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Without further ado, I present to you… *Drrrrrrumroll…* THE PROLUGOIUIIIEe…eeerr… yeah, here you go.

Prologue:



"Urgh." I groaned. I was lying down on a rather long and narrow, but pleasant beach, inhaling the sea's vapors. A few hazy, cottony clouds drifted high up in the atmosphere. The sun was, of course, just rising, and the day was already fairly warm. I lazed about one the soft sand for a while, until I heard foot steps from behind me.

“Hello.” Came from behind me. I calmly turned around, as I was far too lethargic to care if it was some mean person about to kick me.

It was a girl. Actually, she looked to be about fifteen years old, so perhaps ‘female teenager’ suited her better. And she was wearing… what was that? Loose leather armor? I frowned and, suddenly, something clicked in my mind.

I couldn’t remember how I got here.

And what’s worse…

I didn’t know where ‘here’ was.




Chapter One: An Acquaintance



“Hello? Are you okay?” The girl said again.

I lazily responded,

“Me? I’m fine. Where am I?”

My voice sounded just like I had imagined it – smooth and not super deep.

The girl’s hair was silver blonde, reflecting the sunlight like a thousand mirrors, and her eyes were bright emerald. Her skin was a light tan color that defined her lithe muscles, and few freckles speckled her cheeks.

Her nose was short and petite, her cheeks narrow and loosely stretched to her high cheekbones. Lastly, she was wearing a necklace. It was curiously shaped into what looked like a sun with a blade going through the middle of it. The glimmering amulet appeared to be made of silver and was etched with small letters that I couldn’t read.

“Well, currently, you are in the so-called Land of the Returned,” She said. “A rather rubbish name, if you ask me. I would’ve named it something like… Kadysto or something else. Make it something exotic, you know, not like some stupid kid’s game. Rebecca insisted, though.”

The girl seemed nice enough.

“Ah… well,” I slowly stood up, savoring my time as my aching muscles complained against me. “I have no idea how I got here.”

The girl laughed. It was like listening to a waterfall – melodious and fragile, full of natural beauty. It was also kind of weird – who laughs like that? Honestly.

“You must be newly Returned.” She said. Then, when I pulled my ‘What are you talking about?’ face, she rolled her eyes and said “‘Returned’ people are the inhabitants of this world. They - we - just appear here. No one that I’ve… ah… met knows why… except… well, I have a theory.”

“Okay, well…” I was a little interested in her theory, but I would much rather like to know where I was, first. Like… specifically the area I was at, not just the name of the world or… continent.

Suddenly I noticed something that most people would’ve just brushed off as… well, stupid.

“Why are my feet not sinking into the sand?” The sand felt soft and warm under my feet… but, for all of its softness, my feet made no impression on any of it.

“Well…” She started, and then thought a second. “I don’t know. I think… I’ve just never questioned it.”

And that’s when an invisible force suddenly hit her, catapulting her backwards, away from me.

“Oh heck no.” She muttered, throwing her hands up and turning around. I caught a glimpse of another teenager – a guy that looked to be seventeen (and heavily tanned, with black hair.) – hunkering down on the sand behind her. He was wearing loose fitting leather armor as well, but instead of brown (like the girl’s armor), it was black.

“Just leave me the hell alone!” The girl yelled at him.

He seemed to be pushing the air – and every time he pushed, the girl I had been talking to was battered by invisible forces.

Not being sure of exactly what was going on, I just stood there and watched. Not that I could have done anything, at that time. The girl was now pushing the air herself – but… it was different for her. For some reason, whenever she pushed the air, she seemed to be trying to hold it, not move it like the boy. And then the boy was propelled into the air, twisting around, kicking, grasping at air. Nothing saved him.

His head was suddenly twisted gruesomely to the side.

“Oh my god… did he just die…?” I asked, stupidly. Score one for stupid questions; He was hanging limply in the air now, face down, arms and legs hanging around.

“Yes. Well… no. Well, yes. Argh! It’s hard to explain.” She said, lowering her raised hands and her head. At this motion, the boy dropped to the ground.

“If you don’t want to be caught by those jerks, killed, then hunted for the rest of your life, I suggest you follow me… who knows how close they are already.”

So saying, she took off running. Did I mention that a whimsically crafted forest was bordering the sunlit beach? No? Well it was. And the trees were huge. Some of them towered into the air, as if they were trying to make a bridge between the ground and the clouds, their boughs spread out in spiraling patterns, with leaves decorating the empty spaces.

The girl slipped in between two of these giants and disappeared.

Weighing my options, I realized that I had no idea what was going on, and that girl was the only person I had met so far… but, then again, she’d just killed that guy...

I really hoped that she was actually friendly and had only killed that guy because of the fact that he had attacked her first, as I had begun following her on impulse. I made it into the forest just in time to see one of her white shoes disappear through another gap. This time, it was inside of a tree stump. Yes, a tree stump.
The stump was easily thirty feet wide. The reason I hadn’t seen it along with the other towering hulks was due to the fact that it ended about fifty feet up, hence the tree ‘stump’.

The entire thing was pretty gnarled up, old roots feebly clinging to the earth, rough (human sized) bark chips hugging the tree stump, and… the gap in the tree was closing.

“Crap.” I said, sprinting towards it. I made it, but just barely. The dark brown trunk-wall thing sealed itself shut behind me. The first thing I saw was the girl, just standing there.

“This is where I live. No one has ever found it.” She said from in front of me. I wondered exactly why she let a stranger like me into it.

“You must be wondering why I’ve let you in, right?” She said. That wasn’t creepy at all, her mind reading abilities.

I suddenly noticed that she wasn’t even panting from that (what felt to be) long sprint through the forest. Okay, maybe it was only three hundred feet – but it felt like a lot longer to me. I was completely breathless.

“Well… I haven’t been totally honest with you.” She stated.

A dark pit opened in my stomach… this was exactly what I feared. She was probably about to kill me.

“You see… that theory I mentioned earlier? It isn’t a theory. I have dim memories from before the Split – from before the Return as well. They used to be… complete… but…” Her hands twisted the air, trying to find the correct word.
Her eyebrows were trying to bury themselves in her face as she did this.
“The thing is… your face is the only thing I can completely remember. In my mind, there’s a date just underneath it – today’s date. The first day of the third year.” She said, her expression lighting up again.

I was taken aback.

“Wait… do you… do you know why I’m here, then?” I asked.

“No, but I can guess. I told you, my memories are pretty dim, except for your face – so maybe you were someone important to me – a brother, maybe? You have the eyes and the hair, don’t you?”

I twisted around and crossed my eyes trying to see my face and hair. The girl just giggled.

“What are you doing? You can’t see your own face – not without a mirror. But your eyes are green, and you have blonde hair. So… maybe you are my brother. From some time before…” She gestured around the little hallway we were in – I had been so busy contemplating my death that I hadn’t looked around yet – and said “… all this.”

“Well… umm… what if you don’t know me and that ‘memory’ is in there because of someone else?” I said. I said this because I was thinking back to the beach – the girl and the boy seemed to have some sort of telekinesis – so why couldn’t someone alter someone else’s mind and memories?

“Ah. So you’ve worked out the Abilities, haven’t you?” She said.

“That’s what you two were doing on the beach… right?” I asked. “Did you really kill him?”

“... It’s hard to explain. I’ll tell you about it later. But I suppose that you could be right about someone implanting a memory into my mind… like Rebecca or Jade.” She trailed off.

“I’m going to make some tea. You can look around this place; I know you’re dying to. Oh, and I’m evacuating soon.” And she walked off through… actually, I never saw where she’d disappeared to; she’d left me thinking about the numerous questions hanging around in my mind like old cobwebs in an attic.

Evacuating? Because of the kid on the beach? Whatever. Too many other questions to ponder right now.

The inside of the tree stump was completely hollow. I had entered an entry hallway that was surrounded by damp, dark brown wood. The floor was, interestingly, squishy and colored light green. It had a strange texture to it - kind of like fabric threads. There was a door at the end of the hallway, made of metal. It had a small, dark brown button next to it, so, being curious about the house, I went up and pressed it. It was hard and, strangely, warm.

The metal door swung open on squeaky hinges to reveal… a room. It was complete with a wooden sofa (thin red pads sat on top of it), a small table in front of the sofa, and a large, wall sized painting on the far wall. This painting depicted… something. Actually, it looked like a bunch of random red and yellow splatters literally sneezed onto the canvas.

The entire room was lit up by a giant wooden chandelier hanging from the roof – it had weird, brightly glowing rocks attached to its ends. The ceiling itself was only about twenty feet high. Two wooden doors – one on the far, upper left corner of the room, and one to the far upper right corner of the room – led out of the room (which I had unconsciously declared the living room). I noticed that the floor had changed to hard, chestnut wood at this point; making me wonder exactly what material the floor had been made of in the entryway.

I walked to the upper right hand door – the upper left hand door was slightly ajar, meaning the girl had probably gone that way. I wasn’t interested in talking to her at the moment, as she seemed to have an inherent ability to talk about random, dramatic things and I needed some time to calm down from being randomly thrown into this world and seeing some guy killed. The only thing keeping me from freaking out was this little voice in my head saying he’s not dead, just like what the girl had said. Oh, and Waffles. You like waffles.

The door had a black metal doorknob on it and a small window on the top. I looked through the window to see that the door lead to a hallway with many other wooden doors – all nearly identical to the door I was looking through – lining it, but only on the left side. I assumed that this was due to spatial restraints. The hallway was lit up by more of the strange glowing rock – this time, it was actually embedded into the hallway’s walls itself.

“Hey, what’s your name, anyways?” Came to me from the kitchen.

“My name? Uh…” I tried to remember. My mind feebly floundered for something to connect with ‘my name’ but it was completely blank. Suddenly, out of that blankness in my mind, a name came to me.

“My name is Nathaniel. I suppose you can call me Nate, though.” I called back to her.











Chapter Two: Explanations. Kind of.


After my name had presented itself to me, the girl came back into the living room with a tray made of solid gold. It was painted with intricate red roses on its top, and had one of those expensively sculpted rims. On top of the tray was a giant teapot, made of... bark? And two small, fragile looking glass cups, elegantly molded to resemble swans. It was just a little strange. Strange, but cool.

"The bark teapot lets me just pour the tea into the pot... it's like having a tea bag inside of the pot already." She said, noting my questioning look.

"Ah... cool. So... is this 'bark' tea? Or is it 'wood' tea?" She rolled her eyes and smirked at my question.

"It's just tea, stupid."

After that, we sat down on the sofa - surprisingly comfortable for something made of wood with such thin fluffy cushions on it - and had tea. The tea itself had a sort of... liquid smoke taste to it, causing me to spit it out at first (which I sincerely apologized for, as it soaked into the small table in a matter of seconds), but I quickly grew used to it. It wasn't actually all that bad for tea made from dissolved tree juices.

"About the Abilities..." She started, after she had emptied her second glass of tea.

"Yeah? Let me guess, everyone gets a different ability. Am I right?" I said, causing her to just laugh at me while pouring both of us some more tea.

"Well duh, that's a given. I mean, sometimes, people do get the same Ability, but they're almost always different."

"Like you and that... boy on the beach? The one that you… killed?" I said, with a bemused expression.

"He's not dead. I'll tell you about it later, but... he's not dead." She said, rebuffing against my upset look. She sipped from her steaming cup slowly.

"Okay, let's say he isn't dead, which, from what I've seen, what, with your Abilities and such, I could believe. But it still looked like you killed him."

"I did. But... Returned always come to life after they die.” She paused for a second, thinking about what she’d just said. “Well, actually, there is one way to completely kill a Returned forever. But that's something for an... ‘advanced’ Returned." She said. Then, sounding slightly exasperated at my questioning look, she said "That's a Returned that has been in this place for long enough to know how to survive and such."

"Okay. So... he'll be back?" I asked, worried.

"Oh, no, not for a few days. His Point is about twenty kilometers west of this point, over the mountain range behind us. I think. Plus, he'll never find this house... I've disguised it as a really large stump, as you saw when you came in.”

I didn't get it, how would a stump serve as a good place to hide your home?

"How does a stump hide your house? Wouldn't people just want to investigate a giant stump in the middle of the forest?" Cue investigative look.

"It's actually rather clever, if I do say so myself. This stump is far too big to be easily overlooked, therefore people won't pay attention to it if they manage to find it. It is also a tree stump, meaning that no one will try to cut it down for wood. It's perfectly useless!"

She was right, it was pretty clever.

"Funny. I've been pretty rude - I haven't introduced myself yet. Sorry..." She said, looking down, sheepishly. "My name is Clara. Clara insert girly and generic last name here."

I snorted at the last part, causing Clara to smile.

"No, really. I can’t remember my last name… anyways, do you like the house?" She asked.

"Considering that it's the first house I can even remember seeing, yes. Yes I do." I stated, matter-of-factly. Then I burst out laughing for some reason or another.

"What? What's funny?" She asked, looking at me about to fall down onto the floor. Suddenly she started giggling as well, then she broke out into an extreme laughter fit, nearly choking on her tea and eventually just spraying it out over the table and onto the floor.

When both of us had stopped laughing, she looked at me and said "I still don't know what was so funny, but I'm just going to forget that ever happened. It was too random."

"Okay..." I looked down at the empty glass cup in my hand.

"You want some more tea?" She asked, just in time for the teapot to explode in a shower of bark, sending searing hot tea across the room. Luckily, Clara reacted in time and somehow... stopped the tea before it hit any of us. She was holding her hands out in front of her, and the tea splattered against an invisible wall, streaming off of it to the ground.

"Well... that's never happened before..." She said, gasping.

I looked at her, wondering exactly what her ‘Ability’ was. It reminded me that she hadn't told me exactly who that guy on the beach was.

"Err... what is your Ability?" I asked her, the pronoun feeling weird in my mouth. "Is it like that other guy's Ability?"

"What? Ew... gross! No!" She said, shocked that I'd even think such a thing. "I can make force fields. He can move things with his mind." She looked disgusted by this.

"What's wrong with his Ability?" I asked her, noticing the look.

"It's him, not his Ability! He's just a terrible person." She paused, seeming close to tears. “… Well… no, he’s just a terrible person.” She repeated. Her face seemed to be in turmoil from some deep seated emotions.

Apparently, it was time to change the subject. "So... if you can create force fields, how did you pick him up?"

"I can move the force fields with things inside of them, you know." She said, calming down quite visibly. "Anyways, we need to figure out what your Ability is... for most Returned, it's what saves them over and over again from perilous situations."

"Er... okay. And how do we do that?"

"Simple, I put you under situations of stress and see what random things happen. I found out about my Ability due to the Nightlings - monsters - that come out to kill people at night.” She could obviously tell I was curious as to what happened after that, as she continued with an anecdote, “They broke into my first house one night, as I was sleeping, proceeding to wake me up by calmly shooting me full of arrows.” Her mouth twisted into a grim smile as she continued. “Before I knew what I was doing, I had expanded a force field through the entire house - completely shattering it and all the Nightlings there." She sighed and looked down at the ground. "I passed out then, and woke up to find myself in the company of... that guy from the beach. That was the first time that I'd met anyone else. We actually became good friends, but..." She trailed off with a pained look on her face, lost in sad, dark memories. "Anyways, we should try to figure out what your Ability is. Hopefully it's something like super speed or something else that's really over-powered."

"Okay..." I was still pretty curious about her past. It seemed like she was building up to a dramatic reveal or something. "So... when are we going to begin?" I asked.

"Begin? Um… seeing as though we’re going to leave like, tomorrow, I think now is appropriate." She said, pushing her hands down and flying up to the ceiling.









Chapter three: Abilities


"It's a centralized force field that stabilizes me and keeps me in the air." Clara said. "I can do a lot of things with my force fields, you know, they aren't just for protection." She landed gracefully on the wooden chandelier.

I started sweating when I remembered what she had done to the boy on the beach.

"This is just a simulation... right?" She just smiled at me.

"It is... until I release the Nightlings. But don't worry - I'll save you from certain death with forcefields if things get a little too crazy. Plus, your Point is just over on the beach there, so it'll be easy to get you if you die." She said, shrugging.

Her disregard for life was fairly obvious, but, after living here for however long she had, I suppose that you would probably get used to people coming back to life. If, that is, they actually did come back to life.

She reached out with her hand, poked something on the base of the chandelier, and sat down on some sort of invisible (from the ground) platform to watch the party begin. Or maybe she sat on a forcefield.

"Don't worry about the blood; I have to clean this room anyways." She said, making me even more nervous. But... if I did get into trouble, she'd said that she would save me with her force fields... and I would always come back to life. Plus, I did need to find out about my Ability before... before...

"Why do I get the feeling that as soon as I learn about my Ability, the entire world will explode or something?" I said, to myself and under my breath.

"Try to not look directly at the Tall Men. They tend to get very upset, very easily." She said. Then she looked kind of worried, as if realizing something. After a moment, she brightened and muttered something under her breath.

Suddenly, the painting lifted up, revealing two metal doors, back to back. These doors swung, ever so slowly, on creaky hinges, and revealed... an old, yellow skeleton. He was, for some reason, comically outfitted with a bow… which he was now somehow drawing back, yellowed fingers and bones scraping against each other as they strained against the bow string and…

"What the hell?!" I yelled, rolling out of the way as an arrow flew through the area my head had just been.

"Nate, first thing you need to know about living here: nothing is as it seems." She said, as I dodged yet another arrow.

The arrows were strangely shiny and new looking, as if they had been just made...

"Did you give that skeleto- WOAH!" I said (and yelled) as I jumped to avoid another arrow. These things were annoying. And I feared that the next time, I would not dodge the arrow. I really needed to get rid of the skeleton creature. But how? I couldn't really kill the undead...

Or perhaps I could. Although I really needed some sort of weapon, right? My fists couldn't do much against brittle... old... weak bone...

I ran up to the skeleton, somehow dodging another arrow, (‘he’ had a really bad aim) and punched it. Quite a few of the bones broke in his chest, where I had hit him. It was surprising to say the least. The bow clattered to the ground, allowing me to pick it up - I had no idea how to use it, but I had a feeling that there would be more than just a skeleton after me soon.

The skeleton was just standing there, the gaping holes where its eyes were supposed to be were… glaring at me. It seemed like without its bow, it could do nothing.

Deciding to end its misery and get the show on the road, I picked one of the arrows up - this one was impaled in the sofa - and strung the bow with it. Aiming at the skeleton, I loosed it... and...

"Nice. Head shot. But there will be harder Nightlings next... so... be careful." Said Clara as the skeleton dissolved into red dust, which then disappeared in a sudden gust of wind that came from nowhere… we were inside, after all. But I didn’t have time to ponder the occurrence.

Heeding her warning, I picked some of the arrows up, looked around the room for some more, found none, backed into a corner, and watched as a really tall, black, long-limbed, slightly ambiguous... thing with purple eyes walked out of the iron doors. As soon as I looked directly at it, its head whipped around and regarded me with the unholy gaze that signified some demon or other. Its mouth opened a full seven inches and emitted... no sound. Perhaps it was too high for me to hear?

Not wasting any time, I aimed and shot at the thing - I thought that it was what Clara had called a Tall Guy or something like that. It just stared at me, as if accepting its fate, but right before the arrow hit its head, the Nightling... disappeared, making a strange, hellish sound as it did so - kind of like a thousand babies screaming all at once.

"You might want to stay in that corner..." Clara said. I didn't have time to connect with what she was saying before the thing appeared about two feet in front of me, and instinct took over. I ducked beneath its arm swipe and rolled beneath the thing, coming up behind it and springing onto its back, stabbing it in the head with two long, silver daggers that had suddenly appeared in my hands. The thing uttered another unhearable scream and dissolved into red dust, causing me to fall down on top of the bow I had dropped.

"Okay... that's... not an Ability I have seen before. I’ve heard of it... I need to think about this for a few." Clara said, slowly. She pushed something on the base of the chandelier again. The painting swung shut on the iron doors, sealing in whatever Nightlings existed behind them. I sighed with relief and sat on the couch.

"You know... I wasn't joking about the blood, the only difference is that the Nightlings don't bleed, we do." She laughed.

"Yeah... you know, that’s not… funny." I said, worried about her. She wasn't acting like she had been about twenty minutes ago. “You seem… different.”

"Really? I seem different...?" She said, looking at herself closely. "Crap. It's Elagio. We need to go now. I'll explain later. Follow me."

She came over to the couch I was sitting on, lifted the middle cushion up, and punched the wood beneath it. Surprisingly, her fist sunk into it.

"Good. The Enchantment is still working," She looked at me, raising her hand, and said, "Hold your breath, Nate." I did so, as it seemed rather obvious that something weird was about to happen. Suddenly I was floating in the air, some invisible platform beneath me. Clara was concentrating on me, with both of her hands shaking from the effort of picking me up. She maneuvered me directly over the squishy wood thing that she called the 'Enchantment'. She slammed her hands together and dropped them, as if she was swinging a giant hammer, or an executioner’s axe. That… that was probably the wrong simile.

As such, I dropped rather fast, hit the ‘wooden’ stuff, and found myself lying down, on the inside of a really dark room. I gasped, just as a 'Vwoop' sound reverberated throughout the chamber. Another ‘Vwoop’ sound resounded throughout the room just a second after me.

"Whew. I had to send us through because Elagio probably knows where the house is now. Sorry about that, Elagio can... hack into people's minds... and just... uhg." She groaned.

“Anyways, welcome to The Village of the Damned." She announced, making me gulp.













Chapter four: A Run In With Fire... And More Story Time With Clara!


"So... what happened to this place? And why do you have a random... teleporter thing that leads here?" I asked her. We had been walking through the abandoned town for a few minutes now, and I was kind of tired of waiting for her to explain all the burnt down buildings and deserted cottages. Many of the buildings could only be identified as such because they had a few blackened timbers standing.

Clara seemed lost in memory, staring at every blackened shell of a house as if it were someone from the distant past.

We were currently walking down a rather long, dusty road that was lined with burnt down foundations and old looking trees with gnarled bark, lacking leaves. The trees were actually rather peaceful, despite having their blackened branches twisted as if in pain. Or something of the sort.

"Hello?" I stopped to wave my hand in front of her face.

She stopped and said "Sorry? What? Oh, this place? It's called The Village of the Damned, because of... what happened here a long time ago." She trailed away. "I... I built this. Before I had met anyone. Yeah. I’ve been here for a long time."

Her voice was slightly choked with emotion. "I... don't know where it is - I just used... a friend's Ability to create a random teleporter to somewhere else. After this town was... destroyed."

"Let me guess. You built this place, met that guy, met some more people, formed a community, and then that guy betrayed you. Am I right?" Clara closed her eyes and tilted her face forward. "No. It's worse than that. You were right about this being a large community - we had over two... what, hundred? Inhabitants... but..." She studied the ground, her eyes widening before she said "When did it get so dark?"

The town around us had been thrown under a thick blanket of darkness...

"I think it has to do with those storm clouds gathering above us." Clara gave me an alarmed look.

"What day is it!?" She mumbled, then she looked... into the... air? I wasn't sure what she was actually focusing on, but when she reached out with her hand, a wooden calendar with paper glued to it appeared out of the air.

"CRAP!" She yelled, after studying the numbers etched onto it for a few moments.

"What?!" I yelled back, surprised. She suddenly ran into one of the buildings that weren't burnt or roofless. The building looked as if it had been some sort of inn... or saloon. Yes, considering that there were barrels and rotting chests behind the decrepit old wooden counter, I decided that this was probably an accurate guess.

"Whatever you do... do not go outside! I can't create a big enough force field for that." Her face scrunched up into concentration.

"... What?" Was all I was able to say before something bright fell from the sky and landed on the ground in view of the window.

"Don't bother me. I need to... concentrate..." Suddenly, I felt something warm move around and envelope me - presumably the force field - just in time to deflect a flaming projectile that had crashed through the roof back into the sky. The flaming hole it had created in the wooden roof was extinguished by the expanding shield.

Actually, the fire that was raining down on us (fire-rain?) was easily deflected (if not destroyed) by Clara's force fields. The funny thing is that, wherever the fire hit the invisible field, it glimmered for a few seconds afterwards, displaying a rainbow of colors - no black or white, but every color in between. It was actually pretty. And terrifying. Actually, mostly just terrifying.

Clara herself was just holding one of her arms out at a ninety degree angle to the floor, the other was straight up and down. Her hands were in claw-like positions.

She would flinch every few minutes or so.

I just sat down on one of the few chairs, feeling powerless to help in any way. It was sitting next to the remains of a wooden table – half of it had been chopped away and it was tilted diagonally down. After about five minutes there, I laid my head down on the back of the chair and closed my eyes.

"Yo', Nate. It's me. Jon." I jumped up to find myself... when had night fallen? It was so dark in this place. I couldn’t even feel the chair beneath me… I couldn’t feel anything. "You're asleep right now. Don't worry, I'm not against you... or Clara." Suddenly, the voice was coming from all around and I was back in the middle of the abandoned saloon, albeit it was slightly less ominous and dark in my dream.

"So... can I like... fly ‘cause this is a dream?" I asked, before being jolted away by Clara's voice.

"Honestly, an entire Heaven's Rain went by with you asleep." She sighed. "Luckily, I didn't go unconscious like... last time." Seeing my lips form the start of a question, she said "Heaven's Rain was created because of… well, I’ll tell you after we've secured this building from the Nightlings." She was standing in the middle of the abandoned building, looking around for something, hands on her hips.

Once again, I got the feeling that she had a more tumultuous past than I had believed at first.

We scavenged wooden planks from one of the few not-so-rotten chests and secured them over the door - well, Clara did. Whenever I tried to secure a plank, it would fall off of the door's frame. All she said in response to this was "Nate, you really shouldn't even try until you've become adapted to the physics of this place." and then she sighed, seeing my incredulous look. "No, really. This place is ridiculous. You won't notice because you don't have any memories of The Before, but... the physics here are crazy unrealistic." She took the plank she was holding in her hands and threw it up into the air.

Amazingly, it slowed down until it was completely motionless, hovering in the air. This raised questions of how and why the burnt rafters in the blackened buildings had fallen down, as well as how the table I had drifted into sleep by had crashed to the ground. My thoughts fled in a panic as Clara continued.

"I've measured the distance it takes for different things going at different velocities to slow down. It's always exactly two and half feet..." She looked rather contemplative for a second. "Actually, the only thing that I never questioned was why sand is so squishy... yet doesn't let you leave footprints." She laughed then, and we went back to work. I got to go and break all of the chests behind the deteriorating bar for their planks. She put the planks up over the entrance points.

Later, after this had been completed, she told me that we'd spend the night at the saloon - like I hadn't figured that out already - because the Nightlings here were too dangerous for us to venture out at night. By 'us', she meant me - apparently the biggest force field that she could make was about thirty feet in diameter - when she was stationary. While moving, she could make it maybe three feet across... which meant that I would have to piggyback on her unless I wanted to get mauled. I wished I knew what my Ability was.

We had gone into the saloon's back room to find four beds that were intact out of ten frames, but only three of them were actually usable. They were lined around the room, four on one side, four on the other, and two large, decrepit, rotting wooden piles that were presumably retired beds at either end of the room. The doorway that we had entered through lacked a door itself, although it did have some rusting hinges and a small cloth doormat in the middle of it. The doormat had something woven into it – almost completely worn away, but just barely visible. In flowing green script, it said ‘Gol…e inn, our fami…y’ and had a really realistic (and barely faded) picture of a kid holding a fish and smiling on it. He had black hair and looked to be about fifteen. The mountains behind him were woven with delicacy, as if I was looking through a window.

"I'm going to sleep on this one." Clara said suddenly, motioning to a wide bed with green sheets on it, tucked away in the corner of the room and underneath a grimy window of sorts. She lay down on the thing and rolled over onto her back. Apparently, she finally noticed the holes where the window panes had once been and said "Oh well. That window's too high for anything to get through anyways... I think... I'll just..." And... she started snoring.

"Oh freakin god." I said, having lain down on a blue bed closer to the empty doorframe we entered the room with.

"How am I going to sleep with that noise all night...?"

To which Clara responded with "What noise? My fake snoring? Nah. I did that to mess with you." Her laugh faded to a sigh as she told me about the town.



















Chapter five: Truth. Oh, and a Friend.



"It all started three years ago, when I first came here. Throughout my travels, I haven't found anyone that has been here longer than that, which makes me think that... this world was created for me and me alone. Maybe something went wrong and brought others here? People like you. I don't know."

She paused and I pictured her closing her eyes as she revived lost memories. "Anyways, it all started then. I woke up on a beach, just like you. However, unlike you, I still had memories - actual memories, not these half-glimpses of memories I have in my head right now. I could tell you what I remember now about that other world, but then you'd long for something you could never have. And I really wouldn’t be able to explain it that well anyways, so I can't tell you." Her voice was slightly hoarse and she was quiet, as if talking about this was emotional. Which it probably was.

"Those first few days were nightmares. I didn't even know what the Nightlings were, and the only reason I managed to live through the first night was chance. That was before this town... happened, because, back then, you didn't come back to life after dying, you stayed dead. I learned from… a friend." She paused then, as if trying to make up her mind about something.

After a minute she said, softly, "That's how I lost Rebecca."

I realized, now, that she was crying. She had a hitch in her voice before she said 'Rebecca'.

"Err... okay..." I suddenly felt very awkward. "Was Rebecca your best friend or something?"

"She was my true sister... the only person from that other world I can completely remember. And she was the only other person in this world that had memories of Before." Clara sounded more in control of her voice now. By 'in control' I mean that she sounded like a monotonous robot would. It was sad and funny at the same time. "We met just after I had found that… other guy..." Clara paused yet again. To be honest, I felt kind of relieved with all of these random pauses between sentences, as it gave me some time to absorb the information.

"She had this ability - she could control minds. It was like a... more powerful version of Elagio. I don't think it was coincidental that Elagio, according to him and Rebecca, appeared at the exact same time that she did. They said that they had appeared together." She paused, gathering the maelstrom of thoughts around herself. "I think that Abilities are assigned based on what day of the year you appear... but then again, we don't have the same Abilities.” She paused for a moment before continuing. “I'm still working on that theory."

We don’t have the same Abilities? What? I thought to myself before she continued on.

"Anyways, Rebecca found me while using her Ability - she had this weird secondary Ability that let her see all of the minds around her as if they were shining beacons. Apparently, my mind showed up from thirty miles away... the day she found me was the day me and... that other kid... we had finished building this gigantic tree village. I recognized her as my sister... and so... I asked her and Elagio to live with us.”

Hearing another hitch in her voice, I asked her, "What happened to that village?"

"It was burnt down... which forced everyone there - Elagio, Rebecca, me, and Jake - to leave and take up residency in the town that we had built a while ago that time."

"... Who's Jake again?" To which I heard Clara respond (with a note of exasperation in her voice) "He's that guy that... attacked me on the beach." She stammered on her next sentence "He... doesn't really matter to me anyways. And... that was a long time ago.” She trailed off and stopped talking for awhile, as if she were lost in sad memories of a better time

“Anyways, we came back to the village that we had built back when Jake and I had just met. We found it inhabited with quite a few people. Well, actually, there were only four people living there, but, they were the first to move in to our town with us. Because... well, they were already there. And that's how the village started. After a while, a ton of people were living there... and then Elagio went... insane because of… I don’t know. Something about Hell.” Clara's voice escaped with a sob.

"He managed to control my sister... who then controlled Krios. Krios... he... could create pocket dimensions - or something like that. We never really understood his Ability, I just know that he was one of the most powerful."

After a brief pause, Clara continued with yet more emotion in her voice. "He threw the entire town into the Void and pulled it out again in the Blank, creating Heaven's rain in the process. It began pouring down. Almost everyone except for me, Elagio, Jake, Jeremy, Sapphire, and Kaitlyn died that night. What, with the fighting going on between me, Elagio, and Jake, and the Heaven’s Rain pouring down and incinerating people and buildings, nearly the entire town was destroyed."

"So... why is the town still so big?" I asked her. Surprisingly, she laughed, but it was a hollow laugh devoid of any humor.

"The town used to be twenty times larger than this. We… we had a lot of time on our hands… I mean, giant – no, HUGE - stone walls stretched around it, the town itself ranged from ocean to ocean, and had hundreds of outposts around it. Maybe, if I die, I could take you back to the giant hole in the ground. I don't really remember where the town was in relation to where I was living, but where it was is not very important right now. All that matters is that that’s how it ended up... here.”

She paused. I felt as if she was thinking about something.

“That’s why it’s still in the Blank.” She said, begging the question that I said a second later,

“What is the ‘Blank’?” She laughed, sadly. “Well... it’s hard to explain. We... the survivors on my side... we decided to learn something about the place, and it turns out that it’s most likely the place where worlds and objects are created. It’s like… a power source that allows things to be changed into new things – I wish I could show you the power ‘transformator’ Kaitlyn built using some blueprints she found. It could create… anything.” She sighed, lost in memories.

“Sapphire, Kaitlyn, and Jeremy fought with me, against Elagio and Jake. I think that... well... no one died during the fight. But Sapphire wandered off after the big fight between all of us. I think she killed herself... which... well... she was one of my closest friends. I never got to say goodbye.” Clara’s voice was rough, as if she was crying.

“And Jeremy went off with his girlfriend, Kaitlyn. I haven’t seen any of them in... oh how long has it been...?” She trailed off, thinking. “I think it will be exactly a year in about a week.”

Suddenly a low growl sounded from outside. “Crap.” Floated in through the broken window. It was a high pitched feminine voice, laden with weariness.

“Haha... I can see you, idiot. Come here...” The voice drifted closer.

Clara whispered quietly to me in the darkness “Quiet...” Then she reprimanded herself, “As if I need to tell you that.”

“Come… and… get it!” The voice sounded directly outside the window. The shout was followed directly with the sound of something... buzzing. The growling stopped.

“I know that you are there. I suggest that, unless you want me to kill you, you tell me how you made it here. Heh, unless you don’t know where here is, in which case just tell me your...” A dark shape with short hair appeared inside of the broken window frame “... names... ah there are two of yo-”

“Sapphire!?” Clara yelled, jumping to her feet.

Talk about randomness.












Chapter six: The One Chapter To Not Have A Name. Ever.


“…And that’s how I ended up staying here, instead of, you know, doing something stupid like killing myself.” Sapphire concluded. It was now late at night, and the unnatural sounds of scuffling… things outside the secured saloon were easily audible. It was, to put it in a nutshell, quite creepy. The two reunited friends seemed unbothered by the noises, though.

After Sapphire had appeared, Clara had hugged her. Then she’d yelled at her. Then she’d hugged her again. I wasn’t really sure what was going on, so I’d just sat up in my bed and watched their dark forms conversing about what had happened to Sapphire after Elagio went crazy. Basically, Sapphire had lost her boyfriend that first night, when the town was ripped into The Blank, causing her to fall into some serious depression, contemplate killing herself, and wandering alone, through The Blank’s world, for almost two years.

I say ‘The Blank’s world’ because, apparently, Clara’s town wasn’t the only landmass inside of The Blank. It was one of the many small and flat islands in The Blank’s primordial soup. Occasionally, one of the other islands would collide with the town, and, if you were fast enough, you could get onto the other island. Of course, the likelihood of you reaching the town again were so exceedingly remote that doing so is the same thing as throwing that world away. However, Sapphire’s Ability allowed her to skirt these islands and get back to the town without fear of losing her way forever. Exactly why she stayed on the town’s island, I do not know.

Sapphire’s Ability was, in my opinion, seriously overpowered. She could literally bend – no – break the very fabric of time around her. So she’d freeze time, hop onto another island, explore it, get back to the town, unfreeze time, and so on. She’d apparently seen some pretty amazing sites – an island with a waterfall that appeared out of nowhere and ran through a desert, a giant metal structure that she’d been unable to get into, and a huge cliff that had been flushed with wildlife and plants – how they’d survived Heaven’s Rain, she didn’t know.

And then there was the whole fact that The Blank had its own sun and moon. Well – they were always different. Some nights, the moon was blue. Others, there were seventy of them. Some days, though, the sky was taken up by an ultra bright, red star that was so large that it seemed about ready to explode. And there were a few days when the star had been so small and feeble that Sapphire hadn’t been able to see anything. I found it extremely interesting, and I would have kept on thinking about it if not for the fact that the conversation had turned to Clara.

“So, what’s been happening to you? Is that your boyfriend?” Sapphire giggled, motioning in my direction. The yellow-red moon was shining down through the window now, illuminating it enough for me to see the gesture. It also shed some light on Sapphire herself, revealing her short hair, squared shoulders, ragged… leather (why did everyone in this world except for me seem to wear leather?) shirt, and torn leather pants. I couldn’t really make out any colors except the black in her hair and the dark red bloodstains all over her clothes.

Clara scoffed in response to the question. “Him? My boyfriend? I just met him earlier on the beach. He’s… the one I can remember, you know? I’m not sure why. Anyways, he’d just been Returned to his Point and…” She trailed off as Sapphire started asking a question.

“Err… sorry, Clara, but… what’s a ‘Point’ again? And what does being ‘Returned’ do?” Sapphire sounded kind of upset, as if she should know these terms. Actually, I’d been meaning to ask these questions myself.

“Oh, Sapphire… you’ve been here for longer than I’ve given you credit for… jeese. How long has it even been since you’ve talked with someone?” Clara reached over to pat Sapphire’s back softly. “A Point is the exact place that you originated at. See, things have changed back in The Land. People come back to life when they’re killed now; they appear back at their Points.”

Sapphire started asking another question, but Clara continued on, impervious to the interruption. “’Being’ Returned isn’t exactly how I’d put it… but, well, basically… it’s… like… when…” Clara made some growling noises in her throat at this point, out of exasperation. “When someone new… just suddenly appears in The Land. And ‘Returned’ is what we call them. Us. Whatever.” Sapphire finally interjected when Clara finished saying ‘Whatever’.

“What’s ‘The Land’?” She said, sounding hopelessly lost and confused.
“Oh, well, The Land is just what I’ve shortened from ‘The Land of the Returned’ because saying ‘The Land of the Returned’ is too monotonous and… boring.” Clara laughed at this and spread her arms out wide. “Here I am, worrying about things being too boring when I’ve met you again after all this time.” Clara shook her head. “I seriously thought that you’d hurled yourself off of the island’s edges and just... ended it.”

And that was about the time that I fell asleep, dreaming of... well, I don’t think it was a dream, really.

In my… dream, for lack of a better word, I was lying in the bed that I’d fallen asleep in. The same voice that had spoken to me earlier, when Clara had been protecting the saloon, spoke to me again. “Nathaniel. I need you to know something. The Blank can create worlds, Clara is right about that, but what she doesn’t know is that yo-“ I was jerked awake with the words “Nate. Wake up. I need to talk to you before Clara wakes up.” Whispered in my ear.

“Nghh… Did Sarah make bacon for me…?” Was all I said in response to Sapphire’s plaintive plea. She, being Sapphire, proceeded to push me off of the bed. “Gah! I’m awake! What do you want?!” I yelled, falling onto the floor and being half-blinded by the sun’s reflection in a broken pane of glass outside of the other broken window in the saloon’s back room.

I had time to register Sapphire’s smooth and tanned hand on my wrist before the entire world took on a very grey tint.

Sapphire was simply smiling. “I’ve forgotten how cool it is to bring other people into Free Time.”

Now that it was lighter outside, I could actually get a good look at this mysterious (to me) stranger (to me) that had randomly appeared in the middle of the night. She did, in fact, have short black hair. In addition to this, she had… ‘sapphire’ blue eyes, a small nose, and freckles all over her tanned skin. She was quite lithe looking and, as such, moved with a sort of cat-like grace that only came from years of tightrope walking. Her teeth were, mysteriously, due to the lack of anything to clean teeth with, extremely white. She also looked to be about fifteen, my age.

“Woah, what? Did you do something to me? Like... what is this?” I asked her. This grey light was rather creepy. And peaceful. But it was mostly creepy.

“Hah!” She laughed “No! Don’t you remember? I can bend time, right? I can also bend it around others. It’s a lot easier if I’m touching you though.” Seeing my alarmed look, she continued to say “All I’ve done is put you in Free Time, frozen time, so that I can talk to you without Clara waking up.” She snickered.

“Er… yeah. Now, seriously, what do you want to talk to me about?” I asked, feeling slightly out of my comfort zone. I mean, I was just randomly awoken by a girl I barely knew, thrown into ‘Free Time’ against my will, and was now being subjected to her verbal diarrhea.

“Oh, I don’t know. Anything. Trees, sunlight…” She trailed off, looked me in the eyes and said “… Your… Ability, perhaps? What is it? Hyperkinesis?” She seemed serious now; all of her playfulness had mysteriously evaporated like water above lava. “Nate, you’re almost as dangerous as me.” She seemed very defensive all of the sudden for some reason. Suddenly, it came to me.

“Sapphire, listen, me and Clara are friends. Sure, I don’t know her… at all, and this is just my second day here… and she could be lying… and she didn’t…” I paused, as I could see that I was just making my argument worse. “... Yeah… I don’t really know her enough to be her friend, do I? But that doesn’t matter. I would never try to hurt her. She took me in.” I said, offended that this girl would assume that I would do something to harm Clara. And then I considered what she’d mentioned.

She’d talked about hyperkinesis, which was weird, because, consulting my mental dictionary (which seemed to know just about every word that I’ve never heard of, cue alien horror movie music), hyperkinesis was not really what I’d done back when Clara was trying to figure out what my Ability was. Speaking of which, I’d never really asked Clara what my Ability actually was. And, also speaking of which, I was assuming that she was talking about my Ability.

“Um… hyperkinesis? What’s that?” I said, before she could respond to my previous statement. “Isn’t that like, being able to do things like catch arrows in midair? All I did was create some daggers…”

Sapphire seemed perturbed by this. “Clara hasn’t told you about your Ability yet? She hasn’t told you exactly what you can do?” Seeing my look, she continued with “Okay, I guess not. But she does know what it is… did you even ask her about it?”
I laughed a rather hollow laugh at that. “Heh… no. Things kept cropping up yesterday, preventing me from talking to her about it. And I just plain forgot… I think Clara did the same.” I rolled my eyes and tried to smile, although Sapphire was on the bed, crouching down on her hands and knees, and looking over the edge of it at me on the floor. “Why, what is my Ability?”

Sapphire giggled at this. “I think that Clara would be able to tell you better than I could. But know this, even in my Free Time, you would have a chance at beating me. Mm… actually, I don’t know if I’m even supposed to be talking to you.” She giggled some more, blurred a little, came back into focus and said “Oh. Wait a minute. Nah, I’d totally slap you silly. Toodlelo!” She then blurred a lot, disappeared, and suddenly everything was back to normal. The sun was being reflected into my eyes again, blinding me.

While all this had been going on, my brain had figured out that I’d only slept for about five hours. Yet I wasn’t tired at all.

“Yeah, Nate? What’s wrong? Why’d you yell?” Came Clara’s voice, from the other side of the room. Her bed creaked a little as she sat up. “… Where’s Sapph-“

“Here! Sorry about that. I had to go and… um… well, I’m here now.” Sapphire said, buzzing into existence in the middle of the room, sunlight shining all around her.

“Uh huh.” Clara grunted. “Anyways, we’ve got to get moving if we want to reach The Land again, before nightfall. The Enchantment… oh, that’s right, neither of you know what that is yet.” She said, getting up. She’d slept in her leather armor (how is that even possible?), leaving heavy creases in the bed’s white mattress. “An Enchantment is, well, remember Jeremy? That’s what we used to call those teleporters the he would make. Well… technically only Rebecca called them that, I just call them that because… it’s like old times... almost.” She trailed off, lost in sad memories.

“Yeah… Clara, you realize that I could just put all of us in Free Time, right? We’d be there in literally no time.” Sapphire said, rolling her shoulders, trying to make Clara forget about Rebecca.

It worked, Clara responded after thinking for a moment. “No, Sapphire, last time you did that… well… you passed out before getting completely there. To us, a few tenths of a second passed. To you… well, you almost died of dehydration because it was like you were unconscious for... what? Five days? Say, why can’t you remember these things? Did Elagio erase some of your memories? Or did… Jade…” Clara grimaced. “Of course! That freaking diva… she’d do that to you… but why…?” And then she trailed off again, lost in more theories and thoughts.

I piped up with a simple “Clara, what’s my Ability?” Which Clara responded to with an absent-minded “I’ll tell you while we’re walking...”

“... Fine.” Was all I said, disappointed.























Chapter Seven: Gambling


It turned out that when Clara said ‘while we’re walking’, she actually meant ‘while we’re crawling through damp, musty, dark, slimy, old, decrepit (I could go on) catacombs’. Seriously. The catacomb tunnels were only about three feet tall. Luckily, they were about seven feet wide. The only downside was that, currently at least, Clara was locked in a deadly battle of rolling ten sided die with what appeared to be a collection of bones that destroyed souls. And here I was, hoping that the journey would be uneventful.

Allow me to backtrack…

A little while after making my decision, we ate breakfast. I found out exactly how hungry I was while sitting around one of the not completely broken tables near the doorway, as (still warm) bacon and… really weird looking egg-like foodstuffs were passed around. They all tasted like dirt, but I didn’t mind, as it was sustenance and I was suddenly starved, like I hadn’t eaten for a day and a half. Oh wait, I hadn’t.

Not much talking went on at that time, but Sapphire kept on glancing at me as if I were some sort of ferocious man eating tiger hiding inside of a guy’s body. It was kind of funny, but I knew better, and didn’t laugh.

After we’d eaten breakfast, Clara announced that we should ‘Just follow me and don’t ask any questions.’

I really should have asked her at least a few questions, like, perhaps ‘Where are we going?’ or ‘Are there any soul-greedy, evil gods living down here?’ You know… common stuff that everyone would want to know. Instead, I just followed along, behind Sapphire, and kept quiet. I was eagerly awaiting the announcement of my Ability, as I hadn’t quite figured out exactly what it was yet. I highly doubted that it was hyperkinesis.

She led us behind the saloon’s counter and through a mysteriously sparkly oak wood cellar door below one of the bar’s numerous counters. The door even had one of those weird little gold knockers on it, just to make it seem more out of place. And it was completely untouched by decay or fire.

There was a rusty old iron ladder leading down from the door, interrupted here and there with little gaps where the rungs should have been. It was quite a stark contrast to the cellar door above it. The shaft that the ladder led into was comprised mainly of dirt, with some thick brown clay here and there and eventually faded away into pitch darkness.

“Go on. It’s perfectly safe, Nate.” Clara said from behind me, prompting me forwards into the unknown.

“Oh really? Then why are you having me go down first?” I raised my eyebrow, suspicious of her motives.

“Because, when you fall, I can catch you far more easily while up here than on the ladder or down in the dark cave below. Plus, Sapphire is already down there, so you aren’t going down first.” She smiled and said “I could lower you down slowly, but it’s way too far down for me to continually exert myself over you.” In response to my unspoken question.

“Uh huh. I’m only going down because I really don’t want to be stuck here alone. At night. With only me. At night. Oh. And at night.” My sentence became extremely redundant, causing Clara to laugh and shove me towards the point where the rusty ladder gripped the side of the door. I automatically latched on to these grips and began to lower myself before I knew what was going on.

“Hey… that’s not fair.” I said, as Clara bent over the ladder and watched me creep down the ladder. I made slow progress because I always had to be careful of random gaps in between the rungs on the ladder. Eventually, I was unable to make out her face any more.

“Nate, tell me when you reach the bottom. And don’t worry; Sapphire will have probably killed anything that’s alive down there by now.” She yelled, not making me feel any better.

“Yeah-huh…” Was all I shouted back up to her; I was really preoccupied with not falling off the ladder and dying. Although I was pretty sure that Clara would catch me with her forcefields, I didn’t want to take a chance.

Finally, after slipping once and falling three feet before getting a grip on the ladder again, I made it to the bottom. The last five rungs of the ladder were all gone, and, as such, I had to peer into the gloomy darkness intently to make out the barest suggestions of the floor there. Sapphire telling me ‘It’s a floor, jump you idiot!’ didn’t help matters, though. Due to this, it was about ten total minutes before I could shout up at Clara.

“Clara! I’m down! The last five rungs are missing, so it’s a four foot drop to the floor.” I yelled up at the little speck of light that signified the saloon above. The light that reached this far down was fairly feeble, and, as I said earlier, made the darkness rather gloomy. A little like it was darker than a cave without any light.

“Nate, do you have a long stick hanging around anywhere?” Sapphire’s voice cut through the gloom. I could just barely make her out, and she was only about six feet to my left, leaning on (what I assumed to be) the wall. Actually, the wall had slowly changed from dirt to messily piled stoned all jumbled into a wall like shape. Maybe it was, in fact, a wall. I couldn’t really make out the colors, but I made a reasoned assumption that the rocks were probably grey.

“Huh? What? Stick? How could I even carry things with me without you knowing?” I asked.

“Ah. So you’re not accustomed to this place yet? Oh well.” She said, crossing her arms.

“Yeah… no. Ask Clara.” I said… speaking of which…

“Guys, clear the way. I’m jumping; this is taking way too long.” Came from above us. Suddenly I heard the ladder groan, crack, and begin to fall as Clara, presumably, jumped off.

“Oh, come on, the ladder falls? Really?” Was all I heard before I felt a vague sense of moving and I was suddenly in another spot, with Sapphire standing by me.

“My god, Nate, you are so slow at times.” Was all she said, begging me to ask her a question that I would’ve asked earlier, but my presence of mind was inhibited by the randomness of everything.

“Sapphire, how do you know my name?” I asked. And then I mentally slapped myself; Clara probably told her last night when I was either asleep or zoning out.

“Clara told me. Plus, when you were mumbling in your sleep, you were complaining about having a generic name. It was kind of funny.” Sapphire laughed, as Clara’s silhouette appeared in the dim pool of light that was in the middle of the (as yet unknown) room.

“God, Sapphire, you still never come prepared, do you?” Was all she said, moving her arms around. Suddenly something bright appeared out of midair, and, after getting over my shock at being blinded by a random light source appearing, I could tell it was… a really long stick with a very bright flame at the end of it.

“Why is that torch so bright?” I asked Clara. She just scoffed.

“Like it isn’t supposed to be bright? Nate, this place has some weird physics. How should I know?” She retorted.

“I don’t know, I mean, you talk about your theories and experiments all the time.” I mumbled under my breath as I took in the rather expansive room around me.

“Holy crap.” Clara breathed, looking about her as well. “This is all new. Except for that wall over there. That’s not new – you can tell because of the way all the stones are grey and jumbled up against each other.”

The rest of the room was made out of clay bricks – light, tan colored clay bricks with murals painted on them. The murals were of different things, but all seemed to be of the same scene – a giant war between beings that lived on clouds and skeleton-like creatures that came out of the ground. Many of the murals depicted the skeletons dying in gruesome ways, but some of them portrayed the cloud-beings dying as well. One of them showed a normal little girl with blond hair hugging her knees to herself on the ground and cradling her head in her arms in the corner of a dark cave. By ‘normal’, I mean human.

Behind her was one of the skeleton things. It looked as if it was ready to pounce.

“What are those skeleton things?” I asked Clara. “They look like bad news.”

Clara just chewed on her upper lip. “I… don’t know. I think that whoever made this came from before I was here and the dirt previously obscuring it has worn away over the years. Or… something has been going on under my nose.” Clara stammered. I could tell that she was a little thrown with the whole room business. “You know what? We don’t have time to worry about that right now.” She said after a second or two.

“Sapphire, help me find that one brick in the unaltered wall. Hopefully, whoever made this place didn’t move it.” Clara said, basically admitting that the place was new. Sapphire obliged, blurring out of sight.

After about one hundredth of a millisecond, or just instantaneously, if you want to be all non-scientific, the entire grey stone wall slid open to reveal another room. This one was made out of more of the same stone that had made the wall into the hidden chamber. Sapphire reappeared next to me, smiling.

“Okay, everyone, stay behind me. Sapphire, keep an eye out for monsters… and no scouting ahead. I have a funny feeling that, if I let you scout ahead, you’re going to get killed by some mysterious, random, new entity that has taken up residency in these catacombs.

“But Clara, that’s not how my power works! You know that!” Sapphire complained, rushing up to Clara. “I can freeze time, Clara! I can be back before anything happens to me!”

Clara glared at her. She was much more intimidating in the flickering light of the torch she was carrying.

“Listen, Sapphire. I don’t know what could be in these caves. What if there is a new Nightling that somehow absorbed Holly’s Ability? Hmm? How would you kill that before it killed you?” She sighed after saying this, and walked a little slower than before. “I know it’s unlikely, but I’ve just found you again, after almost two years. I don’t want you to die. Then I’d have to find your Point again – I can barely remember where it is. Maybe you never even told me. So please, stick with me.” Clara said.

“And Nate!” I called from a few feet behind them, feeling left out. “Don’t forget Nate back here!” Clara just sighed as if she’d been waiting for me to say that.

“Nate, about your Ability. It’s a little difficult to explain, but it’s like a mesh of… well, you know how Sapphire can control time? You just have faster reaction time. Plus, apparently, you can create weapons. You may be able to create other things. That’s it. That’s all your Ability is. I don’t see why Sapphire makes it seem as if it’s such a big deal – yes, Nate I know what she’s been saying to you. Sure, it’s good in a battle, but it has no practical applications outside of that.” She seemed to be forcing the words out, but I didn’t really consider that at the time.

Clara had hurt my feelings just then, so I remained quiet until Clara reached the end of another tunnel, kicked the dirt wall in front of her, and crawled into the tiny hole that appeared there.

“I suppose that I should watch your back, now, Nate.” Sapphire said. “Although you are perfectly capable of protecting yourself against, like, anything that I’ve seen. Anyways, after you.” She gestured at the hole, a flickering light glowing out of it from Clara’s torch.

“Er… okay… see you in the creepy tunnel, then.” I said, still a little down that Clara didn’t think much of my Ability.

So we made it into the three foot tall, seven foot wide tunnels. Any new, branching tunnels were always the same height and all had little holes cut into their edges where I could barely make out… well, darkness. I guessed that the holes were for storage or something, as Clara’s town probably wouldn’t have needed a catacomb for corpses or anything; no one died (from what I knew) until Elagio went crazy. Anyways, the tunnels were like a labyrinth; when one tunnel ended, two or three began. I wasn’t sure how Clara navigated her way through the place, not until we reached a room in which I could actually stand in.

The room was dug out from dirt, coated in phosphorous rocks, and had two tunnels leading from it; the one we’d entered through, and the one was the exit. The room had a small table in the upper right corner, as well as a ragged, old, red bed in the upper left corner. A small trickle of water dripped down the domed ceiling and entered the tunnel that we’d not entered through – it was really just a continuation of the tunnel we’d exited. From the room’s only other tunnel, I heard loud running water – which was probably what Clara had been following the entire time.

“Alright, almost there, guys.” Clara said. “Although I think you already know that.” She laughed.

Sapphire sighed, began to blur, came back to real time, and then stood still.

“What the… I can’t go into Free Time, Clara. Something’s very wrong here.”

Clara frowned and pushed her hand into the ground. Nothing happened. After a few seconds, something still failed to happen. I groaned.

“Guys, I know you think I’m a third wheel right now, but I think that instead of worrying about why your Abilities are malfunctioning, we should be getting out of the creepy place. I feel like every moment we spend here is another moment that some sort of giant, freakishly scary monster is going to jump out of the darkness and eat someone. Probably me.” I said.

“What? I’m not that freakishly scary. And I don’t really want to eat you,” Came a high pitched, gravelly voice from the small, dark tunnel that I had just noticed above my head. Clara whirled around to face the tunnel. Sapphire conjured some sort of short, vicious looking iron sword.

“Although I enjoy how you said that with absolute conviction. Now, I’ll offer my usual bargain.” The voice continued, getting closer. Now a clacking sound – like someone hitting hollow metal tubes together – could be heard echoing throughout the chamber. Sapphire began to try and go out the way we’d came when suddenly, both exits were sealed shut with glinting iron bars. Clara yelped. I simply stared at the tunnel opening from whence the voice was issuing.

“If you want to pass, or even live, you must beat me, a God, at a game of die.” Suddenly a bleached, white skull (literally, a skull) popped out of the darkness above my head. It was followed by a bleached, white collection of random bones quite literally dancing after it. The sounds the bones made were rather loud and obnoxious… slightly unbecoming of a so called ‘God’.

“It’s been so long since I had a good feast. You are especially tasty when you feel as though you might be able to escape.” It said as five small cube shaped bones separated themselves from the rest of the dancing bones and dropped onto the small table. It was crawling around on the ceiling creepily looking at each one of us.

“Hah. I will only play the luckiest of you. And the luckiest here is… you.” It said, as some sort of bony appendage extruded from its ‘body’ and located Clara.

“You have survived that which you shouldn’t have survived. Multiple times. You have located your dreams. You have lived for three years, here. Yes, you are definitely the luckiest, Clara.” The thing said.

“The thing is… I don’t eat people, I eat souls.” It droned on gleefully. “You do realize that, without your soul, you will be completely dead, yes?” It continued, feeding off of the fear in the room.

I sat down on the bed and bit my lip, willing some sort of miracle to happen.

It didn’t. My stomach was sick.

“Yes. I know. That’s why we come back to life now, because without the influence of The Void anymore, our souls don’t leave this world. I don’t need a lesson on it. Jade informed us long ago.” Clara said, steel in her voice.

This was news to me, as it meant that, possibly, this ‘Jade’ was the one that performed the experiments, not Clara. It would make sense, as Clara didn’t seem to know that much about things she claimed to know a lot about.

“So, shall we begin?” The collection of bones said.

“No, not until you tell us the rules and exactly what we are bargaining for.” Clara responded, like a true bargainer.

Sapphire, meanwhile, was busy staring the assortment of bones down, as if she were willing it to explode. She didn’t seem eager to attack it, which made sense as the thing may actually have been a God.

The bone pile then explained that Clara would roll five ten sided die, and he would roll five ten sided die. It would happen at the same time, to eliminate any cheating on his part (although I suspected that he was lying right then, anyways.)
He also explained that, if two of Clara’s die beat any of his five die, he would let one soul go. Clara would have three chances, one for each of our souls.

“And if I disagree?” Clara asked.

“Easy picking; you forfeit, meaning that I win! Oh, and to be fair, I really don’t have that much luck stored up…” It trilled happily.

“I… accept.” Clara said, glancing at Sapphire (who had decided to sit next to me, as staring at the monster wasn’t having its desired effect.)

Five more bony die appeared next to Clara’s head and began to roll about in the air. These die were black instead of white, though. The white bone die on the table began tumbling about as well.

And that’s how Clara ended up gambling for our lives with a skeleton creature from god-knows-where after making me feel as though my Ability wasn’t very special.







Chapter Eight: Finally, a Setting Change!


“[Censored]!” Clara screamed after her second roll. The black die had scattered around the table in the upper right of the room, the same table that the ‘God’ was rolling his die at.
“I’m sorry, Clara, but I’m afraid that you owe me a soul now.” Was all he/she/it said. I had a feeling that it would have smiled if it had actual muscles, as its voice sure did.

“Yeah? But we have one more role to go. And I already won the first one.” Clara said, trying to not freak out. She cupped her black die and rattled them together in her hands.

Suddenly, she splayed her fingers apart and let the black die fall where they would. The skeleton-god thing did the same at the same moment. Well… apart for the fingers thing.

“Hah! I beat you! Now you’re letting Sapphire and Nate go.” Clara said. I was taken aback by her sudden remark.

“… What Clara? Did you just tell it to let us go? What about you?” I asked her in a panicked tone of voice. She was the only person that I really knew and liked in this world.

“… I’ll think of something. Just go.” She said. The skeleton creature waited patiently until this was over.

“I’m sorry, Clara, but I’ve already chosen Nathaniel as the one who will be sacrificed. Toodlelo, now, children. Go and get back to the real world.” The abomination offered.

“What!!? No! I refuse, you freaking ‘God’ thing!” Clara said, standing up and slamming her fist on the table.

“Why, little girl, I’m afraid you’ve no choice. In fact, you’ve already left.” The creature said, as its bones rattled together in an intricate dance. Sapphire and Clara disappeared, only to end up on the outside of the door leading to the sound of running water.

I, meanwhile, had been sitting on the bed, dumbfounded.
“Ahhh yes, you, the mysterious Boy From the Beach.” And then it lunged at me from its perch on the roof.

Well, technically, it didn’t lunge so much as glide smoothly over the ground in a fast manner.

I, of course, acted without thinking, conjured a large silver short sword (it glowed in the dark!) and stabbed the creature through its eye socket, dealing a little damage as it puncture the back of its skull.

“Oof! Impossible! You stupid little human!” The thing screamed. I realized that I was able to use my Ability… even here.

“Your weird… Ability dampening stuff doesn’t work on me, idiot. Now let me go!”
Clara, whom had been trying to pry the metal bars open this entire time, decided to speak up.

“Hey, creep! Unless you want him to kill you, you should let him go!” She latched onto the fact that I had managed to wound it somehow, even when it was able to suppress everyone else’s Abilities.

Okay… Clara sent mixed messages. And what was Sapphire up to? She was currently standing directly behind Clara… doing… nothing. Just standing there with a glum sort of look on her face, as if she’d seen this all before.

Suddenly realization dawned on the creature’s… skull. “Nathaniel… I… must let you go. I cannot face one such as you. If you had told me, I wouldn’t have even dared.” It stammered some more.

“Forgive me, Nathaniel, for jeopardizing you and your friends. You must understand! It is my job! I was sent here to p-” And the thing disappeared in a puff of black smoke with a surprised look in its hollow eye sockets.

“… Sent here by what?” Clara muttered aloud, walking towards me as the iron bars wound themselves back into the roof and hugging me. I was a little surprised, so I awkwardly patted her back as the leather of her shirt scratched me. It seemed really itchy. She let go after a second, slightly embarrassed.

“I’m sorry that I… for lack of a better word, dissed on your Ability earlier. It’s just… you… well, I was afraid that, if I had told you, you’d have gone and gotten yourself killed right away. And, between you and me, death is permanent either way for you – your soul isn’t anchored here like ours,” She motioned between Sapphire and herself. I was shocked - I had become used to accepting death as a temporary setback, the way Clara talked about it all the time. I was barely able to catch a “Or so I think…” From under her breath.

“But your Ability is so much more than fast reaction time and creating weapons. I wish I could tell you more… but… Jade…” Clara trailed off.

“I give up, who is this ‘Jade’?”

Sapphire interjected here. “Jade is the bossiest, meanest girl to ever exist. But she could… see things. She could see everything. And she could change everything as well. She was so powerful that she existed for only two seconds before she spontaneously combusted due to the sheer amount of power in her. But in those two seconds, she managed to leave a huge trail of…”

“Shutup, Sapphire. Do you want another ‘Alex moment’? Do you remember how long it took to clean his brains up from the walls?” Clara suddenly said, cutting Sapphire off. Sapphire blushed and fell silent. I felt sick, imagining exactly what had happened to this ‘Alex’ kid.

“Anyways, Jade told us that we can’t tell you too much about your Ability. Just the basics. You’ll need to figure it out on your own… I’m sorry. But right now, we need to get to my other base before Elagio and Jake figure out how to get into The Blank, hack into our minds, and find out where it is.”

“Yeah, sure.” Today was becoming weirder and weirder. In fact, my life felt as though it were a story being written in a rather haphazard way. A story in which people could die at any moment and plot twists were so common that not having a plot twist is unexpected.

“Yo’… Sapphire to zombie, we need to get moving.” Sapphire said suddenly, interrupting my beautifully constructed simile.

“Huh? Wha…? Oh yeah. Let’s go.” I said, as Clara took the lead and walked through the tunnel that lead to the water sounds – yes, walked, as the tunnel was six and a half feet tall.

After about two minutes, we made it to a giant underground river. The cave walls were coated in some more of that green phosphorous material that was in the skeleton’s room. It lit the river up like… like… well, nothing really compared to the sight. Some stalactites hung from the ceiling, dripping some of the green stuff into the water and making little green circles in the lazy river.

We were standing on an outcropping that was about fifty feet up, near the roof of the river’s cavern. To our right was a tree stump, and to our left was… well, a sheer drop. The river was flowing from our left to our right, and, in the distance, I could just barely make out a waterfall through all of the glowing mist floating through the cave. The waterfall made a lot of noise and a lot of the mist, nourishing the large, glowing mushrooms that grew on the cave walls. These mushrooms illumined the already bright space even further.

I wish that I’d had more time to appreciate the place, but Clara was suddenly picking me up with her forcefields. Remembering the drill, I held my breath and closed my eyes, as I was expecting to be plunged into an ‘Enchantment’ again. I was correct, as I felt a rather warm, gooey sensation, followed by a rude awakening on a stone floor inside of a wooden room.

Then there was a ‘bloop’ and Sapphire was on top of my stomach. “Urgh! Sa…phi..e… off… blaa…” Was all I was able to say. Luckily, Sapphire got the message and stood up, allowing me to breathe. And then Clara came through, crushing my ribcage again.

“Haha! Hi Nate. Ohh! I feel randomly happy for some reason. Maybe it’s because I’m finally back at this place?” She laughed and got up. I lay on the floor gasping for breath.

“Hunga… rr… why…?”

“Haha… oh… just the memories. That’s why. Hah. Anyways, we should get going.” Clara held out her hand to me and I gratefully grabbed onto it and got up. Sapphire was leaning against the wall with her hands on her head.

“Clara… I feel something… I…” And that was as far as she got before she slumped against the wall and slowly slid down.

“Sapphire… are you-“ Sapphire’s body disappeared without any effects. “SAPPHIRE?!” Clara screamed. I just stood there, slightly numbed from all of the random crap that had already gone on in my life. Suddenly, a sign appeared where Sapphire had been. Clara rushed over to it and pulled out a torch – it mysteriously lit on fire as soon as it was in her hand. She dropped the torch as I began to walk over there in a daze, fearing that Sapphire was dead or gone forever. The sign disappeared after another half second, leaving Clara frozen in place.

“Clara? Um… are you alright?” I asked. No response. “Clara? Where’s Sapphire? Um… did Jade do-“ The thought was suddenly cast out of my head with a piercing pain near my right temple - like a fishing line had caught it and yanked it out violently through my ear. “Awgh…” I said, massaging it. “What was I saying…? Clara? What?”

I remembered everything up to the point when Clara froze in place, after that it was blank. The torch was still burning on the floor and was slowly making the area around it black with soot.

And Clara was still frozen. Crap.

I figured that something had happened to literally freeze Clara – maybe Sapphire had somehow slowed her down to incredibly slow speeds by accident…? Either way, I needed to help her. So saying, I picked her up… it was weird, it was like she was almost weightless yet infinitely heavy. I just tried to ignore it.

With the torch lit and burning on the floor, I could get a view of the room aside from some silhouettes caused by the invisible enchantment behind me (actually, I seriously couldn’t see it.) transporting light into the room. The space we were in was relatively small, made of some sort of hard grey rock, and had two doorways from it. One was to my right and led to something that looked like a door. The other one had what looked like a metal door in its frame. The one to my right seemed like the obvious place to go because it was the only one open.

I began to head to the next room, pausing to pick the effervescent torch up from the floor and carry Clara with one arm. Is this what Sapphire feels when she picks people up? I wondered to myself idly, waiting for the impact for Sapphire disappearing and Clara being frozen in time to hit me.

And it did. Like a soccer cleat to the stomach, oh yeah it did.

But I somehow kept my cool even through the nervousness that threatened to overtake me and make me drop Clara. I needed to somehow figure out what to do with her.

All of this went through my head before I even set foot in the next room. Then I did set foot into the room and saw it clearly for the first time. It was just like the cave beneath the inn back in ‘The Village of the Damned’

Actually… what was that village’s name anyways? Clara had never told me. Oh well.

I studied the more intricate drawings here… this time, it was filled with humans fighting the people on the clouds again. There were no skeleton things hanging around and no creepy caves with crying girls in them… actually… if I looked at the series of drawing from the left to the right, it seemed to progress from a group of humans climbing up a staircase to the cloud being’s lairs and massacring them to cloud beings and humans both signing some sort of paper… a treaty, maybe? Oh well. No time for that – I needed to get out of this place… it was seriously starting to creep me out with no one else around.

Okay, no one else but a statue around.

There was a doorway to my left that was partially obscured by dirt. I would’ve missed it but for the fact that there was a little light peeking in from some thin places near the top of the pile.

To put it in a shorter way, I basically slaughtered the dirt with my hands and made it out into what appeared to be… well… there was stone around me, but it abruptly ended. After it were some broken shards of glass and an island. This island looked pretty small, but I wasn’t sure, so I stepped out and, careful of the shattered glass all over the place (from a glass hallway?) and looked behind me to see that the building was literally underneath a small hill and that the island was actually quite large. The hill was blanketed with quite a few trees (not behemoth scale like the trees by Clara’s house.) and had a river curling around it to the other side of the island, where it ran off into the sky and dissolved to mist.

Oh, I guess I forgot to mention that we were on a floating island with seas of clouds and the sky surrounding us. And here I thought that this place was already too screwed up to become even more screwed up… but no, perish the thought!

Chapter Nine: I Guess Some Things Are Actually Universal… And Clara is Incorrect. For Once.


I was standing on top of the hill that the creepy-ish bunker thing was situated below, staring out into the distance. There were no other floating islands, just endless, rolling clouds and the bright, midday sun. Actually, the clouds were really reflective and didn’t help me when I was trying to peer into the distance. I had tried to look down to the ground (which I hoped was directly down below the island) but, when I couldn’t find it (even through a gap in the clouds) I got worried. This led to me looking in random directions and eventually finding out that the ground was tilted diagonally to the island (or that the island was tilted diagonally to the ground, I guess) and made me wonder as to how I had failed to see it before.

I wasn’t sure how big something needed to be to generate its own gravity, and, in fact, I wasn’t even sure how we could be floating in the sky as a geostationary object anyways – we should’ve fallen. I guessed that it was kind of normal to have random floating clumps of dirt, considering that Clara could just stop an object in space by throwing it (and so could anyone else except for me, by her reasoning.)

But… then again, her village had succumbed to gravity. Maybe it was a property of The Blank or something.

Anyways, I had stood on top of the hill and surveyed the island before looking at all of this stuff. It was actually fairly big – maybe twenty square miles? Enough for one large forest that was divided from a desert by that river I’d mentioned earlier. The river was an odd one, first of all, it started in the middle of nowhere (the middle of the air, about twenty feet above some point in the desert) and proceeded to wind it’s way through the island and off of it, where it dropped off of the island and became literally mystified. Of course, the mist probably dropped to the true ground after leaving this weird island, but I couldn’t really see it, so I really had no way of knowing.

I was waiting for Clara to wake up. I’d placed her in the shade of one of the numerous trees blanketing the north side of the hill (judging from the sun that was now setting. It was actually kind of weird, seeing it move diagonally across the sky. Cool, but weird. And confusing – I had to think it through before I’d gotten to the ‘north side of the hill’ bit, actually) and positioned her so that she wasn’t facing the sun (‘cause over time I was pretty sure that the sun would… like… burn her eyes out or something. Or give her skin cancer.)

I kept waiting for a while near the peak of the hill, eventually sitting down and just staring at the mesmerizing clouds. Eventually I just sort of… drifted into a short sleep of sorts. Luckily, nothing attacked me that night. I awoke to find the island… well…part of the island… was gone. And I was sleeping right next to the crack that had severed everything.

I began to panic, eventually making out what I thought to be the other 3/4s of the island in the distance, right in front of the sun. It looked a little odd, as if it were a different angle or something… which made me notice that the island I was on was actually floating upside down. I was also below the cloud cover at this time – maybe the island was sinking?

Anyways, Clara was five to ten miles away on a random floating island and I was stuck on a different random floating island. And I just sat there. I was powerless. I had always been powerless. I didn’t even know how to survive. I couldn’t build a shelter to survive against the Nightlings… I couldn’t save Clara… Sapphire was gone, possibly dead, an – Oh shut up you self-centered fool. Do I need to tell you everything about your Ability or are you going to find it out yourself? Hmm? Have you considered… heh, pushing the island? Jade OWWWWT!

I jumped up and screamed because it was such a shock.

“What the hell!?” I yelled.

Oh come on. They’ve told you a little about me, yeah? Well… I think I’ve been transported back to that place from before The Rip by now. You know - Earth. Anyways, I’m leaving this for you from the past… I am, like, almost a goddess, you know. Now… I guess I do have to tell you-actually, no. I think you can do this by yourself. Just know one thing… I can’t tell you what to do. Not if this is to work out the way it must. Oh… if only I could control people. Meh. That’s one of the only things I ca-

The mind-voice thing was suddenly cut off. Maybe it was intentional? Oh well. I had to somehow propel the island (currently drifting over a partially burnt forest that was bordered by a huge desert) over to Clara, because, even though we’d only known each other for three days (to me, probably a lot less to frozen-Clara) I really cared for her and didn’t want her to be frozen for forever.

That’s when it hit me – Clara. Clara had told me about Abilities… she said that I would’ve killed myself if she’d told me all about my Ability… so… maybe I was really powerful… and I could move the island with my Ability…? And if I had known sooner… maybe I’d have spontaneously combusted or so-

Now you’re thinking with magical powers! Hahaha… oh… you don’t get it. It’s just something I kind of remember from ‘Earth’. Anyways, got to go. Alex is do-oh crap. Oh… no… I’m so sorry, Nate… I’ve seen your memories… now I have to kill Alex… oh… why? I like Alex…

Jade said, startling me with her… um… voice. When she’d said ‘Alex’ I’d immediately thought of the guy that Clara said that they’d needed to clean the brains up of. And it would appear that I was the cause of it. I suddenly felt kind of bad – but, in all honesty, I didn’t really care. I didn’t know him, Clara didn’t like him. And, to top it, I had a job to do.

I guess I sat there for a while. I had gotten this ridiculous idea in my mind that, if I meditated for long enough, I’d release all of my energy and make the island move or something. That’s not what happened. What did happen was this: I fell asleep concentrating on moving the island back to Clara. Instead, I woke up floating about five feet above the tree that Clara was sitting in. And I was still floating until I noticed that I was still floating. Then I fell and flummoxed onto the ground next to Clara. The sun was still not at midday and… Clara was lying on the ground with her eyes closed. The wind ruffled her hair and I caught my breath.

“Clara…? CLARA?”

She groaned and said “Rebecca… I don’t care if Jeremy just traveled to The Tumult a-“ Then she jerked up and screamed, “WHAT THE HELL!? SAPPHIRE?!” She jumped up as the ground below her rose up in a sphere. Her hair seemed to be electrified. Then she ceased and flumped to the ground. “But she… okay… but only because it’ll save everyone that ever lived, lives, and will live in this world. Including her. And Rebecca.” A tear glimmered from her right eye.

“Nate…?” She said weakly, rolling over to the tree and sitting up against it. I’d moved myself to the tree and I was also sitting on it.

“I think Sapphire will be back. I hope she will. But Jade thinks – knows – that we can save everyone who ever lived. She told me to wait here with you. And… wait… where are we?” She stood up and looked around. “I thought we were in my old emergency bunker… god, you look horrible. Let me guess, Jade froze me in time and you dragged me out here to… we’re on a floating island, aren’t we?” She said, glancing up at one of the thin semi-clouds that floated just a few feet above the tips of the trees.

“Yeah… I got separated from you when you froze. I think Jade might’ve been trying to teach me how to use my Ability… whatever it is.” I said. The island seemed to be right side up relative to the ground now, and…

“Hey, does this island seem like it’s getting further away from the clouds to you?” Clara said after a few seconds, noting that the clouds were now twenty feet above the trees. And now they were twenty two. And now they were twenty five.

“Yeah… mm… I think tha-“ And suddenly we were weightless, the clouds zooming away from us.

“-T IT MIGHT FALL SAVE US WITH YOUR FORCEFIELDS!” I completed my sentence. Clara held up her hands and… nothing.

“CLARAA?!” I screamed.

“I CAN’T DO ANYTHING!” She yelled back, waving her hands around in a panic and just screaming randomly. Then the island below us smashed into a hundred different pieces. Clara and I were next. It wasn’t really that painful. My last thought was I really hope Clara was wrong when she said that I wouldn’t come back. Oh. And Waffles! For some reason.

Then I felt nothing. I saw nothing. I smelt nothing. I heard nothing. I remembered everything. I was like that for what felt like forever… maybe it was simply two seconds. Maybe it was a month. It doesn’t matter because, eventually, I thought to myself Wait… I have something else to do…

And, all of the sudden, I saw something. It was a white light. Then I felt something. It was the wind that began to whistle through my ears. And I smelled… actually, I still smelled nothing. Oh well.

This is nice… but… oh no. Clara thinks I’m dead. I thought to myself as I fell for… maybe an hour. Or maybe it was simply half a second. Either way, I ended up being slammed into the white light and face planting into a sandy beach.

“Grhhuu…” I groaned, slowly pushing myself up and off of my face, spitting a glob of sand out of my mouth as I did so. Opening my eyes, I saw the sun beginning to rise in the distance, up and over the endless, sparkling sea to my left. No clouds floated through the air. Behind me were towering behemoths of trees, old giants that looked suspiciously like Clara’s forest… who was Clara again?

All I could remember from… from before whatever had just happened, was that she was someone extremely important to me. That and something (someone) called a ‘Jade’ and ‘Portal. Dude, get the reference.’

That meant nothing to me.












Chapter Ten: Settling Down.

The next half month or so of my life went by slowly. I ventured through the forest, eventually finding a large and mysterious stump that, for whatever reason, had a small portal that opened for me when I approached it. The weird thing is that I could almost… remember the place. Inside the stump was single large clearing of nothing but a ring of green fiber around a dark wooden floor. The green stuff was squishy and all of the little separate lines that wove together to make it were pointing towards the outside. The ceiling was about thirty feet high and little wooden bits – almost like light fixtures – hung down periodically, as if there had been chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The entire room had been coated in some sort of golden dust that glowed in the dark, allowing me to see everything in the first place as there were no openings aside from the one behind me.

Actually, there had been one furnishing in there, a small wooden chest with cracked and squeaky hinges and a broken lock. Of course, I opened it to see two rusty iron picks that spanned the length of my arm, a small hatchet whose blade was made from something brown and had a sort of twisted, hard wooden handle extending like a river from it. Below those were some bits of what I later identified to be bacon (still fresh) with what I believed to be salt coating the bottom of the chest.

I wasn’t really sure about what I should do, so I just gathered the tools and began swiping at one of the trees near the back of the stump/house for firewood or crafting wood or something. Even though it was a gnarled, twisty thing, stretching up to the sky and as thick as I was, it took surprisingly little effort to cut down. Within moments, the entire thing was falling down – luckily, it was falling to my front and not close to the stump which I’d designated as my home for now.

And that’s how I got myself set for the next month – chopping trees down and living off of the bacon I’d found in the chest. I managed to fashion a large platform that was as long as I was and as high as my chest, on which I found it easier to construct wooden furniture. Actually, I wasn’t really proud of the table as, although it had taken me eight or nine hours (a whole day, really) to make, it had chips all over it from the axe I’d used and it was unstable because I’d had no way to accurately judge the distance to the ground. But it worked if I propped it up with a pebble beneath the upper left hand leg.

Using it, I made a small chair and a wooden bed that was actually too hard to sleep on. I put those in the middle of the clearing, really just to fill up the giant space within Stumpy. Yes, I’d named my dwelling ‘Stumpy’.

A few days after that, I discovered sheep. I had never actually forgotten them… I just didn’t remember them until I saw one. The one I saw was, to put it bluntly, huge. It was as wide as some of the smaller trees in the forest because of all of the white wool on it. The thought that struck me was Hey… I could use its wool for my bed…

My neck was always aching because the floor was really, really hard. Unless, that is, I slept on the green stuff. It was soft enough to make me comfortable, but it made me feel like I was swimming while trying to sleep. It made me uncomfortable by making me comfortable, to make it short.

Anyways, I pulled out my axe – now a little dull – and began to hack the wool off of it. The sheep just stood there, chewing grass from the thicketed forest ground here. So that’s how I got the wool I used for my bed. Nothing much happened for a few days until I discovered why I was always afraid of the dark and couldn’t stay outside at night. Ever.

Seventeen days had passed since I had woken up on the beach when I saw it. A… for lack of a better word, zombie. I had stayed out until nightfall that day, right outside of Stumpy’s opening. I wanted to prove to myself that the darkness wasn’t going to kill me. I was almost wrong.

After a few minutes of me standing outside of my house, I saw it. It was an almost humanoid shape that was detaching itself from the all encompassing darkness and slowly lumbering towards me.

“…Uhh… He…Hello?” I asked nervously. Then a wave of nausea washed over me as I smelled rotting meat and fish and mangos… and, well, basically everything that a maggot would be found in. I edged my way back towards the opening to my house, frightened of the creature that I still couldn’t really see.

And suddenly, it was visible. It was only a few feet away and made me scream and back into Stumpy’s outside wall as I was groping for the opening. I got it and flew inside just before the thing could’ve breathed on me. Luckily, the ‘door’ had instantly closed behind me and locked the it out.

It had been almost human. I mean, apart from the fact that it had one half of an eye (its left eye) and dried blood over the half of its face that was gone, it might have passed as a human. Or maybe the fact that its arm had rotted away, leaving its bones, somehow, would have alerted someone to the fact that it was about to eat their face off.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The next day, I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the very cusp of dawn the next morning. I knew this because I’d hacked out a tiny (finger sized) peephole through Stumpy’s three inch thick walls in order to see when daylight had come.

I approached the place where I knew the door to be (out of memory) and walked outside after gathering my basic tools and food, trying to forget about the living nightmare I had seen two nights before. The land had lost almost all of its perceived enchantment to me.

Anyways, I wandered around outside and waited for the sun to be visible. I was going to go explore.

The key word there was ‘going’ as I ended up not going exploring and, instead, I met a guy.

I was waiting on the edge of the forest. The sun was almost visible and I was double checking to make sure I had everything I really needed. I did. I peered across the new territory. It was an extensive plain with one huge river running through it about halfway across. Some lonely oak trees grew, most of them sporadically scattered around, granting the plains a sort of naturalistic beauty that enchanted me. Beyond it was a long range of mountains that stretched all around the plains and probably stretched to the ocean, which was behind me, making a sort of dome around the me. Some lazy clouds drifted near the top of the jagged, snow capped mountains. That was my destination.

Sudden gasping came from my right.

“Whew… erg… ohh… that takes… whew… a lot… out of you…” I whirled around to see someone collapsing on the ground. He looked like he was sixteen or so, with a deep tan and rippling arm muscles. He had dark red hair (natural or not, I had no idea) and wore a silver sun amulet with a sword through it.

Where had I seen that before?

He was on his side and looking up at me, allowing me to see his face. His eyes were the color of grass, and his lips the color of pale red sunlight. He wore a tight fitting green shirt with some sort of cyan leather jacket over it. His pants were grey and looked as if they were leather as well.

He slowly pushed himself up, looking at me as I regarded him with caution..

“’Ello… dude.” He said. “I just flew here from… er… my house. Which is somewhere. Heh.” He paused and looked up at the sky. “Ohh! We must be near Jade’s Point. I think it’s over there, behind those wicked mountains.”

I looked at him, confused. Who was Jade? She sounded so familiar… yet… so…

“I’m sorry, um… who are you?” I asked him.

“Dude! You’re new here. I’m Jeremy.” He laughed and whipped a violin from out of the air. It was beautifully crafted and amazingly varnished with something that made it look like mahogany. The strings were all white, but Jeremy held no bow to play it with. “…I play music. Watch this.”

He pinched his fingers together, about an inch away from the strings and closed his eyes. Suddenly he began to rub them back and forth and move his entire hand forwards and backwards. And the violin made music.

The melody he generated was amazing… like… like a river flowing through an underground cavern filled with a lost city full of riches. And, suddenly, the ground beneath us was floating and light was flying out of the violin.

He stopped. We flopped down about three inches. I almost cried.

“That was… amazing.” I said, sitting down.

“I know.” He said. “And that’s not all I can do.” He threw the violin into the air, into which it disappeared, and pulled a giant clarinet out of the space the violin had poofed into.

“This,” He began, “Is the Bass Clarinet. Watch this-“ Jeremy held the instrument to his lips and hummed. The black instrument began to move its own silver buttons and out came a tune that was rumbling and dark, like –

CRACK!

- Thunder.

The ground between us split in half and pulled apart. The crevice spread out to the forest and stopped after about fifteen feet. It was about five feet across.

“Heh. Cool, yeah? Anyways… I made a music map and it turns out that you are the person I need to see next. Or… something like that. I’m not really sure.” He stopped to put his instrument away and stand up. He hummed a little octave progression (upwards) and was gently hurled across the rift. I stood up and we were standing side by side.

“So. Do you know Clara?” He asked me.

I suddenly got a splitting headache, as if someone was driving a nail into my skull… from the inside. Then the headache became about fifteen infinity million times worse. Maybe comparable to having a star explode in my head.

“AGH!” I screamed, falling over in pain. Jeremy gasped, crouched down, and pulled something out – I could barely see due to the pain – and began to play something high pitched and soothing. The pain receded suddenly.

“Dude… you should get that looked at.” He said as I stood up. He was holding a silver flute with dragons etched around it. “I think that means that you don’t know Clara.”

“Of course I remember her. How could I ever have forgotten?” My voice was shaky, not only due to emotion but also because I was still in shock from having my head explode. The truth had been there the entire time;

“…We died together.”

Chapter Eleven: Travel.

“Woah dude… you died with… Clara? She hasn’t died. Not once. Are you sure that you’re talkin’ about Clara?” He said with an unsure smile playing on his lips.

“Yes! And… I can prove it! She had the same necklace as you.” I paused to absorb his expression; raised eyebrows and disbelief played across his features. “Actually, what is that necklace anyways?”

Jeremy shook his head before responding.

“I… I don’t believe it. Clara… died? Woah. I need to look at something. Oh, and this necklace,” He held the necklace up. “Represents ‘Silversun’ City, the place that Clara basically built from the ground up. She is… amazing. I can’t believe that she… died.”

I got up from the ground, wincing at my muscles, which had become extremely taught when I had been remembering (read: violently convulsing on the ground as unbearable pain made me want to commit suicide). As such, they hurt like hell now. Jeremy had pulled his violin out and closed his eyes, assuming his normal position of pinched-fingers-close-to-string. He played a single, pure note and balanced on one leg, the other pushed against his support. Suddenly he opened his eyes and looked around, bewildered. He was still playing his violin when…

“Holy crap.” He said, blankly staring at one of the mountains directly in front of us. The violin stopped producing the note and he shook his head.

“So… she really did die. Oh no… no one – not even Clara - remembers where her Point is… I hope she can make it back to Silversun or somewhere.” He sighed. Then he smiled as if he were about to reveal something dramatic.

“’Cause, you know, she should know that Rebecca is still alive.” He said.

I gaped.

“…What? She’s alive?” I was shocked. But… “We really need to get Clara. She just met up with Sapphire. Then Sapphire disappeared. Oh-she really needs to know…!” Jeremy rolled his eyes and made a half smile.

“Dude. You know that she’s probably hundred of miles away, right? My music can’t reach her and I can’t make a M.M. of where she is.” He paused there, like he wanted me to say something. I didn’t. “Right. So, now that you do, in fact, know that, we must go and rescue Rebecca from… well… wherever she is. Which will be hard because…” And he began muttering to himself, eventually taking a triangle of metal out – okay, it was literally a triangle, as in the instrument triangle – and tapped it a few times in different areas.

“As I was saying, she doesn’t really need rescuing. But… getting her to not kill us is going to be a challenge. Maybe… what’s your Ability?” I stared blankly at him, frantically trying to remember what Clara had said about it.

“…I don’t know… I can make weapons though. Oh, and I made myself float right before Clara and I were killed…” Jeremy almost fell down in exasperation.

“Right. Whatever. Oh-wait.” He put his triangle away and whipped the trusty violin out of midair again. This time he just thwacked my arm with its neck. The violin’s noise echoed my own.

“What was that for?!” I yelled at him, upset. Of course.

“I needed to see how powerful you are. Apparently you read as ‘inconclusive’ which either means that you’re ultra-powerful, or so un-powerful that the violin deems you…” He trailed off for dramatic effect.

“Unworthy.” He barely whispered it as the violin played a haunting melody (almost) of its own accord. I could see Jeremy twisting his fingers behind his back.

“Anyways. I know where Rebecca is. Shall we?” He asked. I nodded.

He grabbed his silver flute from the air after pushing his violin back through and grabbed my hands. The flute was somehow levitating in the air by his mouth. I had no idea what he was about to do, plus, random grabbing of hands creeped me out. I had no time to react, though, before the flute whistled a shrill tune that seemed to warp my ears… and… apparently, reality itself.

There was… there was a grayness and then we were in another forest. I fell to the ground and gasped at the same time as I vomited. Probably slightly detrimental to my lungs.

Jeremy was completely pale and bent half over. His flute had already been put away, surprisingly.

While I was lying on the floor, again, I noticed that the forest we were in had a glass ceiling. And all of the trees were of normal height – the largest one in our vicinity was probably eighty feet tall, most of the others were only about half of its size. The ground was cool and fresh with the morning, even though the sun was halfway to the middle of the sky already. There were some random patches of moss and grass surrounding the trees, as well as numerous ferns.

But seriously. A glass ceiling. It seemed to be extremely high up – high enough so that clouds were forming under it. I think. It was hard to tell, with the thing being translucent, you see.

“Ugh…” Jeremy groaned.

“Ugh…” I groaned. Then I closed my eyes and concentrated on not accidentally rolling onto the pile of yellowish vomit by my head.

“Sorry… dude… it’s been awhile since I teleported anyone other than myself.” He paused and stifled laughter. “…Err… you have a little… something by your head.”

“Ugh… that’s… not… funny…” I said, my stomach somersaulting as if it were a gymnast.

“Yeah. I know. Sorry.” Jeremy said, his voice steady by this time.

I stayed on the ground for what felt to be a minute, eventually opening my eyes only to find that the sun had risen up halfway through the sky. The ill feeling had suddenly ceased to exist, so I was able to slowly get up (read: jump up and yell “I’MMAWAKE!” Suddenly.)

Jeremy, who had sat down on the ground next to me, jerked his head off of his hand at this point. Before his eyes had opened it surprised, he’d already summoned his violin and had it pointed towards me, ready to play it. Luckily, before he did, he registered that it was, in fact, just me.

“Dude. Don’t. Do. That. I almost killed you.” He said to me, sleepily.

I nodded sheepishly as he made his violin disappear. I still didn’t quite understand how the poofy thing worked, it just did.

“Sorry. I just kind of… surprised myself. That’s all.” I think that I’d been sleeping or something equally normal when you have your eyes closed. Like… like… well, there was really only sleeping that qualified for that, I guess.

A sudden thought struck me.

“Jeremy, were you…” Watching me as I slept? “…Never mind.” He’d probably just watched me to make sure I didn’t have a random seizure or something. Or maybe he’d been protecting me. Or maybe he’d done none of this, and had instead just sat down and slept. Whatever he had done, it probably didn’t matter.

“Err… right. Anyways. Rebecca is around here… somewhere. I think. This dome is like, in outer space or something.” He considered what he’d just said for a moment. “…Or so my instruments say.”

He stood up and stretched out, yawning. I was already standing, and, as such, decided to join him in his stretching. It felt so good on my super stiff muscles and aching back, so much so that I almost forgot about the vomit behind me. Due to this, I almost stepped in it. I would’ve stepped in it if not for Jeremy catching my shirt and pulling me back in a demonstration of his strength and reflexes.

“Woah. Dude. Vomit pile. You might want to not step on that…” He was right. It was now green and filled with brown chunks of… steak or something that I’d eaten the day before.

“Anyways, we should get a move on. Rebecca could… well, she can probably see me, if I am one to say so, because I am pretty powerful. So she should be able to see me and may already be preparing to leave. Mmm…” He looked up to one of the trees. “Grab…” He started. Then, thinking better of it, “…Nah. Too awkward and dangerous.”

I was clueless, but I let it slide.

“Okay. Right. So, lead on, Jeremy.” I said to him. He nodded, rolled his eyes, pulled out his flute, and played something that sounded like ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’. He then stared into space for a few seconds. The flute was still held up near his lips.

He jerked into motion suddenly. “Okay. Follow me!” He smiled and, putting his flute away, turned around and set off in a seemingly random path through the forest.

It was quite boring. To sum it all up, the trees all started looking exactly the same and were arranged in a pattern – short, tall, short, short, tall, wide, short, tall. After I noticed it, things got boring. The only halfway interesting thing was this giant boulder that Jeremy and I stumbled upon in the middle of a large clearing. It was covered with moss and had a few saplings – five – growing on it.

And it wasn’t a normal boulder – it looked suspiciously like a misshapen giant’s head.

Apart from that, nothing interesting really happened.

And then we were out of the forest and on the border of a huge desert, the glass wall shimmering far off into the distance, warped by heat waves rising off of the super heated sand in the afternoon sun.

A neat little log cabin stood about five hundred feet in front of us. The building was short and squat, with a log chimney rising out of its roof. The front door (which was facing us) was bordered on both sides by glass windows. It was impossible to see inside due to light brown, wooden shutters being pulled over the windows, as well as the fact that some trees grew in her garden, surrounded by red and yellow flowers, as well as purple flowers and cute little bunnies.

Suddenly a girl opened the oak door and stormed out. She wore a green sweater around her waste, as well as a white t-shirt and some seriously ripped blue jeans. She had amber hair and wore red shoes.

Above all that, she carried something my brain identified as a rifle – a sleek, long barreled rifle.

And she was pointing it towards us whilst scowling.

“DUCK!” I screamed at Jeremy, managing to do so myself just before a bullet whizzed over me and a wave of sound – CRACK! – Reached my ears.