I should have known. The stretching rack was what had moved in the bottom of my bag and had been jabbing in the back. Pulling it out ended up dragging several things along with it. With a huff I dumped the rack on the ground so I could shove the rest of my belongings back in. It took a minute or two to manage with one hand, but I would rather take that time than have to go find a stream to clean the hide again.

But in the end, nothing came out of the darkness to interrupt me, and I was able to get my things stowed away. That done, I stretched my legs out towards the fire, feeling the heat from the dancing, snapping flames through the soles of my boots. My free hand scooped the stand up from the ground, and I set it on one thigh so I could brush it clean of dirt and the minor detritus from the ground.

Once it was reasonably clean I started hooking the rabbit hide onto the frame, using the metal hooks to secure it in place. Drawing it taut took a little more effort, pulling the rack apart along the extensions built into the sides and locking it into place. Now with the skin taut and firm, I could actually work on it. I drew my knife out and tested the edge on one thumb - still sharp. Excellent. I propped the stretching stand up on my leg and began gliding my knife along the surfaces, peeling away fur and the outermost layer of skin as the blade moved along the surface.

As my hands worked at the familiar task, my mind wandered back to what I had been thinking about earlier. This place was just off, even now. This wasn't the first night I'd spent by a fire under the stars, not even the first where I had to pass time without a companion. But jarring me from that comfortable routine was the fact that even now, things were out of place. The smell of the burning wood was just off, not quite right and familiar.

The language translated the same, so thankfully I hadn't been forced to learn from the ground up. But even so, what this place called an 'oak' and what I did weren't the same. Didn't even burn quite the same, the wood here burned just a little longer, just a little dimmer, than what I was used to. But that was far from the only thing disrupting the familiarity of the night around me.

Unbidden, my eyes slid upwards as my body followed my thoughts. Far, far above, far off in the distance, pinpricks of light shone down. But they were not the stars I knew. No safe, known constellations glimmered in the night sky above me. That more than anything else was what told me I was not home any more.

That had been my first thought. Magic existed there, like it clearly did here. I'd thought that I had been thrown forward or back when I woke up to so much that was just slightly off. Temporal magic was poorly understood, but some people dabbled in it every so often. My last memories had been that my closest friend and I had been pursuing one such magus, who wanted to enact…..something….. by going into the past.

Or the future. His tenses had been all jumbled and confused. But no. Unless whatever that magus had been working on had been massively overpowered, he could not have thrown me through time far enough for the stars themselves to change in position so much as to be completely unrecognizable. And even then, if that had been the case - such an event would have been almost cataclysmic in terms of power used and released.

While I could not say I had searched every scrap of history, what I had found showed no such signs of that happening. In fact, from what I could find, magics that affected time were almost unheard of, or limited to a rare few instances. I sighed as my hands mechanically flipped the stretching rack over, and I began the process of cleaning the last remaining bits of viscera from the other side of the hide.