Otherlander: Through the Storm

by T. Kevin Bryan

  Thomas moved in and out of consciousness, for how long he could not tell. He was sure he was dreaming of being back in N’albion. He was flying a dragon. In and out of the mist. He was being pursued by darkness. Darkness personified, a malevolent darkness that had only one desire — to kill him and all he loved. He flew on the wings of the dragon until he could fly no longer. His side hurt. Anytime he took a breath, a sharp pain radiated through his body. In that semi-conscious state, he felt ready to panic: the pain, the pursuit, the darkness, it would swallow him whole. Then a voice called to him. Summoning him through the dark mist.

  “Thomas.”

  His heart stopped racing.

  “Thomas.”

  His breathing slowed.

  “Thomas.”

  “Loren?” Thomas answered. Could it be his old friend from before? The Elder of N’albion who had given him the Pendant with the power to navigate through the Door between his world and N’albion.

  “Thomas, listen to me.” The voice echoed. “Your time is not yet finished. The Otherlander will defeat the Darkness.”

  The voice faded with the mist.

  “Loren, don’t go!”

  Thomas blinked to focus his eyes.

  “Thomas.”

  He slowly adjusted in the darkness.

  He sat up, startled and confused. He was staring into the metal helm of a warrior. The voice spoke again, deep and muffled from inside the helm.

  “Thomas.”

  “Who are you?” Thomas demanded.

  The warrior reached up and pulled off the steel helm, locks of red curly hair cascaded down past the shoulders of the warrior.

  Thomas shook the daze away, and for the first time could see clearly in the firelight.

  “You’re a…” Thomas stuttered, dumbfounded. “A girl.”

  “What gave me away?” The girl smirked.

  She could not have been over 13 years old. She wore the leather jacket of a dragon rider, but under it shone silver rings of chain mail. Stitched leather britches covered her legs, and steel shin guards were attached to those. She held the battle helm now under her right arm and her left rested on her hip. Her red hair framed her face and green eyes flashed with a hint of anger.

  Thomas didn’t know what to say. He propped himself up and winced in pain. Then it all came back to him. The dark assassin, the bedroom battle for his life, his parents…

  “My Mom and Dad!” He attempted to get up. The girl pushed him back down with strong but gentle hands and adjusted the bedroll behind his head.

  “You took quite a beating. In fact, you are lucky,” she frowned then corrected herself. “No, blessed, my grandfather would say, blessed to be alive. Rest and regain your strength. We have a long way still to go.”

  “We are in N’albion aren’t we? Are you taking me to the ‘Home?’ I know who can help us. We have to get to Deacon and Ellie.”

  At this, the girl stiffened.

  “This is Home,” she motioned to the ruins that surrounded them. “At least what is left of it.”

  She knelt in front of him with a bowl and raised it to his lips. “Drink this.”

  Thomas accepted the bowl. It smelled of spicy broth. He took a sip, and it warmed his aching insides.

  “My name is Fion,” she stood. “Deacon and Ellie are my father and mother.”

  Thomas choked. “What?”

  “I hope to the creator they are still alive.” She stared into the small fire. “We are at war.”

  “But how can that be?”

  Fion leaned forward and stared at him with her emerald eyes.

  “Thomas, you have been gone for 14 years.”

  Thomas collapsed back on the bedroll as the weight of the revelation crushed him. He could hardly breathe. He stared up at the dark sky. The strange constellations of N’albion twinkled in the darkness of the vast expanse. He tried to make sense of it. He had been back in Britain for a year and a half. And yet this girl claimed to be the daughter of Deacon and Ellie. He remembered how time moved at a different pace here in N’albion. Then the reality of the time shift hit him. Every day on Earth seemed to be years here. Wait. He couldn’t go anywhere with this girl. Visions of his pregnant mother filled his mind. If he put his mother through this again, it would devastate her.

  “I have to go back.”

  Thorn growled.

  Fion’s brows arched. “What?”

  “I have to go back.” Thomas struggled to his feet.

  The girl poked her finger into Thomas’s chest, and her green eyes sparked with fire. “I don’t think you understand what was happening back there. That was not just any lumbering Shadow Warrior. That was a Shadow Hunter. An assassin bred for one thing and one thing only. To kill. And it will not stop until it succeeds or dies trying. It has taken an oath to its clan. If it fails, it must kill itself. And I’ve never heard tell of a Shadow Hunter killing itself. They never fail.” Fion fixed her intense green eyes on Thomas. “Never.”

  Thomas willed himself to look away. He took a step and his leg buckled. Thorn quickly steadied the boy with his head.

  Thomas patted the dragon’s head. “Thanks, boy.” Then he faced Fion.

  “I understand what you’ve done for me, and I am grateful, but I must go back, my parents need me.”

  “You’re not the only one with parents in trouble.”

  Thomas ignored the cutting remark and turned to Thorn.

  “Thorn take me back to the portal.”

  Thorn rumbled, followed by a whine. He swung his head from Thomas to Fion, torn between his love and loyalty to both the boy and girl.

  “Thorn, No!” Fion commanded. Her eyes flashed.

  Thorn lowered his head in submission to the young girl and Fion smirked in triumph, but not for long as the dragon swayed his head back to Thomas and then raised it to gaze at his young friend from earth.

  Now it was Thomas’s turn to smile.

  “Traitor,” Fion muttered.

  Twelve

  Thomas stood in the center of the monolithic stones of N’albion’s Mairead Fhada. The pillars were still cold and dark. “It has to work,” Thomas said through gritted teeth as he moved to the twelve-foot-high monolith known as “Long Meg” on Earth.

  He examined the ground where he stood, surveying his position within the ruins. Thomas inhaled then paced to the next stone, tracing the strange pattern that he knew would open the portal. He stopped and examined the stones in anticipation. They were mute and dark as the heavens above them.

  Thomas glanced at Fion, sitting outside the circle. She yawned, clearly losing her patience.

  “How many times are you going to try the combination. I told you the door is closed; it can only be opened one way.”

  He turned to protest, but then it hit him.

  “Of course!” Thomas shouted, unfastening his leather riding jacket. The pendant. He could open the door not only with the combination, but he could also open it with a key. The key given to him by Loren. He grasped at his chest. Nothing.

  “Wait. It has to be here!” Thomas gasped.

  He felt at his neck. There he found the gold chain and pulled. It came out of the collar of his t-shirt link by link until, at last, it slipped out. The chain swung from his hand, glinting in the twilight, clearly broken. Thomas inspected it forlornly, remembering his final panicked struggle against the Hunter as he resisted, and the chain snapped. The pendant was not here; it was there, still on earth somewhere in his bedroom. The door was locked, for how long he had no idea, and the key to open it was on the other side.

  He plopped into the grass and fingered the broken, twisted link. He was stuck, again, a long way from home.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Thomas,” Fion spoke to him with a softness that he had yet to hear from the girl. “We have to go. It is not safe here.”

  She was right. Thomas struggled to his feet, wincing from his injured side.

  Fion offered her hand.

  Thomas
paused, effected by her kindness. “Thanks.” He grabbed her hand, and she pulled him to his feet.

  “Don’t get used to it. We each have to pull our own weight.”

  Thomas looked one last time at the portal, the door that would lead to his own world, then turned his back on the stone circle of ruins and followed the girl rider to the waiting dragon.

  Thirteen

  Daniel Colson vainly trudged through the stone circle of Mairead Fhada in the icy darkness. The glow he observed from Thomas’s window was now long gone. He watched it slowly subside as he rushed from their house on the edge of the village, spurred on by the desperate cry of his wife. Her voice still rang in his head. “Daniel, get our son.”

  How could he be here again? He had tracked the trinitarian pattern countless times, wracking his brain for all the combinations and pulling from his vast knowledge of the door and its workings. But the door to the other world of N’albion remained firmly closed. This was all beyond him. Beyond his power, beyond his ability, beyond his intellect. Daniel finally had to admit that he was trying to force God’s hand. He crumpled in the grass, defeated.

  He looked to the heavens above past the stones that stood surrounding him like mute witnesses.

  “God on high. Creator of Heaven and Earth. Help. You above all know what it is like to have your Son leave home. To have him go to another country. Please, one father to another father. Bring my son home. I need to open this door. I need a way. I need a key.”

  He ended his prayer and looked at the cold dark stones. Then somewhere deep in his mind there was a tiny spark. A nagging thought like something begging to be discovered. What was it? What had he forgotten?

  Wait! The key. They had the key! Thomas’s pendant.

  Fourteen

  Daniel burst through the front door of the house. “Caroline!”

  Caroline rushed to her husband. “Where’s Thomas?”

  Daniel ignored her question in his excitement and bolted up the stairs to Thomas’s room followed by his waddling pregnant wife.

  “The pendant!”

  “What? Why do you need the pendant? Where is Thomas?” She asked on the verge of tears.

  Daniel grabbed his wife by the shoulders. “Thomas went back through the portal.”

  Caroline froze. “No.”

  “I can fix this! I just need the pendant!”

  Daniel flew into Thomas’s room, shoving debris out of the way to get to his son’s bed.

  He continued as his wife looked on. “Thomas’s pendant, the one given to him by Loren.” Daniel knelt beside Thomas’s bed. “It has the power to open the door. It’s the key!”

  Daniel reached under the bed and found the wooden trunk and jerked it out.

  He gave his wife a reassuring smile, then thumbed the latch and the locks snapped back. The lid opened with a groan. Caroline held her breath.

  Daniel stared into the box. It was empty.

  “No.”

  The leather riding jacket given to Thomas by the Dragon rider Deacon was missing.

  “No.”

  Where the pendant usually lay, kept safe wrapped in felt, there was only an empty, circular indention.

  Daniel’s mind reeled searching for the answer. Thomas had to have the pendant. He had taken his jacket and the pendant and had gone through the door. But why? What would drive him to such extreme behavior? What had torn through his bedroom? How could he find his son? The questions just kept coming but were soon drowned out as his wife began to weep as she stood behind him holding her pregnant belly.

  Fifteen

  “We will never get through this way,” Fion said.

  Thomas hated to admit it, but the girl was right. He surveyed the valley stretching below them in the distance. In the dusk campfires dotted the floor creating their own cruel constellations.

  Fion pointed. “Each of those fires represents a squad of shadow warriors.”

  Thomas did the math in his head, as he slid down and rested his back against the rock outcropping that shielded them. “There must be hundreds of them.”

  “At least,” Fion responded. “They have been growing every day as the men of the South now join them. They are amassing their army for a full-scale attack. When they are ready, they will sweep north through the pass and crash onto our mountain stronghold. They were still scattered, moving through the land stamping out villages of resistance when I came for you and I made it through the valley unseen. But no way now. There are too many and they would surely see us.”

  Thomas turned and peeked over the rock. “Why not just fly over the mountain?”

  “There.” Fion pointed at the bottom of the mountain pass between the twin peaks. “That is the lowest point of the pass and that altitude would be a struggle for even the mighty Thorn.”

  Thorn lifted his head and growled his protest.

  Fion ignored him. “To fly over the peaks of the mountain is impossible. Before Thorn could make the summit, we would pass out from lack of oxygen or freeze to death in the blizzard that blows continuously up there.”

  Thomas traced the jagged grey cliffs as they pushed up into the sky higher and higher until he lost them in the clouds. He shivered and pulled up the fur lined collar of his jacket.

  “Well, if we can’t go through it and we can’t go over it, then we have to go around it.” Thomas stated matter-of-factly with a smirk remembering his elementary school rhyme.

  Fion leveled her gaze on Thomas. “You don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “What did I say?”

  “To go around the great mountain means we would have to go through the Forbidden Lands.”

  Thorn whined.

  “Okay. Why are they called the Forbidden Lands?” Thomas made air quotes with his fingers.

  “They lie within the shadow of the mountain. It is a land of snow and ice and bitter cold. Nothing lives there, but the Snect-beathac, the snow-beasts. The land in the mountain's shadow is their dwelling place. It belongs to them. The stories say any who dare to cross their border never return.”

  Thomas frowned. “Why don’t we just go back?”

  “Because we are being followed.”

  “What?”

  “The Hunter has been behind us, tracking us for at least a day?”

  “Wait! I thought Thorn killed him before we went through the door.”

  “Thorn wounded him. But he escaped in the storm's darkness. The door was closing and, in your condition, there was no time to spare. He must have slipped through the door behind us.”

  “I would’ve made sure he was dead,” Thomas mumbled.

  Fion turned on him her green eyes flashed. “As I recall, you fainted!”

  That stung.

  He shook it off. Maybe they missed something.

  “Are you sure he’s following us? Have you seen him? Come on, you could be wrong.” But even though the words came out of his mouth, he was not convinced. He remembered those eyes, the rabid intensity to kill.

  A night bird sounded in the growing darkness. Fion paused, listening.

  “You are right, Thomas. I could be wrong.” Fion patted the dragon’s side. “But Thorn picked up the shadow hunter’s scent and Thorn is never wrong.”

  Thorn growled confidently.

  The weight of their predicament bore down on Thomas. He put his hand to his chin and furrowed his brow, thinking.

  “I’ve seen the Shadow Hunter, and I really don’t want to see him ever again. If we have to choose, between a savage shadow assassin or a no-trespassing land, I say we take our chances with the Snickerdoodles.”

  Fion rolled her eyes. “Snect-beathac,” she corrected as she stood.

  Thomas moved to stand and gasped as pain shot again through his side.

  Fion opened Thomas’s jacket. Fresh blood spotted the bandage. She frowned as she gently examined her bandage. Her somber gentleness reminded him of his mother. At home he and his dad always called her “Dr. Mom.” She always knew exactly what to do for them
when they were sick.

  Fion helped him sit back down. “Your wound has reopened. We will rest here tonight.” She retrieved her bow and quiver of arrows from Thorn’s saddlebags. “Besides, we need to eat and be ready to fly in the morning.”

  She gave the dragon a pat. “Guard the boy well Thorn, I’ll be back soon hopefully with supper. Rest Thomas Otherlander, for at first light into the shadow of the Great Mountain we go.” And she slipped silently into the night.

  Sixteen

  It was happening again. Darcon, the Dark Lord of N’albion was having a nightmare. Searing pain. White hot. It slowly receded. Was he dead? Was this hell? Now he perceived that he was resting on jagged rocks. They pushed into his shoulder blades. His skin and bones all ached, and this convinced him he was alive. Water lapped at his side. He sat up and peered into the mist. It shrouded all. He was on a gray, craggy beach that stretched away disappearing into the fog. And then he remembered. They deceived him! They robbed him! He forever lost his chance to return to his homeland. But then another vision struck him. As he slammed through the door, before crossing the threshold of the portal. In the time between times. Somewhere in the mist he saw the future. A figure in a dragon rider’s jacket with blade drawn. He could feel the cold steel impale him. He reached and rubbed his side. In Darcon’s vision the rider withdrew the blade and whipped away causing something to swing free of his leather jacket. A pendant. The pendant!

  “Master!” A voice called from the darkness.

  Darcon jolted upright. A form was leaning over him. It was the Otherlander—the boy come to kill him! Darcon drew out the long-curved dagger from under his pillow he kept hidden there and struck. The blade found its mark and with a gasp the form slid to the ground and thumped onto the floor.

  “Guards!” he screamed, springing out of his bed. “Guards!”

  Two guards entered the bedchamber cautiously. Their master had grown more and more unpredictable over the years since his return. An elderly male servant entered with them and before he could catch himself stared at the scarred and misshapen flesh on the naked upper torso of his master. The scars crawled cruelly up his neck and left Lord Darcon’s face with a permeant scowl. A trophy from the powerful force of the portal.