He picked a tree a few paces off, a solid old thing with bark like cracked leather, and squared up in front of it the way he vaguely remembered boxers doing on television in his past life.
He threw one punch, unhurried, more curious than serious, yet still full of skill and precision.
The tree ground and a clean fist shaped hole was embedded in it, the surrounding fauna running away from the strike that sounded like an explosion.
Cormac stared at his own hand for a moment.
‘Yeah,’ he thought, flexing his fingers, thoroughly pleased with himself.
‘That’ll do.
That’ll do nicely.’
He tapped his thumb against his middle finger, twice, and let the world bloom back into that quiet, glowing dance of light for just a moment, testing it on purpose this time instead of stumbling into it.
The forest answered him instantly, patient and vivid, and somewhere off to his left he caught a small, dim shape drifting between two trees, faint as breath on cold glass, gone before he could decide what it had once been.
He tapped the gesture again, and the light folded itself away, obedient, waiting for the next time he called for it.
‘Good,’ Cormac thought.
‘Everything seems to be working fine.’
He allowed himself a slow, satisfied breath, the slight itch of sunlight faintly urged him to stay in the dark, the slight ache in his knuckles, already barely perceivable, already fading faster than normal.
He stood there a moment longer, flexing the ache out of his knuckles, and let the actual scale of his situation finally catch up with him.
‘Right,’ he thought.
‘London 1966 was eaten by an eldritch weather event, and I’m currently standing in a forest in who knows where.
Forward is dead.
So let’s move-‘
He looked down at himself, arms behind his back, trying to make it a habit, and finished the thought with the specific dignity of a man pretending he’d planned this.
‘-backward.’
He said to no one in particular, perhaps he has truly gone insane.
He had no compass, no map, and certainly no friendly suitcase-wielding woman to ask for directions.
What he did have, sitting warm and certain somewhere behind his sternum, was a pull.
Not urgent.
Not painful.
Just patient, the way a compass needle is patient, content to simply be correct and wait for you to notice.
‘Well,’ he thought, ‘when in doubt, trust the eldritch GPS.’
He picked a direction, vaguely northeast, though north and east both felt like generous words for the vague direction his intuition was actually offering him, but he started walking anyway.
The forest did not stay ordinary for long.
He passed a deer that had too many joints in its legs, folding itself down to graze with the unhurried patience of something that had never once needed to worry about a predator, and it did not so much as flick an ear at him.
Further on, something in the canopy shed a soft trail of dim light every time it moved, gone as soon as he turned to look properly.
The way his spiritual perception kept catching things his ordinary eyes couldn’t was starting to tire him a bit.
But none of them approached him.
None of them seemed to care that he existed at all, which suited him fine.
‘Live and let live as the saying goes,’ he thought, stepping neatly around a patch of mushrooms that were very slowly, very deliberately breathing.
‘Especially when the alternative might involve finding out the hard way what “let” means to something with that many extra joints.’
The pull sharpened somewhere past an hour of walking, tightening like the leash of a dog that suddenly changed directions while out on a walk, so he slowed without quite deciding to.
The trees opened into a small clearing, and in the center of it stood a sword.
It was driven clean through a flat grey stone, hilt upright, the blade sunk deep enough that whoever had put it there had clearly meant it to stay.
On it, arranged with a neatness that does not follow how armor is supposed to fall when nobody’s wearing it, a pair of knight’s gauntlets.
Draped over them, clean and rather handsome, hung a coat of deep blue with gold thread worked through the fabric in careful, intricate patterns.
Cormac tapped his thumb against his middle finger, twice.
The clearing bloomed with that quiet, glowing dance again, and there, underneath the cloak, a figure like smoke that had decided to have opinions, sat a shape.
Human, roughly.
Faint.
Patient in the specific way that only the dead ever seemed to manage.
“Ah,” Cormac said, mostly to himself.
“Hello there.”
The smoke stirred.
A voice came from the garments, smooth, warm, and thoroughly relieved.
“Bonjour, comment allez-vous?”
“…
Bonjour?” he said in the rough shape of a mimicked accent, looking directly at what he assumed to be the figure’s face based on the colors.
“Thou canst see Someone?” it said.
“Praise be.
It hath been a great while since another soul treading the border of life and death didst cross Someone’s path.”
Cormac blinked.
‘Someone,’ he thought.
‘Mysterious and a weird naming convention.
I respect it.’
“I can indeed,” he said aloud, speaking with the easy confidence of a man who had already decided not to explain a misunderstanding that benefits him.
“You’re a spirit, aren’t you?
A knight, by the looks of the wardrobe.”
“Thou hast the right of it, thou may call Someone, A Knight” the voice said, and something in its tone brightened, hopeful in the way of someone who has been alone a very long time.
“Might Someone ask a boon of thee, stranger?
Someone’s blade hath been bound fast in this stone these many years, and Someone’s own hands are… insufficient to the task, in this present state.”
Cormac looked at the sword.
He looked at the bundle of colorful smoke wearing a cloak.
He decided that the sensible course of action was absolutely not to ask why the sword was stuck, and instead did the polite thing.
He walked over, took the hilt in both hands, and pulled.
It came free with a sound like a held breath finally letting go, clean and sudden, no resistance at all.
Cormac turned it once in the light, admiring it the way he admired his own strength not too long ago, then held it out toward the armor, hilt first.
The smoke went very still.
“…Thou art surprisingly strong,” the voice said slowly, “for a corpse.”
‘Ah,’ Cormac thought.
‘Yes.
I expected that misunderstanding.
I Shan’t be fixing doth one today, or something, I’m probably using that wrong.’
“I get that a lot,” he said instead, entirely straight-faced.
The knight took the sword, or the gauntlets did, somehow floating, gauntleted fingers closing around the hilt with no visible hand inside them to do the closing.
The knight held it with both gauntlets with the practiced motion of a body that had done this ten thousand times before whatever had stopped it from doing it again.
“Someone is in thy debt,” the knight said.
“Ask, and Someone shall answer it as best he can.”
Cormac considered this for a moment, realizing what a walking armor with a sword and an apparently endless well of misplaced loyalty might be worth to a man currently possessing no allies, no money, and no idea what decade he was standing in.
“Actually,” he said, “how would you feel about coming along with me for a while?”
The knight seemed, if smoke could seem anything, faintly baffled by the offer.
Cormac got the distinct impression that in however many years this poor soul had been standing in this clearing, nobody had bothered to ask it for anything at all except to leave the sword where it was.
“Someone…” it began, and then, with a warmth that hadn’t been in its voice a moment before, “Someone would be honoured.”
“Excellent”
Cormac said, already walking, already feeling the pull tug him forward again now that its errand had apparently been run.
‘A knight in shining armor.
Sworn to a supposed corpse.
This is either going to be extremely fun or extremely inconvenient, and possibly both.’
They walked together for the better part of another hour, the knight’s garment moving without a sound.
There was, unless Cormac uses spirit vision, absolutely no one inside it to move, and the trees thinned by degrees until they gave way to hedgerows, then a dirt track, then the unmistakable smoky haze of a city sitting somewhere just past the next rise.
A boy was sitting on a low stone wall at the edge of the track, perhaps ten years old, kicking his heels idly against the stone.
The knight, with what Cormac was fairly sure was genuine tact rather than any particular fear, stepped behind a tree and went quiet.
Cormac approached alone, hands clasped behind his back, and offered the boy his most disarming smile.
“Pardon me lad,” he said.
“Might I trouble you for the year?”
The boy looked up at him.
Whatever the boy saw settled somewhere behind his eyes and did not sit well there.
His face went pale, his heels stopped kicking, and he answered in a rush, the words tumbling over each other on the way out.
“It’- it’s 1929, sir,” he said, and was off the wall and running before Cormac had started his thanks, sprinting away down the track without a single backward glance, as though something cold had brushed the back of his neck and he’d only just now placed the feeling.
Cormac watched him go, unbothered, filing the memory away.
‘1929,’ he thought.
’37 years short of home.
Could be worse.
Could’ve landed me somewhere with dinosaurs.’
It was only once the boy was well out of sight that he glanced down at himself and remembered, with the specific delayed horror of a man realizing he’d walked into a job interview with his shirt on backward, exactly what he was wearing.
The jacket was a slim, single-breasted number cut close through the shoulders, in a bottle-green herringbone that had been, as recently as two days and thirty-seven years into the future, extremely fashionable.
Narrow lapels, four buttons up the front in a neat tight row, the hem cropped short enough to sit well above where a more old-fashioned coat would have fallen.
Underneath it, a black polo-neck jumper, fine-knit, worn without a tie in the specific way that was meant to announce he didn’t need one.
His trousers were drainpipe-narrow, charcoal grey, breaking cleanly over a pair of pointed Chelsea boots with a stacked heel that added a good inch he hadn’t strictly needed.
He still had, tucked in his jacket’s inner pocket for reasons unknown, a pair of round, dark-tinted sunglasses he had absolutely no present use for.
He looked, in short, exactly like a young man who had stepped out of a Carnaby Street boutique roughly four decades before Carnaby Street would exist.
‘No wonder the poor lad ran,’ he lampooned, examining his own sleeve with something between pride and dismay, halfway joking as he knew the true reason the boy ran away.
‘I look like I’ve been dropped here by a UFO.
Which, credit where it’s due, isn’t actually that far off.’
He glanced back toward the tree the knight was hiding behind.
“We’re going to need a disguise my friend,” he said.
“Both of us, frankly.”
A search along the edge of a nearby washing line, strung between two cottages that, thankfully, showed no sign of anyone watching, turned up a plain white bedsheet, worn thin but serviceable, forgotten on the line and flapping half off its pegs.
Cormac liberated it without much guilt, folding it over his arm.
“Here,” he said, holding it up toward the tree.
“Wrap this round yourself.
You’re a bit conspicuous.”
The knight, for all his old-fashioned formality, took the sheet without complaint and draped it over him with the resigned dignity of a man who had clearly decided some indignities were simply the price of good company.
“A curious garment,” he said, “for a knight.”
“A curious time,” Cormac said, “for the both of us.”
And with that, he squared his shoulders, straightened a lapel that had no business existing yet, and led the way down the track toward the smoke and noise of 1929 London.
might not be able to update next week because tests, we’ll see