“Is that all you can remember?” says Blain.

I nod, leaning back against the pillows.

“My guess is that the portal opened up under the water as you fell,” she says.

The windows rattle as another ash storm sweeps across the plain. Through the grimy glass, the distant volcano looks greyer than it is, the fiery crater a dull red.

I rub my temples, a sharp pain throbbing in my head. It hurts like I've cracked my skull open. I think I'm going insane.

One moment, I was on a bridge, drunk out of my mind and thinking of ending my life, and now, I sit in this ruined tower in the middle of a barren plain.

This isn't the only house here, I soon find, as I pull the dusty curtains away from the window. Ragged looking buildings jut from the ashen ground, some so crooked that I fear they might topple over. The architecture is unlike anything I've ever seen. They are not made of bricks, nor stone, but fashioned from hollowed out tree trunks, raising their grotesque heads high above the current of dust-choked winds.

Down below across the ground, rivers of lava flow, slow and steady, burning their way through molten rocks. Their red glow lights up the starless night. I can only assume it's night time. There is no way to tell what time of the day it is when the sky is overcast with clouds and smoke.

Blain rises from her chair and brings me another cup of that strong drink she gave me when I first woke up. “Here. Have some more. It'll ease the headache.”

It burns as it goes down, but it does ease my pain. “Thank you, once again.”

With an offhanded nod, she leans over to take my empty cup.

Her grey tank top is stretched thin over her body. She is lean yet strong, all hard lines and sharp angles as though hewn from stone. There are shadows under her weary eyes like smeared kohl, septum ring gleaming silver in the low light. Wavy, dark hair ripples behind her as she shuffles around in the kitchen. As she gets a fire going, the light of it casts a tall silhouette across the walls.

There is a sort of rugged allure about her that is hard to look away from.

Though when she found me collapsed by that dry lake, she had given me the fright of my life. I have never screamed louder than I did then, when I opened my eyes and found myself staring into the many eyes of a human-sized, insectile creature.

The inhabitants of this ash plain don such extravagant helmets and equally strange gear when they step outside in the middle of a storm. Blain has given me a set of her own outfit, though I'm still having a hard time getting a hold of my surroundings. I get up from the bed.

“So how do I find another time portal to take me home?” I ask.

Blain looks up from stirring a pot of soup with a wooden ladle. “You can't.”

“What?”

“You cannot just find another portal. They do not occur naturally.”

I give her a blank stare.

Sighing, she sets the ladle aside and sprinkles in some pepper. “You see, the kind of portal you fell through is created when the very fabric of time and space is ripped apart from the impact of a paradox occuring somewhere. Some sort of space-time-clusterfuck must have happened on your end to open one up in the first place.”

My head reels from even trying to comprehend that. I sink into a rickety chair that groans underneath me.

“I can take you back to your time, if you want,” she says.

If you want? Of course I want to go back.

“So you can travel through time too?” I ask.

She nods. “In a much more comfortable and precise way than plummeting through reality-shattering gateways.”

A few moments later, she places a steaming iron bowl before me. It's a thick soup of some kind, and though the aroma is delicious, I cannot quite tell what it's really made from.

“Eat,” says Blain in that nonchalant way of hers, as if this is just another Tuesday. “Falling through a time portal can alter your state of being in ways that are unimaginable.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, the possibilities are endless. Time flows strangely inside a portal. You could've aged seventy years, or turned into a baby, you could die, be brought to life again, then die again, or maybe, if you are very lucky, you come out unchanged!”

I stare at my own limbs. I don't think I've changed much--except for the awful, skull-splitting headache. Well, I must be very lucky then.

I look at the food. I don't know which meal of the day this is supposed to be.

“What day is it?” I ask. “Or rather, what year?”

Blain sets down her own bowl and takes a seat opposite from me. She roots around in her pocket and takes out an old pocket watch, it's face cracked.

“6 o'clock in the evening. 30th of September, year 5043 AD. Tuesday,” she says. “Though for the rest of the folk of this village, it's the year 1179 after the Apocalypse.”

My spoon lands on the table with a loud clang.

The corner of her mouth twitches, a ghost of a smile, and she hands the spoon back to me. “Yeah. The world couldn't take our shit anymore and blew up. Big deal. But you know what's worse? Cold soup. So hurry up and eat.”

I eat in silence. The soup warms me up, the ache in my limbs easing off, but it does nothing to the storm that's churning inside.

After dinner, I find my strength to walk around the tower and explore my surroundings. I pick up my jacket from where it hangs on a hook and shrug it on as a damp chill settles into the air.

A light rain patters against the windows, just enough to wet the layers of ash and dust. It's a rare occurrence in these parts. Voices holler outside. Figures dance in the rain, though still armour-clad and masked.

The raindrops bleach the rocks they fall upon, steam and hiss as they hit the rivers of lava.

I find myself longing for rain too, but not this kind. I want to feel the cold water hit my face, sharp and crisp, and the smell of earth flooding my senses. The feel of grass under my toes. I want to jump in puddles, though I've never done that even as a child. But right now the urge is overwhelming.

Blain lounges in what looks like a couch from the Victorian era, though it retains none of its glory that it may have once possessed. She has offered to take me out to have a look around, but there is nothing to do until the rain stops. I look around indoors.

The tower room is cramped, every surface cluttered, most of the windows boarded up. She has many strange things lying around, artefacts that are certainly not from this smoking rubble of a world.

A dagger with an ivory handle. A rotary phone. A longbow. A typewriter. A laptop from the late 2000's. A masquerade mask leers down at me from one of the shelves, though its neighbour, a ghoulish bird-faced plague mask sits soberly and watches me with sightless eyes. A set of rusted surgical instruments. A radio. And rows upon rows of books. Some ancient tomes, some modern magazines. A tangled mess of a VHS cassette hangs from the top shelf, its tape unravelled. Above it all hangs a solar powered lamp from some far fair future.

It's a junkyard. It's a museum of time. Perhaps both.

I stand for a long moment, eyes glued to the chaotic display, artefacts of so many different times piled up together. Strangely enough, it makes me feel at peace somehow. Seeing all these things arrayed before me, I'm now certain that I'm not going insane. This is really happening.

This isn't a bad dream.

But I wish it was.

I wish I could wake up and find myself back in my apartment, late for my class, hungover, my phone blowing up with texts.

I wish I never went to that bridge that night.

✧✧✧✧

My breath fogs up against the glass visor of my helmet. The boots make my feet feel leaden, the protective gear too heavy to move with ease, and the pair of oxygen packs strapped to my back doesn't help. Blain hauls a dozen of empty oxygen packs in both hands as though they weigh nothing.

I stumble after her as she leads me through the small settlement of ash-plain dwellers. It's named Zarco.

Calling it a village seems too generous. There are only about fifty or so towers. Upon a raised patch of land in the distance, there stand a few tents, their flaps fluttering in the wind.

“That's the marketplace,” says Blain. “Closed. Well, it's pretty late.”

People on the streets are scarce, and those few who care to exchange pleasantries address Blain as ‘sorceress’.

Or that's what the translation device set into my helmet interprets.

Sorceress.

I look at her, though I doubt she can really see my questioning look underneath this insectile mask.

She understands me anyway. She laughs and shakes her head. “For the folk of Zarco, travelling through space and time is a thing of the past. Ancient magic. They've heard their grandmamas tell stories about it. They called me that when I first showed up here, and I just sort of rolled with it.”

The purpose of this trip soon becomes clear to me as the tall grey structures in the distance loom closer.

It's an oxygen plant. Rust gnaws away on the metal fences, the sign knocked askew. The oxygen tanks stand beneath a thick layer of red ash. Dull, lifeless creepers coil and twist at their feet. Like the rest of this dying land, decay lays thick and silent over this place.

I doubt the plant is functional. Blain doesn't. She goes ahead, and pushes aside a curtain of drab brown leaves to reveal a button. She slams it with all her strength, and with a buzz, it stutters into life, glowing neon green. The only glimpse of green I've encountered here up till now.

“What happens if you walk around without one of these?” I ask as I sit on the ground, the weight of my oxygen packs half pulling me down. “I was fine when you found me.”

“You were,” she agrees. “Technically, you can walk around without them, for a while. But long term exposure to the smoke is what's harmful for you.”

She puts down the oxygen packs, connects one to a port, and turns a lever. We watch the meter on the pack go up, the pointer slowly rising above the red zone. When it's fully refilled, she connects another. Then another. Then another.

We sit and we watch, because there is nothing more to do, here at the end of the world.

“Is this the end of everything?” I ask her, suddenly sure she knows the answer to any question I might have, this armour-clad, all-knowing sorceress who can leap through time.

She shakes her head. “Quite the contrary. This is just another beginning. One of the many. In a few thousand years, this land will cool, and towns and cities will rise. Nations will be rebuilt, history rewritten. The cycle will repeat until...say, the sun blows up and swallows earth whole.”

“And what comes after that?” I ask.

Blain turns her head toward me, and after a moment, I realise she's laughing under her helmet. It's hard to tell, but there is no mistaking the sound, so human, yet so alien in this land that's hanging on the verge of death.

“You talk as if I know everything,” she says.

“You sure look like you've been through everything.”

Laughter again. “I'll take that as a compliment.” Then a pause follows as she fits another empty pack. “Truth be told, I haven't seen everything.”

“But you said you can travel through time.”

“There is a limit on how far I can go,” she says. “After all, I cannot afford to push poor Adam too far.”

“Who's Adam?”

There is a fondness in her voice as she speaks. “The reason I'm stranded on this junkyard.”