fantasy 1.2

The chill that woke you had nothing to do with a broken thermostat; it was the damp, earthy cold of a shallow cave, far from the climate-controlled comfort of a classroom. Your eyes snapped open to a sky you immediately recognized as alien—a swirl of bruised purples and sickly greens where the sun should be. Memories flooded in, stark and clear: the smell of chalk dust, the rhythmic click of a keyboard, the specific weight of a calculus textbook. You remembered the Pythagorean theorem and the date of the Battle of Hastings. You could write a 5-paragraph essay on The Great Gatsby and explain the nuances of the US Constitution. But survival? The knowledge void was absolute. You knew what a wolf was, but the three-headed, armored beast currently drinking from a nearby, steaming rivulet was an unknown variable. You knew basic biology, but the glowing, carnivorous plant gently waving tendrils near your face defied every law of botany you'd ever learned. And then the shadow passed overhead. It wasn't a cloud. The massive, leathery wings blotted out the strange sky, and a chilling roar—a sound more felt in your bones than heard with your ears—shook the very cave you were hiding in. A dragon. The word came easily to your mind, a piece of vocabulary you'd learned in an English class exploring mythological archetypes. You knew their cultural significance in medieval literature; you knew nothing about avoiding being scorched by their fire. You were a scholar in a world that demanded a warrior or, at the very least, a basic survivalist. Your mind, once a well-organized library of academic knowledge, was now a useless encyclopedia in a jungle. The world smelled of ozone and damp earth, a scent you could not categorize with your previous life’s limited olfactory database. A low growl echoed from the shadows, followed by the sound of immense claws scraping rock, and you realized, with a sinking heart, that knowing the quadratic formula was not going to help you build a fire,