The night after the bridge fight was long and restless. The soldiers built small fires, speaking in low voices as they patched wounds and counted the missing. Emily moved from man to man, checking bandages, giving water, and forcing herself not to think about what she had seen. Her hands were steady, but her mind would not stop spinning. Every time she touched someone, she felt the faint pulse of the brass key beneath her shirt, like it was alive.

Nathan sat near one of the fires, his uniform torn and his face lined with exhaustion. When she finally reached him, he tried to stand. “I’m fine,” he said, though he was bleeding from a cut along his ribs.

“You always say that,” she replied, pulling him back down. “You’ll make it worse.”

He sighed but didn’t argue. She cleaned the wound with boiled water and wrapped it with cloth torn from her own shirt. “You don’t talk much when you work,” he said.

“It helps me stay focused.”

“Focused on what?”

“Keeping you alive.”

He smiled faintly. “That’s a full-time job.”

They sat in silence for a while, the fire crackling between them. The smell of smoke clung to everything. Finally, he spoke again. “You said the key glowed when you helped the wounded. Do you think it’s magic?”

Emily stared at the ground. “Magic isn’t real where I’m from. But whatever it is, it reacts to pain, to life. It’s like it knows when someone’s close to dying.”

“Then maybe it’s more than just a key,” he said. “Maybe it’s choosing you.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want it to choose me. I just want to go home.”

Nathan’s expression softened. “And if home isn’t where you came from anymore?”

She looked at him, but he didn’t wait for an answer. He stood slowly, wincing at the pain in his side. “Get some rest, Emily. Tomorrow we move again.”

After he left, she stared into the fire until the flames blurred. The words from the journal echoed in her mind: The healer’s heart opens the gate. She didn’t know what gate it meant or how to find it.

Sometime after midnight, she heard a faint hum—the same sound that had pulled her through time. She stood and followed it into the dark field beyond the camp. There, half-buried in the dirt, lay a piece of metal shaped like a broken circle. It pulsed with the same light as her key.

When she touched it, the hum grew louder. A wave of images flashed through her mind—battles, hospitals, cities she didn’t recognize. For a moment she saw her own reflection, older, standing in a place made of light. Then the vision vanished, and she was alone again, trembling.

She pocketed the metal fragment, unsure what it meant but knowing it was part of something larger.

Back at the fire, Nathan was watching her from a distance. He didn’t ask where she had gone. He just nodded, as if he already knew she had found another piece of the mystery connecting them all.

(A modern nurse named Emily Hart, living in Los Angeles, accidentally triggers a strange energy surge from an old Civil War–era medical kit she bought at a vintage market. When she wakes up, she finds herself in Virginia, 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War.

With her modern medical knowledge and courage, Emily must survive in a time without anesthesia, equality, or technology—while hiding her true identity. Every five chapters, a new “mini story” unfolds: she helps soldiers, saves a family, meets a mysterious officer, faces suspicion as a “witch,” and searches for a way back to her own time.)