Chapter Text
Prologue
"Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives."
― Amal El-Mohtar
Sarah awakes to a ringing in her brain. Her eyes stuck together like she had taken too many edibles the night before and now wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep. However, the chill crawling up her arms and legs, and through her hair, kept the sleep away. She had no choice but to force herself awake, then double-take.
"What the fuck?" she mutters, rubbing her eyes and looking around her again.
She is at a graveyard, an honest-to-god cold and foggy graveyard! She half expected and dreaded catching sight of Elena Gilbert sitting by a stone, a book in her hand, with a crow hanging around her. Thankfully, she found nothing but a raven standing on a stone cross.
Within an instant, she sees flashes of her first step on Irish soil for her birthday present to herself, meeting a new friend through the tour guide, and going out to a pub to try the food while everyone else drank around her. She sees herself making her way back to the motel alone, passing a statue that appears to look like a weeping angel at the entrance to an alleyway.
A wiser nerd would not have blinked at it and called a cab to get the fuck out of there, but not this girl. She just stared at it, then turned away from it with a thought hum, only to feel a bone-breaking grip on her arm, and then everything went black.
Catching her breath as the memories of that night faded, she quickly tore off the sleeve of her jacket and found a hand-shaped welt exactly where she had been grabbed. With a shaking hand, she traces it, wincing at the pain, the coldness in the air, and her brain trying to understand what had happened to her.
Looking around for anything familiar, but then again, she didn't know Ireland all that much, or wherever she was. She was not going to conclude what she was just whisked away by a freakin weeping angel to Hestia knows where, so with effort she brought herself to her feet and is happy to see that besides the handprint on her arm, she is still her chubby self with no other injury or anything stolen.
With a little puff of warm air from her mouth, she slowly made her way out of the graveyard, doing her very best not to gain attention and become one with the shadows that she had learned from high school to get away from the eyes of her bullies. It took a while to find civilization; however, the more people she sees, the more she realizes she is not in Kansas anymore.
Well, not her time, Kansas, unless the whole place was dressing up like they were from the 1910s for a comic-con of sorts, and the smoking creeping into her lungs was just a practical effect.
"... Where the fuck did that crusty winged freak place me?!" she mutters to herself.