by Jeff Sabean
Nodding as he listened, Heishi found he was fighting back tears for the first time he could remember in his adult life. “My friend, I could not have survived more than a day in this place if it was not for you. I understand why you must stay and hope that you will find me again when this place is safe for good people to live.”
The companions said their goodbyes, then Shenroc and Yutri stepped back and watched the other four board the ship. Tylo saluted the pair from the bow of the ship as it slid away from the dock, then returned to his duties as captain of the vessel.
“Will we see them again?” Yutri asked, not even attempting to hide the tears in his eyes.
“If they live long enough we will,” replied Shenroc, then the two turned and walked back to face the ramifications of their actions that morning.
Epilogue
The fire started in The Portal spread beautifully to the surrounding buildings. From each direction, men and women of every race imaginable ran back and forth with buckets of water, attempting to control the blaze. Standing in the stern of the ship as it pulled out of the harbor, Heishi stared at the growing flames and knew it was no use: at least half the city would be ravaged by the fire.
Serves them right. If ever I have seen a city that needed a good purging, it was Terminus. Maybe they will have a chance for a fresh start now. There were good people in Terminus, but they never had a chance under that tyrant Big Jim. I’ll have to come back some day and check in on them, and if they haven’t learned their lesson, we’ll burn it down again. Too easy.
He turned and wandered to the bow, lost in thought. Tiane walked over and stood by his side, looking to the horizon as the sun began to slip into the sea. For a time, they stood quietly, watching the sunset, then Tiane broke the silence:
“So, Heishi, do you think we’ll ever find the rest of the team?”
The silence was deafening as he waited for a response, but Heishi finally looked back and grinned. “I do believe we will. We both counted three other parachutes, so we know the guys potentially survived the jump. From the light in Zatus’ eyes, I have to assume he is here somewhere and understands more than we think he does about what is going on. The first thing on the agenda is to make it safely to Harmonui and warn them of the attack. Hopefully somewhere along the way we will pick up some information of other-worlders appearing so we can track them down. Be patient, my brother, you were here for over three months before I arrived, and that has been less than a week. As much as I hate leaving Terminus and the thought of Aki and Zatus arriving there without us, I trust Shenroc and Yutri to keep an eye open for them, and we must deliver this message to the elves. I have never believed in fate, but it would seem we have arrived in this place just in time to assist the forces of good against an encroaching evil, and it is something I feel I have to do.”
Tiane nodded and turned back to the horizon as the last rays of sunlight disappeared and his vision shifted into the low light spectrum. He hoped the crew had just been trying to scare the newcomer with their stories of sea monsters, but after everything he had witnessed in this place, he had to assume there was truth to them. He was not afraid, he had nothing to lose at this point, but he kept a watchful eye as the harbor disappeared behind him.
◆◆◆
Unseen by those making a hasty getaway on the ship was a dark shape floating effortlessly above the burning city. The shadow dragon glided in circles, occasionally catching an updraft to maintain its elevation. Yellow eyes glinted through the mass of shadows swirling around the beast, obscuring its bulk from the vision of those below as the sky darkened. It watched as the puny beings scampered back and forth, the size of ants from this height, the futility of their efforts making them more pathetic in the eyes of the ancient one.
Its rider, Fion, also cloaked in shadow, looked on with an amused expression. This was a shadow elf in the truest sense of his race: cruel, brutal, and thoroughly evil. Unbeknownst to those escaping the burning city, he was the true power behind Big Jim, the bumbling oaf who had recently perished. Fion shook his head and laughed mercilessly.
“Yes, Dracorex, Jim was a buffoon and received what he deserved. He should know better than to antagonize men of such power. The Orb is lost to us for now; I do not sense its presence on the puny vessel.” Fion sighed and stared at the ship as it disappeared from the harbor.
“Master let me kill them and search the corpses,” Dracorex grumbled, his voice sounding like the rumble of distant thunder to those below. It disgusted the Dragon King to call this elf “master,” and to feign subservience, but it served his purposes to bring about the destruction to come. A wicked smile crossed the lips of the dragon, razor sharp teeth showing as he thought of destroying the elves and then moving on to the cities of men.
“No, my friend, we must allow them to live until the location of the Orb can be discovered. Then we will send someone to recover it for us. It is too soon to reveal our presence, so bide your time, and soon we will revel in the annihilation that awaits this world.”
◆◆◆
In the distance along the edge of the mountain, unnoticed by all, a cloud formed, spewing red lightning…
Aki
Shifting Planes Series: Book 2
Copyright © 2019 Jeff Sabean
All rights reserved.
Prologue – The Jump
Sergeant First Class Jay Aki hung in mid-air listening to the radio chatter around him. He had jumped from more aircraft than he could remember in his Army career, but he had never floated back up instead of down after exiting the plane. Yet here he was, floating at 10,000 feet elevation, staring at the ground below, red lightning flashing around him, and wondering what bad decisions he made in his life to end up here.
His morning had begun well, with a sparring match against his student and long-time friend Master Sergeant Paul “Heishi” Neasba, who was also the team leader for their Top-Secret Antiterrorism team, code named Ronin Team. The two trained in martial arts together regularly, and this morning Heishi had almost beaten him for the first time, but the session was cut short by a call to action. Terrorists were planning to detonate a nuclear device at a new Florida theme park, and Ronin Team had been tapped to stop the disaster from happening. The flight from Fort Bragg, NC to Florida had gone well, with everything taking place like clockwork, right up until the jump.
The exit from the aircraft at 25,000 feet had been flawless: the sky beautiful, no excessive wind, just enough cloud cover to assist in the stealthy approach, and the team was lined up perfectly to mask their descent into the park behind the fake mountain in the center, which housed the world’s fastest roller coaster. Everything was going well until they reached 9,000 feet, when everything went haywire. A freak storm appeared from nowhere, and the red lightning began to flash immediately as the clouds rolled in. The team then floated up to 10,000 feet, where they were currently suspended in mid-air and wondering if this is how they would die.
"Ronin Two, do you have any clue what is going on here? You are the expert on weird things, did one of your toys break and do this to us?" Neasba's voice broke through Aki’s contemplation.
Chief Warrant Officer Adam Zatus, call sign Ronin Two, was the technical guru for Ronin Team. He had designed the communicators each member carried which were nuclear powered, required no satellite connection, and would reach the other communicators anywhere in the world. He had also designed the gadgets SFC Aki used in his medic bag to save lives, making them smaller and more effective than anything previously available. But at this moment, CW3 Zatus was not answering his communicator.
"Zatus, seriously, if you don’t answer me, I am gonna throat punch you if I can ever reach you again. Do you have any idea what is going on here?” Neasba seemed to be losing his normal ability to remain calm in every situation.
“I guess floating in mid-air will do that to just about anyone. I better help him out here.”
"Top, I don’t think he's conscious. I can see his chest moving, so he's breathing,
but I can't see his eyes." Aki responded. "He still has his oxygen mask on, which is a good thing, but it's keeping me from seeing his eyes."
Neasba radioed back to the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) at Fort Bragg to advise of the situation while Aki continued attempting to reach Zatus. He knew how to “fly” different directions in a typical descent, but this was different: he could feel wind rushing at him but was not able to change his position in the sky, he was simply stuck in place.
“I need to get to Zatus. He could be dying in front of me, and I can’t even see if his chest is moving.”
As suddenly as the storm began, it ended. The team remained suspended in mid-air at 10,000 feet, but there was no longer any wind or any noise. The communications from the TOC ended abruptly, leaving Neasba talking to dead air as Aki listened in, but that was the only sound. Without warning, Aki felt himself propelled toward the ground at an alarming rate of descent, his altimeter spinning too fast for him to see the needles.
"Ronin team pull your chutes NOW! Pull Pull Pull!!!" Neasba screamed into his radio.
“Wow, he never loses his cool, this must be really freaking him out,” thought Aki as he calmly pulled his chute and watched it open above him. He took a moment to glance to the sides and saw three other parachutes open, but there should have been four more.
He did not have a chance to dwell on the thought, as suddenly he felt like the whole world turned upside down. A flash of red light splashed around him, and thunder cracked at the same moment. He looked down to see how close he was to the ground and found himself looking at the sky! He looked “up” at his parachute, and it was still fully inflated but facing the ground. As he attempted to sort out the difference, his vision shifted again, and he found himself looking up at his parachute inflated in an azure sky: there were no clouds or lightning in sight. He looked down again, and discovered he was closing in on treetops along the edge of a mountain and was drifting into a clearing with a dirt road running through it.
As he cleared the edge of the tree line, he came into view of a wagon on the dirt road directly beneath him, where a battle ensued between some men wearing medieval armor and their green-skinned attackers. His first glance proved deceptive as he dropped lower, as the defenders were not men at all, but what appeared to be dwarves!
“Great, somehow I ended up dropping into the middle of an afternoon show. How am I going to explain this?” Aki thought as he prepared to land. "I guess it isn’t the strangest thing to happen to me in the last few minutes...”
His speed of descent was off due to the storm, and rather than a Parachute Landing Fall (PLF), he hit the ground like a cherry jumper: feet, butt, head. As he wriggled loose of his suspension lines, Aki rose to his feet to see both the attackers and defenders staring at him, jaws slack.
The group of attackers ranged in height from three feet to well over six feet tall, with varying shades of green skin. The taller ones had some semblance of tusks protruding from their lower jaws: some had two, some only one and a broken second tusk. Varying shades of yellow and red eyes stared back at him, and several of the smaller monsters who were closer to the wagons had black blood oozing out of sword cuts spread over their bodies. As he continued to study the scene, he realized there was no audience, and there were dead bodies on the ground surrounding the wagon, to include that of a horse that had apparently been pulling it before the attack.
“What did I just land in the middle of? Can this be real? There’s no way it’s real. But if it was a show the smell of blood and guts wouldn’t be in the air, and there would be an audience or a camera crew present,” Aki thought, baffled at what his eyes were seeing but his brain was telling him could not be true.
Taking advantage of the surprise he caused by floating down from the sky, Aki slipped his tonfa out of the backpack he had packed for the mission. The handles were cool and smooth to his touch, and with a thought he commanded the shadows to begin curling around the weapons, slightly obscuring them from view and creating a protective barrier that would cushion and stop any sharp object they encountered. As the beasts stared stupidly at him, trying to decide what to do, he rushed into the middle of the group, tonfa spinning and crushing the head of the largest of the attackers as he leapt into their midst. A second beast snapped out of its shock and swung a crudely forged sword at him, which he picked off cleanly with his left-hand tonfa, then willed the blades on the edges of his right tonfa to snap from inside the shaft as he spun it across the throat of the beast, cutting deeply into its throat and removing it instantly from the fight. He retracted the blades as the tonfa spun back around and he brought it in close to himself, punching forward and into the nose of a third attacker, shattering bone and dropping it to its knees, where a backhand swing of his left hand caved in the side of its head.
The defenders, bolstered by the sudden appearance of an ally, rushed forward into the mix of green-skinned marauders, hacking with axes, smashing with hammers, and stabbing with daggers. Within moments, every one of the beasts lay dead at the feet of the defenders, with Aki standing in the middle of a pile of corpses.
“Ye kill orcs good, human,” stated a stout looking dwarf who stomped forward to stand in front of Aki, his shield still in front of him in a defensive position. The dwarf stood between three and four feet tall, with black hair hanging loosely to his shoulders under a horned helmet and a beard braided into a single braid that hung almost to his belt. He stared suspiciously at Aki as he held a well-worn axe in his right hand, positioned to strike at any moment. “Will ye be givin us a name to call ye, or does meself have to guess at it?”
Trying to contain his surprise at the events of the past few minutes, Aki deactivated the shadows swirling around his weapons as he bowed from the waist to the dwarf. “Good sir, I am known as Aki, although I must confess that I am at a loss as to where I am. May I ask what this place is?”
As Aki lowered his weapons to his sides, the dwarf relaxed a bit as well, although he kept his shield and axe in his hands. “Aye, ye can call meself Bendiac Brewdigger, and I’m the one who saved yer hide just now.”
At this, Aki nodded his head in a show of respect, although he knew his appearance had assisted the dwarf greatly in his defense against the monsters. His head snapped up sharply, and he looked Bendiac directly in the eye. “Master Brewdigger, did you say ‘orcs’?”
“Aye, ye durn fool, the three ye dropped were orcs, the little ‘uns were goblins,” Bendiac replied, dropping his guard further as he burst out laughing. “Ain’t ye never seen an orc before?”
“I can honestly say I never have, good sir. Where exactly am I?” Aki asked, as he attempted to discreetly search for hidden cameras. “Am I on a hidden camera show or something? Because those three boys aren’t getting back up...”
Looking baffled, Bendiac scrunched up his nose as he stared Aki. “Ere now, human. I don’t be knowin’ what a ‘hidden camera show’ is, but ain’t no one here but us. If ye want to join us, ye can travel to town and we can be discussing where ye come from just now, and how ye got up in the sky,” he said, as he glanced up toward the cloudless sky.
“I would like to accompany you to town very much, sir. But you still have not told me where we are,” replied Aki, as he pulled his backpack over his shoulders and prepared to walk.
“Aye, so I didn’t. We’re headed to Terminus to sell me wares. See that cloud o’ smoke over them trees?” Bendiac asked, pointing down the dirt road. “That be the direction of Terminus, and where we’re headed. Ye comin’?”
Nodding his head, Aki walked toward the wagon with Bendiac as one of the other dwarves finished taking the harness from the dead horse and tossing it over his own shoulders to pull the cart.
“This day just keeps getting stranger and stranger,” Aki thought to himself as he fell in next to the dwarves and headed down the road.
Chapter 1 – Answers and Questions
As the group started back down the dirt road toward Terminus, Aki walked beside Bendiac a
nd attempted to discover what had happened. The morning was bright and clear, with birds singing in the trees along the road, and the smell of flowers was in the air. Nothing about the stroll down the country road gave away the violence he had landed in, and he was positive he had not landed in a Florida theme park.
“Good dwarf,” Aki began, “I have to be honest with you: I have no idea where I am. I was with a team and we were parachuting into a park to remove a threat from terrorists, when suddenly, I was in the middle of a storm, with red lightning flashing all around us. We floated back up into the air, stayed there for what felt like an eternity, and then were thrown back toward the ground. I was able to open my parachute, and I counted three others, before the storm disappeared, my companions with it, and I appeared here in the middle of your fight with the orcs and goblins.” Aki paused, looking Bendiac in the eye, and when the dwarf remained silent, he continued: “I have no idea where I am, but where I come from, orcs and goblins are stories we tell our children. They are not real, and neither are races of dwarves, as I assume you are?”
“He still won’t answer. What do I have to say to get some answers from this guy?” Aki asked himself. “I’ll just play his game and stare at him until he says something. I’m done giving up information for free.”