Lionstar k'Leshya is in trouble. 

Things have been going badly for a while. Basically ever since he woke up in the stolen body of a teenager he killed, actually. He can't give up - he made a promise, never to walk away until the world was fixed, and so far all he's managed to do with his life - lives - is break it more, but he's alive and that means he has to keep going. 

Some part of him quietly wishes he didn't have to, though. 

And it's increasingly unclear that he's going to make it back to whatever is still left of his kingdom. He can't remember his first life well enough to use Gate-locations he used to know, and he's been working hard on improving the control of his mage-gift but he still hasn't re-mastered unscaffolded or blind Gates. And doesn't have the range, either, the body's Gift was newly-awakened, and initially getting stronger with use but for the last week he's been steeply limited on reserves. He's traveling through arid mountains, right now, without a lot of usable node-energy. He knows he's not eating enough, and he's been troubled by a nagging cough for the last four days. He barely has the energy to cast a weather-barrier over his makeshift camps, lately, and the nights are very cold. This morning he woke up feeling feverish, his chest hurting. 

The fall, when it happens, is entirely his own fault. He was being careless, and cutting corners, trying to save on mage-energy and not checking the ground ahead of him thoroughly or reinforcing less stable bits with a force-net. And so when the rock crumbles under him and starts to slide down the mountainside, he loses his footing, tries to catch himself by flinging out a net of mage-energies but the first attempt fizzles out and then it's too late. 

It seems to go on forever, pain and confusion and the world whirling around him, and then it stops and he's...still alive...try to orient... 

He's slid to a halt on what seems to be an incredibly unstable ledge, with a fifty-foot drop ahead. He can't stay here. He's in a lot of pain, and can feel wetness soaking through his matted hair, he must have cut his head on a rock. 

...on the other side of a gorge is a flat mesa. If he can Gate to there, he - can at least rest. But there's no threshold to raise a Gate on. He's going to have to try his best to cast it unscaffolded, and he doesn't feel ready, he's losing blood and feels dizzy and sick now, but he has to, he cannot just give up and die on this mountainside... 

The Gate feels wrong from the beginning, the search-spell twisting in some direction he didn't mean it to, but he's not going to have the strength for a second try. He pushes harder, and something lands, and he puts in a vast effort and builds the destination threshold on nothing... 

In the hallway of a hospital in Reno, Nevada, a glowing portal appears from nowhere - unseen by any of the staff, the hallway is at this moment unoccupied - and a very underweight teenager of vaguely Hispanic-looking ethnicity tumbles through, bleeding from a deep gash on his head and a dozen other lacerations and abrasions. He lies with his cheek pressed against the cold tiled floor, staring dizzily up at the ceiling lights and trying to figure out what happened and where he is now.