The ceiling was wrong.

That was the first coherent thought Aldric Vayne, Crown Prince of Vaelrun, managed to assemble - not where am I, not how did I arrive here, but simply: this ceiling is wrong. Low. Popcorn-textured. A single bulb hanging from it like a question mark. He lay still on the floor - not a bed, not a pallet, a floor - and catalogued the rest of it the way he'd been trained to catalogue unfamiliar rooms. Exits. Threats. Points of advantage. There was one door at the top of a staircase. There were no windows. The air tasted stale and faintly sweet in a way he had no name for. Something hummed in the walls. He did not know what.

He sat up. Slowly, because his body was heavier than it should be - wrong in a way that registered as deeply, viscerally wrong, like wearing someone else's armor badly fitted. He raised one hand and examined it. Soft. Uncallused. The hand of a man who had never held a sword, and the knowledge of that landed in his chest like a stone dropping into water. His sword. He did not have it. He was not wearing it. He was wearing - he looked down - a grey garment of unfamiliar construction, too loose, gathered at the waist with a cord, and a shirt printed with some sort of creature he could not identify. Someone had worn this before him. Worn it often.

He stood. He stood precisely the way he always stood - spine straight, shoulders back, weight balanced - and if the posture looked absurd in this body, in this room, he was not in a position to know that yet. He turned in a slow circle. There was a desk against one wall, covered in objects he could not classify. A large glowing rectangle sat dormant on it. There were garments on the floor. There were food containers - empty, crumpled, labeled with bright colors - stacked near a small waste bin. There was a pillow on the bed that had been shaped to resemble a woman. He looked at it for two seconds and then directed his attention elsewhere, permanently.

The room belonged to someone called Kyle. He had gathered this from the containers, from a paper near the glowing rectangle with letters and numbers on it he did not yet have context for, from something written on the inside of the collar of a jacket he'd found draped over the desk chair. Kyle M. It told him nothing and everything simultaneously. Someone lived here. Someone lived here and it was, apparently, now him, inside a body that was theirs and in a situation for which he had no precedent, no framework, no counsel. He was alone. He had been alone before. He had simply never before been alone without knowing what country he was standing in.

He breathed. Even pressure. Four counts. He was trained for crisis. He was trained for ambush and betrayal and rooms full of people trying to kill him with their faces arranged into pleasantness. He was not trained for this, but the mechanisms of composure did not distinguish between types of catastrophe. He pressed his hands flat against the desk and breathed and let the discipline settle over him like armor, because it was all he had and he was not going to waste it.

The stairs creaked.

He turned before the sound fully registered - weight shifted back, body half-angled toward cover, eyes fixed on the door at the top of the stairs - and then he caught himself, because there was no cover, and because he had no sword, and because whatever instincts lived in Kyle's body had not reacted at all, which was somehow the most disturbing thing that had happened in the last ten minutes.

The door opened. Light spilled down. A figure descended - a woman, older, moving with the unhurried ease of someone who had navigated these stairs a thousand times, carrying a tray bearing a plate of some kind of breaded meat and a bright green liquid he could not identify. Household staff, his mind filed, almost automatically. The bearing, the domesticity, the food - some kind of attendant, then. He did not know what arrangement she operated under or how this household functioned but she had come down here bringing food and that suggested at minimum that she was not a threat. He straightened further, if that was possible, and inclined his head.

"My lady." The words came out precisely as he intended them - formal, composed, the voice of a man in full command of his circumstances, which he was not, but she did not need to know that. "I find myself - somewhat disoriented. I would not trouble you, but I confess I do not yet have clear understanding of where I am or how I came to be here." A pause. Measured. Careful. "I would be grateful for whatever you are able to tell me. If it is not an imposition."

The cold hits differently here.

Aldric Vayne - Kyle, he reminds himself, the name still foreign and blunt in his mind - stands on the small rectangle of concrete outside the back door and lets autumn do what autumn does. It is not so different from Vaelrun's autumn in the narrowest sense: the light goes pale and thin, the air sharpens, things die quietly and without ceremony. He finds this almost comforting. It is one of the few things in this world that requires no translation.

He has been here one week. He knows this because he has counted the darknesses. Seven of them, long and poor in sleep, spent on a sleeping platform that is lumpier than anything he has ever used and significantly less restful.

His mother came on the third day. He had not been expecting a mother and the adjustment was significant, though he believes his expression gave nothing away. She is a small woman with kind eyes and the particular brand of worry that belongs to people who are used to worrying about someone who will not admit to needing it. She brought food in containers and touched his face and said something about a doctor. He told her he was well. He said it with enough certainty that she almost believed him. He could tell the moment she decided to. He has always been able to tell. His sister came with her and was louder and asked more questions and he managed those too, one at a time, like doors he could close behind him. They believe he struck his head. He has not corrected this. It is the most functional explanation available and he is not in the habit of discarding functional.

What he has not managed - what sits behind his sternum like a stone he cannot dislodge - is the larger question. The one he allows himself exactly as much as he can then shut away again. He does not know where Vaelrun is from here. He does not know if here and there exist in the same world or adjacent ones or in some arrangement for which he has no framework. He does not know who is managing the eastern border negotiations in his absence, or whether his absence has been noted as absence or as something more permanent. He does not let himself hold that thought long.

He came outside for air and for the specific purpose of standing upright under an open sky, which the basement does not permit and which he has discovered he requires more than he anticipated. The street is quiet. Vehicles move at the far end of it with the easy confidence of things that are completely normal here and remain entirely strange to him. He has watched them. He has not yet determined how they function. He has added it to the list.

It is while he is standing there- hands loose at his sides, spine straight, wearing the sweatpants and the shirt which he has again tucked in because there is no version of him that does not tuck in a shirt- that he sees them. Next door. The neighbor. He has been aware of them at the edges of the week, the way he is aware of everything: quietly, continuously, filed. They are taking out what he has come to understand is refuse, dragging the large wheeled container toward the road in the particular mundane way of people who have done this every week for years and will do it every week after. There is something almost enviable about that. Continuity. Rhythm. Knowing where you are well enough to have a routine.

He considers going back inside. He considers it seriously, for approximately four seconds. Then Aldric Vayne, Crown Prince of Vaelrun, adjusts his posture - already correct, now more deliberate - and crosses the strip of dead grass between properties with the even unhurried pace of a man approaching a court he has already decided how to read. He stops at a conversational distance. Not too close. He has manners, whatever else he has lost.

"Good morning." His voice is level, the cadence careful in the way it has been for a week now - every sentence constructed a half-beat longer than natural, leaving himself room to hear his own words land. "I am - Kyle. Next door." A pause so brief it almost isn't one, the name still sitting wrong in his mouth. "I've not had occasion to speak with you yet. I find I have a question, if you're willing." His eyes, steady and rather more intent than small talk typically calls for, move to them with the same quality of attention he would give a general describing the state of a campaign. "How fare things, in this part of the city? The borders - the surrounding areas." A slight tightening at the corner of his jaw. He knows, dimly, that this is not how people speak here. He does not know what the correct version is. He proceeds anyway. "I've been - away. For some time. I find I am short on current information."

It had been seven days.

Seven days since Aldric Vayne, Crown Prince of Vaelrun, had opened his eyes on a floor that smelled like synthetic cheese and something he could not name and would not try to. Seven days since he had taken full inventory of the room — exits, three; threats, zero visible, several probable; objects, innumerable and largely incomprehensible — and decided that composure was the only currency he had left. He had maintained it. Barely. The glowing rectangle on the desk had nearly broken him on day two, when it had emitted a sound like a dying animal and he had knocked it off the desk and then spent twenty minutes deciding whether to apologize to it. He had not apologized to it. He was not going to start apologizing to furniture.

The family had been told he hit his head. He did not know who had decided this — presumably the people who lived in the upper floors, who moved around above him in patterns he had started to map. A woman who knocked on the door once a day and left food. A man who spoke loudly about something called a concussion. They looked at him with a specific kind of tired concern he recognized from court physicians, which told him the story was holding. He had not contradicted it. He did not have a better one.

The glowing rectangle — the computer, he had learned the word, he was learning words, it was slow and humiliating work — had not stopped making noise. There was a program on it. A grid of small moving text that refreshed constantly, emitting soft chimes, demanding responses he did not know how to give. A communication device of some kind. He had gathered that the name Kyle was attached to it. He had gathered that many people were attempting to reach Kyle and were becoming, based on the tone of the text, impatient.

He had read the messages. All of them. Several times. They were the most confusing documents he had encountered in his life, and he had once received a declaration of war written entirely in political euphemism.

xX_GRIM_SIGMA_Xx: bro where are you. server vote is tonight xX_GRIM_SIGMA_Xx: KYLE xX_GRIM_SIGMA_Xx: did you die BasedPillDispenser: he probably coped himself into a coma lmaooo BasedPillDispenser: jk jk but also NPC_Slayer99: he's been offline a WEEK this is actual ghosting behavior xX_GRIM_SIGMA_Xx: kyle your mom said you hit your head?? dude get on when you can we're about to lose mod privileges on the other server NPC_Slayer99: foids do this too btw. disappear for a week and act like nothing happened BasedPillDispenser: this is off topic but I got rejected again NPC_Slayer99: L BasedPillDispenser: yeah

Aldric had read this exchange four times. He understood approximately half of it and had decided the rest was not worth decoding. He had moved the rectangle slightly to the left so it was no longer directly in his eyeline. The sounds continued. He had found a way to make them quieter. He considered this his greatest achievement of the week and thought about it with some private satisfaction when nothing else was going well, which was often.

There were also small pictures that appeared unbidden at the edge of the screen. They advertised things — objects, services, a great many women who wanted, apparently, to speak with him specifically and urgently. He had closed fourteen of them this morning. Three more had appeared. He was beginning to understand this was not a problem he could solve through persistence alone, and the understanding sat badly with him, because persistence was most of what he had.

He was sitting on the floor beside the desk — the chair was built for a posture his spine refused to adopt — back straight, hands on his knees, running his daily assessment. One week. He was fed. He was housed. He was not dead, which in his experience was a meaningful baseline. He did not know how to get home. He did not know if home was still there to go back to. He allowed himself exactly as much of that thought as he could close the door on again, and this morning the door was heavy, and he was tired, and the rectangle was making noise again, and then he heard footsteps on the stairs.

The door opened. He turned his head.

She stood in the doorway with the expression of someone who had been doing this reluctantly all week — coming down, absorbing whatever she found, carrying it back up with her. Kyle's sister. His sister, technically, for as long as he was in this body. He did not know her name yet. He had been waiting for someone to say it in front of him so he would not have to ask and reveal, again, the full size of what he did not know. She looked at the room — at the dark, at the glow of the screen, at him sitting on the floor with the posture of a man holding court — and her face did something complicated.

He held her gaze steadily. Then the rectangle chimed again. A new message: kyle if you don't respond I'm telling the mods you left voluntarily. Something in his chest made a decision before his composure could stop it. He had been in this room for seven days. He had managed alone, and he was going to keep managing, but the screen was making noise and the pictures kept appearing and somewhere in Vaelrun his kingdom was either standing or it wasn't, and he was sitting on a floor in a body that could not do a single push-up, and he was going to need help with at least one of these problems.

He said, with all the careful control of a man who has never asked for anything in his life and is not going to start doing it poorly: "You understand how this device works. The computer." A pause. His jaw was tight. "I need you to show me. There are messages — many messages. I don't know what most of them want and I need to know what most of them want." His eyes moved briefly to the screen, then back to her. "Please."