A month had passed.
No—wait.
A month and a half?
Two months?
Bruce honestly wasn't sure anymore.
Time in this world didn't behave like time was supposed to. There were no clocks. No phones. No calendar apps. Days didn't have names; they had patterns. Cold mornings. Fire. Hunger. Warmth. Sleep. Rain. Repeat. Sometimes snow again. Sometimes mud. Time passed because his mother kept moving and because he kept waking up a little bigger than before.
That was all he had to go on.
His world—the entire world—was the cottage.
One room.
Wood everywhere.
A fireplace that popped and crackled and tried its best. A bed his mother had built herself from logs and grass and stubbornness. A broken table with a wobble that never got fixed. Two wooden chairs that were never in the same place twice. An iron pot—metal, blessed metal—always either boiling water or threatening to burn something important.
Clay pots lined the wall, some half-buried in earth. Food lived in those pots. That was important knowledge. Eggs went in. Dried plants. Whatever else his mother trusted not to rot immediately.
And then there were the chickens.
Seven hens.
One rooster.
Bruce had learned their personalities by sound alone.
The rooster was a tyrant. Loud. Arrogant. Convinced the entire universe existed to hear him announce the passage of time. The hens were practical. Busy. Opinionated. They wandered the floor pecking at tiny moving things—silverfish, beetles, whatever dared to exist at ground level—and occasionally stared at Bruce like he was either sacred or stupid.
Sometimes both.
Beyond that—there was outside.
Bruce knew outside only as a rectangle of light and cold through the door.
When he'd arrived in this world, outside had been snow. Real snow. Cold enough that even the fire felt like it was arguing with it rather than winning. Now outside was mostly rain. Mud. Wind that slipped through cracks in the walls and found his ears no matter how carefully his mother wrapped him.
Green existed out there too. He knew that because he smelled it when his mother came back—wet leaves, bark, moss, the sharp tang of something alive that didn't care about people.
No one else came.
Not once.
No Rob. No guards. No voices. No footsteps.
Just his mother leaving, returning, leaving again.
And on the wall—scratched carefully into the wood near the hearth—there was a number.
904
Next to it were marks. Lines. Maybe words.
Bruce stared at it a lot.
He had no idea what it meant.
Nine-zero-four.
A year?
A count?
A warning?
Was this really the year 904?
Had he actually gone back in time?
That seemed… absurd.
And yet—nothing else made sense.
There were no modern things. No plastic. No electricity. No distant highway hum. No airplanes. No radio waves whispering nonsense into the air. Just wind, fire, animals, and people who spoke like English had been put through a rock tumbler and left there for a few centuries.
And those visions—he hadn't forgotten them.
The Godling. The stars. Humanity fractured. The future rushing past like a storm of metal and fire. He had been told—tasked—with something enormous.
Unite humanity.
Grow fast.
Be kind.
But how was he supposed to do anything when his entire universe was a cottage and some chickens?
He looked down at himself.
Well—felt down at himself.
He knew who he was.
He was Bruce.
Bruce Redford.
Dead cop. Loyal friend. Ugly man with an egg-shaped head and a heart too big for his own good.
Except… apparently now he was Lillipad.
That's what his mother called him.
Or her.
That part was still… unclear.
Supposedly a girl.
But how did you even know that?
Bruce had absolutely no idea how babies were sorted into "boy" and "girl." Maybe that was something you found out later. Maybe when you grew older and things… happened.
He thought for a moment, very seriously.
Maybe once I grow tits, I'll know.
Yes.
That seemed logical.
He nodded to himself, pleased with the conclusion.
For now, he wore an itchy wool dress that his mother had made far too early and far too enthusiastically. On top of that, a little coat. Warm. Scratchy. He hated it, but he hated being cold more. There were also soft furry slippers and tiny gloves, which he actually liked. They made his hands look like useless little paws.
Boy or girl—whatever.
He was warm.
That counted.
And somehow—despite everything—it hadn't taken him long to do things.
He could lift his head now.
He could sit up.
And he could… sort of crawl.
Not well. Not elegantly. More like a determined loaf inching itself across the floor.
Still.
It was fast.
He remembered Frank's kids. Sarah's kids. How long it had taken them to do anything useful. They'd mostly just lain there, screaming at the ceiling like it owed them money.
Bruce was different.
And he knew why.
Inside him, always, there was the second heartbeat.
The light-heart.
He felt it when he focused. A quiet pulse beneath the softer thump of his flesh heart. He had tried—carefully—to push it into his hands.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
And each time, he thought he saw something. A faint glow. Barely there. Like breath fogging on glass.
White.
Then exhaustion.
Not "I need a nap" exhaustion.
"I have committed a crime against my own existence" exhaustion.
It wiped him out completely.
So yes—he had power.
Some kind of healing power.
But he had no idea what it could do. Or how to use it safely. Or whether using it too much would just… kill him again.
Which would be embarrassing.
The worst part of all of this wasn't the cold. Or the confusion. Or even being named Lillipad.
It was that he couldn't talk.
Not really.
He couldn't ask his mother questions.
He couldn't explain who he was.
He couldn't even begin to explain that he didn't understand a single damn word she was saying.
She spoke Norse.
Real Norse.
Old. Rolling. Heavy.
He tried to listen. He really did. But languages were hard even when you had a grown adult brain and a notebook. Right now he had a baby brain, milk mouth, and exactly zero notebooks.
God damn it.
So Bruce sat there—Lillipad, baby, whatever he was—watching the chickens, listening to the fire, staring at the number on the wall, feeling his mother's footsteps when she moved outside, and wondering what kind of insane cosmic joke this was.
He had questions.
So many questions.
And absolutely no one to ask.
Except the chickens.
The chickens, however, were deeply unhelpful.