by Rachel Aaron
“Julius!”
He jumped, tearing his eyes away from the alien landscape just in time for Marci to tackle him back to dusty ground. “That was amazing!” she cried, hugging him until his ribs creaked. “I didn’t even know you could move that fast! I thought we were dead for sure!”
Julius wasn’t sure they weren’t. “We’re in another dimension.”
“That was kind of the idea,” Marci said, sitting back up with an odd look. “Are you okay? You look kind of freaked out.”
“How are you not freaked out?” he said, heart pounding. “We’re stranded in an alternate dimension!” A dead dimension. With no one who could make them a portal back out.
Julius sat up in a rush, lifting his dusty, shaking hands to his face. What had he done? Why hadn’t he jumped another way? Why hadn’t he gone alone? Estella probably considered Marci beneath her notice, which meant she might have gotten away. But no, he’d panicked and dragged her through the one-way portal to a hidden plane and doomed them both.
“Would you stop it?”
He lowered his hands to see Marci glaring at him. “Honestly,” she huffed. “I can hear you blaming yourself, and you seriously need to cut it out. I wanted to come here, remember?”
“But we weren’t going to be trapped then,” he reminded her.
“Better trapped here and alive than back there and dead,” she said with a shrug. “Besides,” her look turned sly. “We’re not necessarily trapped.”
Before he could ask what she meant by that, Marci lifted her hands to show him the glistening, golden orb clutched between her palms.
“The Kosmolabe,” he whispered, eyes wide. “But…how?”
Marci laughed. “Did you forget who you’re talking to here? This little beauty was the most valuable thing in the room and the only way to get to where we were supposed to go. I grabbed it the moment Amelia went weird.”
Julius could have hugged her. He was pushing down the impulse out of habit when he suddenly remembered he could. So he did, grabbing her tight against him. Marci hugged him back just as hard, grinning like there was nowhere else she’d rather be. And that was actually what brought him back to reality, because there were places they needed to be right now, and if his impulsive decision to get them both stranded here was going to be anything other than a disaster, they needed to get moving.
“Come on,” he said, standing up. “We’re burning daylight. Moonlight. Whatever.”
“Assuming time even works the same here,” Marci reminded him, grabbing the hand he offered and pulling herself up. “For all we know, Estella hasn’t even left the house yet back in our world.”
“Or she could already be at Heartstriker Mountain.” That possibility reminded Julius of his seemingly brainwashed siblings, and his spirits dropped even lower. “I wonder if they’re aware?”
“I can’t imagine they are,” Marci said, squeezing the Kosmolabe into her jacket’s inside pocket. “If I understood your brother correctly, the whole point of the chains was to take away someone’s ability to make decisions, thus turning them into a mindless cog in your own future, and that certainly looked like what was happening. I mean, can you imagine Amelia taking orders like that normally? She’d choke herself first.”
That was true, though Julius wasn’t sure if it made their situation better or worse. On the one hand, turning them into puppets would vastly reduce his siblings’ abilities since their experience and personalities were a huge part of what made them powerful. On the other, even a reduced Chelsie, Amelia, and Conrad were still a giant threat, and they still didn’t know what had happened to Justin. Even so. “There’s nothing we can do for them now except stick to the plan,” Julius said, looking up at the motionless red moon. “We’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope that, if there is a time disparity, it’s in our favor.”
“I bet it is,” Marci said with an optimistic smile. “This place doesn’t exactly strike me as fast moving. There’s no wind or animals.” She slid her boot through the black dust. “I don’t even think this stuff is sand.”
Julius didn’t think so, either. The soft black powder looked like a cross between extremely fine sand and old ash. Other than being annoyingly soft to walk in, though, it didn’t appear harmful. He was about to suggest they get moving when a sudden flash of light on the ground nearly made him jump out of his skin.
“What the—”
Ghost was sitting at their feet, tail flicking smugly back and forth.
“How did you get here?” he cried.
The question was more reactionary than interrogative. For once, though, the spirit actually answered. I go where she goes.
Marci gasped. “Even through dimensions?”
Ghost flicked his ears, the cat equivalent of a shrug. We’re bound. If you go, I follow. Doesn’t matter where.
“That is amazing!” Marci cried, reaching down to scoop the glowing cat in her arms. “Who’s my clever boy?” she cooed, covering his freezing fur in proud kisses. The spirit responded by butting his head against her face, rubbing his cheek against hers while giving Julius a smugly superior look.
Julius crossed his arms. Spirit or no, that was deliberately insulting. But he refused to be jealous of a cat, so he just turned away, scanning the landscape to determine where they needed to go next. Not that it was really a question. Besides strange black sand and sky, there was only one other thing here, and that was the mountain.
The black, scary, moving mountain.
“What do you think it is?” Marci asked, following his gaze as she placed Ghost on her shoulders.
“Only one way to find out,” he said, reaching back for her hand. To his great relief, she took it without hesitation, and they set off together into the rolling sea of dust.
Julius had never missed his wings so much in his life. Every step sent their feet sinking ankle-deep into the fine, ashy dust. When they yanked themselves out, the disturbance sent clouds of the stuff up into the air where it made a beeline for their mouths, eyes, and noses like metal filings to a magnet. To Julius’s relief, it tasted just like it smelled, which was like nothing at all, but the fine grit in his throat made him horribly thirsty, a grim reminder that they were on a real time limit here since they had no food or water and zero chance of finding either.
Being mortal, Marci was probably faring even worse, but she didn’t say a word of complaint. She just pulled her shirt up over her mouth and nose to form a makeshift bandanna and trudged behind him, keeping her eyes determinedly on the mountain they didn’t seem to be getting any closer to.
The only one who actually seemed to be enjoying the trip was Ghost. He trotted over the landscape like his namesake, vanishing every few minutes only to come back and meow silently at Marci, who translated his findings for Julius. Unfortunately, there was nothing interesting to report. Every time the cat came back from a scouting mission, it was the same: desert and more desert.
The whole thing reminded Julius of those anxiety dreams where you run and run as fast as you can but never get anywhere, but it wasn’t like they could turn back. Forward was the only valid direction in this place, so they kept moving, trudging through the mercifully cool, apparently eternal night. And then, just when Julius was certain they’d be walking until they died, the mountain was suddenly there, rising straight up from the desert in front of them like a wall.
“About freaking time,” Marci said, running toward the cliff.
“Don’t touch it!” Julius cried, hobbling after her.
Marci scoffed. “Wasn’t going to. I’ve seen movies.”
She did lean perilously close, though, bending over until her nose was less than an inch from the mountain by the time Julius joined her. “What is this stuff? It’s not rock.”
He leaned in as well, squinting in the dim, red moonlight. Even with his superior night vision, though, it still took Julius several seconds to understand what he was looking at. And when he did, he almost wished he hadn’t. “They’re chains,” he
whispered, stomach sinking as he tilted his head back, looking up, and up, and up.
The mountain in front of them wasn’t a mountain at all. It was a pile. A colossal, towering, cylindrical pillar of glistening metal chains just like the one Estella had slapped on Chelsie. Each one was scarcely wider than a string, but they were stacked to the sky, all of them tangled together in a giant knot that seemed to have no end or beginning. They were also all moving, the little links expanding and contracting in unison like the breathing of a sleeping animal. Just watching something so horrendously creepy was enough to make Julius’s skin crawl. Marci, as usual, was unfazed.
“That’s so cooooool,” she said, leaning back so far she nearly fell over in her efforts to see the pile’s top. “I guess we know where Estella got her chains now. So how do you think these work? Do we just pick one out?”
“No way,” Julius said with a shudder. “You saw what happened when one of those things touched Chelsie.”
“I wonder if they’re all different futures?” Marci said, leaning back in to peer at individual links. “You know, all the different chains of events that could possibly happen?”
“How would that even work?” Julius asked. “We’re in another dimension, and didn’t Amelia say that seers couldn’t see out of their own?”
“It has to work somehow,” Marci said. “These are clearly the same chains Estella used, so they obviously function in our world.” She frowned. “Maybe it’s a dragon thing? This is where you’re all from. Maybe part of your future is still here or something?”
That wasn’t a bad theory, but just trying to think through all the implications was already making Julius’s head ache. Before he could reply, though, the black wall in front of them began to vibrate.
“Perceptive lesser creature.”
The words rolled through the ground like shockwaves, making them both jump. “Um,” Marci said, moving closer to him. “Did that mountain just backhand compliment me?”
Julius was lifting his shoulders in a bewildered shrug when the mountain’s surface began to move, the softly pulsing chains curling like tentacles until they’d formed a wide, arched opening.
“Enter.”
Again, the voice shook the ground, but this time Julius was ready for it, listening closely to the words as they rumbled through him. Not surprisingly, given where they were, it sounded like a dragon. A big one. Under any other circumstances, that would have filled him with a healthy amount of dread. Now, though, after a full day of crisis, an evening of almost dying, and a night spent walking untold miles across an alien desert, Julius was too excited about the possibility of actually finding someone who might have some answers to be more than mildly apprehensive.
“Come on,” he said, pulling out his phone to use as a flashlight, the only usefulness it had left out here. “Let’s finish this.”
“I just hope it doesn’t finish us,” Marci whispered, nervously eyeing the tunnel of chains. “And I thought we weren’t going to touch those?”
“The chains are safe,” the voice assured them. “They sleep until cut. Though I invite you to take your time. We have plenty of that to spare, here.”
It might have been Julius’s imagination, but he’d have sworn the strange voice sounded bitter at the end. But while the idea of walking over mind-control chains—sleeping or not—sounded like a very bad one, he was sick of dragging this out. So, with a deep breath of the strange, empty air, Julius closed his eyes and took a big step forward, planting his foot straight down on the tangled chains that made up the tunnel’s floor.
It was…not pleasant. In fact, Julius was certain the feeling of thousands of tiny threads pulsing through the bottom of his shoe was going to be nightmare fodder for the rest of his life. But other than that cheery detail, nothing actually bad happened.
“Is it safe?” Marci whispered.
“I think so,” he whispered back, placing his other foot on the creepy, breathing floor. “Relatively speaking.”
She stepped in beside him with a grimace, her whole body shivering like she’d just jumped in freezing water. “That’s a feeling you don’t forget,” she said, opening her eyes at last as she locked her arm through his. “Let’s get this over with.”
The two of them set off into the dark, marching side by side down the sloping tunnel of chains. Again, it was impossible to say how long they walked. According to Julius’s exhausted legs, it was miles, but the reality was probably closer to a few hundred feet before the tunnel took a sharp turn upwards, expanding into a large, and surprisingly open, space.
From the outside, the pile of chains had looked like a tall, steep, strangely cylindrical mountain. Looking up from the inside, though, Julius realized it was actually shaped more like a very steep volcano, and he and Marci had just entered the caldera. Coiled chains rose in sheer walls around them on all sides, but here in the center, the ground was relatively flat, creating an enormous, circular space open to the moonlit sky above. It actually reminded Julius of standing in the center of a giant nest, which was fitting, because lying in the middle of it all was the largest dragon he’d ever seen.
It was impossible to tell just how large, because the dragon’s snake-like body was coiled in a circle, looped over and over onto itself like a giant pile of rope. That said, even the small coils were still twice Julius’s height and as big around as a school bus. He couldn’t begin to imagine how huge the dragon would be if it stretched out, but what really made him stare were its scales.
In addition to its enormous size—or more likely because of it—the dragon’s body was covered in huge scales. Each one was easily five feet across and arranged in overlapping rows, like a snake’s. This wasn’t unusual—with the notable exception of feathered serpents like the Heartstrikers, most dragons were scaled—but where normal dragon scales varied in size and coloration, these scales were all bone white and so uniform that they looked like they’d been made in a factory. The only difference between them was the writing.
Every scale on the dragon’s body was covered from top to bottom with neat, tightly packed lines of curling black script. Julius couldn’t read what they said, but he recognized the symbols from some of his mother’s oldest—and therefore most valuable—treasures. But just as he was wondering if they’d stumbled onto some kind of giant monument, the coils began to move, sliding over each other with the sound of clicking stone beads as a square, white-eyed head the size of a tank rose from the dragon’s center to look at them.
“Welcome, son of the Heartstriker,” it said, its deep voice still booming, but at least not ground-shaking anymore.
Julius swallowed. “You know who I am?”
“I know whatever you bring with you,” the dragon said. “which, in your case, is very little.” It opened its mouth, showing its bone-white fangs in what Julius hoped was a smile. “I am Dragon Sees the Beginning, and while I’d like to have more than twenty-four years to work with, I welcome you all the same. It is entertaining to have something to look at again.”
Julius was trying to think up an appropriate response to that when Marci said, “Is ‘Dragon Sees the Beginning’ your name or your title?”
The giant dragon rolled its coils. “I don’t see the difference. It is what I am, just as you are a perceptive, presumptuous, death-bound creature.” The wall of smiling teeth grew wider. “Perhaps that should be your name?”
“I’ll stick with Marci, thanks,” Marci said. “But what is it that you do here? Do you just sit around and stare at chains?”
“Does it always ask this many questions?” the dragon said, turning its milky eyes back to Julius. “I shouldn’t have to ask, of course, but your recent memories are highly emotional and disordered, which makes them difficult to interpret.”
Julius wasn’t sure if that was an insult or just a blunt observation, but taking offense at a dragon hundreds of times his size was pointless in any case, so he just moved on. “Is that how you see the beginning?” he asked. “By reading memo
ries? And how is it you are still here? I thought all the dragons had to flee this plane?”
“They did,” the dragon said. “I am merely a magical construct created to preserve the history of this world. All that has happened before this moment is mine to preserve.” The toothy smile faded. “Unfortunately, since the collapse, there has been little for me to remember and no one to remember it for.”
“We would love to hear your memories,” Julius said quickly. “I know nothing about this place or why we left it.”
“So I can see,” the dragon said with a sigh. “The depth of your ignorance is truly depressing, though not surprising. Our kind doesn’t like to remember defeats, and there is no defeat more shameful than the loss of one’s homeworld to careless greed and lack of forethought.”
“How does lack of forethought cause that?” Marci asked, pointing back down the tunnel toward the empty desert.
“It doesn’t. The waste you crossed is not the current state of the former draconic plane. It is merely a representation of emptiness, a buffer to protect me and the history I guard from the void that lies beyond worlds.” He nodded to the chains rising around them on all sides. “Even this place is nothing but a construct created by the future the two of you brought here with you. Though I must admit I’m impressed. I haven’t had a mountain this large to enjoy for a long, long time.”
“Wait,” Julius said. “Are you saying all these chains are connected to us?”
“Who else would they belong to?” the dragon asked. “This is a dead world. There is no future in this place save what you bring with you.” It raised a massive paw from beneath its coils, running its meter-long claws over the curving wall of chains that surrounded them. “These are your possible futures, every chain of events that could yet happen from the moment you entered this place until the end of time.”
