Kenny’s POV: Day 0

We were all gathered up the day it happened. Cádo had some sparring match scheduled with a regional fencing champion, and he’d wanted us to make a day of it. We watched him trounce the guy during the afternoon, and went back to his place for drinks in the evening. That was the plan at least. Plans have a nasty tendency to change when you happen to be dragged through some portal between worlds.

Bernard and I were sitting in the stands, talking during the match itself. There was hardly anything to actually pay attention to with the contest, given how one-sided it was. Few people could make Cádo break a sweat, and his opponent was definitely not amongst them that day.

So we chatted away. For a pair from walks of life as different as us, we had an odd amount in common. We all did I suppose. People tend to when they decide to write a book together.

I was the rich boy of the group, from older money than either of the others could trace their families back to, and uniquely humble despite the fact. Incredibly humble, in fact. Bernard often said I was snooty, arrogant, and only about half as smart as I thought he was. Which I reckoned made me three times smarter than most everyone else.

By contrast, Bernard’s upbringing was slightly weird. Not weird in the funny way, though. More in the “raised by a paranoid schizophrenic in an apocalypse cult” sort of way. His family had been poor for generations, and working class spirit ran through their veins almost as thickly as chromium dust.

And he was a genius. Never forgot anything he put his mind to remembering, thought seemingly four times faster than most, ran through multi-line equations just in his head even while distracted. It probably wasn’t the cause, but this intelligence definitely gave him a lot of excuses to mouth off and vent his massive ego everywhere. God himself could’ve descended to tell Bernard he wasn’t important, and the only answer he’d have gotten would have been sneering laughter. Probably followed by an accusation of Fascism.

“Has Cádo gotten faster?” Bernard asked, eying the contest rather absently, thoughts a mile away somewhere else. I was hardly focusing any more intently, but frowned at the question.

“Maybe, he’s training all the time.”

Cádo was, at that. He’d been an olympic champion before sixteen, and five years later he kept on swinging away. It was as if he were worried about being ambushed someday. Whatever the exhaustive habit said about his obsession, it said much more about his actual abilities. As of a half minute ago, the man had switched hands to his left- his weaker one. If he noticed how much the fact pissed off his opponent, Cádo gave no indication.

“We’d be millionaires if he put that much focus into writing. Well, me and him would be, you’ve already got that covered” Bernard grumbled, leaning his head back, sighing. “God, he’s taking ages. Can you give him a shout? Tell him to hurry it up? Maybe throw something at his opponent to distract them?”

I grinned at his irritation. Bernard never could sit still for long, always fidgeting or switching tabs or building something the government didn’t want him to. If patience was a virtue, then he was about as saintly as Emperor Nero.

“Hey, Cádo, hurry it up, would you?”

Cádo glanced over at my call, parrying one swing without even looking and stepping back from the rest. He let his annoyance show, but turned back to the fight with a new vigour as he switched hands again. It wasn’t long before the match was over. Two touches to him in barely twice as many seconds.

“You two never let me have my fun.” He complained, marching over to the stands as he unclasped the protective headgear covering him. His hair spilled out, tousled and curled by the exercise, but not sweat-coated. It hadn’t been even so much effort as it looked, apparently.

“We let you have plenty.” I shot back. “You just never have enough to be satisfied.” The headgear came down onto a bench, and Cádo sprawled along it an instant later.

Bernard piped up, then, eying the discarded gear.

“It’s a lot more bearable when you’re just doing martial arts, at least there’s something to watch there.”

Cádo shrugged.

“What can I say? I was cursed with skill.”

“Oh, no I was talking about getting to watch you be hurt without all the pads and stuff. But yeah, sure, I suppose the struggle is something too.”

Bernard and Cádo shared a grin as the conversation stretched on. It was a while before we finally took our leave, everything was all slow for us back then, lazy. We had as much time as there were waking hours in a day. More or less. Close to one of those hours passed before we all finally came back to Cádo’s home.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

All of us were fairly well off, by that stage of our lives. Our book, Chronicles of Destiny and Bone, had sold better than expected, and we were all sitting on a sequel deal. Cádo’s home was his home, not simply his family’s, and he’d made sure to buy a fairly big one. Possibly just because he’d gotten used to just that sort of living area, but also because he needed the room to hold all his damned trophies.

We were in the living room when conversation moved onto politics. Unfortunately, Bernard was there, so politics then quickly moved onto a debate about whether or not the government was harvesting circumcised babies’ foreskins to de-age their elderly elite when the Change happened.

It was subtle at first, hardly noticeable at all really. One could only have expected to catch it if one had paid attention to the tiniest of details, such as the sudden taste of ozone in the air, or the building violently imploding in on us. Then we were falling.

What we fell through, really, can’t be described. It could barely be felt. To force it into words the entire experience was like sailing through an ocean made out of liquefied rainbows, only to be caught in a giant whirlpool and suddenly dragged to the depths, then for God himself to tell you about half the universe’s great secrets, while lying about the other. All while the magic mushrooms you dropped twenty minutes ago finally kicked in.

If that’s a bit abstract, then unfortunately there’s no way you’ll grasp what happened to us, because it’s as grounded as I can make the explanation. What matters isn’t the particulars of sensation or sight, though, only what happened next. We landed.

There was a fairly gradual deceleration before all three of us belly flopped onto the hilltop, which was lucky because whatever terminal velocity might be in the netherworld, it’s probably not survivable.

A few moments passed with our ears ringing and brains shivering, bearings completely stripped away by the trip and senses trying- failing- to adjust to our surroundings. It all dawned on us eventually.

We were outside. It was day, not evening, and the terrain was vaguely European. The air was frigid, the wind sharp, and the city we’d all been in just minutes ago seemed gone. In its place were rolling hills and bowing trees, from the base of our hilly perch to the horizon.

Similarities or no, we are all different people, and our disparate reactions probably conveyed that better than any words could.

Cádo was amazed, all awe and grinning astonishment as he let himself ponder the sight, staring at everything around us. I was pure, distilled nerves. My hand was moving for my phone in an instant, but I realised the moment after that I’d left it on the kitchen counter. Half a second after that I was screaming, calling out for my father, for friends, for help. For anything at all that might drag me out of the nightmare.

Bernard was not a dazzled optimist, and he wasn’t a panicker’ like me. He was something much worse.

The moment he realised what had happened, he already started working the information over in his mind, making deductions, then drawing conclusions. All of them were wrong, and they led him to one rather particular response.

Thinking back to his mother’s teachings, Bernard turned on his heel and took off at a sprint to locate something he could use as a weapon for when “they” inevitably made the second move of their nefarious scheme.

And so it was that our first few minutes spent in our first alternate world were dedicated to chasing down a screaming psychotic before he could harm himself or, much more likely, someone else.

I noticed Bernard’s sprint first, but was much slower. Cádo, of course, was the fastest of us, but by the time he started running we were already fifty feet ahead. It took a while before Bernard finally stopped, and we pulled in to approach just a few yards short.

He was hunched down beside a tree, muttering to himself as he picked out the pointiest of several nearby rocks to use as a makeshift shiv.

“Bernard, calm down.” Cádo tried, saying the exact wrong thing to say to any paranoid who was calmed up. Bernard snarled at him, actually snarled, like some sort of animal. I barely cut in before things could worsen.

“We’re with you.” I tried, voice low and soothing. “You know we are, but we don’t know what’s going on, what have you noticed?”

Bernard stared at me, as if I was an idiot.

“We got suddenly transported to god knows where?” He practically shrieked. “Why am I the only one behaving rationally about this?”

Apparently settling on a rock, Bernard tore it from the ground. It looked like the sort one might use to kill a man whose only weakness was meat tenderizers.

My real name wasn’t Kenny, my friends just called me that. I’d been born Keyinde Johnathan Adebayo, in Nigeria. And I’d dealt with a lot of very irrational, stubborn old men in my time spent shadowing my father and studying the running of his company. It meant I was absolutely lightning at defusing Bernard when the situation called for it, and few situations ever had as much as this one. I took a careful step forward.

“If we need protection, then you can offer it better by sharing what you know, yes?”

That, at last, got through to Bernard, who nodded and stood. Cádo let out a sigh of relief. Apparently he really hadn’t been in the mood to choke out his friend, today. I couldn’t blame him, Bernard was a biter.

“Follow me.” Bernard breathed, taking off at a jog once more. We followed him, reaching our destination a minute later. It was the exact spot we’d started. Bernard gestured out to the landscape before the inevitable questions could come, eying the rest of us.

“See what I mean?”

We didn’t, and he sighed.

“God, apes, fine then. Look at that river, yes? And those trees? Now focus on-” He described the relevant features, one by one, and it was I who finally got his meaning. Cádo, bless him, needed it spelled out. He’d never been as good with the more concrete aspects of our work.

“That’s impossible.” I snapped, glaring at Bernard. I shouldn’t have, it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t control the truth.

“We’re probably all hallucinating in some facility.” Bernard agreed. Cádo ignored both of us , growling out his question.

“Will someone explain it to me with small words, please?”

I gave him the answer, with about as much tact as I felt capable of.

“This seem familiar, Cádo? Does it match any descriptions you’ve heard…Anywhere?”

Of course it did. The landscape around us was exactly as it had been when we’d all first read it mentioned.

In a passage from Chronicles of Destiny. Our own fucking book.