Cold ground. That was the first thing you noticed — damp earth pressing into your back, the smell of moss and something sweeter underneath it, like flowers that didn't grow anywhere you recognized. You opened your eyes to a canopy of leaves in colors that didn't exist back home: deep violets and burnished coppers, threaded through with a faint, impossible shimmer, as if the trees themselves had been dipped in something molten and left to cool.

You sat up slowly, waiting for the dizziness to pass, for the world to resolve into something familiar. It didn't. The forest around you was too quiet, and too loud at once — no traffic hum, no distant voices, but a low chorus of insect song in a key you'd never heard, and underneath it, something that might have been a heartbeat too large to belong to anything you knew.

Your phone was dead. Not out of battery — dead, the screen cracked with a spiderweb of frost across glass that had been warm in your pocket minutes ago. There was no time stamp. No bars. No home to call.

You got to your feet, brushing damp leaves from your clothes, and that was when you saw them — footprints pressed deep into the soil a few yards off, three-toed and taloned, each print easily the length of your forearm. Fresh. And they weren't alone; a groove was carved beside them, shallow and long, like something heavy had dragged itself — or been dragged — through the undergrowth.

A shadow passed overhead, too large and too fast to be a bird, gone before you could look up properly. Then another. Then a third, close enough that the wind of its passing stirred the canopy and sent a shower of strange leaves down around you, and for one full second, the sun disappeared behind something with wings.

They didn't slow. They didn't look down. Whatever they were, they had somewhere else to be — and you were still just a girl standing very still in a forest that was not, by any measure you had, part of your world anymore.