by Shaun Barger
He’d come ashore near the first of the houses. He opened his mouth to call out, but let his flame go out instead and covered himself with a sheet of invisibility. He was startled by how difficult it was. Already the spell sapped away at his strength, like he was carrying some heavy burden. Without the supplemental energy of the Disc omnipresent within the Veils, maintaining a high energy weave like camelos with nothing more than his internal reservoirs of magic really took its toll.
Still, better safe than sorry. Sticking to the shore, he began to search for any sign of life among the houses.
The first few were utterly in ruins. The next was a little better, but shifted alarmingly when he forced open the front door. Peering into the remnants of the house, he decided it wasn’t safe.
Two houses down, he found one that looked pretty solid. It was obviously the newest of the bunch, though still long abandoned. Its windows were boarded up, unlike the other houses. A once swinging bench seat on the front porch hung from a single rusted chain.
The front door was busted in. Running his fingers along the splintered wood, Nikolai felt a jolt as he realized that the damage was recent. Days? Weeks? He noticed gouges on the floorboards in front of the door and kneeled down for a closer look. Deep scratches—claw marks?
Nikolai cautiously passed through the shattered remnants of the entrance, allowing his weaves of invisibility to dissipate. Dust hung heavy in the air. There was a great stone hearth, sofas and chairs smashed and scattered around the fireplace. Chips and bullet holes in the wood—also recent.
Nikolai walked lightly as he explored, attempting silence. No food in the kitchen. The cupboards were stripped bare—what he thought might be a refrigerator had an unpleasant, musty stink to it—and though the door was transparent glass, a thick black mold had completely overgrown the inside surface, hiding the contents within.
Nikolai really should have been worried about the recent signs of violence. But he was giddy with excitement. He couldn’t help it. Old and decrepit as the ruins were, what little tech he could find was incredibly advanced compared to what he’d seen in museums and books. Abandoned, yes—but for decades at most—not a century. And if the humans hadn’t really died in 2020 like he’d always been told—oh, what sort of wonders they must have created since then! Flying cars? Hoverboards? Commercial space travel? Virtual reality? Robots? Not to mention all the new movies and music and books and—and!
The humans were alive. The humans were alive! If those bullet holes hadn’t been so fresh, Nikolai would have been singing and dancing. He was practically running around the house, pulling out cupboards and shelves, looking under sinks and behind broken furniture.
There weren’t any buttons on the glass-front refrigerator. The glass was oddly textured, and he wondered if when there was power the glass turned into some sort of computer display. Behind the fridge there wasn’t any sign of tubes. He pushed it a couple of inches to see if there were hidden wires underneath. Nothing.
There were a few other appliances—a rusted glassy thing that might have once made coffee. A rather ordinary-looking blender—Nikolai guessed that even after a century, some things stayed the same. None of them had any wiring.
Much of the wall over the fireplace was covered with a thin, white layer of some sort of plastic—light blue fluid crusted below where it’d been cracked by a spray of bullet holes. A screen?
Upstairs there were two bedrooms sharing a bathroom. The mattresses were stripped and rotten in the bedrooms. One room was obviously for a child. The window was broken over a jumble of stuffed animals sodden and melted from years of weather exposure. The walls were patched with great swathes of mildew, but underneath he could make out a cartoonish mural depicting the solar system. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. Earth, most prominent of all.
Comets scattered throughout. An asteroid belt drawn in detail between Mars and Jupiter, with happy astronaut miners in sleek suits. Smiling, anthropomorphized spaceships traversing the planets, with giant underground metropolises drawn on Mars and the Moon, and a beautiful, lushly gardened city floating in the atmosphere of Venus.
On the city floating over Venus, standing next to it as tall as skyscrapers, was a cartoonish drawing of an older couple. Painted next to them in childish scrawl were the words Grandma and Pop Pop.
Nikolai traced his fingers along the details of the mural with awe, wondering if it was anything more than fantasy. But a century—a century! So much could have happened, so much could have changed. Why had they been lied to? For generations!
Entire Veils had been lost in the 2020 calamity. Millions of magi dead. All the humans—dead!
He sat down, letting his invisibility slip away, struck with the enormity of it. All his life, Nikolai had been told that the humans died in 2020 because of one incredibly evil mage’s magically enhanced warheads.
The Unraveling.
He’d been taught that in the aftermath of the bombing, reality had been twisted and bent in the immediate area surrounding Earth. That all life had been wiped out, some of the Veils destroyed in the process.
He’d seen pictures and footage of humanity’s final moments—entire countries swept away in twisting light. Studied the Edge Guard expeditions into crumbling cities and glassy stretches of land churning with radioactive hex clouds. Visited the New Damascus memorial dedicated to the magi who’d died, where millions of names flickering constantly across the glassy white surface of a monolith.
Lies! All lies! Had those magi ever really existed? Had it all been some grand global conspiracy? And if so, to what end? To keep up such a lie for a hundred years—to seal off their Domed Veils and tell everyone that to venture beyond was death.
Nikolai stared at the pile of rotting stuffed animals at the corner of the human child’s room. A hundred years. What could have happened in so much time? And what happened to the people who used to live here?
A small, terrified voice within whispered that, after everything, the humans destroyed themselves after all—that they were all dead. That something terrible really had occurred—something magi could have prevented if they hadn’t been so blissfully unaware while those in power hid like the lying cowards they were.
The Mage King. He knew about this. He had let this happen. Made this happen. He’d been in power a hundred years before, when the Unraveling supposedly occurred. But why? And how could he think this was okay? Did he really plan to keep this fiction going forever?
It’s as terrible as you think, Hazeal had said. But not in the way you suspect.
His mother had known. And whatever was really happening out here, it had driven her to attempt regicide and revolution.
So many questions! The true fate of humanity. The real purpose of the Edge Guard!
Nikolai thought back to the claw marks gouged into the porch. To the bullet holes sprayed into the walls. Humans? Monsters? Something else?
He went back downstairs. Following the trail of bullet holes and destruction, he found a basement staircase at the center of whatever struggle had occurred. Bullet sprays were clustered on the frame along the outside of the door and on the wall opposite the stairwell. Bending over, he saw what appeared to be an oil slick, left behind by . . . something. And whatever that something had been, it had been dragged away, leaving a smear on the wood and a dribbling trail back outside.
Nikolai peered down into the absolute darkness below. Whatever clawed thing had broken in must have been after someone in the basement. And whoever had been in the basement had tried (unsuccessfully?) to fend it off.
Nikolai knew that his uniform was bulletproof, but sincerely hoped that he wouldn’t come across something with any sort of advanced weaponry. Leaning into the stairwell, he sniffed the air and pulled back, retching. It was the worst thing he’d ever smelled—a powerful, rotting stench. There was something terrible down there.
Nikolai briefly considered leaving, but curiosity outweighed fear and disgust. Breathing through his handke
rchief, he began to descend.
“Hello!” he called into the darkness. “Don’t shoot! I—uh, I mean no harm!”
No answer.
He took another step, tasting the rot through his handkerchief.
“Hullooooo! Anybody here? I’m coming down! So please don’t shoot! Or jump out at me! Or anything like that! Cause, seriously, I will fuck your shit up. Understand?”
Reaching forward, he created a small globe of light with the illio weave. He sent it floating down the stairs with an impatient gesture, illuminating damp cement walls.
Stifling fear, he began to descend, carefully staying within the delicate halo of light provided by the illio sphere.
At the bottom of the stairs, Nikolai sent his globe of light to the center of the room. He gasped through his handkerchief, inadvertently taking in a big mouthful of the stench.
A few feet away, awkwardly contorted from being seemingly shoved to the side, was the bloated corpse of a man in filthy military fatigues. He’d been nearly cut in half. Starting from between his shoulder and neck, down to his abdomen, he was parted in a V—skin and bone and organs hanging rotten along the inside. The bone was very lightly blackened where it had been cut, the separation looking smooth—surgical even.
Looking down, Nikolai found a thick, crusted pool of blood, a smearing path leading from it to where the body now rested. There was a line scorched down the stone of the wall beside him, surrounded by a halo of gory spatter. Nikolai realized that he was standing where that human had died—and that he must have been killed by some sort of energy weapon.
The giddy excitement he might have otherwise felt at discovering evidence of a functional laser gun was greatly subdued by the condition of its victim. Nikolai always thought lasers were supposed to cauterize the wound, but the man might as well have been sliced through the shoulder with an extremely sharp sword.
Across the room was another corpse. A woman, also in military fatigues. She was huddled in the corner, her knees tucked up like she was trying to hide. Her arms hung limply at her side—the top of her head splattered on the wall and ceiling. Though there weren’t any weapons that Nikolai could see, it appeared that she’d shot herself in the head.
There was an oversized bag in the opposite corner from the woman, full of little sealed packages and boxed water spilling out onto the dirty cement floor. There were some filthy sleeping bags, pushed to the side. Kicking them apart with his shoe, Nikolai counted four.
The little brown packages were MREs—Meals Ready to Eat, manufactured by something called the Wornick Company in McAllen, Texas, for the United States Army. Nikolai got a thrill reading that.
Each of the MREs had color-changing tabs—almost all red, to his dismay, with little black letters in English, Spanish, and a few other languages he didn’t recognize saying Expired—and then the date, 12/4/19.
It was October 16, 2120 in the Veils—Nikolai wondered vaguely if the humans had stayed on the same calendar.
Sifting through the reds he found a few that were yellow—with approaching expiration, but no date. Dumping the red-tagged packages, he rolled up the cleanest sleeping bag and stuffed it into the bag with the water and rations.
Bag heavy over his shoulder as he left the house, Nikolai couldn’t stop thinking about the dead humans inside. What would it be like to die, not knowing if your soul would be intact afterward?
Magi had no idea what happened to their souls after they went into the Disc. But by all appearances, humans, half-magi, and animals didn’t even have souls at all.
Unless there was some other kind of life after death that thousands of years of magical and scientific research had yet to detect, humans, like half-mages and animals, faced a nothingness that was terrifying to Nikolai.
The sun peeked through a break in the clouds. It was barely noon; plenty of daylight left.
Nikolai noticed a glint in the sky—something distant and metallic, flashing in the light. He moved back into the shadows of the awning and wrapped himself in a cloak of invisibility.
He squinted, trying to make it out. It was obviously artificial—some sort of aircraft. It was silent, but that might have just been the distance.
The object disappeared into the cloud cover. Nikolai waited, watching for it, but it didn’t reappear.
He found a big, flat stone and placed it on the grass at the edge of the beach. He scorched an arrow onto it, pointing it toward the Marblewood Veil’s point of entry. Nikolai burned a large X across the front of the lake house—careful not to light the building on fire. It was large enough to see from high up over the lake in case he had trouble finding his way back.
With no real destination in mind, Nikolai followed the dirt driveway past the house out onto a small street. The street ran through dense forest broken up by overgrown driveways to the other abandoned homes.
Despite the abandoned houses and rural surroundings, the street itself was well maintained. He kneeled, placing his hand on the warm asphalt. There were off-color patches darker than others here and there—holes that’d been filled. Not a single actual pothole or crack to be seen.
The area was obviously abandoned, so who was fixing the roads?
Nikolai followed the road, careful to track his progress, marking the occasional tree or rock with a discreet scorch mark. The street, marked on a few barely legible, rusted signposts as Fischer’s Way (why maintain the roads but not the signs?), slowly began to curve.
Another odd thing: despite the dozens of abandoned buildings he passed, there wasn’t a single car to be seen. Abandoned, new, or otherwise. A hundred years had passed, so who knew what people used for transportation anymore? But where there were streets, Nikolai thought there should be some sort of private wheeled transport. Most Veils had excellent public transportation—better than anything the humans ever had pre-2020. But there had always been and would always be magi who preferred their own private crafts. Nikolai couldn’t imagine that humans would be different in that regard.
He heard a crackle in the underbrush to his right and spun to face it, dagger drawn. Nikolai held his breath, scanning the trees . . .
There. An immense wolf, with thick black fur. It calmly regarded him from beside a fallen tree; pale green eyes focused directly on Nikolai, who suddenly wished he’d remained invisible.
Nikolai blinked, and it was gone. He searched for it, goose bumps rising on the back of his neck. But it was no use. The wolf had disappeared.
Nikolai continued on, unsettled. There weren’t any humans to be seen, but the wildlife seemed to be flourishing. Squirrels in the trees, the foliage musical with birdsong. Wolves, stalking him in the shadows.
The forest thinned out, then ended abruptly, coming into rolling grassy fields and hills. There was farmland on either side of the road, with scattered houses and barns. Dense wooded forest circled the fields. The road continued out in the open for about a mile until it continued back into the thickly shadowed trees. But unless Nikolai wanted to take a long, painful detour through thick underbrush around the fields, he had to continue on.
Nikolai lingered at the edge of the tree line, hesitant to go out in the open. He whipped up another cloak of invisibility and pulled it around himself. The effort was draining without the supplemental magic from the Disc, but until he knew what the hell was going on he wanted to minimize any chance of being seen.
A strange, silent tractor pulled out of a barn in the distance—heading toward a field neatly lined with dirt and long rectangles of dead wheat. Though the nearby farmhouse was abandoned, the barn next to the field was in good condition. Nikolai stood there frozen as he watched it trundle along, dozens of little metallic things following after it like an insect swarm.
Invisible, Nikolai crossed over to the edge of the wheat field to take a closer look.
The tractor was sleek and compact, but obviously powerful considering the size of the seed sower it pulled across the soil. It was unmanned—no place for a driver, unlike the tractors he’
d seen in museums. Crablike robots the size of tiny dogs scuttled after it, digging and planting and gathering seeds dropped by the seemingly autonomous tractor.
The machines were almost silent. Totally electric, Nikolai guessed.
Occasionally, one of the little crabs split off from the group, going back to the barn. Nikolai followed them, peering through the barn door to find a large hitch trailer taking up most of the space. It was big and white—like the back end of a semitrailer truck. Two slatted ramps led out from the front, up to a pair of panels. The crab Nikolai was following trundled up the left ramp, and one of the panels hissed open, revealing darkness. The crab crawled inside, the other panel opened, and another of the crabs came out.
Nikolai guessed that they were resupplying, and that this was some sort of portable, automatic farmer.
He was struck with a sensation of dread as he quickly made his way back to the road. The clouds parted overhead, the sun shining down brightly. Nikolai held up his hand, trying to shield his eyes—but, still invisible, the light passed right through.
A glint caught the corner of his eye. It was the aircraft from before, turning at the fringes of the cloud break. He squinted, wishing that he could shade his eyes, and noticed a second craft, flying much lower than the other. It had rotors, like a helicopter—but no cabin for riding. Just a black, pill-shaped body.
It came to a stop over the edge of the field, hovering stationary.
Feeling extremely vulnerable despite his invisibility, Nikolai turned away, quickly following the road toward the distant tree line.
A red point of light trembled on the ground a little ways ahead of Nikolai. Panicking, he deviated his path, but the red dot followed—moving along to block his path. But how was it—
Too late did he realize that the laser target was simply passing through him—but locking on, nonetheless.
He spun around, desperately moving to put up a shield.
“Akr-OOF!”
There was a sharp noise and something struck Nikolai in the chest hard enough to make him stumble back despite the force-dampening nature of his uniform’s enchantments. He was sprinting towards the tree line now, and thinking back to the Predator movie he’d seen in the Gloaming, and the Predator’s heat vision, and about every other military movie he’d ever seen, and realized, kicking himself for being an idiot, that camelos only hid him on the visible spectrum—not the infrared!