The world dissolved into a cacophony of screeching tires and shattering glass. One moment, Dr. Evelyn Reed was meticulously cross-referencing primary source documents for her research on the social impact of the Black Death in 14th-century Hertfordshire; the next, a blinding white light consumed her. There was no pain, only a profound and unsettling sense of displacement, as if her very essence was being unraveled and re-spun.
She awoke to the scent of woodsmoke and damp stone, a stark contrast to the sterile, paper-filled air of her university office. A heavy weight pressed down on her, and a coarse fabric scratched against her cheek. Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through her as she struggled to open her eyes. The light was dim, filtered through what looked like a leaded glass window. She was lying on a bed, a massive, four-poster monstrosity draped in heavy, dark velvet curtains. Her own body felt…wrong. Unfamiliar.
A woman with a kind, weathered face and a simple linen coif bustled into the room, carrying a steaming basin. “My lady,” she said, her voice a soft, concerned murmur. “You are awake. Praise be.”
My lady? Evelyn’s mind, the mind of a historian who had spent two decades deciphering Middle English, reeled. The accent, the clothing, the very air she was breathing—it was all wrong. Or rather, it was terrifyingly, impossibly right. A gilded mirror, propped against a nearby tapestry, confirmed her fears. The reflection was not her own. The woman staring back had the same deep brown eyes, but her face was younger, framed by a cascade of auburn hair that Evelyn, with her practical, shoulder-length brown cut, had never possessed. She was wearing a simple linen shift, and the hands she raised to her face were slender and unblemished by years of typing and turning brittle pages.
“Where…where am I?” she managed to ask, her voice a hoarse whisper that felt foreign in her throat.
“You are at Blackwood Manor, my lady,” the woman replied, her brow furrowed with worry. “You took a terrible fall from your horse. Do you not remember?”
Blackwood Manor. The name echoed in the chambers of Evelyn’s memory, a place she knew not from personal experience, but from countless hours spent poring over faded land charters and tax records. Blackwood Manor in Hertfordshire. A place that had been little more than a footnote in history, its last recorded mention in the year of our Lord, 1348. The year the Black Death had first swept through England. The year Lady Genevieve de Blackwood, the last of her line, had vanished from the historical record.
The realization struck her with the force of a physical blow. She was not Evelyn Reed anymore. She was Lady Genevieve. And she had woken up in the one time, the one place, she knew was on the precipice of utter devastation. The historian had become the history.
The serving woman, whose name she soon learned was Agnes, helped her to sit up. Memories, not her own, trickled into her consciousness – fleeting images of a spirited ride on a black mare, a sudden fright, a sickening lurch. Genevieve’s memories. It was a disorienting fusion of two lives, two sets of knowledge, vying for dominance in her mind. Evelyn, the scholar, knew the broader strokes of this era: the political tensions between England and France, the precarious reign of King Edward III, the whispers of a devastating pestilence creeping across the continent. Genevieve, the noblewoman, knew the intimate details of this life: the scent of her father’s leather-bound books, the feel of the cool stone beneath her bare feet in the castle corridors, the simmering resentment she held for her betrothed, Lord Alistair.
Her father, Lord Thomas de Blackwood, a man whose historical records painted him as a recluse more interested in alchemy than in managing his estate, soon appeared. He was a tall, gaunt man with eyes that held a flicker of something Evelyn couldn’t quite decipher – not just concern, but a strange, knowing intensity.
“Genevieve,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “You are back with us.”
“I… I feel as though I have been on a long journey,” Evelyn replied, choosing her words with the care of a diplomat navigating hostile territory.
Lord Thomas’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps you have,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. He then inquired about her health, his questions probing and precise, less like a concerned father and more like a scientist observing a curious specimen. He spoke of humors and miasmas, the prevailing medical theories of the time, and Evelyn, with her 21st-century understanding of medicine, had to bite her tongue to keep from launching into a lecture on germ theory.
Days bled into a week, a disorienting period of adjustment. Evelyn learned to navigate the cumbersome layers of 14th-century attire, to speak in the more formal cadence of the time, and to feign a memory loss that conveniently excused her ignorance of certain customs. The fusion with Genevieve’s memories was both a blessing and a curse. She knew the names of the servants, the layout of the castle, and the intricate web of local politics. But she also felt Genevieve’s emotions: her grief over her mother’s death years ago, her affection for Agnes, and her deep-seated dread of her impending marriage to Lord Alistair Beaumont, a man known for his ambition and cruelty.
Her fiancé. The historical records Evelyn had studied mentioned him only in passing as the one who absorbed the Blackwood lands after Genevieve’s disappearance. Now, he was a very real, and very immediate, threat.
One afternoon, as she sat in the castle’s small, dusty library – a room that had been Genevieve’s sanctuary and now felt like the only familiar space to Evelyn – she stumbled upon her father’s private journals. They were filled not with alchemical formulas, as she had expected, but with astronomical charts, complex calculations, and cryptic passages about celestial alignments and the “thinning of the veil between worlds.” One entry, dated the day of Genevieve’s accident, sent a chill down her spine:
“The celestial alignment is upon us. The loom of fate is poised. A new thread is needed, a soul from beyond the tapestry, to reweave the coming darkness. I have opened the door. May God have mercy on my soul…and on hers.”
Her reincarnation was no accident. It was an orchestrated event. Her father, the man history had dismissed as a dabbler in the arcane, had somehow pulled her across centuries. The question was why.
The answer arrived with a messenger from London, his horse lathered and his face grim. He brought news of a “great pestilence” in France, a creeping death that was now being reported in the port cities of England. The Black Death had arrived.
Evelyn’s blood ran cold. She knew what was coming. She knew the horrifying statistics, the social collapse, the sheer, unmitigated suffering that was about to be unleashed. She looked at the faces of the people around her – Agnes, the stable hands, the kitchen maids – and saw them not as historical figures, but as people on the brink of an apocalypse.
Her father summoned her to his study that evening. The room was filled with strange contraptions – astrolabes, armillary spheres, and charts of the heavens. He looked at her, his gaze unwavering, and said, “You are not my Genevieve. Not entirely.”
It wasn’t a question.
Evelyn, her heart pounding, decided that deceit was pointless. “No,” she said, her voice steady. “I am not.”
He nodded slowly, a strange mixture of grief and triumph on his face. “I had hoped… I had to try. The pestilence, the darkness that is coming… it is not a natural event. It is a tear in the fabric of the world, a shadow that will consume everything. Genevieve… my Genevieve… she did not have the strength. But you… you come from a time that has survived its own apocalypses. You have knowledge. You are the weaver.”
“Weaver of what?” Evelyn breathed, the immensity of her situation crashing down on her.
“Of yesterday’s dawn,” he replied, his eyes gleaming with a feverish light. “You are here to mend the tapestry of time. You are here to save us all.”
