Chapter Two: Arrival

This wasn’t a purchase. It was an inheritance of problems.

jkr

2.1 No transition.

 Auction Room. New York

Her husband wasn’t known for having a sense of humor.
The thought landed heavily on Katrina Kane as she stood staring at the archway, from which moments before Victor Kane and his assistant Harris had vanished right in front of her eyes.

She stepped back; her eyes fixed on it at the end of the corridor in the New York Auction House. It looked very old, as if it had been lifted from somewhere else and dropped into the building. When she had first seen it, she had assumed it was decorative, just an architectural flourish, part of the Auction House’s attempt at looking grander than it actually was.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

Victor, her septuagenarian husband, had gone first without hesitation. Of course he would. He never questioned anything, which was the core of the problem in their marriage. As if there was nothing strange about it, his assistant, Harris, had followed immediately after.

No confusion. No sound.

She had already checked the far side of the archway twice. There was nothing there. Just the same corridor, empty and indifferent.

They were simply gone.

Katrina did not move immediately. She stayed still, watching the space they had occupied, not confused but calculating, measuring what she was looking at as if deciding whether it was an exit or a mistake.

Victor had always been like that. Confidence in the wrong things. Blind in all the places it mattered. She had spent years watching him barrel through life as if consequence was something that happened to other people.

She had a feeling that Victor had walked into something that he absolutely deserved.

Slowly, she looked around the room through her sunglasses. Then she made a decision that had nothing to do with either of them.

She stepped through.

Katrina Kane had been brought up in a former Soviet republic. She understood geography well enough, the way borders shifted on maps, but still meant something in the real world. She knew Europe. She knew its countries.

And she had never heard of the Kingdom of Ainran.

That was her final thought before she crossed the threshold.

“There was no Kingdom of Ainran.”

Then she stepped forward.

The room vanished instantly. No transition. No threshold.

Cold air hit first, followed by wind.

There was no sense of arrival. The world simply changed around her.

A beach stretched out in every direction.

Sand dunes rose and fell under a grey sky, the sea close enough to be heard but not yet seen. Behind her stood an identical archway, as if it had always been there.

Katrina did not move.

Ahead of her, Victor Kane stood on top of a dune in his usual golf clothes, entirely unbothered by the wind tearing at his polo shirt. He wore no coat, as if he had wandered onto a golf course rather than into another world.

He was talking, firing off instructions at Harris, who was struggling to climb the dune Victor stood on, his shoes sinking and slipping with every step.

Victor finally noticed her.

He did not react with surprise, only irritation, as if she were late to something important.

He looked out over the landscape, then back at Harris.

“No one has come to greet us,” Victor said sharply. “Get on the phone with the auction house. Find out what is going on.”

Harris hesitated, already pulling his phone from his pocket.

“There’s no signal,” he said after a moment.

Victor exhaled through his nose.

“Damn Europeans,” he muttered. “They don’t even have cell towers. Make a note. We will have them installed immediately. This place needs infrastructure.”

Harris did not respond. He just stared at his phone as if it had betrayed him personally.

Victor had already turned away, scanning the horizon as though assessing a property deal rather than a location.

Harris looked back at the arch.

“Maybe we should confirm our return route?”

Victor turned and glared at him.

“We’re not leaving. We’re building. Look at the potential of this place for a resort and casino.”

Katrina, standing closest to the arch, turned to look at it. She walked up to the arch and stepped through, then waited for a moment. Nothing happened. She simply stepped back onto the sand on the other side.

Harris walked up to the arch and stepped through, falling flat onto his face in the sand.

Victor Kane’s expression barely changed. After all, he had just purchased a Kingdom. What other New Yorker had done that?

“Let’s move,” he barked.

Katrina Kane looked around at her surroundings. She noticed that the beach curved in a wide arc, and through her sunglasses she could make out the sea, grey beneath a muted sky. She judged the time to be mid-afternoon.

She never wore a watch. Who needed them when you had people her husband paid who could tell her the time?

It hadn’t always been like that.

She had grown up crammed in with her family in the former Soviet republic of Daciania, packed into a three-room Brezhnevka in a decaying tower block on the edge of Carpavia, the capital. The walls froze in winter, and the lift hardly worked. Her brother had learned to sleep curled up, knees to chest, because there simply wasn’t space for anything else.

Her father worked in a state car factory, the kind that kept running on improvisation more than parts or planning. Officially, that was all he did.

But Katrina had learned early that “officially” didn’t always mean much. He came home with money that didn’t match the wage slips, with phone calls he took on the communal landing telephone, with silences that filled the room more than conversation ever did.

They always seemed to have just a little bit more than everybody else. Never enough to draw attention on its own, just enough to raise questions if you were inclined to ask them.

Money that didn’t quite match the job title. The economic problems of the Republic never fully touched them, as if someone else had already dealt with the awkward parts in advance.

In Daciania, you learned early that questions didn’t always get you answers. Sometimes they just got you silence.

She never asked. He never explained it. She never needed him to.

Later, she would recognise the pattern in her husband. The same careful omissions. The same assumption that there were things she didn’t need to know, because knowing would only complicate what was already working perfectly well for him.

That life felt like someone else’s memory now. Something she had stepped out of and left behind without looking back long enough to feel guilty.

Ahead, at the edge of the bay, Katrina could just make out a settlement.

Not a castle. Not a fortress.

A village.

White buildings clustered low against the coastline, with a single pale tower rising above them. Smoke drifted from a few chimneys, thin and steady in the wind.

No roads were visible. No signs. No modern markers of any kind.

Just wind, sand, and seashells crunching underfoot.

Victor’s voice carried faintly back.

“If you’re done playing with rocks, we’re going.”

“We’ll start with the local authority,” Victor said. “Someone must be in charge here.”

“Ah, my beautiful wife,” Victor remarked, noticing Katrina standing nearby.

“There is smoke,” she said. “That is civilisation.”

Victor followed her gaze, though slightly too slowly, as if making sure she had spoken first.

He nodded once, as though confirming something he had already concluded.

“Yes,” he said. “I noticed that.”

A pause.

He adjusted his stance on the dune, looking out over the coastline less like a man surveying property than one looking at an unknown world.

He glanced back at Harris.

“I saw it first, of course, but I was waiting to see if either of you would catch up.”

Harris hesitated.

“I thought Madam…” he started to say.

Victor cut him off without looking at him.

“Never mind. Focus.”

His attention returned to the village in the distance.

“We will go there,” he said. “They will need to be informed we are here.”

He started down the dune without waiting.

The wind carried the sound of the sea across the dunes, low and constant. No engines. No aircraft. No distant hum of anything mechanical. Just water and air.

There was a sign outside the village proclaiming:

Kingdom of Ainran Population 1000

Victor did not slow down as he read the sign.

“Good. That’s manageable,” he said.

Katrina said nothing.

Harris turned around slowly, not yet quite taking in that New York had gone and been replaced with whatever this was. The air felt different here. Salty.

The village clung to the cliffside, as if grown there by accident. A single street cut upwards from the shore, lined with whitewashed stone buildings. At the top of the hill stood a stone tower.

Victor looked at the inn.

“We will start here.”

He walked inside without waiting to see if the others would follow. No discussion.

Katrina lingered for a moment, looking up at the tower, almost certain this place was going to cost her something. She was sure of it.

Inside, the low ceiling of the inn forced Harris to duck his head. He was an unnaturally tall man, and the low ceiling made the space feel tight.

The room was dimly lit with the smell of ale and smoke. Heavy wooden beams ran across the ceiling, making the room feel compressed, like it was smaller than it should have been.

It was late. Only a few people remained.

They stopped talking when the door closed.

One by one, they looked over at the three strangers.

The barman watched Harris approach.

“Can we have three rooms?” Harris asked. “And some drinks.”

The barman didn’t ask what they wanted.

He simply reached under the counter, selected three glasses, and began pouring without hesitation.

Different bottles. No pattern. No questions.

Victor watched him but didn’t speak.

“That will be three Fennigs for the drinks.”

The three New Yorkers looked at each other before Harris stepped forward.

Victor muttered, “You mean three dollars?”

The barman replied, “Three Fennigs. Standard rate.”

“We don’t have cash,” Harris said, already aware of how that sounded. “We can pay electronically.”

The barman looked at him.

Then at the others.

“And the rooms?” asked Harris.

“We don’t have any rooms available.”

“Don’t you know who I am?” Victor snapped.

“Nope.”

“This is Victor Kane, world-famous businessman.”

“Who?”

“I paid twenty million for this Kingdom. We could at least have some rooms.”

The barman considered him for a moment.

“So, you say you are royalty,” the barman said. “I have the perfect room for royals such as yourselves.”

Victor’s gaze hardened.

“I will have my lawyers deal with this.”

The barman blinked once.

“Don’t know what that is.”

They were given space in the barn.

Victor took the straw without comment, as if it were his by right. Harris lay down on the cold stone, saying nothing.

Katrina chose the far corner.

As far from her husband as possible.

She lay awake for a long time, staring into the dark, the smell of hay thick in the air.

Whatever this place was, it had already started taking things from her.

And she had the distinct feeling it wasn’t finished yet.

Harris waited for the other two to go to sleep and then stepped back into the inn later that night, alone this time, as if distance might make it all make more sense.

Kane didn’t like those around him drinking, whether family or employees. As a control freak, he saw loss of control as weakness.

2.2 Don’t Mention the Ains.

The room was quieter now. Fewer people remained. The same eyes lingered on him for longer than felt comfortable.

He knew that feeling.

It reminded him of home in a way he didn’t like thinking about. Several years after his father had died, his mother’s maid had knocked the side of the bath loose while cleaning. Inside the cavity, she had found a hidden stash of whisky. His father had tried to hide his drinking from his mother.

Harris had only been young then, but he had learned something from it, even if he hadn’t had the words for it.

“I needed something stronger than ale,” he said, trying to sound like this was normal. “Neat whisky. Or a vodka soda. Something like that.”

The barman didn’t move for a moment.

Then he gave a small, slow shake of the head.

“We don’t have that.”

Harris hesitated.

“Right. Wine then. Spirits. Anything distilled.”

Another pause.

The barman leaned slightly forward.

“This is Ainran.”

As if that explained everything.

Harris tried again, softer now.

“Right. Okay. What do you have that people drink when they want to forget where they are?”

That got a reaction. Something closer to curiosity.

The barman turned, poured something dark and thick into a clay cup, and slid it across.

Harris looked at it.

“It’s local,” the barman said. “It works.”

Harris drank. It smelled like paint.

He immediately regretted it.

The barman was wiping down the same stretch of wood he had already cleaned twice.

Harris glanced up.

“Ainran,” he said. “That’s the name of the place?”

The barman didn’t stop wiping.

“It is.”

“Sounds like a city name.”

That made the barman pause.

He looked at Harris properly for the first time that night.

“It was. ‘Ran’ literally means city in the local language.”

Harris waited.

The barman looked perplexed.

“It means City of the Ain.”

Harris didn’t know who or what the Ain were, but he didn’t want to ask and show his ignorance. Still, he made a mental note to find out.

The silence stretched a little too long, but not enough to feel accidental.

“Ainran was a mighty city,” the barman said at last, as if repeating something people should already know. “A proper one. Not this.”

He gestured vaguely at the room, the village beyond it, everything pressed into the cliffside.

“It was built up from the coast. Trade, stonework, ships, army. All of it.”

He set the cloth down.

“Then it wasn’t.”

Harris frowned slightly.

“What happened to it?”

The barman gave a small shrug, like it wasn’t a question with a single answer worth giving.

“The neighbors grew jealous of Ainran’s wealth. And over centuries of wars, this is all that remains.”

“We just want to be left alone, to our own affairs, to govern ourselves. Our neighbors disagree.”

He picked up the cloth again.

“We kept the name.”

Harris looked down into his drink.

“So it’s not a city anymore.”

The barman gave a short, humorless sound that might have been agreement.

“No,” he said. “But we don’t bother changing words here. Too much work.”

The barman stopped wiping the counter.

He looked past Harris, not directly at him.

And said quietly:

“You shouldn’t be asking about the Ain. It gets people killed.”

He immediately wiped the glass clean, broke eye contact, and refused further service.

Harris frowned.

“Understood.”

He didn’t ask again.

The room had gone quiet again. Not empty. Just listening.

Harris wondered what Kane had already walked them into without noticing.

END OF CHAPTER TWO