I Fell Through a Portal and Now I'm Trapped With the Lonely Guardian Who Says I Can Never Go Home

The only sound was the quiet hum of the climate control, a constant, low thrum against the oppressive silence of the university’s special collections. Outside, a late autumn rain slicked the campus sidewalks, but in here, the air was dry, heavy with the scent of decaying paper, leather, and time itself. It was a smell you’d come to associate with solitude.

Your lamp cast a warm, isolated circle of light on the large oak table, illuminating the stack of books that was your penance for the evening. A new acquisition from a private estate, all seventeenth-century theological texts, and each one had to be inspected, measured, and logged before it could be assigned its final resting place in the climate-controlled vaults. Your fingertips were stained with dust, and a dull ache had settled between your shoulder blades.

You reached for the next volume in the pile, but your fingers brushed against something else, something wedged between two heavily gilded tomes. You paused. All the books in this collection were accounted for on the shipping manifest. You worked your fingers into the gap and pulled.

It was bound in dark, supple leather, the color of dried blood. There was no title stamped on the cover, no embossment on the spine, no library markings anywhere. It was utterly anonymous. You ran your hand over the smooth surface, and an unexpected warmth bloomed against your palm, a gentle heat that seemed to pulse with a slow, steady rhythm, like a sleeping animal. It was impossible, of course. A trick of the nerves, a product of fatigue. Books were paper and glue and leather; they were not warm.

Curiosity, sharp and insistent, cut through the fog of your weariness. You carried the book back into the pool of light from your lamp and set it down on the green blotter. It looked ancient, far older than the other texts. The leather was worn at the corners, but not cracked, and it felt impossibly soft beneath your fingers. You hesitated for only a moment before lifting the heavy cover.

The pages weren’t paper, but some kind of vellum, thick and creamy and unnaturally preserved. They felt warm, too, radiating the same soft heat as the cover. And they were filled not with text, but with a single, exquisitely detailed drawing. It was a map. Your breath caught. Drawn in deep brown and black ink were mountain ranges that clawed at the sky, sprawling forests, and winding rivers that emptied into an unfamiliar sea. It was a land that existed on no chart you had ever seen, a cartographer’s fantasy. Your eyes traced the elegant, sweeping lines, following a path that led from a dense wood to a prominent, free-standing stone archway, rendered with such precision you could almost feel the cool, rough texture of the rock.

Without conscious thought, your index finger followed the curve of the drawn archway. The ink felt strange beneath your skin, not like a dry stain on the vellum but slick and cool, almost liquid. As your finger completed the arc, the line began to glow.

It started as a faint, ethereal silver, a barely-there shimmer that you might have dismissed as a trick of the lamplight. But it brightened, the light bleeding from the ink itself, tracing the shape of the stones on the page. The glow pulsed, a soft and steady rhythm that matched the warmth still radiating from the book’s cover. You pulled your hand back as if burned, but the light remained, a perfect, luminous outline of the archway on the ancient map.

A sudden, inexplicable chill swept through the room. It was a deep, penetrating cold that had nothing to do with the building’s climate control and everything to do with the impossible light on the table. The fine hairs on your arms stood on end, and a shiver traced a path down your spine. The air, once heavy with the dry scent of old paper, now carried a sharp, electric quality, like the moments before a lightning strike.

Something flickered in your peripheral vision.

You lifted your head, your gaze drawn to the far end of the long, narrow archive room. For as long as you’d worked here, a decorative stone archway framed the back wall. It was a pointless, vaguely gothic architectural feature, leading to nothing but a solid expanse of brick and mortar. Now, it was no longer static.

The stone itself seemed to tremble, the air within its frame shimmering violently, like a mirage rising from hot asphalt. You blinked, certain your tired eyes were deceiving you. But the distortion grew stronger, warping the familiar lines of the bricks behind it. The mortar seemed to melt, the bricks blurring into one another until they lost their shape entirely.

The solid wall dissolved.

Where there had been brick, there was now a silent, swirling vortex of color. Deep indigos bled into bruised purples, shot through with streaks of fading orange and the soft pink of a dying sunset. It moved without a sound, a slow, hypnotic churn of twilight colors that seemed to pull the light from the room into itself. Your breath caught in your throat. The book on the table before you continued its steady, silver pulse, a silent invitation. The cold air grew more intense, prickling at your exposed skin as you stared, frozen, at the impossible window that had opened at the end of the room.

A force seized you.

It wasn’t a gust of wind or a sudden draft. It was a firm, inexorable pull centered on your torso, as if an invisible rope had been thrown around your waist and was now being hauled in with immense strength. The breath left your body in a sharp gasp. Your chair screeched against the polished floorboards, legs catching for a moment before it tipped, sending you sprawling onto the cold, unforgiving wood. The impact jarred your teeth, but there was no time to register the pain. The force didn't relent.

You were being dragged.

Panic, cold and sharp, pierced through your shock. You dug your heels in, the rubber soles of your shoes squeaking uselessly against the lacquered surface. Your hands flew out, scrabbling for purchase, your fingernails clicking frantically against the floor. You clawed at the leg of the heavy oak table, your fingers wrapping around the carved wood for a brief, hopeful second. But the pull was too strong. Your grip slipped, the polished wood sliding through your desperate fingers, and the momentum sent you sliding faster across the room, directly toward the shimmering, silent vortex.

The archway loomed, the swirling colors of the portal growing larger, more vibrant. The hypnotic beauty you had seen from a distance was now terrifying up close. It was a gaping maw of impossible light, promising nothing but annihilation. You twisted, trying to roll onto your stomach, to find any friction, any way to slow your helpless slide. The smooth floor offered none.

A scream built in your throat, a raw, desperate sound born of pure terror. You opened your mouth and pushed it out, a cry for help, for anyone. But the sound died the instant it left your lips. It didn't echo in the cavernous room; it was simply gone, swallowed by the profound silence that emanated from the portal. The light seemed to drink the very sound from the air, leaving you in a vacuum of your own rising panic.

You were at the threshold. The cold intensified, a deep, cellular chill that felt like it was freezing you from the inside out. The air crackled, and the light of the portal washed over you, blinding you. It wasn't just light; it was a physical presence, a wave of energy that tingled against your skin before you plunged through.

The world dissolved into a chaotic, weightless tumble. Colors streaked past you—the deep indigo, the violent purple, the fading orange—no longer a distant spectacle but the very substance of your passage. There was no up or down, only a sense of falling and flying at once. The scent of old paper and dust, the smell that had defined your life for years, was scoured from your senses in a single, violent instant. It was replaced by the rich, vital smell of damp earth after a hard rain and the intoxicating perfume of night-blooming flowers you had never known.