Or, rather, I blinked. Humans often say that they blink and the night passes them by. I believe this to be a sign of deep sleep, which I rarely experience. Dogs’ ears twitch all through the night, radar dishes sensing actively for any sign of trouble.

One second I closed my eyelids, and the next I pulled them back to see the rocky top where we had pitched camp in the hard, golden light of morning. Everyone was arranged just how they had gone to sleep, but on the wet ground. I jumped up with a start.

One by one, they awoke. Addrion leaped to her feet and began scouting the area instantly. The merchant farted noisily and attempted to pull nonexistent covers over his head, then used the trail of his long coat. Helmgarth’s first sign of waking was his hand subconsciously dipping into the pocket of his backpack, even before his eyes opened. Commander Zideo scowled, shivered, and sat up on the rocky ground. He reached over to pet me and froze, looking at the mud on his Jordan-shoes, then frowned deeply and continued my morning backrub.

“Some tent,” complained Zideo.

The merchant curled up into a fetal position and attempted to go back to sleep on the hard ground as a brisk breeze, no doubt the product of our altitude, chilled us. Dew had collected on his hood. He groaned in defiance of wakefulness.

“Need coffee,” said Zideo, smacking his lips.

Kriegsgeswinnler sat up straight. “I can get you coffee,” he said, fully alert. “You like flavors?”

Zideo hesitated. “I mean,” he said. He looked to Helmgarth, who was rubbing his eyes, and Addrion, who was climbing to the top of the rock above us for a better vantage point. “Yeah, bud.”

“What’s your poison?”

“Oh, I do not like it at all when you say it like that,” said Zideo. “But, hazelnut.”

The merchant shoved an arm into his coat, moving it experimentally like a man with a particularly difficult itch to reach. He began to whisper to himself. “Iced mocha… cinnamon french toast latte… hang on, one sec… ah-HA! Hazelnut.” He tugged at something near his chest beneath the coat. It came free, and he jerked his fingerless glove back out, holding a ceramic coffee mug already steaming, spilling a couple drops onto the ground.

“King shit,” said Zideo. “Absolute legend.” He reached for the coffee, but the merchant retracted it just a little.

“It’s got milk already. That work for you?”

“Works for me.” Zideo reached again and again the merchant pulled it back toward him.

“Fifteen gold.”

I was not entirely certain what a “record scratch moment” was in Commander Zideo’s very particular parlance, but this seemed like it would qualify.

Zideo pointed his nose nearly toward the ground and stared down the merchant from beneath his brow, which, for the benefit of my dog readers, is an advanced human expression meaning something along the lines of “Surely, my friend, you cannot be serious at this time.” His face was turned so far downward that a blue patch of hair had to be pushed aside to maintain the effect.

“I don’t have any gold,” said Commander Zideo.

“Then I’d say you don’t have any coffee,” said Kriegsgeswinnler.

“Bro, I just fell here from another world,” insisted Zideo. “And I was taken immediately to jail. I don’t have any money.”

“You sure about that?”

Zideo held up his hand to rub his thumb against his fingers, a human gesture indicating money. “I haven’t even been here twenty-four hours. How would I have had time to-”

Something flashed between his fingers, reflecting the light in the hue of a scuffed mirror. Late some nights when Lisa has had too many of the White Claw, she will attune the large glowing rectangle mounted in the den to a signal that displays men and women doing something like this—causing coins and cards to appear or disappear, quite impossibly. I find this quite difficult to watch. Human technology and convention is already so much to wrap one dog’s brain around, and here they are engaging in what can only possibly be dark and forbidden magics, conquering impossibility to wow and amaze the person sitting on the couch, watching the glowing rectangle in the living room. Although, in Lisa’s case, she usually turns on the big glowing rectangle in order to ignore it and stare at her small, glowing pocket rectangle.

Humans, am I right?

Once on this program I saw a woman create an entire white bird out her headwear. I barked and startled Lisa, such that she spilled her drink, and was sent to my crate for an hour.

Needless to say I was highly alarmed to see my favorite human, the most high-minded and conscientious of the species, perform the forbidden magic act. I do not believe he did it intentionally, based on the look on his face. Nobody else seemed surprised, but Helmgarth looked up and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He smiled after a moment, and walked over between the two men.

“How did… what’s?” asked Zideo, unable to form a cogent question.

He pinched the coin between pointer finger and thumb, flipping it to inspect both sides. On the obverse, a castle rose—one that reminded me of the tower in the distance, just over Zideo’s shoulder from my vantage point, except that it had five spires instead of one. It was not crooked and slinking under the weight of time and gravity as the shape did now, but stood proudly, a spike flanked by its lesser wings. “Who is she?” asked Zideo. No answer was forthcoming, and with his middle finger he spun the coin in place. The reverse showed a woman in silhouette, the profile of some medieval personage with a very tall hat. Around the edges was stamped something in a language I could not read (given that I could not read any language, generally).

Zideo looked at the tower in the distance, and back to the coin. His confusion was palpable. He pointed to toward the real tower, and asked, “How did I?” Helmgarth’s hand closed gently over the coin, pressing it back into my human’s palm. It disappeared, and I would have accused the man vocally of stealing it I had not ever witnessed Lisa’s show about making cards and birds disappear and reappear. Helmgarth tossed a few dull coins to the merchant and took the coffee mug, offering the handle to Zideo. He took it graciously and sipped.

His eyes went very wide. “It’s good!” he said. “It’s coffee!”

“Super,” said Addrion, whose mask was off. She stood on the rock with one hand flat against her brow, blocking harsh morning light from her eyes. This struck me as a familiar gesture, bud odd, since the sun was still behind the great floating rocks on the horizon. At that exact moment, it peeked out between two of the other planet bodies, casting them into silhouette and causing me to turn my head away. “Let’s get moving.”

Helmgarth loaded up the creatures into his pack like a human bus service. I pitied the animals for their size, but I could not help but contemplate their abilities of speech. I have mentioned their differences before, but now that there was ambient light, I could confirm the strange variety of ways that they reflected light. Each suffered gravity differently as well, the mouse easily jumping halfway up the pack and making himself at home, while the porcupine struggled to climb and had to be lifted by Helmgarth and deposited into a sagging pocket with no covering flap, it’s cord unfastened.

“How long is this leg of the journey going to take?” asked Zideo as he gulped his coffee and looked out over the terrain between us and the tower.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Couple hours,” said Addrion. “More, if we keep talking about it instead of doing it.”

Down the rocky outcrop upon which we stood, the hill plunged into scrubby wilderness. The dramatic foothills petered out, and there was an expanse before us of uneven plains, carpeted by unruly grasses of different shades of green competing for the peculiar sunlight. Herds of beasts roamed and grazed, lumbering heaps of shadow that I could not smell since the breeze was at our backs. Patches of trees dotted the landscape, stragglers mostly and the occasional copse, but nothing like the deep, chaotic woodland we had been caught in. I saw it then, to the south—or what felt south—a dim, jittering smudge that never stopped moving.

I should note that the other Shards were quite beautiful in the morning light. Platformia, behind us, was bathed in the golden light of morning, its transient cloud layer swirling like a gray-white sweater. The slow clockwork movement of the other Shards caught my eye, and I noticed that their details were much more difficult to make out in the light of day.

Zideo tilted the bottom of the coffee mug almost completely skyward. He cast his eyes left, then right, then did a full circle looking for a place to set the mug down. “Hey boss,” he said to the merchant. “You want the dishes back?”

Kriegsgeswinnler stretched. “All yours,” he said.

My human looked stuck. He has a way of freezing up when presented with a quandary, typically a moral one, while his brain sifts through all possible options and finds the best one. “Is it littering if I just leave this here?” he asked Addrion’s swiftly disappearing back. He turned to Helmgarth. “You got room for this in your pack?”

Helmgarth nodded. “I am sworn to carry your burdens, m’lord.”

Zideo handed him the ceramic mug, which disappeared into some pocket or pouch.

“Pit stop before we go, okay fams?” said Zideo. Addrion was already gone, and Helmgarth did not seem to understand. “Hey Krieger-weiner or whatever you said your name was.”

“Kriegsgeswinnler.”

“Exactly! You got any… uhh… port-a-potties in there?”

The single visible eye of the merchant squinted. “Port of Potty?” he asked. “I dunno that one, but… I know a guy. I can get you one by tomorrow, guaranteed.”

“Tomorrow’s too late,” said Zideo. “I gotta go now.”

“Go where?” asked the merchant. “I thought we were going to the city?”

Zideo looked to Helmgarth, who waited patiently but cluelessly. The human preoccupation with arrangements for their waste has always struck me as silly. I have yet to meet a human who did not have these bodily urges, nor even a creature under the sun in Airy Zone. Yet, they insist on piling pleasantries and customs on top of the conversations around the topic, just as we dogs kick up dirt to hide our own waste from predators and other nosy, unwelcome critters. Just go do it and be done with it, I say.

“I mean I gotta go, bud. Don’t you have to go when you wake up?”

“I’m going right now,” said the merchant. “We all are. Let’s go.”

“No thanks!” said Zideo. “Give me a minute. I’ll be right back.” He crept his way down the rocks and wandered into the scrub. I scouted a little way farther out before doing the same.

“Stop watching, you perverts,” he shouted back them, standing in hip-high scrub, the closest thing to a human bathroom around these parts.

“I thought you said to wait?” said the merchant.

“Go behind something! Geez!”

The merchant shrugged, and he and Helmgarth walked a ways off so that they could not see him, nor he them. I sniffed for the most strategic location to pee, noting the traces of animal smells and possible animal smells in the breeze, gauging the distance and how likely they were to stumble onto my tracks. I opted to pee directly onto a bush, in case the boarsquirrel or any other monster came this way. I really put my back into it—this one was good. Any animal that found this was sure to think, “Oh no! What a terrifying, alpha creature there must be in these parts! I had hoped to eat an innocent human, but now I feel I should turn back, and quit this place forever!”

Zideo had unzipped his shorts and begun to relieve himself against a bush. There was a rustling in the shrubs, and I smelled the scent of Addrion’s artificially circulated air and the sweat of her confined pores before I saw the green of her armor.

“What’s the holdup?” she asked. “Let’s stop wasting t—” She re-formed her weapon arm and struck a combat pose. “Are you okay?!” she shouted.

There was much explaining after that, but the locals of this world did not seem to comprehend our need to expel liquids that we drank. Helmgarth was concerned for Zideo’s health, Addrion suggested that he had been “compromised” in some way (her words), and the merchant was logically confounded. He asked what the point of drinking for nourishment was, if we were going to lose the moisture inevitably? Zideo tried to reason with him and explain that it was perfectly normal.

I kept an eye on Addrion, who kept her weapon out was we walked, and kept stealing glances back at Zideo. I was not sure what was going on there. After discovering him peeing, she could not mask her suspicion.

“You got some weird mechanics in Air Zone,” said Kriegsgeswinnler, “But this reminds me of something they do in the Survival Zone.” He pointed toward a floating rock on the horizon, slightly north of Shard Platformia. “I spent a few cycles there. Made an absolute killing. That is a very ripe customer base.”

“Ew,” said Zideo. Addrion, stomping through the shrubby ground at the head of our pack, turned backwards and scowled, equally repulsed.

“It’s a dream come true if you’ve got ambition, and you’re willing to risk being eaten by dinosaurs or huge jungle cats. Hiiiiighly motivated buyers, I mean highly motivated. These people start with nothing, and they often lose everything. There was a summer when I cornered the iron market. They all use iron. Ingots, ore, little chunky 2D icons. It was glorious. I had a small fortune’s worth, and I found a few spawn points where the populace was in need of mid-tier materials.”

“What happened?” asked Zideo.

The merchant blew out air, ballooning his scarf mask. “They got this particular kind of zombie out there in Survival Zone. Green guy with four legs. Hisses everywhere it goes. Called–”

“Creepers?” asked Zideo.

“Yeah, actually! Highly explosive. Wandered in one night and blew up my entire inventory. I had to go back to punching trees for weeks to build up enough money to get out of there, and even then I had to disguise myself and hop aboard an imperial transport.”

“They’re on that Shard too?”

“They’re on all the Shards,” replied the merchant. He sounded sorrowful, but more for his lost wealth than the plight of the locals. “Shard are imperial territory. You can barely get in or out of some of ‘em.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Addrion, but declined to expound.

The difficulty of the terrain, while no longer as severe as the rocky foothills, demanded our attention and we walked in silence. Our group expanded as companies do on long journeys–Addrion far in the lead, scanning for any signs of trouble and never missing a step, the merchant second, scanning for signs of exploitable resources, no doubt. Helmgarth kept up pace with Zideo, never letting himself be further than a few feet away, and often paid attention to my human as he walked. I noticed Zideo halting on a number of occasions, kneeling down to tug on a leaf or pull up a plant by its roots, or dislodge and inspect a stone, throwing it experimentally and watching what happened. He kicked tree stumps, or dragged his feet like a child, then turned to see the marks he had made. He jumped, then jumped again, then stood for a few seconds pondering.

“Is m’lord quite alright?” asked Helmgarth, eventually.

“Yeah,” said Zideo. “Just seeing what works and what doesn’t.”

“Indeed.”

“Keep moving,” Addrion called back toward us.

The morning warmed. “So what happened to this place?” Zideo asked Helmgarth as we walked.

Helmgarth looked at him with pity. “An apocalypse.”

Zideo stared at him. “Is that… the thing the book was talking about?” was the question he decided to ask first. I sensed that he was choosing his word carefully, probably so that he did not draw forth the Compendium and pause us all in our journey.

“Some things are merely as they are here in the Screenwilds,” said Helmgarth. He had nothing further to say.

“Who did it?” asked Zideo.

Helmgarth looked around the sky, from one distant Shard to the next. His eyes settled on something, and he pointed to one of the Shards. At that time, being wholly new to the world, I could barely distinguish one from another. A small, dark shape orbited low in the sky–not our sky, but the skies around one of the Shards. It was barely more than a speck, but I could just barely make out the shape that reminded me of a downward-pointing arrow: a fat triangle at the base, and a long stem drawing away in the other direction, perhaps two or three times as long. I could not recall ever seeing anything like it.

I did not know what this meant, but as we crested a wide stretch of highland, the tower came into view very suddenly. It was decrepit, damaged, surrounded by piles of rocks where I presumed the older spires depicted on the coin once stood. Banners flapped and a weathervane creaked at the top of a roof with holes in its vast shingles. Much nearer, crenelated city walls enclosed the city, not unlike an enormous bowl of dog food. A moat, empty of any water, encircled the walls, and beyond them a patchwork quilt of farmland squares were tended by humanoid shapes with long poles. I had seen similar implements at a similar distance during long road trips, some time before Commander Zideo had broken my heart by moving out of the house to a place called “Plasma House.”

We caught up to Addrion, who had paused. “Straight to the tower,” she said, then turned towards the vendor. “Even you.” He raised his arms to protest, but she cut him off. “You’ll be released after debriefing,” she said. “If you answer everything truthfully.”

Zideo’s upper lips curled away from his teeth at the sound of that.

He didn’t snarl exactly, but he did rear his head back, in what any dog will immediately recognize was a defensive position. It never fails to amuse me how human humans believe themselves to be!