Sensation returned slowly. First, the dry feeling in his mouth, as if he had been asleep for days. Then the uneven, hard ground beneath him. Had he fainted and fallen to the pavement? If he had been lying there for as long as the ache in his bones and the lack of moisture in his mouth suggested, he was surprised no passer-by had called an ambulance for him.

  What the hell happened?

  Alix’s first thought was that he was discovering the beginnings of a serious hangover after a night he couldn’t forget, but it didn’t feel like he was in his own bed, and he had never been so rough before that he couldn’t remember a single detail of what happened. Not even his cheap couch was this uncomfortable, and his floor, even in his dungeon of a flat, wasn’t this bumpy. He couldn’t even remember what he had been drinking. He felt like he hadn’t been drinking anything at all.

  Suddenly he remembered his conversation with Mac, and then the strange mist that descended upon him, followed by the rushing darkness.

  Alix tried opening his eyes but all he could see was the same all-encompassing darkness as before. No street lamps, no stars in the sky. The smell of the city was gone, replaced by a dry earthiness. Alix got to his feet to have a look around, trying not to panic.

  There was a rustling in the dark as Alix stirred, the sound echoing around the room. He was definitely inside somewhere, although he had no idea how that had happened. It didn’t feel like a dream, he felt wide awake, but he had no idea where he was. The rustling turned to moaning, and then grunting. There was someone else with him.

  “Who’s there?” he asked instinctively, instantly hating himself for breaking the first rule of ‘how not to get killed’.

  “Who are you?” a man’s voice replied. “What are you doing in my house?”

  Oh dear. Received Pronunciation bordering on the Queen’s English?

  Alix could almost visualise his companion from their accent. It was undeniably English, and posh, far removed from the accents he was used to hearing locally. Which made his new surroundings even more confusing.

  “We aren’t in a house, unless you live in a cave.” As he got to his feet, Alix felt the dirt and rocks beneath him, and from the dank smell and the echo, a cave is the only place he could imagine them to be.

  “A cave? What on earth is going on?”

  “I know just as much as you do, which is nothing.” Alix’s eyes were slowly getting used to the darkness. The faint outline of a man standing a few metres in front of him slowly revealed itself. Two large angular shapes rose up beside them.

  “Look, there’s a light,” the stranger said, hope filling his voice.

  Alix looked around until he spotted the light. It was faint, a short distance off. He took a few awkward steps in the dark to check that the ground was stable, and then made his way towards the light, inching slowly in case there were any hidden obstacles. Eventually he reached the source of the light. It came from cracks in a flat surface, one line running vertically and another horizontally along the ground. He pushed on the surface, and felt that it was wood, but it didn’t budge. “This looks like…a giant door. Give me a hand opening it,” he called back to the stranger as he examined the lines. Alix jumped when he noticed the man was right behind him.

  Together they pushed on the door but still it didn’t open. There was no lock or handle that he could see, so as a last resort he knocked on it. The sound echoed around the chamber, growing louder and louder.

  “Maybe there is another way out of here,” the other man asked, trying to look around in the darkness. “It feels like a bloody tomb in here.”

  Alix wanted to keep trying to find a way through the door, the sunlight beyond tantalisingly close, but before they could wander off into the darkness, a rumbling cut through the dwindling echo of his knock. The door began to move, and light spilled in to the room. He had to shield his eyes from the sudden brightness.

  When his eyesight recovered, he saw a pair of men dressed in leather armour standing in front of them. Their eyes went wide at the sight of them.

  “W-w-what are you doing in there?” one of the men asked. His hand hovered warily by a sword hanging from his belt. They looked to be some sort of medieval soldier, but Alix hadn’t heard of any Renaissance fairs nearby. That sort of nonsense was more of an American thing anyway. From their accent, which he couldn’t place, they weren’t anywhere near there.

  Now that Alix could see, he saw that it really was a cave they had been in, and an elaborately columned one at that. The two shapes he had seen rising in the darkness were massive thrones carved from stone. It was more of a grand hall than a cave, but it held no comforts, only hard angles, like some ancient temple, or an abandoned throne room for giants.

  Alix got his first look of the man that had appeared with him in the cave, and his suspicions turned out to be correct. He was tall, blond haired and blue eyed, with annoyingly well chiselled features. Statuesque even in the throes of confusion.

  The men before them wore leather armour dyed a deep red, with a golden sun emblazoned on the front. One was old and grizzled. The one that had spoken was young and fresh faced. Both looked stunned to see them appear out of the darkness.

  “Idiot!” the older man barked, punching the younger on his armoured shoulder with his gauntleted fist. “Remember your duty, Osian.”

  “Bastian…isn’t it too early? No one is supposed to be here for another-“ the young soldier tried to say but at a glare from his superior, he fell silent.

  “It’s not our place to question such things,” the one called Bastian hissed at the young soldier. When Osian remained silent with his hand wavering above his sword hilt, Bastian grabbed him by the arm and dragged him to the now open chamber. “Look!” he said, pointing to the giant thrones. “The statues are gone! If they aren’t the right ones then the king can deal with them, but I won’t be the one accused of not doing my job properly. Hurry up and get on with it.”

  “Sorry, sir,” he murmured in apology, finally dropping his hand away from his sword. Then he picked up a horn looped over his shoulder. He took a deep breath and blew into it hard. A mournful blast echoed around the clearing and then swept out over the fields.

  Alix looked around and saw that they were at the base of a mountain, surrounded by lush meadows, full of tall grasses and flowers. A few trees swayed lazily in the warm breeze and the sun hung low on the horizon. He couldn’t tell if it was rising or falling. It was pristine, picturesque. Definitely not anywhere near home.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Can you tell us what is going on here?” Alix asked the pair. His companion was still staring awestruck at the view. He had to admit, he felt invigorated at the freshness of the air, and the untouched look of the place. It was almost enough to make him forget that he had no idea how he had gotten there. The more he thought about it, the more he felt the panic rise within him so he focussed on the view instead. It was a lot nicer than where he had come from anyway. Still, there was something disturbingly alien about the place.

  “I apologise, my lords, but I cannot say anything,” Bastian replied, bowing slightly.

  A chill ran up Alix’s back at the same time his companion replied; “My lords? My father is the Lord. I’ve got no interest in that nonsense. Leon will do fine.”

  “I am sorry, Lord Leon,” Bastian replied, “but I would be executed for not referring to you by your proper title.”

  Leon turned to Alix and mouthed what the fuck? but Alix didn’t have any answers for them. He was too busy thinking Posh bastard.

  “Where are we anyway? The last thing I remember is driving my car. If you have so much as scratched her-”

  “Leon, is it? My name is Alix. What is the last thing you remember?” Alix asked, drawing Leon’s furious attention away from the hapless guards.

  “I was out driving. There was this weird fog, then everything went dark, and then I woke up in that cave. What about you?”

  “I was just on my way home, then I was surrounded by a fog as well, and then I passed out or something. Everything went dark and I can’t remember anything else after that. How the hell did we end up in that cave?”

  While Alix spoke, Leon took out his phone and took a quick look at the screen. “I have no idea what they did to us, but as soon as I get a signal they will be hearing from my lawyers. Have you got anything?” Leon asked, waving his phone around in the air to try get a signal, while the two soldiers looked on bewildered.

  Alix had completely forgotten about his phone and he suddenly felt like an idiot for not thinking to use the torch function back in the cave. He pulled his phone from his pocket, but found he had no signal either. He still had a good amount of battery left, which told him that he couldn’t have been knocked out that long. His crappy phone barely lasted a day without needing charged.

  “Nothing,” Alix replied. He couldn’t help but take a photo of Osian and Bastian as they stared at them with their mouths hanging open.

  Before they could take their conversation further, a carriage appeared from out of the trees. It was then Alix noticed the dirt path that led from the cave off through the trees. The carriage turned around in the open field before the giant door, before coming to a stop in front of them. Bastian opened the door and motioned for them to get inside. The driver up front was dressed in similar red leather armour, with a dark brown cloak. He didn’t so much as look in their direction. Was that a bead of sweat Alix saw rolling down his face?

  A curious flag waved in the slight breeze from a flagpole on the back of the carriage. It showed a white dragon entangled around a black dragon on a field of dark red.

  At the sight of the carriage, Leon’s spirits seemed to lift. It wasn’t anything either of them would have considered normal, but anything was better than hanging around in the cave or with the two weird sword wielding soldiers. Alix however, was becoming more confused by the moment. It felt awfully like a kidnapping, but one dressed up as an honour.

  “We have an encampment nearby. A royal carriage is kept there at all times for this situation,” Bastian explained, sensing some of Alix’s unease. He bowed again and ushered them inside. “Please, my Lords.”

  “Can you not even tell us where we are?” Alix asked. Leon had already clambered inside and taken a seat on the cushioned benches, suddenly a lot happier at the sight of the luxurious carriage. He was probably used to such pomp and ceremony.

  “The coachman will take you to Galdea. I will send a raven ahead so that they will expect your arrival. Everything will be explained to you there,” Bastian replied, trying to keep his gaze from lingering on Alix and Leon for too long. He examined a smudge on his leather armour instead. Osian looked like he couldn’t wait for the pair of them to be gone. His face had lost all its colour once Bastian had pointed out the empty thrones, but Alix had no idea what the significance of that was. He couldn’t care less though, he had a lot more important questions he wanted the answers to. It sounded like this place Galdea was where he would get them.

  Alix sighed and climbed aboard. As soon as he took a seat, the door was closed and the carriage took off at a brisk pace. Alix watched out the window as the two soldiers in their red armour and the giant door disappeared around a bend in the road, and soon all was obscured by woodlands and gently rolling hills. What was it they were doing guarding the cave anyway? There had been nothing inside other than the two stone thrones and dust.

  Leon seemed engrossed in the views from the window as the carriage trundled along the road, but Alix heard him mumbling under his breath.

  “It must be a dream. It has to be a dream. I fell asleep without realising it. Did I crash and fall into a coma? Cant be real.”

  Alix was feeling similar thoughts. He decided it would be better to discuss them than drive himself mad trying to figure it out for himself.

  “If this was your dream then I wouldn’t be real, and I can assure you that I am. I seem to have been stolen off the streets just like you were,” Alix said, trying to calm down the panicking Englishman before him.

  “That’s exactly the kind of thing I would expect to hear from a dream to convince me otherwise,” Leon replied.

  “Look, I’m just as freaked out as you are by all this, but it doesn’t seem to be dangerous here. They speak English, don’t they? I don’t think this is a dream, everything feels too real, but my other guesses aren’t any better.”

  “What are your other guesses, because I’m about to lose my mind if things don’t start making sense again soon.”

  “Well, it could be an elaborate prank? No, that wouldn’t make any sense. It would cost a lot of money to set up something like this, and I don’t think either of us are worth it. That same logic kind of rules out everything else. Drug experiment? Again, why waste good drugs on us?”

  “Maybe folie à deux?” Leon offered.

  “Shared hallucination? I’ve never met you before in my life so that doesn’t seem likely. How did we end up together in the first place? From our accents we live very far apart, but my phone battery is still pretty full, so I don’t see how we managed to travel so far in so short a time. Unless they were kind enough to charge it for us, but then who are ‘they’ and why did they pick us for ‘this’?”

  Before they could discuss the madness further, the forest broke and the path led them through a village, which appeared out of the trees as an explosion of colour. Alix braced for them to come to a stop but the coachmen kept the horses going, speeding past the colourfully painted houses with their golden thatch. The houses were built in a whimsical style, with curiously tall roofs reminiscent of storybook architecture. At the centre of the small village was a bustling market, full of stalls and tents. At the sound of the carriage, every pair of eyes stopped what they were doing and turned in their direction.

  “Wait…”A chill ran down Alix’s back at what he was seeing. At first glance, the people going about their shopping looked normal. They were dressed in loosely draped robes and shawls, dyed in all the colours of the forest, but as the carriage got closer, his gaze was drawn to those that had their voluminous hoods down. Sticking out of thick heads of hair were tufts of fur that looked disturbingly like ears.

  “Look at their ears!” Leon exclaimed, the sight of them finally breaking him from his crazed spiral into madness. He sounded excited, as if he had forgotten they had both just been abducted from their homes to this strange land. He pressed his face against the window, and the eyes that followed them grew wider at what they saw. They were as transfixed by the sight of their passing as Alix and Leon were with them.

  “Are those…tails?” Alix asked, pointing at what he had at first mistaken for more draped fabrics.

  “Incredible,” Leon whispered once he spotted the black and white striped protrusions curling out from under hems and around legs. “They look like foxes. I think this confirms that I’ve actually died and this is some sort of weird heaven or limbo. I’m sorry Alix if that means you are just a figment of my imagination or if we both died at the same time, maybe I was in a car accident or something, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “If that helps you handle whatever this is better then go for it.” Alix was beginning to think the same thing. Had a car run him down in the street? Was that the black shape that had rushed towards him? “I don’t think they are foxes though. Maybe racoons?” Alix replied. He cringed internally when he heard himself.

  What the hell am I talking about? Foxes? Racoons? What is this? Some sort of Furry village? Impossible!

  “Such a shame, I had just won the lottery as well,” Leon lamented. The village slipped back into the trees but he continued to gaze out the window as the miles passed them by.