Even through the fog slowly filling my brain, I felt a stab of worry at this. What were they going to do to me in this strange place? How had I gotten here and what did they mean to do?

Then I was gently sat in the chair and Angelica wheeled me nimbly down several halls and into a large space that wouldn’t look out of place at the nicest hospitals in Moscow or America. An older man with a mustache stepped forward and introduced himself as Dr. Graham before easing me out of the chair and onto a nearby metal table. I felt myself tensing again, but he patted my shoulder comfortably. He told me he understood this was all very strange, but it would make more sense in time. For now…for now they had to make sure I lived long enough that I got the chance to see everything.

Three days later I was back on my feet. Angelica had come by several times to check-in on me, but otherwise I had been left to my own devices. I mainly slept, but I also read sometimes as well. I had grown used to my shared and overlapping memories, but I was still amazed that I was able to read and think in both English and Russian. While I was still worried about Alena and the others, it all seemed strangely distant now. And by the time I had been there a week, I hardly thought of them at all.

”It’s the hotel.” Angelica told me one day when I asked her why I wasn’t more scared or worried. I made sure I prefaced it with telling her how much I appreciated her saving my life, but she had just nodded and waved it all away with a laugh as she explained. “Not that you shouldn’t be happy to be alive and appreciative that we were here to help, but much of your…peace…is coming from this place. It is very special.”

She continued. “My family has always been very fortunate. We live a very long time and we tend to live very well. But out of all my kin, I was the one blessed with finding Mirror Valley. That’s what the locals used to call it because of the small, still lake that lies at the valley’s center. It’s perfectly round, perfectly calm. It was also the subject of many superstitions and folktales, as geographic oddities often are. Except this time…well, this time some of the tales were true.”

”I built my hotel on top of that lake more than a hundred years ago, both to be close to its untapped potential and to channel it. This hotel is my temple and my tuning fork, if you’ll pardon the clumsy alliteration, as it serves as both a monument to my system of belief and the means by which I exert my will in this world and others.”