Chapter 005 - Why Wouldn't There Be Two Moons?

  Valerie’s question seemed to hang in the quiet room. Her professional gaze swept the scene again, cataloging the details with a practiced calm against her growing dread. Tori was at the bedside, her hands still emitting the soft light of healing magic, her target was their patient. The man, clearly unconscious, with an ugly bruise forming on his face despite Tori's best efforts. And then there was the book. A heavy, library owned medical text splayed open over the floor, its cover bent at unnatural angles, pages stained with damp splatters of what could only be blood.

  “Tori…” Valerie repeated, her voice projecting a firmer tone, laced with a dawning horror she fought to keep at bay. Deliberately keeping her eyes away from the patient and from Tori. "What happened to the book?"

  Tori pulled her hands back from Mark's face, the healing light faded to nothing through her glove. "It's... nothing. I dropped it." Her voice was brittle, the unending confidence she usually wore as a second skin was gone, replaced by brittle dismissal.

  "You dropped it," Valerie stated, not as a question, but as an observation that didn't align with the evidence. Stepping further into the room and ensuring the door had closed with a comforting click, her eyes finally left the book to meet Tori's. "With enough force to bend the cover, and the blood?"

  "It happened so quickly!" Tori snapped, her composure cracked as the embers of her rage threatened to reignite. She wrapped her arms protectively around herself, facing away from both Valerie and the man in the cot. "It wasn't my fault."

  Valerie remained silent, the vague admission like a poison. The pattern was too familiar, the aftermath of another Tori's rages, the cause of many quiet coverups, but never involving a patient.

  "He's a monster, Valerie," Tori whispered, her voice thick with a mixture of fear and loathing. She finally turned back, her dark brown eyes filled with tears, haunted by the memory of the dreamscape. "You don't understand what he did. The things in his head... he's not what he seems."

  "A monster?" Valerie asked, her gaze shifting to the still figure in the bed. He looked like any other mundane, older than any she had seen, just as physically weak and helpless as anyone else of his level. "Tori, what are you talking about?"

  "He broke my memories," she accused, her voice rising with renewed anger. "That beast attack... back in Tethys. The one I told you about." Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. "The slaughter, the beasts... he made it all pour out! I wasn’t ready! Not prepared!"

  Valerie listened, her expression keeping as neutral as possible while she processed the torrent of accusations. She knew parts of Tori’s story, the Tethys beast attack, it was something Tori rarely spoke of, and with good reason. Most of the limited number of survivors were never the same. The thought that this stranger, that they had somehow weaponized that specific memory was deeply unsettling, but it didn’t change the scene in front of her. A part of her ached for her friend, the need to offer some comfort, but for the patient her professionalism was an unyielding wall and this was beyond what could be wished away.

  “Tori, I believe that something terrified you,” Valerie said, her voice soft but firm, a tone she often used in the most critical moments of surgery. “But whatever happened, he is our patient. He’s unconscious and injured. I need you to focus, the here and now, with me and tell me what actually happened.”

  The directness of the question, stripped of any emotion, seemed to finally break through Tori’s simmering rage, she wasn’t judging them, she needed answers. Her shoulders slumped in momentary defeat, the anger draining away leaving shame. Fresh tears welled in her eyes, cutting new clean tracks through the grime and sweat on her face.

  “I hit him,” she admitted, the words barely a whisper. “When I woke up… the dream, the pain… It was so real. He looked right at me, and I just… I screamed, I had hit him, I had to protect myself.” She gestured vaguely towards the door. “Silas…He stopped me.”

  Valerie’s composure faltered, her eyebrows shooting up in surprise.

  Silas? The quiet man who cleaned the floors?

  Seeing Valerie’s shock, Tori rushed to justify herself, her voice regaining a sliver of its defensive edge. “I know it was wrong, Valerie, I know! But you didn’t see it! He’s a monster, I swear it. I may have been partially in the wrong for… for losing my temper, but he is the reason it happened.”

  A tired, raspy voice cut through the tension from the cot. “The only real monster… there… was you.”

  Tori and Valerie both snapped their heads toward Mark. His eyes were open, obviously clouded with layers of pain, but they were focused. He struggled and pushed himself up slightly on his elbows, a pained groan escaping his lips.

  “Look, I’ve no idea where I am, or what the hell is going on,” he continued, his words slurred but coherent. “And I really don’t care about your excuses. Lets just… move to the part where someone explains anything?”

  Tori looked aghast, stunned into silence that he could not only speak but was lucid enough to be so dismissive of his own actions, and her own. Almost silently she managed a whisper, “sorry,” to whom it was aimed or who may have heard, she wasn’t sure other than it needed to be said.

  It was Valerie who reacted, her professional curiosity overriding her shocked expression. She shuffled closer to the bed, her eyes assessing him with a new interest. "You can speak," she said, a note of genuine surprise in her voice. "Your recovery is… faster than I could have predicted. Dimensional stress usually takes days to clear this much."

  "Finally, a bit of good news, is there a but?" Mark mumbled, his head falling back against the pillow, his energy spent. The world was still a painful, confusing mess, but the simple act of speaking his mind, of pushing back against the madness, felt like a small, necessary victory.

  Valerie’s professional curiosity was now fully engaged. She pulled a chair over to the bedside, matching the one Tori had used earlier. “It is a good sign,” she affirmed, her calm demeanor returning for show. “But it also gives more reason to question any chain of events.”

  Mark ignored the comment, his mind fixated on the one thing that broke every rule of his known world. He pushed past the lingering pain in his head. “in the forest… The sky was wrong.” He met Valerie’s gaze, then flicked his eyes towards Tori, who was now standing rigidly by the closed door. “Why were there two moons? Or even why was one of them green?”

  Valerie and Tori exchanged a quick, bewildered look. The question was so fundamentally strange it took them a moment to process. Memory loss wouldn’t account for that kind of gap in the obvious, and that wasn’t related to dimensional stress, maybe the blunt force impact?

  “What do you mean?” Valerie asked, her brow furrowed in genuine confusion. “Why wouldn’t there be two moons?”

  That was a simple, matter of fact answer. The certainty of it hitting Mark harder than the imp creature's flaming branch. A cold dread, far worse and different than the life and death fear he’d felt in the forest, slowly consumed the moment. They weren’t joking. They truly believed it.

  He let out a shaky, humorless laugh that turned into a grunt of pain. “Okay. Okay.” He took a shallow breath, trying to organize his scattered thoughts. “So, probably not a hoax, at least not for a random project manager from Manchester…” He paused, his own words sounding insane. “Or I’ve actually, literally, fallen off the face of the Earth.”

  The casual, unthinking certainty in Valerie’s voice was the confirmation he didn’t want to hear. This wasn’t his world, not with its single familiar moon, with its boring but now very much missed grey color. The phrase fallen off the face of the Earth was just a turn of phrase, but now by accident he had made everything so much more real. Not on Earth…

  Tori, who was keeping quiet by the door, seemed to take this moment of stunned silence as an opportunity. She pushed herself gently away from the wall, a sliver of her former condescending authority returning to her voice as she sought to reclaim at least some of her professional pride, a little dignity.

  “Or,” she began, her tone still quiet, but sharp, clinical, even professional in her delivery, “the dimensional stress has simply broken your fragile mind. It’s not unheard of in rare cases, unable to cope, creating elaborate fictions to protect itself. Forgetting a moon, for instance. It would be a textbook case of delusion.”

  Valerie shot Tori a venomous scowl, her disapproval silent, carrying a warning of following that line of thought so openly after what just happened. Tori actually flinched at the glare, the moment of professional protection collapsing, akin more to office politics than a medical environment. Before her objection could be put into words, a dry, cracking laugh broke the moment, a sound completely devoid of humor that sent a fresh spike of pain through his body.

  “Trust me,” he wheezed, looking at the ceiling as if it might offer some answers. “Insanity seems a lot more appealing right now and it would be a whole lot simpler.”

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  Valerie’s attention sharpened, her focus shifting from Tori’s unprofessional jab to the specific words Mark had used moments before.

  “That was an odd phrase you use,” she said, her voice quiet and analytical. “Falling off the face of the Earth. Was it? Why would you be falling off a dead world?”

  Mark was considering madness as an option now. Dead world? From his perspective it was hours, maybe a day or two since he was microwaving pasta. The bitterness of failing to enjoy it was a perfect memory, tangible and disappointing, and completely out of line with what the professional acting woman just said.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, the words coming out sharper than he intended. “Why.. How would Earth be a dead world?”

  For the first time, Valerie seemed to be at a loss for a direct answer. She rose from her chair with a sigh, the smooth motion of a person buying a few precious seconds, thinking of a response. She walked over to where the heavy book lay sprawled on the floor. With a practiced gentleness, she picked it up, her fingers tracing the bent and broken cover with the stains of her patient's own blood.

  Taking the moment while examining the carnage, she turned and held the book out to Tori, who flinched before taking it, refusing to meet Valerie’s gaze. The exchange was silent but heavy with unspoken meaning, there was obviously something more there, maybe about the book or something else?

  Valerie turned back to Mark with her mask of professional calm. “Given that we still can’t rule out some cognitive damage from your... arrival, and the subsequent blunt impact,” she said, her eyes flicking pointedly toward Tori for a fraction of a second, “I don’t think we're the most qualified people to be giving history lessons right now. Our priority is your stability.”

  Mark stared at her, it was a deflection, an impressively masterful one at that, wrapped in the unimpeachable logic of medical prudence. She was right, of course. He thought he knew otherwise, maybe his brain was scrambled? Maybe he was misremembering. The seed of doubt, a possibility that his own mind was the problem or part of it, was unsettling and yet… He let out a slow breath, the fight momentarily draining out of him as he slumped back against the pillows.

  Seeing his brief, weary acceptance, Valerie leaned forward slightly, her tone softening. “Let’s start with something simple. We know next to nothing about you since Dawn brought you in here. What is your name?”

  Embarrassment and guilt washed over Tori’s face, she had tried to hide it, Mark didn’t miss the change in color or the quick aversion of her eyes. He could remember a grand, defiant declaration, the beach of his youth and as embers of his own anger stirred inside himself he was sure that she was there, not imagination or a tripped out mushroom. She already had his name.

  With considerable effort he forced his simmering rage aside, as it was Valerie who had asked, and her professionalism, so far, had seemed genuine. Being difficult now felt petty and counterproductive, and he really wasn’t in much physical condition to do anything.

  “Mark,” he said, his voice a little stronger this time. “Mark Shilling.” He shifted slightly, trying to find a position that didn't put pressure on his bruised arms. “I’m a Project Manager from Manchester.”

  With just the statement of his name, he felt like he had regained something lost, something dismissed by Tori. Memories or fiction, the name was his, it was something no one could take from him. It was with this he noticed the changes in the room, both his healers, the professional Valerie and Tori seemed to relax somewhat.

  It was at this moment Tori took an opportunity Mark never saw. The slight witch of her mouth as almost a smile threatened to break, if not for the layers of guilt and shame, but what followed was unexpected and in that very moment both needed and very much welcomed.

  She repeated his own words back to him, her voice quiet. "The Forger of Fictional Futures?"

  The reference was so unexpected, so absurd, regardless of what was going on at that moment, allowed a genuine laugh to erupt from Mark’s chest. The sudden movement sent a jolt of agony through his ribs, and the laugh hitched into a pained cough, but it was real. For a moment, the two of them were the only ones in on the joke, sharing a memory of sand and shadows. A dangerous moment that held a memory of triumph, sadness and despair, and now a single moment of understanding.

  Valerie just stared, her expression of professional curiosity shifting to one of complete and utter confusion as she looked back and forth between her unstable colleague and the patient who was now sharing an inside joke with his supposed assailant.

  As the laugh subsided, the sharp edges of pain returned, he was sure all this pain at least confirmed some level of real. Still, he held onto the feeling, a small, warm coal of absurdity in the cold dread of his new reality, it was something, at least. A moment of shared memory, however bizarre, with someone at that moment he hated, was better than the crushing isolation he’d felt moments before.

  Valerie was quick to move as the coughing and obvious pain, her hand glowing as she moved it over his body, provided a soothing if very unsettling feeling that allowed him to breathe easier.

  He looked at Tori, a real smile touching his lips for the first time. “Well, you announced you were some magic healer from a moon,” he explained, his voice still raspy. “Declaring that I was a project manager from a city in England didn’t seem a dramatic enough response at the time.”

  His explanation had the opposite of its intended effect. The brief moment of shared humor evaporated, replaced by an even thicker layer of confusion. Valerie and Tori exchanged another bewildered glance, their expressions asking a question neither could answer.

  It was Tori who spoke first, her brow deeply furrowed as she tried to parse his statement. The defensiveness was gone, replaced by genuine, intellectual confusion. “A moon? I’m from Enceladus. What makes you think I’m from a Moon?”

  Mark’s mind briefly ground to a screeching halt, the names were right, but the context was completely wrong perhaps? He remembered the blonde medic called Tori introducing herself in the weird dreamscape, and he was sure it was one of the moons.

  “Apologies,” he said, rubbing his head. “I was sure you said you were a healer from Tethys, but the point stands for Enceladus, too.” The names were straight out of astronomy books. Ignoring the absurdity and focusing on gathering facts. “So, where is Enceladus then?”

  “Enceladus is the Sawtooth Crossing,” Valerie answered patiently, as if explaining to a child. “You’re in its main infirmary right now.”

  “Moons again, and you don’t know of Tethys, Enceladus…” Tori said, ticking the points off on her fingers, her expression a mask of intense curiosity. “Why are you so focused on Moons?”

  There was a disconnect, there had to be. These couldn’t just be places with familiar names, in this strange wherever he was. Names had meaning and reason, names had a history, he had to know how deep the divergence went. He looked directly at them, his gaze steady as the pounding in his head seemed to grow.

  “One simple question, then,” he said. “Do you know what Saturn is?”

  Blank stares were his answer, the name appearing to mean less than nothing, not even worth following with their own question. Had he been back home, that question would have provided an obvious answer, even to the uneducated or the idiots. Maybe not the conspiracy theorists, wasn’t their latest one that Saturn was some alien gas mining or refueling station, something about lots of moving lights being space craft and not storms.

  Maybe it was language? He thought there was already something wrong with the accents, but it could be a language difference for Saturn. His mind scrambling for other connections, the settlement names could not be coincidental, and he needed this. Tethys, Enceladus... they are moons, but they are also titans! “How about Cronus?” he offered, then quickly corrected himself, thinking of the Greek. “Probably would be Kronos?”

  That provided a flicker of recognition, a spark in both their eyes. Tori seized on the familiar word, a clear sense of relief washing over her as she found solid ground in their sea of misunderstanding. It was her chance to take control of the conversation, to be the expert again.

  “Never heard it mispronounced as Cronus before, but Kronos, yes!” her voice steady and clear, taking on a lecturer’s tone. “Mount Kronos is the heart of the Titan Collective. It’s the mountain our capital city, Titan, is built upon.” She paused, letting the information sink in, a hint of pride warming her voice. “The Collective is our country or territory, it is this entire mountain range, the Iron-Tooth Mountains. Enceladus, where we are now, is just one of its settlements.”

  The pieces were clicking into place, forming a picture that was both terrifying and grotesquely logical. If they named their settlements after the moons of Saturn, and their faction after the Titans of myth, then there was a pattern. A familiar, repeating pattern he could use.

  “So, you have Titan, Tethys, and Enceladus…” he began, testing his theory. “Then you must also have places called Mimas, Rhea, Dione… maybe Iapetus and Hyperion?”

  The shared look of astonishment on the healers’ faces was all the confirmation he needed.

  “Perhaps you do have memories of this place after all, but Hyperion is wrong.” Valerie suggested, leaning forward again. Her voice was gentle, coaxing. “Maybe some level of amnesia has caused a disconnect between the names from their context. It would explain a lot.”

  Mark shook his head, the motion less painful than before. This was something he knew, something once upon a time he had enjoyed, spending time reading about and occasionally viewing for himself.

  “No, there's more to it,” he said. He looked from Valerie’s curious face to Tori’s guarded one. “The Titans were a race of gods from old myths. Kronos was their king. Tethys, Rhea, Dione, and Iapetus his siblings. But scholars had named moons after them, these all orbit the gas giant Saturn, sometimes known as Kronos.”

  He pressed on, needing them to understand. “Enceladus is one of those moons. It’s small and covered in ice, so bright it reflects almost all the sunlight that hits it. Iapetus is famous for being two-toned, with one side bright as snow and the other dark as void. Tethys is covered in craters.”

  Tori couldn’t help but jump in at the name of her former home, “I’m sure the elders would love to know our village is known for its craters!” The others were unsure how much of what she had said was supposed to be in humor.

  “If not from the myths,” Mark asked, his confidence fading quickly, “and not from a planet… then where did you get the names?”

  Tori answered first, glad to be on familiar ground again. “The founder of the Collective, she scaled the mountain where our capital now stands, carved a path herself all the way up for others to follow, she was known as The Titan,” she explained. “That’s why we’re the Titan Collective. As for the settlements…” She shrugged, a hint of her old dismissiveness returning. “History like that was optional, and in Tethys some things are more important. I know there is a pre-approved list of names for future expansion.”

  They both turned to Valerie for more info, she gave a soft, slightly embarrassed cough, a faint blush creeping up her neck. “History held little interest for me during my academy days,” she admitted. “There were… other, more distracting interests at the time.”

  Mark leaned his head back and stared at the log ceiling, processing. They didn’t know. The names of their homes, the very framework of their civilization, were just names to them, their origins either forgotten or deemed unimportant. Their history was as alien as their sky. He was well and truly, in every sense of the word, lost.