach below.

  For one disorienting moment, I thought I had somehow been transported to the very coastal resort I had been pitching to Dr. Thompson. Had I imagined the entire collapse? Was this some kind of bizarre, stress-induced hallucination?

  “I’ve lost my mind,” I whispered, my voice still rough from the dust of the collapsed building.

  I turned to see I was standing at the wide mouth of a cave opening in the hillside. Perfect shelter, I thought automatically.

  That was, until I noticed not twenty steps deeper in the cave, a dragon lying curled like a massive cat.

  My mind stuttered over the word “dragon,” but that was the only possible description. The creature was the size of a small bus, its body covered in glistening scales the color of fresh blood. A sinuous tail wrapped around its haunches, ending in a spade-shaped tip that twitched occasionally in sleep. Smoke curled lazily from its nostrils with each rumbling breath.

  My knees threatened to give way.

  This wasn’t Bulgaria. This wasn’t even Earth.

  This wasn’t anything that made sense!

  And yet, a strange exhilaration coursed through me alongside the fear. A dragon. A real, living dragon. If I wasn’t hallucinating, I was witnessing something no human from my world had ever seen. Despite the danger, I couldn’t help but stare in fascination.

  Moving with excruciating slowness, I backed away. Every muscle in my body tensed, ready to flee. A small rock skittered beneath my foot, clattering down the slope.

  The dragon’s eyelid twitched.

  Panic surged through me like an electric current. I turned and scrambled down the steep path leading to the shoreline. Loose stones and sand slipped beneath my shoes as I half-ran, half-slid down the embankment, expecting at any moment to feel claws tearing into my back or flames engulfing me.

  Ten minutes later, I reached the beach and kept running, my dress shoes sinking into the wet sand and slowing my progress. Only when my lungs burned with the effort did I dare cast a glance back over my shoulder.

  The cliff loomed behind me, the cave a dark smudge against the rock face. There was no sign of pursuit—no winged terror descending from above, no distant roar of anger. The dragon, if it had woken at all, hadn’t bothered to follow me.

  I bent double, hands on my knees, gulping air. I hoped the boulder I’d picked by the shoreline was enough to block the dragon’s view if it happened to look my way.

  That’s when it happened.

  A Voice, speaking in a tongue that was like a strange mixture of Turkish and Greek—languages I recognized from Bulgaria’s neighbors. Except I could understand every word.

  [Entering Eyrth. Language stack added: Calidonian. No Core Attribute detected. Find a class core to unlock a Core Attribute and class!]

  I jerked upright, spinning in a circle. The voice had been inside my head—clear as a bell but utterly sourceless.

  It was warm, friendly. Even inviting.

  “Hello?” I called. “Who’s there?”

  Only the cry of seabirds and the gentle lapping of waves answered me.

  “I’ve gone mad,” I murmured, pressing the heels of my palms against my eyes. “The building collapsed, and I’m dying, and this is all some…some oxygen-deprived hallucination.”

  But the sand beneath my feet felt real. The sun beating down on my neck felt real.

  The lingering terror from seeing a creature out of legend felt very, very real.

  I forced myself to think logically. That strange blue portal in the rubble—it had transported me somewhere. Somewhere with dragons and voices in my head that talked about “core attributes” and “classes,” with a language stack called “Calidonian.” Indeed, I found myself naturally thinking in this new language as easily as my native Bulgarian.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  In fact, all this reminded me greatly of playing EverQuest in Internet cafés while in college. That damn game had caused me to nearly flunk my studies before I swore it off entirely.

  The absurdity of it almost made me laugh. How many nights had I stayed up reading Tolkien? How many science fiction novels had I devoured, imagining other worlds?

  Now here I was, seemingly living inside one, and all I wanted was to go home.

  Home to Irina.

  The thought of my daughter brought a physical pain to my chest. If this was real—and the increasing evidence suggested it might be—then I was separated from my little girl by more than collapsed concrete.

  I might never see her again.

  “No,” I said firmly to the empty beach. “No, I’ll find a way back if it’s the last thing I do.”

  I stared up at the cliff. The dragon had scared me out of my wits, but I had enough presence of mind to note that by the time I had woken up, the portal was gone. And even if it was still there, it would just lead me back to the ruins of my office.

  Not that going back to the cave was an option while the dragon remained.

  First, though, I needed to survive. To understand where—what—this place was. I could find a way to get back later.

  I took stock of my situation. I was alive, uninjured save for scrapes and bruises from the earthquake. I wore my work clothes—button-up shirt, slacks, and leather shoes, all filthy with concrete dust and stained with what I now realized was Georgi’s blood.

  The blood. It covered large patches of my shirt and pants, already drying to a rusty brown. I needed to clean myself, needed water. The sea beckoned a few meters away.

  It wouldn’t be smart to do that without gaining a bit of distance first. I walked down the sandy beach a couple of miles at least before approaching the water’s edge cautiously. The liquid looked like regular seawater, behaved like it too, forming small waves that broke gently against the shore. I knelt, dipping my hands in. It felt cool and normal. I splashed some on my face, wincing as it stung the small cuts there, then began to unbutton my ruined shirt.

  The saltwater would help clean my wounds, I reasoned, and might wash away some of the blood and dust.

  I waded in up to my waist, still wearing my pants, and began to scrub at my shirt in the water. Red-tinged clouds bloomed around me as the dried blood dissolved.

  I had been at it for a couple of minutes when I saw a fin.

  It cut through the water, perhaps thirty meters out, a dark triangle moving with deliberate purpose straight toward me.

  I grabbed my shirt as I scrambled back toward shore. The water that had seemed so welcoming now felt like molasses, slowing my retreat.

  I risked another glance over my shoulder. The fin had halved the distance between us, moving with terrible speed.

  I lunged toward the beach, losing my balance and landing hard on the wet sand, expecting at any moment to feel teeth sink into my legs.

  Instead, I heard an angry thrashing sound.

  Twisting around, I saw a shark-like creature, its skin a mottled gray-green rather than the blue-gray of Earth sharks, writhing in the shallows. It was too big to follow me into the ankle-deep water.

  After a few moments of violent struggle, it retreated, slipping back into deeper waters with a flick of its powerful tail. I collapsed onto my back, chest heaving, staring up at the alien sky.

  “Not Bulgaria,” I laughed weakly. “Definitely not Bulgaria.”

  When my breathing finally slowed, I sat up. The sun had begun its downward arc toward the horizon, though it still hung well above the sea. Evening would be coming in a few hours. I needed shelter, food, clean water—all the basics of survival.

  A strange thought flickered across my mind: in some ways, this was simpler than my life in Bulgaria. No bills, no debt, no boss breathing down my neck, no Elena complaining about money while spending it faster than I could earn it. Just pure survival.

  I pushed the thought away, ashamed of myself. Irina was back there. Nothing was simpler without her.

  I rose unsteadily to my feet. My pants were soaked, but at least the worst of the blood and dust had been washed away. I put the shirt back on, and the coolness was actually refreshing.

  The cliff with its dragon was clearly not an option for shelter. Instead, I began to walk along the shoreline, away from the predator-infested waters and the fire-breathing monster.

  The beach curved gently, revealing new stretches of coastline as I trudged along. My dress shoes, never designed for such terrain, were fast becoming uncomfortable. If this kept up for much longer, I’d get blisters. The sun beat down on my neck, which already felt warm to the touch. That would be a nasty sunburn.

  I tried to make sense of that voice in my head—Eyrth, it had called this place. A name uncomfortably close to Earth, with just enough difference to underscore how far from home I truly was.

  Again, I went back to that Voice that had talked about “class cores” and “attributes” in the strange language I understood.

  So, it wanted me to find one of these class cores? Become a Warrior, a Wizard, a Necromancer, or a Bard?

  “Stop it,” I told myself. “Focus on what’s real. Focus on survival.”

  Yet a part of me couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to wield magic or possess superhuman strength. In my world, I was a failed academic reduced to cold-calling strangers.

  Here, perhaps I could be something more.

  As the sun sank lower, exhaustion began to weigh on me. I had survived an earthquake and traveled through some kind of portal, all after a full day’s work. My body ached, and despair threatened to overtake me each time I thought of Irina.

  Perhaps it would have been better to die than to enter this situation. Was it even possible to get back?

  I rounded a small headland, and there, half-buried in the sand like the skeleton of some massive beached whale, lay the broken remnants of a ship.

  It was unlike any vessel I had ever seen. Its wooden hull was split open, revealing a maze of shattered timbers. The design resembled a carrack from the Age of Exploration, but with strange modifications—metal reinforcements along the gunwales, oddly shaped sails still clinging to one partially intact mast. The figurehead, a snarling beast with too many eyes, leered at me from where it had come to rest in the sand.

  It must have been there for some time; sand had built up around the lower sections, and parts of the wood had been bleached white by the sun and salt.

  Still, it looked solid enough to provide shelter for the night.

  As I approached, movement caught my eye. A figure emerged from what must have been a cabin, now tilted at a precarious angle against the sand dune.

  A woman. She staggered slightly as she navigated the sloping deck.

  I froze, uncertain whether to call or wait. Before I could decide, the woman looked up, her eyes widening as she spotted me. There was something familiar about her face.

  Recognition dawned on both of us simultaneously.

  “Petya?” I called, disbelieving.

  “Dragomir?” Her voice carried across the beach, thick with the same shock I felt. “Dragomir Valdrik? Is that really you?”

  Petya Kovacheva. She worked three cubicles down from me at the call center. A quiet woman who kept to herself, always the first to arrive and the last to leave. We had barely exchanged more than pleasantries in the break room.

  She was in her early thirties, with striking black hair that fell in waves to her shoulders—though now it was tangled with sand and salt. Even in her disheveled state, there was a certain severity to her features that made her seem unapproachable at work. High cheekbones, dark eyebrows perpetually drawn together in concentration, and eyes so dark they appeared almost black in the fading light. Her navy blue button-up blouse and dark pencil skirt were torn and salt-stained.

  Now she stood before me on an alien beach, as impossible as the dragon on the cliff or the voice in my head.

  Somehow, against all odds, I was not alone in this strange new world.

  A surge of relief washed over me—not just at finding another human, but at finding someone who could confirm I wasn’t hallucinating.

  Someone from the world I had left behind.

  Someone who could help me survive.