A thousand years and a hemisphere. The medieval world had a thousand years and half the planet’s worth of other people you could have been.

You could have been Margaretha Beutler. After her wealthy husband’s untimely death, Beutler donated all her money to the poor and journeyed around southwest Germany for five years, funded by those who donated money to her instead of to the poor. During her travels, she was probably preaching—in an age when Christian women were not allowed to preach or teach religion in public. Until, that is, she was arrested in Marburg for being “an evil thief” and sentenced to death by drowning. Understandably, Beutler preferred to make some powerful friends who found her a spot in a monastery instead, after which she went on to lead several monasteries of her own.

Or you could have been Pietro Rombulo, the Arab-Italian merchant who moved to Ethiopia, started a family, became the king’s ambassador to Italy (and possibly India), and befriended an Ethiopian-Italian servant and a bishop.

You could at least have been Buzurg Ibn Shahriyar, who was not a real person but was still a celebrity, known for writing a book that included all the incredible stories people told him about pirates and sea monsters and islands beyond the edge of the world.

Nope.

You’re just… you. You get to live in this village fourteen miles from the nearest market “town” and 1,400 miles from a town that doesn’t need air quotes to merit the name. Everyone in your village gossips in terror-laced excitement about the apocalypse, but you just think bitterly that the apocalypse wouldn’t even acknowledge the existence of your village.

— How to Slay a Dragon by Cait Stevenson (Page 11)