Warning: yes, this is a "girl goes back in time" story. However, before you hit the back button, please understand that romance isn't the focus of this story. There will be one (eventually), but it will be with... someone unexpected. This is the story of an outsider witnessing the changing cultural landscape of southern Britain with the withdrawal of Rome and onslaught of the Anglo-Saxons, and how the beleaguered native Britons are struggling to survive as a people. It's about how Arthur came to be king, how Guinevere's love of her people made her decide to be his queen, and how a bunch of Sarmatians decide that Britain is an island worth giving a damn about. Also, no knights are dying in this story. I'm trying to be as historically accurate as possible (as much as one can be historically accurate when dealing with the Arthurian myths) and would love your feedback. Thank you.

Actual warnings for this story include: canon-typical violence, mild language, and references to the fear of rape.

So. I have my backpack with a change of clothes, a tourist's guidebook to walking the path of Hadrian's Wall, my water bottle, some crackers in a plastic baggie, this journal, and two pens. Currently I am sitting in front of a campfire in the middle of a forest and being stared at by blue-painted people in leather clothing who might be historical reenactors gone rogue, or weird British survival cultists, or just a plain ol' pack of psychopaths. Regardless, they haven't tried to kill me yet, which is a good sign.

I'm writing down the day's events because The Blue Weirdos are apparently waiting for the arrival of their leader/wizard, a man they call Myrrdhin (Latinized name: Merlin). Maybe Merlin is actually sane, unlike the rest of them, and will rip off some quaint British sayings and then direct me towards the nearest bus station. The rest of these alleged 'Celts' are pretending not to understand English, and will only talk to me in thickly-accented Latin—my feeble attempts at Welsh did excite them a bit, however, and seemed to make them warm up to me somewhat.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What I remember most about today prior to the The Event was the arguing.

"Claire, we need to go back."

"No, we need to finish," I gritted out, lowering my head against the rain. It was always raining, or about to rain, in England.

"Claire—"

"We are so close," I snapped, "so close to Banna. And then the bus will take us back to the hotel in Gilsland village, and we can dry off and go to bed. This is our last day, Jake. We go back to the US tomorrow. We have to finish." We wouldn't really finish, of course. The entire Hadrian's Wall Path was eighty-four miles long, and a two week vacation wasn't long enough to cram it all in. But our end point was the ruins at the Roman fort of Banna, and we could at least get that far.

Lightning split the cloudy sky off to the west, followed closely by a boom of thunder. Jake waited for the noise to end before wiping his nose and speaking: "This isn't safe; we shouldn't be out hiking in a thunderstorm."

"I don't care."

"Stop being an idiot! Do you want to get struck by lightning?"

"We won't."

"How do you know that?"

"I just know. This is too important."

"…To you."

"What was that?"

"I said, 'to you.' This is important to you, not to me."

"Well, you didn't have to come."

Jake sighed. "Babe, stop being difficult. What's a few more miles? It's just some stacked rocks." He kicked the pile of tumbled stone next to his foot.

"It's Hadrian's Wall, you idiot. It was built more than a thousand years ago. We're going to finish the hike and get to the fort, and then we're going to explore the ruins just like we planned."

"In the rain?"

"Yes, in the rain."

Lightning flickered in the sky again, bigger and more dramatic than before. The thunder that followed almost instantly was louder as well.

"It's not safe," Jake repeated.

"Then go back to the bus on your own."

"I don't want you to be out in this weather!"

"I'll be fine."

Jake was quiet for several moments. Then: "Are you acting like this because you didn't get accepted into Oxford for your Master's program?"

"Shut up."

"You are, aren't you? You know you're never going to study the Bath curse fragment or any of that other 'Common Brittonic' stuff, you know you're never going to be a real anthropologist, you know you have to give up and go home, and you hate it. You're treating this like some grand old last hurrah before we get married and have kids."

"Shut up! Just shut up! I will get accepted! Maybe not at Oxford, but there are other universities—"

"Why are you like this?"

My face and especially my eyes felt hot even beneath the cold rain, and my vision was blurring with tears. Jake and I were always fighting, and it always hurt. He never held back, especially when it came to my decision to put off having a family in favor of pursuing a Master's degree in anthropology.

"Because I don't quit," I growled, the effect of which was slightly ruined because I was choking back sobs. Damn him! Damn him when he was like this. I did not want to have children quite yet. I wanted to research, to learn, to discover old things and preserve ancient languages. I—

And then the lightning struck.

I don't actually remember very much of it. The afternoon was dim because of the cloud-cover, but then was suddenly bright. Really bright. I had just enough time to look up and see that the sky had gone flat white and feel the ground shaking beneath my hiking boots—and then it was over, just like that. I looked down and rubbed my eyes to get rid of the dazzle-spots that had blossomed across my vision, then looked around.

Hadrian's Wall was suddenly... bigger. Rather than a waist-height hump of stacked rocks, here was a fourteen-foot or so wall of fitted and dressed stone standing beside me. On the ramparts, men with helmets and red cloaks were looking down at me. I waved up at them.

"Hello?" I called out.

"Apage!" they called out in return, which was Latin for "go away!" oddly enough. I waved at them again, and they drew bows and pointed arrows at me. Bows and arrows! What was this?

"Are you reenactors?" I asked.

They called out something in Latin again. I can't remember the exact phrase now but it was to the effect of "this is your last warning" so I took the hint and raised my hands to show they were empty, then slowly backed away towards the forest in the distance—which also hadn't been there before. It was still raining, though. The red-cloaked men watched me retreat, then started pacing back and forth along the rampart.

I looked around again. The Hadrian's Wall path was nowhere to be seen, and surrounding me was a no man's land of scraggly, un-mowed grass and weeds. The forest was dark and ominous, but maybe it would be dryer under the trees. Armed with that hope, I grabbed the straps of my backpack and started walking.

Where was Jake? What had happened to us? Why were those historical reenactors so unfriendly? I didn't know what was going on, but I refused to be afraid. This was Britain, a densely populated island. If I kept walking in one direction for long enough I would stumble across modern civilization in less than a day. This wasn't like my native Virginia, where you could get lost in the mountains and be eaten by a bear. There weren't any bears in Britain. Or wolves. Or even snakes with a venom powerful enough to kill an adult human.

I reached the trees and kept walking, now wading through underbrush. Bramble-thorns scratched at the fabric of my jeans, but couldn't penetrate it. It actually wasn't dryer under the trees, which was a bummer, but there was nothing I could do about it besides pull up the hood of my rain jacket. I kept one hand on my compass, and made sure that I was walking steadily east. I kept worrying that this little misadventure would make me late getting back to the hotel, which would in turn make me late for my flight home.

There was movement in the underbrush next to me. I stopped and looked, but saw nothing. Maybe it had been a rabbit or something.

There are no large carnivores in modern Britain, I mentally repeated to myself. I was perfectly safe.

A bush rustled on my other side. I whirled around, trying to see what had caused it, but again saw nothing.

"Hello?" I called out.

Someone said a phrase I didn't recognize, in... Welsh? And their voice came from... above me? What? I looked up, and saw perched in a tree a shirtless man covered in swirling blue paint holding a drawn bow. Nocked to the string was yet another arrow. What was with these people and arrows?

I slowly raised my empty hands. "Can you please help me?" I asked. "I'm lost."

"Do you speak the Roman tongue?" the man asked, in Latin.

"Yes, I speak that language," I answered. I had been taking Latin classes since freshman year of high school, and had won prizes in Latin-speaking competitions with my school.

"Who are you, and why are you here?" the man demanded, not lowering the bow.

"I am... a traveler," I answered. "I come from across the sea, and am lost. Could you please help me?"

"Are you Roman?" the man demanded.

"No. I'm American."

"...You are from Armorica?"

That was... part of northern Gaul, right? Yeah, yeah, Armorica was the Celtic name for the land between the Seine and Loire rivers, I remember that now. But it wasn't right.

"No, I'm from America," I repeated, stressing the word and saying it slowly. The man in the tree only shook his head, however.

"Perhaps one of us is pronouncing it wrong," the man said with surprising diplomacy. "Regardless, you are not Roman, and therefore not our enemy." He lowered his bow and gracefully climbed down from the tree to stand in front of me. "What is your purpose in Britain?"

"I seek..." I said, and trailed off. There was no way to say 'vacation' in Latin. "I am a scholar," I said eventually. "I seek to study the language of the British tribes and record it, so that it isn't lost to history."

The man snatched up one of my hands and examined it, probing my fingers for calluses. Finding none, he grunted in apparent satisfaction.

"You seem to be what you say you are," he said. "Come with me."

He turned and walked away through the underbrush, moving with a soundless hunter's tread. I followed him, blundering over roots and through thorn-bushes, making a godawful racket. He walked quickly, and we must have walked for almost an hour—maybe two miles, then. I was panting and sore-footed by the time we arrived in a clearing where a camp had been made. There were no tents, but a campfire flickered miserably in a ring of stones, hissing and steaming in the light rain. Sitting around it were a bunch of other blue-painted people I would come to dub The Blue Weirdos, most of them bearing medieval weapons. More bows were in evidence, but there were also spears, axes, and swords.

They saw me and asked questions in that Welsh-sounding language, and the man who had led me here answered in the same tongue. Room next to the fire was made, and I was ushered into a place. Through gesturing, they bid me to sit down with encouraging smiles.

"Why do you want to study our language?" the man asked.

"The Romans write everything down," I began, "and as such we can trace their history back for hundreds of years. We know their customs, their holidays, their cultural beliefs and religion, all because they wrote them down. But the Britons don't write anything down; they passed all their knowledge among themselves by word of mouth. I worry that someday there will be no Britons, and that means your stories will be lost. So they need to be written down and preserved and shared so that more people know them, even hundreds of years from now."

I was playing along with the fantasy that these people were real Celts, rather than just really dedicated reenactors. Regardless, the man laughed at me.

"This is Britain!" he said. "We are Britons! Do you think us weak and feeble, that we will be wiped out by a puff of air? We have survived generations of Roman rule; we can survive whatever comes next." His smile to me was pitying, with an edge of mockery. "You are foolish," he pronounced.

Except, I wasn't. This fantasy-land was... what? Sometime between 200 and 450 CE? As soon as the Romans left Britain, the Anglo-Saxons would arrive. And they would dub this land Angle-land, which would eventually morph into England. Their language, which is preserved most famously in the poem Beowulf, would dominate by the 6th century and be Old English, which would change into Middle English with Shakespeare and then the modern English spoken in England today. Remnants of Common Brittonic, the language spoken by the Celts of Britain, would survive in a handful of toponyms and through its descendants, Welsh and Cornish. But we don't really know the Common Brittonic language except for a handful of words and a single inscription. That's why I wanted to study it, to find new fragments and maybe, glory of glories, get the rudiments of a grammar system and dictionary.

But for these Celts... culturally speaking, the Britons of this island were doomed to be overwhelmed by the Saxons, and there was nothing they could do about it.