An Autobiographical History

Chapter 2: How I Actually Got Here In The First Place

It was a windy autumnal morning, roughly in the middle of a month we call October. I was taking the train back to the university after visiting my parents for a weekend, listening to my music while reading one of the numerous textbooks that I had packed into my bags, as I had to study for my degree in, essentially, the design of spacecraft. It was coming up to the final semester of the course, and all in all it was going rather well.

That, of course, was when it happened. I don't know what it was exactly, but it began with a feeling of unease and a tingling in my extremities. Everything began to feel strangely floaty , before a wall of some sort of golden light ripped through the carriage. The windows shattered inwards, shards of whatever they're made of ripping through the air, tearing clothing and flesh alike. The carriage was just settling back down, before it was ripped into the air, twisting and rolling as it went. As I turned in mid air, I could see the ground rushing up to meet us through the holes that used to be windows, my phone just starting to play Mad World by Gary Jules, and I'm pretty sure that my last thoughts before everything went black were something along the lines of 'Huh. How appropriate'

To this day I still have no idea what actually happened back then, but having tried all I can to research the phenomenon, the closest I have come is old local legends, that talk of giant monsters falling from a sky burning gold, which sounds similar to how I got here, but I am still no closer to understanding it, let alone fabricating a way to return home. At least I got stuck somewhere nice, if a bit windy. Back to the story, then.

I awoke, bleary-eyed and confused, head driving me crazy with pain, writhing on the ground, on what I first thought was some sort of road or path, as I could feel gritty rock under me and could see nothing but fuzzy grey, with some tiny specks of green. As my vision gradually cleared, however, I realised that I instead appeared to be in a small crater in the surface of some sort of high mountain-side path, just wide enough that I hadn't fallen down the terrifyingly deep valley alongside.

Scrambling to my feet, I looked around in panic, based on the principle that when you survive a train crash in a bit of English countryside, you're supposed to stay in the English countryside. It was at the point when I was getting desperate enough to start pleading at the sky that I saw a flipping great city perched atop the mountain's peak, the path spiralling up to meet a set of large doors. Overwhelmed with happiness at the thought of shelter and rescue, and scolding myself for having not immediately having noticed a bloody great city right next to me, I began the run up the mountain. Said run then immediately collided face-first with the mountain when I tripped over something else I should have noticed - my backpack. Scolding myself for being an unobservant idiot once again and still not wondering how in the hell the backpack and I got here in the first place, I quickly packed away the couple of loose books strewn around, set the pack on my back, and started back up the path.