I woke up in a meadow because of course I did. There's always a meadow. In every fantasy novel I've ever read, the protagonist wakes up in a meadow with the sun in his eyes and the smell of wildflowers in his nose, like the universe has a standing reservation with a landscape painter. Mine had a goat. The goat was staring at me.
"Great," I said to the goat. "Which one of us is having the weirder morning?"
The goat did not answer. It had the good sense to keep chewing.
Let me back up, because if this is going to be my life now — and the evidence was mounting — I should probably establish who I was before I became That Guy Who Talks To Goats In A Meadow. My name is Ethan Parker. Twenty-four years old. Junior account coordinator at a logistics firm, which is a job title that means "sends emails about shipping containers." I lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment that smelled faintly of instant ramen and good intentions. My last clear memory before the meadow was my commute, standing on a train that had stopped between stations, reading a fantasy web novel on my phone and thinking, *man, the isekai genre really needs to give these guys a backpack at least*. Then the train lights flickered. Then — the meadow.
No truck. I feel like that's worth noting. No truck, no goddess voice, no mysterious app on my phone. One second I was reading about shipping container demurrage charges — riveting stuff — and the next I was facedown in grass with a goat performing a citizen's inspection of my spine.
I sat up and took stock. I had: one wallet (contents: debit card, expired gym membership, seventeen dollars), one phone (battery: 3%, signal: absolutely not), one pair of shoes that were not rated for medieval terrain, and a growing suspicion that this was going to be one of those days.
The meadow sloped down toward a town in the distance — stone walls, peaked roofs, a tall pale tower with a pennant fluttering at the top. Classic fantasy starter town. I started walking toward it because there didn't seem to be any other options, and halfway down the slope I ran my first inventory problem: everyone I was about to meet was going to think I was a vagrant.
"Excuse me," I said to a man leading a cart along the road, "can you tell me where I am?"
He looked at me. His gaze traveled from my sneakers to my button-down shirt to my hair, and his expression arranged itself into the universal human face of *this man is a problem I did not budget for today*. "Millbrook," he said. "The free town of Millbrook, in the kingdom of Aldermere. And you'd best get some proper clothes, stranger, before the constable decides you're a beggar."
"Friendly start," I said. "Love that for me."
He flicked the reins and moved on. I followed the road in at a distance, trying to look like a traveler of means rather than a man who'd been thrown out of a portal without luggage.
Millbrook was lovely. I mean that sincerely. Cobblestone streets, window boxes full of flowers, a fountain in the square with clear water. The people, though. The people were where it started getting strange.
The first woman I saw was what the locals would later call the epitome of grace: willowy, pale as milk, flat as a plank, dressed in a gown that hung off her frame like a flag on a windless day. She moved with this careful, gliding step, like she was afraid the ground might offend her. Three men turned to watch her pass, their faces reverent. An old woman actually pressed her hand to her heart.
"Oh," breathed a young man beside me, "the Lady's own grace upon her."
I looked at the woman. Then I looked at the young man. Then I looked back at the woman.
*Plain*, my brain said. Not ugly — I have manners — just completely, aggressively plain. The kind of face you describe as "nice smile." She looked like every background extra in every period drama: fine. Perfectly fine. The town was acting like Gal Gadot had just walked by.
That was my first data point. I didn't know it was a data point yet. I thought I was just tired.
The second data point arrived two minutes later. A guardswoman walked past the fountain — broad shoulders, arms like she'd arm-wrestled a bear and won, a scar through her left eyebrow, and a figure that under the armor was unmistakably, aggressively, gloriously curvy. She moved like she owned every stone she stepped on. I stared. I am a man, I was twenty-four, and I had a pulse.
Every single person in the square looked at her the way you'd look at a math problem you were glad you didn't have to solve. Polite. Averted. One mother pulled her child closer. The young man next to me actually shuddered.
"Poor soul," he murmured. "The Temple says she could have been something, once."
I looked at the guardswoman. I looked at the willowy woman, who was now accepting flowers from an admirer. I looked back at the guardswoman.
Something in my brain did the math, and the answer it came up with was: *this town's taste is broken.*
That's the charitable way to describe the moment my worldview tilted. I didn't know the half of it yet. But I stood there in the square of Millbrook, in clothes that marked me as a lunatic, with seventeen dollars and a dying phone, and I felt the first real thought I'd had since the meadow:
*Oh no. I'm going to fit in here.*
I spent the next hour learning the rules of the new universe, mostly by eavesdropping, because walking up to strangers and saying "hello, I am from another dimension, please explain your culture" seemed like a fast track to the stocks. Here's what I pieced together:
The dominant religion was the Temple of Grace. Their goddess — the Lady of Grace, I gathered — had decreed that beauty was a sign of spiritual favor, and beauty meant one thing: delicate, pale, willowy, flat. "Grace" wasn't just a compliment here; it was a measurable social currency. People talked about having "little grace" the way people back home talked about having a bad credit score. Young women carried themselves like they were being graded, because they were. The Temple ran inspections — actual inspections — where they'd measure a girl's wrists with a ribbon and pronounce her sufficiently graceful or not.
The mirror image was equally absolute. Curvy was coarse. Muscular was mannish. Busty was — and this was the word I heard most often, delivered with real sorrow — *unfortunate*. Tanned skin meant you worked in the sun, which meant poverty, which meant you'd never amount to anything. And beastkin — people with animal traits, ears or tails or what have you — were spoken of the way my grandmother spoke about her neighbor's divorce: with pity so thick you could spread it on toast.
"It ain't their fault," a baker told his apprentice as I loitered near his stall, pretending to find bread fascinating. "The Lady made 'em wrong. You just pray they find a husband who don't mind."
*The Lady made them wrong*, I repeated silently. In what I was starting to suspect was a long, long line of bad news, this was the worst of it: it wasn't just fashion. It wasn't just culture being culture. These people *perceived* the world this way. The young man in the square hadn't been performing when he'd shuddered at the guardswoman — he'd genuinely felt it, the way you feel a draft. It was in their eyes. Literally, maybe. I didn't have the vocabulary for it yet.
What I had was a growing, itching wrongness at the back of my skull. Because to my eyes — my ordinary, office-worker, twenty-four-year-old eyes — every single judgment this town made about beauty was exactly backwards. The "divine" willowy women were plain. The "unfortunate" curvy women were gorgeous. The "mannish" muscular women were, and I cannot stress this enough, exactly my type.
I was standing in a world where my taste in women was considered a spiritual disease.
I should have been horrified. Instead, and I am not proud of this, my first coherent emotional response was relief. *Thank God*, I thought, watching another devastatingly attractive blacksmith's daughter carry two anvils like they were handbags while the town averted its eyes. *At least the dating pool here is enormous and completely unappreciated.*
Then I felt bad for thinking it. Then I thought it again.
By late afternoon I was hungry, broke in a currency I didn't have, and sitting on the edge of the fountain trying to figure out my next move. The options were:
1. Announce myself as a traveler from another world. (Pros: honesty. Cons: the stocks. Possibly a pyre.)
2. Find work. (Pros: money. Cons: I had no skills that translated. "Junior account coordinator" was not a medieval profession.)
3. Keep sitting on the fountain until someone took pity on me. (Pros: zero effort. Cons: dignity, what was left of it.)
I was leaning toward option three when the commotion started.
It began with laughter — the mean kind, the kind with an edge you can hear from fifty yards. A knot of young men had gathered near the baker's stall, and at the center of their attention was a woman in battered armor, sitting on the fountain's opposite edge with her arms crossed and her jaw set.
She was — okay, I need to be careful here, because "she was beautiful" doesn't cover it. She was tall and broad-shouldered, with the kind of muscle that comes from actual work rather than a gym membership. Her hair was dark and pulled back in a severe braid. A scar cut through her left eyebrow — the same guardswoman from earlier, I realized. And her figure, even under dented plate and a worn surcoat, was the kind that made my seventeen dollars feel like a personal insult, because there was no version of this universe where I deserved to be looking at her.
The young men were circling her like she was a curiosity at a fair.
"—swear she could pull the plow herself, save her father the ox—"
"Paula! Paula, love, when's the wedding? Oh, right —"
That one got the biggest laugh. The woman — Paula — didn't move. Her knuckles were white where her hands gripped her own arms.
"Maybe the Temple'll take her as a cautionary display," said the loudest one, a kid who couldn't have been more than nineteen, dressed in the kind of clothes that said *my father owns things*. "Stand her next to the graceful girls at the festival. 'This is what happens when you eat your supper.'"
The laughter went up again. Paula's jaw tightened further. She stared at the ground.
And something in my chest did a thing it hadn't done since — I don't know, since I'd watched a coworker get publicly dressed down by our manager in a meeting and said nothing. That hot, sour, *do something* feeling.
I stood up.
Now, I want to be clear: I am not a brave man. I am a man whose greatest physical confrontation to date was an argument with a vending machine. I had no plan. I had no weapon. I had a phone at 3% and seventeen dollars. But I had something these people didn't have, and it was rising up in me like heartburn:
I thought she was the most beautiful woman I'd seen all day. And they were laughing at her.
I walked over. The group noticed me — the strange man in the strange clothes — and the laughter hitched, curious.
"Excuse me," I said. "Sorry to interrupt the comedy hour. I just have a question."
The loud kid — the lordling, I assumed — looked me up and down. "And who are you?"
"Ethan Parker," I said. "New in town. Just passing through, hopefully upward. My question is this." I looked at Paula. She was staring at me now, wary, like she was trying to figure out what angle I was playing. "Are you lot always this loud when you're wrong?"
Silence. Beautiful, total silence.
The lordling's face did something complicated. "Wrong about what, peasant?"
"Well." I gestured at Paula, sitting there in her battered armor, scar and muscle and all, looking like the cover of a novel I'd absolutely buy. "You're standing in a circle mocking the best-looking woman in this square. That's not an insult, that's a confession. It's like standing in front of a Rembrandt going 'haha, look at the ugly painting.' It doesn't make the painting ugly. It just makes you the guy who said it."
Someone in the back made a noise like a teakettle starting to boil.
The lordling went red. "You — you dare — do you know who I am?"
"I'm going to guess 'about to be embarrassed in front of his friends,'" I said. "Look, I'm new here, so maybe I'm missing some local context. Is there a festival where everyone pretends the plain girls are gorgeous and the gorgeous ones are a joke? Is that — is that a thing? Because if it's a thing, I want to make sure I get the schedule, so I can plan my disappointment accordingly."
Paula made a sound. It was small and strangled and might have been the beginning of a laugh, or a sob, or both. She clapped a hand over her mouth like she'd surprised herself.
The lordling opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "This is — this is heresy against the Temple's teachings on grace—"
"Oh, we're bringing the Temple into it," I said. "Great. Yes. Please, tell the goddess I said her taste is bad and she should feel bad. I'm sure that'll go well for you."
I heard it then — the crowd that had gathered, the actual townspeople, not the lordling's friends. Someone gasped. Someone else laughed, quickly stifled. The lordling looked around, realized his audience was slipping, and did what bullies do when they're losing: he got loud.
"You'll regret that, stranger. When the Temple hears about the man with corrupted taste—"
"Corrupted taste," I repeated. "That's what we're calling it. Okay. Put it on my tombstone: *Here lies Ethan Parker. His taste was corrupted. He thought the beautiful woman was beautiful.*"
The lordling stormed off, his friends trailing after him like embarrassed ducklings. The crowd began to disperse, suddenly very interested in being elsewhere. And I was left standing in the middle of the square with Paula Mercer, who was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read at all.
It wasn't gratitude. I'd been hoping for gratitude — or at least a smile. It was something colder. Something assessing. Like she was looking at a puzzle box that might contain a snake.
She stood up. She was taller than me. Of course she was taller than me.
"You," she said, "are either the bravest man in Millbrook or the stupidest."
"Historically," I said, "it's been the second one."
She didn't smile. "Men don't defend me, stranger. Not without wanting something."
"I wanted them to stop laughing," I said. "That was the whole list."
She studied me for another long moment. The scar through her eyebrow pulled when she frowned, and I had to actively remind myself to maintain eye contact like a normal person and not like a man having a religious experience.
"Paula Mercer," she said finally. "Disgraced knight of Aldermere. If you're going to make an enemy of young Lordling and his friends on my account, you should at least know whose account it is."
"Ethan Parker," I said. "Disgraced junior account coordinator of Earth. I think we're going to get along."
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't be kind to me." Her voice was flat. "I've seen what kindness costs. It always comes with a bill."
She turned and walked away before I could answer, her armor clinking, her braid swinging. The square watched her go with that same polite aversion, and then they watched me with something new — curiosity, suspicion, the beginning of a story.
I sat back down on the fountain. My hands were shaking. Adrenaline, mostly. Also the dawning realization that I had just, on my first day in a new world, publicly insulted the dominant religion in front of witnesses, made an enemy of the local aristocracy, and attached myself to a woman who had just told me not to be kind to her.
The goat from the meadow would have been proud. Or concerned. Hard to say with goats.
Across the square, Paula stopped at the corner. She looked back at me — just for a second. Long enough for me to see that the cold assessment in her eyes had cracked, just slightly, into something else. Something that looked a lot like hope, trying very hard not to be hope.
Then she was gone.
I exhaled. "Well," I said to no one. "Day one."
Somewhere behind me, someone in the dispersing crowd whispered, loud enough to carry: "Did you hear what he said? He called her *beautiful*. To her face. In front of everyone."
And that was how, on my first afternoon in the kingdom of Aldermere, I became a rumor.