by BJ Hanlon
“The real world I suppose,” Edin said.
The monk said nothing. He stared out at the land before him with a thoughtful expression; then he reached out a hand as if to feel for an invisible wall. “I will go no further,” the monk said. “This is where we part.”
Edin turned toward him so the setting sun was at his back and he looked out onto the primeval valley behind the man. “It is beautiful,” Edin said. “Maybe I’ll return one day.” Maybe he and Arianne could find a cottage on the lake here.
“The way back is difficult, but if you continue forward, you may find it.” He said in a prophetic type tone.
“Very confusing,” Edin said but then something caught his eye and he shut up. Something that didn’t make sense. The light of the fading sun was catching something far to the north. In the direction of the monastery.
It looked pinkish-red mixed with a yellowish hue and it was rising. Edin blinked. “What is that?” Edin said.
The monk didn’t answer. He was gape mouthed and staring as if he’d never seen anything like it before.
That wasn’t natural.
The fog began to move toward them across the lake. It was very slow, much like the rest of the world when Edin moved like a terrin.
Then he heard voices in his head. Muddled ones, fearful ones, and confused ones. He could tell where they were. Their exact locations and their fears. Some were at the monastery, others were in the cottages, and yet more were on banks of the lake next to the serene animals. There were loud cries from men and beast. Birds began to leap from the lake as the fog rolled on.
Edin watched as a bird that looked almost black in the light started to fly. It had a long needle-like beak. The fog began to rise and the bird flew slowly into it.
Then he could only see the shadow of it in the mist. And the shadow dropped. From below it, Edin could see sparks of red.
He heard other voices, one possibly the abbot’s cry out. ‘What is happening?’
Answers came in, monsters, fog, death.
He felt the fear in them, a wicked, leg-locking, pants wetting fear in them and could not move. Then he felt like he was choking for a moment. He saw a stampede of large mammals, elephants, across the lake headed south toward an unknown.
His head began to pound with all the cries of panic and the muffled prayers. “They’re dying,” the monk said next to Edin. “My family.” He wasn’t using the wave. Maybe the lines of communication were too crowded.
It sort of took Edin away from the sight and the feelings and he had a clear thought of what monsters? Edin saw the monk next to him was staring, gaping still. He opened his mouth to speak and then they heard it. A giant piercing sound like a knife on a shield, but only if it had been Vestor’s knife on Losilin’s shield. The largest and loudest screech of all.
Edin’s knees nearly gave. Nearer to them in the water that was slowly being shrouded, something leapt from the serene surface.
Edin guessed they were maybe a hundred feet above the lake’s surface but what he saw leap from that water dwarfed them.
It was giant and segmented like a worm. Fifty feet in diameter with its mouth taking up the end. Inside that mouth, Edin saw giant teeth.
But he only saw them for a moment because suddenly, more fog began spilling out; spewing like it was an avalanche coming down the mountain. The worm turned left and right for a moment and dove back under the fog line and into the water.
Its spew did not. It held in the air above before dropping. He saw the fog rolling further over the lake and valley. Edin saw man and beast fleeing but the fog was too fast.
Many of the screams of man and animal grew softer. Then they were silenced.
An eerie, complete silence came over the world, it was as if the wind and the water too had been snuffed out.
The monk was shaking next to him, his mouth trembling. Then he said, almost as an aside, “I have to go.”
As he was about to go. Edin snagged his arm and squeezed as tight as he could.
The feeling of almost déjà vu came over him. Only he was in the opposite position. He was holding a man back, a man who wanted to run toward a fire to save his family. Edin swallowed. He’d die, just like Edin would have if Grent hadn’t held him back.
“Let go,” the monk cried.
“They’re gone,” Edin said. The man ripped his arm away.
Then there was crashing through trees. Ripping out of bushes and grasses and breaking of branches.
Down below, Edin saw the fog rising. It was coming up through the trees and preceding it were monkeys, deer, snakes, and birds. They were fleeing the yellow death that was coming upon them.
Edin slammed his staff into the man’s legs as he took a step. The monk collapsed.
“Do not throw your life away. Even these animals know to flee.”
Bliz whined but did not move from Edin’s side.
Edin reached down and grabbed the monk by the scruff of his collar and hauled him up. Rage came over the man’s face. Rage and fear and confusion.
Edin pulled him back down a narrow game trail toward the real world.
The monk barked incoherently, fighting back, slapping at Edin’s hands, though they were half-hearted attempts to break free again. Finally, he stopped resisting and was simply catatonic as they descended.
Edin kept waiting to see the fog crest the hilltop and come down but it didn’t, only a nimbus aura of it came from the sunlight’s reflection.
It took an hour to get to the bottom and Edin collapsed on a fallen log and Bliz laid down at his feet, still whining. Then in his head, there was words. Monk’s words. He heard the abbot and a few others from dinner. He heard ‘It has stopped rising.’
Edin glanced over to the monk who was looking back at the crest. This must’ve been what happened in the Northlands. Edin thought. The swamps of old will spread like weeds.
That part of the prophecy was right.
Then he heard, ‘no one below responds.’
Edin heard weeping in his head and in real life. Then he heard wet lapping and saw Bliz was licking the monk’s face. The man tried to block, but it too seemed half-hearted and he stopped after a moment.
“My brother was at the cottage, my real brother,” the monk said.
“I’m sorry.” Edin said remembering Berka. If it stopped rising, he should be safe. At least for now.
“His name was Irat.” He said.
Edin looked around, there were trees and he saw some animals cresting the hill still. A large orange ape and other monkeys. “I thought you forgot your names?” He said.
The monk sniffled. “No one really does. It is something we tell each other, something we’ve told people for three-thousand of your years.”
“Three thousand?” Edin balked. “What do you mean…” the man had a look of complete seriousness on his face. “How is that possible.”
The monk shrugged.
“What’s your name?”
“Just call me Monk,” he said. “It’s what I am, it’s what I’ll always be.” Edin saw him looking at his hands. “I wonder if I’ll age at the same rate as you people now, or will father time want to make up for lost time?”
Edin said nothing. He looked up toward the farmer in the distance and couldn’t see him. No more livestock, no more farmer. He was probably over some small berm.
In their location, they were covered by the hill to the east and a copse of trees to the north. It was as good a spot as any for a camp. He was out of the old, slow world and could rest now.
“You didn’t perhaps pack me a sparkstone did you?”
Monk looked up and nodded. “Front pocket of the pack,” he said.
Edin found it, a front pocket. He set the sparkstone to his sword and lit the fire in one strike, though his talent did a bit of the work.
The flames whooshed and he sat in its warmth.
“The first time I’ve not spent a night in my own chambers in a long time,” Monk said. “I don’t know if I’ll be
able to sleep.”
Edin thought about the fogs, the giant worm, then Yio climbing the tunnel to get to their world, to destroy their world. He didn’t know if he could either.
But he did and the dreams were not pleasant.
13
Losing to Gain
Yio Volor was close. He was behind Edin, he was all around Edin, like a giant canvas blanket in a pool of water. It felt like it was falling deeper and then he was shocked. Electrical shocks struck at his body. They seized his heart and his lungs like a giant hand reached down his throat and grabbed them. All breath, all heartbeats stopped.
He was smothered like a child beneath a pillow, like a man buried beneath the earth.
Fear wracked him as he suddenly felt rips and tears in the blanket. But whoever was doing it, wasn’t there to free him. They were there to hurt him.
Above his mouth he heard the tearing ripping sound that pulled through his body. The canvas was shredded and there was a deep wide hole ahead of him. A hole of complete darkness. A hole as if the world had been torn away. It was nothingness. An empty space.
Then something appeared before him. A humanesque face. A gruesome and horrible face. Edin shuddered and tried to scream, but there was no one to cry out to.
At that moment, he knew, the world had died. All of it, and it hadn’t simply died. It was as if everyone who’d ever lived was gone.
Their lives had been wiped out. Their souls, their memories. Everything that had ever been, everything they aspired to be… it was as if it never existed.
There were no humans, no elves, no magi, not even any dwarves. Only the dematians, the monsters and their god.
Then he was somewhere else. A landscape that looked like a sickly old man on his last legs. The sky had turned a wicked orange. There were no more trees either, but many shrubs. Though they weren’t really shrubs. The greenery had turned red. It was reddery.
The plants, all had red leaves and stems the color of blood or if it could be made into a color by the color gods, terror.
There was a wicked howl, but he wasn’t sure it was the wind that howled or something else. A creature’s shivering cry on the wind.
“I’m not here,” Edin said and looked down to see that wasn’t true. He was his full body, he wore green robes and had his sword strapped to his side and his quarterstaff in hand.
Edin looked around and saw the mists to the left. They were yellow and choking but they stopped a few hundred feet away as if held at bay by an invisible wall. He could see dark shapes at the side of the mists. Wights or draugrs of some kind. He saw large bat-like wings easily six feet across and long serpentine figures like vines, but they all seemed to come from a single source.
Above he saw a giant flying reptile. A wyrm. It cried out above him with the wind.
Edin spotted giant birds, real birds far off in the distance. A flock of them seemed to be fleeing the fog and the wyrm.
Then Edin spotted the glow of the mouth and the bolt of electricity strike one of the birds. It cried out, squawked in pain, and began to drop.
The wyrm swooped down and seized it in its mouth. The raptor still was alive and it cried out. Even from this distance, Edin heard the crunching of bone as the animal was eaten.
‘This will come to pass,’ a voice said. One that was familiar, ‘if you let this happen. If you fail.’
Edin looked around but there was no one. Then the mists rose up and around him blotting out all visions of creatures and the red land. They hung at a distance like shy boys and gals at a wintertide festival dance.
Then he looked up.
Directly above him were two gray clouds, oval in shape and reminding him of furious eyes. They seemed to stare at him with venom and fury.
“I won’t fail,” he yelled, though his voice quivered so much it was more of a whimper like that of Bliz or the monk named Monk.
Edin woke to look up at a purple, aching sky. His pulse racing as he gasped for the largest breath of air he’d taken in a long time. Edin’s back arched and he felt his stomach twisting and pulling.
Then he collapsed it. Everything collapsed back to the hard ground. Monk was above him with wide eyes. Fearful eyes.
Edin’s chest hurt, he had phantom shocks around his body and his heart felt like it’d been bruised by a stone being whipped directly at his chest.
‘What was that?’ he said in Edin’s mind, the inner words barely known beneath the throbbing headache.
After a few moments he was able to suppress the headache and his eyes adjusted. Edin blinked away tears. Painful tears and saw the outline of the forest and the green leaves that were beginning to appear.
Another few moments he was able to sit up with some effort. “A bad dream.”
But was it really a dream? He remembered the voice. Why would I ever let that happen? he thought.
“That wasn’t a dream, it was something else,” Monk was speaking normally.
“You saw it?”
“Parts. I was there. I saw the sky and the monsters.” He paused, “and the burning.”
Edin nodded.
“It was as if the world had turned on its head, as if it had become a different dimension.”
Edin reached for the waterskin and took a few deep swigs of the fresh water, then he remembered the valley and looked back up over the ridge. He couldn’t see the fog, not even that nimbus aura anymore. Was it even there or was it a shared delusion that he and Monk had experienced?
“Thousands of years ago, there was a thinker who believed in different dimensions,” the monk was saying. “Could it be true?”
Edin looked back at him but didn’t answer. At this point, he honestly did not care. “What time is it?” Edin asked interrupting some spiel about the thinker who was dead for thousands of years now.
Monk looked at him as if he were crazy and then said. “I haven’t worried about time in—”
“Millennium, right, I forgot,” Edin said and picked himself up off the ground. “Maybe it’s time you start.”
“I suppose so since I’m probably aging now.”
Edin pointed back up the hill. “Would you rather be in there?”
Monk didn’t answer. He let loose the tie around his waist and retied it. There was a hard look of determination on his face and Edin wondered what he was thinking, and if he could read the man’s mind as well.
For a moment, he tried but got nothing.
“We should get a move on,” Edin said. He looked toward the forest a few miles distant, he looked to the fields and the hills that slowly disappeared to the south and beyond the horizon. To the west it was the same.
He knew somewhere over there was the Allutian River and a crossroads. One for travelers.
Edin was going to head toward Turridor, or so he hoped. Soon, he’d have to meet the dematian king. Edin clenched his jaw. It could end this threat, maybe put the world back to normal.
Did he just wander until he stumbled across the dematian king or did the dematian king wait until the last moment? Maybe when Edin was worn out from travel.
He picked up his pack and the quarterstaff and looked at the dark skies to the west. Away from the rising sun, though the sun wasn’t rising as bright. The sky was gray and purple like a sick bruise.
Then he started that way. He put one foot in front of the other and walked toward the darkness.
It took hours, longer than he’d have thought to reach a small dirt track that looked at least somewhat familiar. He found the path that had led him through the forests and past the ghost hollow. Monk stayed behind him not talking while Bliz disappeared at points after he’d seen something in the tall grass or near one of the many brambles of bushes or copses of trees.
Edin stared off into the darkness ahead that was still there despite it being nearly noon.
He thought of the vision of the dematians swooping down through the deserts of Porinstol. He thought of the prophecy. The west is in darkness, the is being covered in shade.
; Edin swallowed.
There were many different people, false prophets and crazies who’d yell about the end times. He heard one in Carrow on his first visit when he was searching for Arianne. Then he remembered another in Aldenheim on a trip when he was young. The man wore a sign around his neck that read. Pray to Losilin before he sends his son Yio to destroy all!
Edin didn’t think Losilin would want the destruction Edin had seen. Heck, the old father of the gods created the world.
After one of his trips away, Bliz returned with bits of blood and fur in his teeth. Edin, who had been famished, lost his appetite.
Monk didn’t complain. They walked on with the sky far in the distance staying dark and evening coming earlier than it should have.
As night came on and the orange moon lit up the western sky. They grew tired as they headed south toward what he remembered was the ferry.
It was much faster by horse but eventually, around midnight, he began to see manmade shapes in the distance. A silo and the upside-down V of a small cottage. It was warm out and late into the night, so to Edin, it wasn’t too odd that there was no smoke coming from the chimney.
As he continued, he saw a giant tear in the silo. Coming from the tear was an avalanche of some sort of grain; wheat or oats he couldn’t tell.
A section of the grain seemed darker… shinier. Edin swallowed, blood, he thought but didn’t say anything. He fingered the hilt of his weapon and watched.
They hiked on and he saw the inn from across the way. In the dark, he could see it was still standing.
Edin caught the smell of over-cooked flesh and was glad he hadn’t been hungry earlier.
They found the small ferry crossing with the raft on the far side. Edin sighed. He was tired, too tired to summon the raft to them and certainly too tired to swim the cold water.
