chapter 6: a strangers mery

The man knelt in front of her, his dark eyes scanning her face with concern. He spoke again, his voice low and steady: "Esne vulnerata?"

Isla's breath hitched. The words — they were familiar. They tugged at something in the back of her mind. It sounded like… Latin? But no one spoke Latin. It was a dead language.

Still shaking, she didn't speak. She just slowly shook her head — not because she wasn't hurt, but because she didn't trust her voice. She wasn't okay. Not even close.

The man frowned. "Tu intellegis linguam meam?" he asked, his voice softening.

It clicked then. She did understand him — or most of it. The language… it was Latin. But why was he speaking it? And why did he call it his language, like it was something still alive?

"Latin," she whispered, her voice cracked and raw. "You're speaking Latin."

The man tilted his head, clearly puzzled. "Latin?" he echoed, testing the word like it was foreign to him. "This is not… Latin. This is Old Arvellian."

Isla blinked, her mind spinning. Old Arvellian? What the hell was going on?

Noticing the torn state of her clothes and the way she trembled, the man's expression softened. Without a word, he shrugged off the heavy, rough-looking cloak he wore and gently draped it around her shoulders.

The fabric was coarse and smelled of woodsmoke and earth, but it was warm — and right now, warmth felt like the safest thing in the world. Isla clutched it tightly around herself, her fingers digging into it as if it might hold her together.

"Thank you," she whispered, her voice barely there.

The man nodded, his eyes still studying her like she was some kind of puzzle. "We need to move," he said in that strange, familiar language. "It's not safe here."

Isla wanted to ask what he meant — wanted to ask a thousand things — but her body felt heavy, and the shock was still too fresh. So she just nodded, and when he offered his hand, she took it.He took her to a church.

The church was unlike anything Isla had ever seen — small, charming, almost like it had been plucked from some old painting. The stone walls were covered in ivy, and the stained glass windows glimmered faintly in the moonlight. It was quiet, peaceful — a strange contrast to everything she'd just been through.

The man knocked firmly on the heavy wooden door. It creaked open after a moment, and a woman appeared — middle-aged, in a simple but modest nightgown, her dark hair tucked into a cloth cap. She squinted at the man, then her eyes softened in recognition.

"Brother—" she started, but he cut her off with a gentle urgency. "Sister Elenora, I need your help." His voice was calm but firm. He tilted his head toward Isla like he signalling towards her, who was still wrapped in his cloak, her legs trembling beneath her.

The woman's face shifted immediately to concern. "Oh, dear child," she murmured, stepping aside to let them in. The warmth of the church's interior wrapped around Isla like a blanket, and she fought the sudden sting of tears.

Sister Elenora led her down a narrow hallway into a small room — simple, with wooden floors and a bed covered in soft linen. Against one wall sat an old-fashioned wooden bathtub. Isla stared at it, stunned.

Who even uses wooden bathtubs these days? she thought, her mind grasping for anything normal. Maybe they'd taken a vow of poverty or something.

The sister helped her sit on a small stool beside the tub and began pouring warm water from a kettle, the steam rising in soft clouds.

As Isla sat in the wooden tub, the warm water stung against her cuts and scrapes, but she barely noticed. The shock of everything that had happened was starting to settle in — and with it, the fear, the exhaustion, and the overwhelming confusion.

Tears slid down her face before she even realized she was crying. She tried to hold them back, but the harder she tried, the harder they fell.

"It's alright, child," a soft, gentle voice said behind her. The nun — Sister Elenora, — knelt beside the tub, her hand brushing softly over Isla's shoulder. "Let it all out."

Isla shook her head, but the tears kept coming. She hadn't even processed what had happened — the attack, the man who saved her, the severed hand still gripping her wrist. She hadn't even thanked him before he'd brought her here to this strange, quiet church and handed her over to the nuns.

It wasn't until Sister Elenora reached for a cloth and dipped it in the water that Isla started to pay attention again. The nun pressed the wet cloth against a cut on Isla's leg — and that's when she saw it.

The rag was dirty. Frayed at the edges, stained from who-knows-what, and Isla's medical instincts kicked in hard.

"Oh my God — what are you doing?" she yelped, pulling her leg back. She started speaking in English without even thinking, panic rising in her chest. "You can't use that — it's filthy! You're going to make it worse!"

The nun blinked at her, clearly not understanding a word.

Isla took a shaky breath and tried again, switching to the language the man had spoken earlier — the one that sounded so much like Latin, even though they'd called it something else. She stumbled over the words, her grasp of the language rusty after so many years. "Why… use… like that?"

Sister Elenora's face softened with patience. "I'm cleaning your wounds, child. It must be done."

But Isla shook her head, trying to keep her voice calm even as panic fluttered in her chest. "No — I can do it," she said in broken words, holding her hand out for the cloth.even though she did not wanted to use the cloth because she knew she could get infection but she was already feeling greatful to the nun as she is letting her in and she did not wanted to cause trouble for her.

The nun hesitated but eventually handed it over, watching as Isla tried to clean her own wounds as gently as possible. The dirty water made her stomach twist, but there wasn't much choice.

Before Sister Elenora left the room, Isla called out, trying again to make sense of this strange situation. "Antiseptic? Iodine? Cotton swabs?" she asked, hoping the words might click.

But the nun only looked more confused. "I know cotton, child," she said slowly, "but I know not this… antiseptic you speak of. Are you asking for the medicine that cures infection?"

"Yes!" Isla said quickly, her heart leaping. Finally, something familiar — some kind of antibiotic or disinfectant, right? But the hope was short-lived.

"Oh, my dear," the nun's voice softened with a kind of pity that made Isla's stomach drop. "Only nobles can afford such things. We are but a humble church — we don't have that kind of money."

Isla froze. She stared at the nun, the bloodied cloth slipping a little from her fingers.

No antiseptics? Only nobles could afford them? This wasn't just an isolated village. This was something else entirely.

Her fingers tightened around the cloth. Her voice trembled as she whispered to herself, "What the hell is going on here…"As Isla sat there, the warm water cooling around her, her mind started to spiral. Maybe this was all some kind of sick joke — a prank someone was playing on her. Some twisted reality show where they dropped her in the middle of nowhere and watched her fall apart. Maybe there were hidden cameras. Maybe any second now, someone would jump out and yell, "Surprise!"

But the fear in her chest told her it wasn't a joke. Neither did the pain in her leg or the rawness in her throat from screaming. And the severed hand — she couldn't forget the severed hand.

Still, her brain tried to latch onto any explanation that made sense. "This can't be real," she whispered to herself.

But then a more ridiculous — and terrifying — thought crept in. She remembered the things Sofia was always going on about. Novels, manga, those wild fantasy stories she wouldn't stop reading. "Isla, you have to read this one!" she'd say, shoving a book in Isla's face. "Isekai is so popular right now! Imagine getting transported to another world — wouldn't that be amazing?"

At the time, Isla had laughed it off. She was too busy studying, too focused on the real world. But now, sitting in a wooden bathtub in a church where antiseptics were a luxury only nobles could afford, she wasn't so sure anymore.

"No," she whispered, shaking her head. "That's impossible."

But was it?