We four climbed uphill, the humans looking behind us, though there was nothing to be seen nor even its effects. Commander Zideo suggested that maybe it had stopped, and halted. No sooner had he done so than he began sliding backwards again, his Jordan-shoes leaving two streaks in the dirt once more. He tripped immediately, back- and upwards, and hurried to find his balance before the unseen threat reached him again.

“Fine,” he said. “Alright. We can work with this. It’s not the first auto-scroller level I’ve done.”

Addrion’s weapon was drawn, and she scanned the cliffs for a target as she maintained her cautious, backward walk. “I don’t like it,” she said. “Who’s behind it?”

Helmgarth shook his head. “No one, I would think.” He inserted his thumbs behind the straps of his backpack and pushed outward to keep the pack tightly against his back. “The Wall Force is a natural element peculiar to Shard Platformia. Completely natural.”

Addrion showed not signs of being convinced. “It’s repositioning us. Where?” She glanced backward over her shoulder as we topped the hill. Helmgarth did the same, taking great pains to twist his backpack sideways, out of his view. The scrubby ridges around the edge of the fissure had given way to the nut brown hills through which we marched, and they in turn faltered, vanishing some distance ahead and downhill beneath a carpet of sorrel and umber woodland.

For my part, I kept ahead of the invisible threat, and mentally urged my human to do the same. Zideo clearly wanted to learn more, and could only do so by loitering a few feet from the mysterious border that was closing on us. He pushed his palms against it, kicked at it, alternately hopping a few steps backward and testing its reactions. It caused me great distress to see him continually fuss with it, rather than heeding the common sense that nature had installed in my own instinct, screaming: “Run away!”

At the same time, the effect of being on the Shard could not be ignored. The path coalesced once again before my very eyes. The hills naturally lent themselves to a glen through which the trees parted to allow a wide river to rush toward us, curling off to the side and, I am sure, somewhere back into the fissure behind us. Even if there had not been an invisible hand forcing us forward, I was certain this is where we would have wound up.

“Forest ahead,” said Addrion.

“Hmm,” said Helmgarth, although I do not think he meant it to be out loud.

“So,” she continued pointedly, “that’s not good. More chance of getting lost, and being squashed against a tree-trunk.”

Zideo glanced over his shoulder, reluctantly giving ground to the “Wall Force.” I did not think this was an appropriate name. I had seen my fair share of walls, and had never seen encountered an invisible one. However, I had to admit the truth that that dogs and people alike could be compelled by unseen forces no more resistible than this one, whether in Airy Zone or in Exe. Consider how Lisa leaves the house every single day to go to Work, and by all indications, unwillingly. She drinks a lovely smelling but foul tasting drink aptly known as “coughy” to wake up faster, and sighs heavily upon going to the garage. What Wall Force is pushing her out the door? If I were a human, I would simply opt not to go to Work. I would stay home and gnaw the tastiest bones and sleep in the comfiest corners of the house like a sensible person. My human, too, is subject to these peremptory compulsions. He is not able to avoid going to R-Mart once or twice a week, and indeed after Doing A Stream, the powers that be send him downstairs to the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning to replenish his hunger with scentless snacks. In the end, we are all beholden to our own singular gravities.

Zideo glanced a second time, now snapping his head back down the hill. Humans who speak human English call this a “double-take.”

“Look,” he said, although he did not point. All eyes were drawn to the river, sparkling currents foamed against stones and fallen logs, and eddies swirled purposefully before bottlenecks. Over the river floated a series of cubes, larger than the ice blocks, but opaque.

“Doesn’t it low-key feel like we should be going that way?” He proceeded downhill, but refused to take his eyes off the thing he could not actually see. Having watched Commander Zideo through many situations, I may be the foremost expert on his mind’s state, and I could tell this was something he refers to as “multitasking.” Although the term may suggest doing two things at once, Zideo’s approach to it is rather to rapidly alternate his attention between tasks. He continued in this way down the hill, snapping his gaze back and forth between the inviting break in the trees which we approached and the unobservable threat behind us.

“It…” began Addrion. Her eyes darted to Helmgarth and myself. I memorized the moment, for I saw what must have been concern. That was a very tentative dog point for Addrion. “We’re being herded into the river.”

“Over it,” said Zideo. “See the blocks?”

“I see the blocks,” snapped Addrion. “But I’d rather walk along the riverbank.”

“We will run out of ground, love,” said Helmgarth, his limp showing a little bit as he trotted downslope. “Remember where we are.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Yeah,” said Zideo. “This is a sequence. How many platformers have you played where you start out on the tops of hills or whatever, and the auto-scroller kicks in, and it’s like, noooooo?”

“We didn’t have those,” said Addrion. “That’s not a thing where I’m from.”

“Then trust me,” said Zideo. “We are going to have to make our way down the river… above the river.”

Addrion did not want to accept this. “What about them?”

“Cormac?” he asked, and my spine tingled. Acknowledgment by one’s assigned human never loses its novelty–and my circumstances were no exception, as mine was the greatest among them. “He’s fine. Probably?”

“Okay,” said Addrion, her voice dipping like a low slash from a curved blade. “Is he carrying a big-ass backpack?”

Zideo was silenced for a moment. The forest grew tall and shady before us. My instinct was to flee into its shady bowers for safety, but the thought of the covert terminus haunting behind us terrified me.

“Bro,” said Zideo, “this shit is getting so old. Can we not just glitch our way out of this?”

“We could in my g-word,” muttered Addrion. She snapped her helmet closed and approached the curving bank of the river. Helmgarth ran ahead, a thwomp-thwomp-thwomping noise sounding from the shifting of his burdens at every step. He attained the riverbank, no doubt for an extra few seconds to think through the problem before the hidden wall pushed us in.

“Yeah,” said Zideo. “Huh. Well… about that. Okay. First off, HG: can’t you just get rid of your backpack?”

Helmgarth’s eyes went wide, the eyes of an offended lover. The three of us hurt for him, I am sure. Even Addrion’s hand went to hear heart for a moment. “Willingly?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Zideo. “Just take it off, like you did back home. Plus, you lost it at the avalanche for a while, and it came back. It will always come back next time there’s a mod, right?”

“No offense, love. But I couldn’t possibly. It would go against my oath. Remember, I’m sworn–”

“To carry my burdens, I know. Fine.”

As a dog, I have faced threats I could not see–animals, traces of unknown humans, other senses of things just not being right. But as any human reader has no doubt gathered by now, a dog is equipped with a considerable package of sensory detection. Therefore, even in situations where one sense failed, I had others to rely on. If I could not see an opossum, I was aware at least of its presence by virtue of its reek. Had a robber been upstairs in Lisa’s house (Dog forbid), the creaking of floorboards and the shuffling of bumped papers or unrecognized shoes would certainly have located them.

The “auto-scrolling” Wall Force did not offer any such accommodation. It made no sound, touched nothing but my human and his friends. Having no particles to speak of, it brought with it no odor. It even failed to vibrate against anything except for, at that moment, Commander Zideo, who continued to push against it and feel it out, as we waited for him and it to arrive. Without him, I was as clueless as a human baby wearing a blindfold. I found its stealth–more absolute as anything I had ever encountered–uniquely haunting. Grimly, I thought that villainous but inept assassin from Ludopolis ought to take some useful notes from this.

I waited at the bank of the river in the shade of the stoic stone cubes. The water looked no less frigid for the more temperate biome in which we stood. I had learned some time previously that water can be deceptively cold, and that estimating its temperature based on the air above it is a folly. Once, Lisa took me to the pool too early in the spring, the day it opened for use by the residents of the Airy Zone neighborhood. The pool was empty of visitors, which ought to have been our first clue. I became hypothermic after a single dip, and she walked me home covered in multiple towels, the laughingstock of the neighborhood canines. You better believe I heard about that one in the next neighborhood Howl.

I knew better than to try to swim. Not only was the current against us, but I could see bits of ice among the bubbles. Beneath the currents, scaled bodies, pearlescent and bulbous, wriggled back and forth in anticipation. Sure enough, the muddy banks on either side narrowed into rocky walls, scraped roughly by the current and its debris. If we could not devise a strategy for moving Helmgarth from block to block, if he could not be convinced to part with his pack… well, we could only hope.

Zideo approached faster than we could plan. He leaned his back against the invisible wall, toes up and heels of his Jordan-shoes splitting the sod. “Guys,” he said. “Go! Get up there!”

It was Addrion who made the first move. She jumped to the first pair of blocks, an easy landing, and reached a hand down for Helmgarth. He was an inch too short to grab hands.

“Come on, serf!” she prodded. I think she aimed to get a rise out of him in every sense. “Jump!”

His pack was too heavy and would not let him get more than a couple inches off of the ground. On his third try, Addition slapped her hand against it, digging her gauntlet fingers into the bedroll on top and hauling him up. Pans and ingots clattered as he fell face-down onto the block, quickly twisting to make forward progress. For my part, I jumped up to the nearest floating stone and gained the first block platform.

“Okay, I’m letting go!” shouted Zideo. We would no longer have eyes on the approaching wall, and I think we all knew it may well sneak up on us and thrust us into the icy, waiting river below, as surely as a cat baps a pair of keys from a countertop.

Zideo jumped in the air, and realized he hadn’t given himself enough forward momentum to clear the gap. He burst into flames and screamed past us, quite literally, bouncing off of a stone further ahead and landing on another of the cubic platforms lower to the river surface, slick with river spray.

One of the pearlescent fish, eyes the shape of lemon slices, sprang out of the river in a burst of hissing water droplets. It was shaped like a chew toy, but with bulging jaws and fins that scourged the air. It snapped at my human and came away with a lock of pink and aqua hair for its trophy.

“BRO,” said Zideo, ducking instinctively and clutching his chest. “Jump scare as fuck!”

He stood up straight. “Guys, hurry! It’s probably right behind you!” He pointed back toward us, framed by a perfect dark square of the stone right behind him, which opened its eyes.