by A L Hart
Contents
Part 1
Ch. 1
Ch. 2
Ch. 3
Ch. 4
Ch. 5
Ch. 6
Ch. 7
Ch. 8
Ch. 9
Ch. 10
Ch. 11
Ch. 12
Ch. 13
Part 2
Ch. 14
Ch. 15
Ch. 16
Ch. 17
Ch. 1
There comes a time in everyone’s life where they look up to the skies and ask one question: is this real? For some, it’s the overwhelming moment when a newborn first opens their eyes and gaze into those of their creator. For others, it’s the moment the final powerball number is called and you discover you have the winning ticket.
But for me, it was when I found myself jumping through a portal to another world only to be instantly hunted by unseen assailants.
Assailants—I’d all but gotten used to words like that. Along with perilous, eliminate, captured. Those which in some way or form indicated my life was in mortal danger.
Mortal danger, that’s another one, I thought as I dashed blindly through the high grass.
Literally blind.
The dark elf Inoli had warned me that the Shatters was a dangerous world and that most of its inhabitants were deadly in one way or another. With that being the case, I’d only agreed to the absurd mission because one, it was either I helped close the gateways between worlds or risk my world dying and two, I’d been assured there would be three other people more experienced with the art of survival to see the mission through.
But things hadn’t exactly gone according to plan. For one, not only did I not know how to close said gateways—but I was without the three aforementioned people, and my own survival skills? Nonexistent.
The four of us—me, Jera, an HB medic and unknown immortal who broke my wing just to send a message (that wasn’t even for me)—were supposed enter the portal together on New Years Eve. But due to a little incident involving a talking, shapeshifting cat and a talking, shapeshifting dog, a portal was opened prematurely. One in which Jera leapt into impulsively when chasing after the talking cat.
I’d only jumped moments after Jera, yet when tumbling into the bed of high grass, the temperature considerably tepid, I was alone. Or so I’d thought.
Then I heard the voices.
“Did you hear that?” came a whisper not five feet from where I’d landed none-too-gracefully.
“I did,” answered another voice. Then, “Ready your bow.”
That was all I needed to hear to start running, only to open my eyes and find nothing but darkness, my ears droning as if liquid sloshed within them. I didn’t stop, feet pounding in the dirt, lungs and calves reminding me why cardio workouts were always a good idea. Yet, when I heard the high grass rustling behind me, the unknown faces closing in, I forced my legs to run faster, farther, disregarding the very real possibility of me running face first into something.
Not even ten seconds in this world and I was already running for my life. I had to give credit where it was due: the world lived up to its declarations.
“He’s too close. Use your dagger, son.”
“Fast for a boar,” the son panted, his breath all but falling on my neck.
Boar? They thought I was some wild animal?
“Wait, wait!” I shouted, running in zigzags, remembering how Jera said a moving target was harder to hit. “I’m not an animal!” I didn’t want to die being someone’s practice kill. “I’m hu—”
“Hurry and stab this fool before he activates the wards!”
Wards?
“Don’t!” I yelled, but before I could get another plea in, my vision began to clear, daylight coming into view in filmy blotches—just in time for me to slam into an invisible wall.
My world went dark for the second time.
*****
I woke to the sound of a distorted, electrical buzzing sound, roping me into full on consciousness. The pounding right in the center of my skull, I was starting to get used to it. Pain of some variety was becoming as second nature as my arsenal of malicious vocabulary.
What I wasn’t getting used to?
Waking up to, “Father, I think we should still kill him.”
I lunged to my feet.
My sight was back completely. Around me, long hairs of grass rolled out in all directions, endless, their tips stretched high towards a . . . purple pastel sky, thin silver clouds drifting by. Everything here must have been miscolored, because even the grass was of a bluish tint rather than green. Except for the large patch of grass where I stood. That was a blue-grey, reminding me of old mulch.
“He’s awake.”
I took in the boy across from me. He leaned his back against an invisible wall, arms crossed, watching me from beneath a hooded jacket of some kind. On his back was a bow nearly half his height.
The animosity he oozed had me taking a step back—
I bumped into something, but when I looked behind me, there was nothing. The ward they spoke of. We were trapped.
“Yeah, we have you to thank for that,” the boy said with a tongue dipped in sarcasm. “You activated their wards with your screaming. Had you just accepted your death quietly, we wouldn’t be fodder right about now.”
Fodder?
“Callum, if you would leave the stranger be and help.” A man dressed in similar clothes as his son stood on the far side of the flattened grey grass, hand upheld. It pulsed a faint blue, the buzzing sound having come from it. The light drilled against an invisible barrier, the force field rippling in orange waves but otherwise unfazed.
“No point,” Callum sighed. “We’re good as dead.”
“Who are you?” I found myself asking.
“We should be asking you that,” the boy fired back. “First you appear out of nowhere, then you interrupt our hunting session. Then you get us trapped here. I’d be skinning you right now were it not for my father ordering otherwise.”
Ignoring the jarb, I told him flat out, “I’m Peter. I didn’t mean to interrupt your hunting. I came here looking for someone. Two someone’s. A talking cat and a succubus.”
Given the boy’s father was clearly trying to perform some escape tactic via—I tuned into the man’s energy and found blue threads of it humming lowly. Definitely dark energy, definitely not human. A succubus and talking cat shouldn’t have been too out of the norm, then.
Yet the boy looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “There’s no talking cat around here and the succubi haven’t been spotted for ages. Where are you from, the Torsun? Those idiots are always spouting nonsense.”
“I’m not from whatever you just said. I’m from Earth and I’m human.”
The electrical buzzing noise stopped, the dad lowering his hand and turning towards me. “What did you say?” Greyed beard, tired but experienced eyes like lapis, I pinned him around forty-five, but by the spindly set of his body, he could have been older or younger, give or take a couple years.
No weapons were on him.
“I said I’m from Earth.” It sounded more bizarre the second time I said it. “And I take it this is the Shatters? An Emperor Beast opened the portal here and a succubus followed it through. I’m looking for that succubus. Did she come through here or not?”
“Do you mean Imperial Beast?”
Probably. “The succubus, have you seen her?”
The father and son exchanged a glance, then, slowly, Callum drew his bow once more and ever so casually, he readied an arrow directly at my head.
“How much do you think he’ll fetch, Father?”
“At the very least, they’ll free us from this cell
in exchange for him.”
“What on earth are you all talking about?” I couldn’t have been more confused if the grass itself started talking to me—which, in all honesty, I was one hundred percent prepared for.
“Humans haven’t breached the gateways in centuries. Those who have before you are considered royalty in some parts.”
“Why?” I couldn’t fathom under any circumstances why immortals of incomprehensible powers would uphold my race as anything other than, well, an animal, which, in retrospect, I was beginning to understand why Jera and most other immortals I’d run into regarded humans as precisely that.
Still.
“Because the wolves are halfwits, is why,” Callum answered. “We don’t question their culture.”
“Like, real wolves or?”
“There’s only one kind of wolf! The creature that shift between man and wolf, obviously.” The boy looked to his father. “Humans might actually be dumber than the wolves, in which case, it makes plenty of sense now.”
It was probably saying something that I’d grown used to immortals insulting human intelligence.
I kept my eyes on the boy. He didn’t want to kill me now. He wanted to exchange me to whoever put the wards up.
I wasn’t trained for this. Negotiating. Bargaining for my own freedom. Especially when we were all trapped. Which meant, “You can’t hold me hostage when we’re all stuck in the same ward.” Not that I particularly liked the fact, but who was to stop the captors from doing what they wanted, cutting out these “middle men?”
The father stepped forward to speak, but he never got a word in. Below us, the ground began to quake. The field of tall blue grass jarred beneath it, the once tepid air cooling. That was when a familiar sensation crawled up my arms, not dark energy but something eerily similar.
Bracing against the invisible ward, I looked around but saw nothing. Was this what Inoli was talking about, the Epilogue? I couldn’t have been in this world for anything more than an hour and already death had found me. Where was the fairness in that?
Teeth gritted and vibrating beneath the jolts, I looked to the father and managed, “Is this the Epilogue?”
This seemed to cause him a moment of relief to look at me disbelievingly. “The what—no. They’re waking up.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think we’ve been talking about this entire time?” Callum quipped. “The giants.”
Ch. 2
When I was kid, my sister Liz and I would play with toy Hot Wheel cars. We had this whole elaborate setup where we would use VHS tapes as parking lots and apartment buildings. When Mom and Dad finished closing the shop for the evening and went upstairs to shower, we would sneak downstairs with a bucket of the cars and tapes and we would hide under one of the booth tables, make an entire city out of the tapes. Liz always wanted the firetruck because she liked to pretend she was saving people from burning buildings, but me, I always liked the Chevy because it had the number 1 on it and I may have been unconsciously competing against her in life.
If possible, we would play Life until the sun came up or we fell asleep.
It was usually the latter.
We would wake up to Ma “sternly” calling our names, and from down there, huddled far back beneath the table, we could only see her legs. We always figured, if we couldn’t see her face, she couldn’t see us. We’d be very quiet at that point, hoping she wouldn’t find us.
That was when she’d call for Dad and tell him she heard the little people again. No stranger to the game, Dad would say it’s a good thing giants ate little people, right before he leaned over and looked under the table.
Back then, being as small as we were, as imaginative as children were prone, it was easy to get into the game. Easy to see our parents as giants determined to make stew out of us.
It wasn’t a game anymore.
Standing in the field in the middle of nowhere, trapped by some invisible force, I watched in abject horror as the line between imagination and reality stretched then snapped. The swaying sea of grass and the purple skies, they shimmered, becoming a corrupting image as the meadow itself began to ripple and take on a different form, two towering figures casting shadows over the entire, vast meadow. A man and a woman who had to be over twenty feet tall.
Callum, bow jostled from his grip, cowered back towards his father. “I-it’s true, Skashora is glamored to look like hunting plains.”
That name, I’d heard it before.
The giants’ images solidified, the ground stilling. I could discern their every detail clearly now. Two pairs of massive green eyes stared down at us from high above. That same disturbing sensation, wet, transformative, licked at my skin as I felt like nothing more than an ant beneath a microscope.
If not for their terrifying size, they could have been majestic in that both clothed themselves in a resplendent fabric, neither silk nor velvet, but a material so fine, it flowed like one giant, turquoise waterfall. Gems studded the neckline, waistline, conforming in respect to the male’s figure and the woman’s. Their skin was of flawless design, cut-ivory smooth, emitting a glow so otherworldly, I was sure they sparkled.
One of them spoke. “Mages, then? Daring to come upon our lands?” The man’s voice fell over us with a resonating echo, the grass hairs bending beneath the reverberations.
Absolute petrification clutched my lungs. These things, these monsters, could step on us with relative ease. My mind struggled to keep up with the world around us, the way Callum and his father dropped to their knees and began begging to have their lives spared.
“A simple remedy,” the woman returned. When she straightened her back, she moved slower than I expected, likely in relation to her size. Did ants perceive us at the same speed?
That was when I realized Callum and his father weren’t begging to have their lives spared. They were begging them to take mine in offering.
The giant man seemed to finally discern their words as well. “What could we possibly want with a human?”
“The wolves, they value humans and would pay a large sum for him,” the father was quick to relay.
“Our riches are already limitless,” the woman said and I watched as she lifted a sandaled foot, gown shimmering in the purple daylight. She was actually going to step on us.
Time fractured.
Oh, great, I thought bitterly. Whenever impending doom neared, time always slowed around me, as if somehow witnessing my oncoming death in slow motion would help me in anyway. It wasn’t like time slowed and I moved faster. Instead, I slowed with it.
—Actually, it did allow me one thing: time to sift through all possible advantages I had, which meant first I had to assess the disadvantages.
I was an inexperienced human hybrid. Jera and Lia weren’t here to bail me out of this one. I was in an unknown world, facing creatures with unknown powers. I was trapped in an invisible cube, about to be squashed by a giant woman for seeming trespassing.
In light of those dismal facts, I found, for once in my life, the advantages outweighed the bad: they all assumed I was a defenseless human, their superiority complex actually a good thing. But, while Lia wasn’t here to zap me into some hyper state, there was one thing the dark elf Inoli told me that stuck—in this world, I was infinitely stronger than I was in my own.
And only now did I figure out why.
Though my world was infected with dark energy, it wasn’t the kind I could consume and convert. Instead, it was as if a component was missing, as though the airborne substance wasn’t as authentic as the true form that inhabited immortals and those infected by it.
But in this world? Jera said everything was made of the substance, and when I opened my core to test that claim, I was slammed with waves of a dark, potent force so raw and electrifying, I found my airways cut off for a reason wholly separate from terror.
Jolt after jolt of energy rushed into me in a uniform torrent. Around the cube ward, the blue grass began to dilute, fading into a mesh of
grey just like that within the ward. Had I been the cause of killing the grass from the start?
I filed the question aside as I inspected one more pressing. While the world may have slowed, the in-pour of energy filled the pit of my stomach at dizzying speed, so that I was too hyperaware of everything.
The magnificent glade, the grass blades and how the purple daylight cast a thin veil of fuschia onto its surfaces. The cool lilt of wind moving through the ward at a decelerated speed. The wicker straw weaving of the sandal descending onto the ward.
Maybe this was why time slowed but not the flow of dark energy. It was allowing me a window to consume it. And use it.
Jera and I had tested teleportation on multiple training sessions in the past, only for the attempts to leave a mocking stain on our impetus. I’d thought I had to be in a dangerous situation for the teleportation to work after having teleported from the compound, but when an altercation with HB agents proved otherwise, only then did I discover my teleportation failed for one reason alone: I wasn’t fueled, charged, amped.
But now that it flowed through me, buzzing a high drone beneath the skin, inside my head, would it be as simple as closing my eyes and envisioning myself anywhere but here?
I closed my eyes, but the only places I knew were in my world and I didn’t want to go back there, not yet. Wasn’t even sure if I could.
My only option, the only place I was familiar with in this world, was across the meadow.
Deep breath, I imagined myself as transient, unsustainable, no longer standing beneath the impending death but elsewhere in this vast terrain.
This was the first time I felt it, the vanishing. A moment where I felt as if I simply didn’t exist across space-time.
And when I appeared yards away from the two giants, stunned by the success and staring out at the high grass and looming figures, I was stomped by one very real question—what if I was as great as the immortals in my world claimed?
It was a question that died as soon as it was born when the male glanced over his shoulder, spotted me through the tall, swaying grass and performed a gesture that was all too familiar: he snapped, the sheer size of it sending a harsh gust of wind in all directions, then perished. A figure as tall as a mountain, first there, then gone.