Jacob blinked, hardly able to believe his eyes. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled forward to where the portal had been just a moment before. He waved his hands through the air, but there was nothing there anymore.
This can't be happening.
His breath came fast and his hands clutched his head. Jimmy's face flashed across his vision.
They would be back, right? They'd realize they'd left him here and they'd come back for him, wouldn't they? Wouldn't they?
He looked around, really taking in the magical world for the first time. Around him cubic shelves and crystalline growths sprouted out of the ground. Some towered several stories into the air. It was silent apart from a faint, eerie ringing that seemed to come from the crystals.
He looked around for a sign or an exit, anything to let him know where he was. His blurred reflection followed him along the ground. He remembered that you could tell time or direction by the sun, but when he looked up there didn't appear to be a sun in the sky. Just a mass of roiling clouds and darkness.
The Reaper's mangled corpse lay twisted in the little clearing where it had gone down. Spiderweb cracks littered the crystal where either one of the deputies or the Reaper had impacted. As Jacob watched, they shrunk, sealed up, crackling like ice on a cold winter morning. Man, they were really taking a long time to come back for him. He swallowed and tried not to panic.
His hands shot to the pockets of his sweatpants and felt the familiar weight of his phone. He fumbled it out of his pocket and turned it on. His heart sank. It turned on, but there was no cell service.
"Christ..."
Something flashed across his sensation, and he froze. It was coming through the crystal forest. Then he heard it, a sound like metal on glass.
Jacob threw himself behind a low shelf of crystal. The sound grew louder. Panic trembled through his body. What if it was another monster? What the hell had he been thinking coming here? He squeezed his eyes shut, but the sound kept coming.
Whatever it was, it scrabbled into the clearing.
Click. Click.
Jacob's heart was going to explode from his body. He braced himself, then peered around the edge of the shelf as slow as he could move.
A Dream Tiger prowled the clearing. It shone with an inner light that reflected blue off the black crystal and its silver tassels blew in an unfelt wind. Jacob froze. A thin, black spear jutted out from its side, just above one of its fore legs. The same Dream Tiger that had attacked him and Camilla. It was smaller than it had been when it had attacked them; more like the size of a normal tiger. What the hell was it doing here? Was it a coincidence?
He didn't think so.
The Dream Tiger approached the Reaper's corpse carefully, lifted its big furry head up, and sniffed it. Satisfied, it padded over to several of the gleaming silver crystals that had exploded out of the Reaper when Jimmy had killed it. It bent down and lapped them up like a kitten licking milk out of a bowl.
The image almost made Jacob laugh hysterically. He clamped a hand over his mouth.
To his horror, the Dream Tiger grew bigger.
A strangled noise escaped his throat. The Dream Tiger whipped its head around. Jacob lurched back behind the shelf, trembling. It had seen him. He knew it had. Those silver orb eyes had met his for a single terrible instant. Oh God, should he run, or stay quiet, or...?
Silence.
Jacob heard it padding around the Reaper, and that lapping noise of it licking up those crystals. He risked another glance around the side of the shelf. The Dream Tiger was as big as a car now, and the tassels that whipped back from its face rippled faster. It licked up more of the crystals, then paused, scanned the clearing warily, then licked up more.
Jacob couldn't sit still any longer. He pulled back behind the shelf and crawled away from the clearing, deeper into the forest of black crystal.
Behind him, the lapping noise had stopped.
----------------------------------------
Speed? Or silence?
Jacob didn't know, so he tried his best to do both. Cheetahs and lions hunted at night using stealth, but he wasn't a cheetah or a lion. He was prey. He wracked his brain frantically trying to remember what the prey that big cats hunted did to get away. But nature documentaries rarely focused on the wildebeest and water buffalo.
Goddamnit. He thought, not daring to speak out loud. Gazelle ran. They could outrun big cats over long distances. Maybe he needed to move quickly?
No, that was stupid. He couldn't run. He wasn't half bad when they ran laps around the field in gym class, but right now he wasn't running from a bunch of human teenagers.
Jacob couldn't stop himself from laughing nervously. He pressed the back of his hand into his mouth. His father said that Jacob laughed when he was nervous and that it was a bad habit, but he couldn't help it.
Speed was out, so was camouflage. He had to be stealthy. Humans had better eyesight than most other mammals in the day, he could use that.
But does the Dream Tiger see the same way mammals do on Earth?
Probably not. Would it see magic perhaps, instead of light? Or a mix? Christ, he didn't know anything!
He crept through the forest of black crystal. It warped and twisted around him, a world of shadows and surreal reflections. Dark things flitted through the crystal on either side of him. Spindly things with too many joints, half-there one moment, then merging with the shadows. Decomposers. He tried not to think about them, and keep his mind on putting on foot in front of another. The more he listened, the more the crystal forest came alive with sounds.
A skittering came from his left, that same sound of claws on metal. He froze by a sprout of crystal, hand on its smooth surface. A gallop of phantom hooves. A snarl and a terrible screeching noise. He was sweating. He could stay here forever, frozen to this sprout of crystal.
He slipped away to his right.
At first the change was only a flicker of sapphire inside one of the sprouts. Then a black crystal with a heart of crimson. Then a verdant shelf, like some computer generated grass from the early 2000s. The black crystal receded, replaced with rainbows of colour. The sprouts grew taller, looming, curling over him in two great shelves. He walked as between the walls of a canyon, the murky sky a river running high above him. Then it was gone and he was in a broad tunnel. His footsteps echoed back to him. Soft lights danced in the walls, red, green, violet, flickering, swaying, almost as if they had a life of their own.
Jacob emerged from the tunnel and for one blissful moment forgot where he was, the peril he was in, the Dream Tiger chasing him. A great valley swept out from him. In the distance, towers of crystal rose in stepped tiers to a cluster that reminded him of skyscrapers. The crystals glowed, bathing the valley with their brilliance, replacing the lack of a sun.
A flying creature with a flat-bladed tail circled the cluster of crystal skyscrapers, soaring above the world, free from gravity and everything else. For him to see it at this distance it must have been massive. A cry came from his left and below. Flashes of sparkling gold through the crystal structures. A beast that looked like a lion cast from molten gold chased what looked like a red fox with nine tails. They disappeared from sight.
Faint cries and sounds came from all around him. Magic pulsed, a thousand tiny waves lapping at him. His senses were overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of magical sensations. Dull, almost blank sensations that he guessed were magical signatures, and soft flashes of colourful magic. His eyes glazed over and for a brief moment it was all a molten rainbow river, flowing past him, through him, around him, filling him and every crystal surface.
It only then struck him that this was a whole new world, complete with different ecosystems, organisms, biomes, everything. And here he was among it. By himself. This was exactly what he'd wanted, what he'd been gearing himself up for by hopping that fence. Going out into the wilderness and studying animals, how they eat, how they interact, how they live. He'd stumbled into what ecologists and naturalists only fantasized about. Suddenly the terrifying, alien world of monsters became one of dreams.
The only thing he could compare to the elation he felt right now was the first and only time he'd been to the Vancouver Zoo for the spring Grade 7 field trip. That field trip had been when he'd first discovered the world of ecology and nature. He'd been nervous the whole trip there because his parents said zoos were bad places and dangerous because of all the animals that could escape and were full of germs and viruses. The only reason they'd let him go was because his teacher Mrs Stanford had had a 'chat' with his parents.
The zoo workers taken the kids on a brief tour and then had let them roam around by themselves. Jacob had wandered through the exhibits by himself until coming to the polar bear enclosure on the outskirts of the zoo. There had only been one lonely bear in the entire enclosure, but it wasn't playing in the large pool, or on the rocks, or on the ice shelves layered like giants' steps. It had been walking forward up to the big door to the enclosure. Then backing up several steps. Then walking forward again. Then back again. Forward and back like a broken wind up toy, swinging its head in an unheard rhythm. The grass where it stepped had been worn to mud.
There was something wrong with it, Jacob knew that almost immediately. But he couldn't for the life of him figure out what. He couldn't see any wound or disability, and that had bothered him deeply. He'd watched the bear go back and forth until they called everyone back to the bus.
Had it still been doing it when he'd gone to sleep that night? He'd spent weeks on his laptop trying to find out what had been wrong with that polar bear and trying to figure out how to fix it. During that time he had discovered the beauty and complexity and freedom of the natural world. A world he hadn't known existed until that point. A whole new world, just like this one.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Jacob smiled. Sir David Attenborough would be shitting himself. He had a vision of himself years down the road, writing a book on the ecology of this world. A New Ecosystem. A groundbreaking, seminal work. What were the creatures here made up of? How exactly did they gain magical power? The questions were endless.
A skittering sound echoed down the tunnel behind him.
Jacob blinked. To his right a sloping path descended to the valley. He jumped off the wall and leapt down the path to the valley without thinking. He reached the valley floor and stumbled along as quickly as he could. The ground was a mirror of flat crystal. Great crystal structures reared up on either side of him. Some looked hollow, like caverns. On others he could make out the underlying lattice, like a skeleton of glowing light.
At first, from a distance, the whole area had just seemed like overlarge crystal growths, but now that he was among them, he could feel the magic emanating from them, glowing just like their inner light. It was different, less... Flavoured, than the magic in the mages and in the creatures now all around him. Each growth and structure felt slightly distinct, perhaps like individual trees in a forest.
He came to a crossroads and paused to catch his breath. Faint noises reached him, and unknown sensations tickled his senses. He was flexing his magical muscle without realizing it. Okay, he couldn't let his fascination overwhelm him. He needed to get his bearings, not run around like a chicken with its head cut off.
He was less into survivalism than nature itself, but now he'd wished he'd paid more attention to the details of how people actually went out in the wilderness and lived to talk about it. Respect the animals was the big one. He didn't know how to deal with them, whether to 'lie down or fight back' so to speak, but he could be wary.
If he could just find a place to hole up until Sheriff Hueller and Jimmy came and got him he should be fine. Maybe one of those crystal caverns? But even if they came back for him how would they know where he was?
The nape of his neck burned, as if a summer sun was beating down on him. He whirled around.
A living flame floated behind him. It whisked away to the other side of the crossroads and hovered there. It looked like a body made of fire. A torso like an inverted candle flame, long, ethereal limbs. The head was a tennis ball sized orb of fire, its eyes and mouth little indents in its face.
It giggled and burned crimson as Jacob's eyes widened. Then it wiggled a limb at him and floated over to one of the paths leading from the crossroads. Jacob followed, tentatively.
The sprite floated down the path, then beckoned for him to follow.
Jacob licked his lips. No way. He'd seen too many movies where this went badly. Don't follow the light, eh?
Before he could turn away something rustled overhead.
A lithe creature that looked like a cross between a frog and an armadillo leapt down from overhead. It landed on the fire sprite and crushed it to the ground.
The fire sprite squealed. Flames exploded out from it, but the frog-adillo curled up into its bronze armour plates. The fire washed over it harmlessly. It uncurled and shot its tongue out, latched onto the fire sprite, and dragged its flaming body into its mouth. It snapped its jaws shut, extinguishing the flame. Silver liquid dribbled out of its lips onto the crystal ground. It licked it up and its armour scales rippled, sprouting jagged spikes.
It looked warily at Jacob, then bounced up onto a nearby crystal growth and was gone before Jacob could say boo!
Jacob took off for one of the other paths. Easy to forget how dangerous wild animals were. Christ, he was thankful the thing hadn't been any bigger.
He ran through the avenues of crystal until he was out of breath, slowly making his way towards the crystal towers. There was something there, he could feel it.
Jacob rounded a corner and skidded to a halt, heart clutching in his chest. Ahead of him was a low den beneath a crystal overhang. A bronze furred creature that looked like a cross between a lion and a bear dozed, its paws tucked underneath its bulk. Jacob froze, unable to move. Little crimson lines ran along the length of the creature's body, and as its chest heaved with dozing breaths they pulsed. An albino snake slithered around the side of the creature. It spotted Jacob and reared up, hissing. Scaly flaps around its head flared out.
Jacob tried to remember everything he'd learned about animal encounters but his mind was racing. It was just like the Dream Tiger. He couldn't think of anything. All he managed to do was back away slowly. Better to let the snake and the bear-lion fight it out than get involved.
The snake reared up and butted its head into the side of the bear-lion's head. The bear-lion blinked, the crimson pulses vanishing. It shook its head and looked at the snake. The snake hissed at Jacob. The bear-lion squinted, noticed him, and roared. It unfurled itself from the ground. Its paws were massive things tipped with ugly black claws, its fur was long and shaggy, brushing the ground beneath its mass.
To Jacob's surprise, horror, and flicker of fascination, he realized that the snake wasn't a different creature at all. It was the creature's tail, attached to the tapering trunk of the bear-lion. A chimera of some sort.
The chimera's heads roared and hissed in unison.
The terrible noise shattered Jacob's paralysis. He turned and fled, his feet slapping against the crystal surface. The chimera shuffled after him.
Jacob tried not to let panic overtake him as he ran. He was such an idiot! Traipsing around as if he were in VanDusen! Christ, this thing was going to eat him! He silently begged Sheriff Hueller or Jimmy to come get him.
The landscape around here was tight, narrow, like a labyrinth. He ran through an intersection, took the narrowest route, and rounded a corner. His arm caught on the edge of a jagged crystal sprout he hadn't seen. It cut a deep gash along his left forearm.
Jacob hissed, clutching his arm close to his chest. Bright blood welled up in the gash, then trickled out. Shit. He tried to ignore the pain and pressed himself up against the smooth wall of a shallow alcove.
Silence.
His heart pounded in his chest so fast he thought it would explode. The gash along his arm burned. He held himself back from vomiting. That thing had been right there. Right there. Fifteen, maybe ten metres away.
Jacob sat back against the low alcove and hugged his knees to his chest to try and stop from shaking. He shut his eyes. None of this was real. None of this stupid world and these stupid animals and freaking magic for Chrissakes was real.
How could he have stood around and fantasized about studying these monsters? How could he have thought it was a good idea to go gallivanting around with a bunch of crazy mages and some random girl from school? How could he have been so stupid? He should have listened to his parents. Of course they knew what was best for him. His mother had warned him about being a rebellious teenager, about getting into all sorts of trouble at this age, and yet here he was! Christ, he'd screwed up. Badly.
Jacob had never sincerely prayed before but he prayed now. He prayed that he'd listened to them, that he had never been such a fool.
He glanced down at the throbbing gash on his forearm, and gently dabbed some of the blood away with his shirt. This wasn't a video game. He could die here. He knew enough about wild animals to know they wouldn't hesitate to kill a human if they felt threatened, and these magical creatures were probably no different.
He would sit tight. If he ran he'd make noise and that chimera would hear him. It would still be lurking nearby, he was sure of it. Yes, sitting tight was the smart thing to do; that was the safe thing to do; that was the thing his parents would want him to do; that was the thing he should have done in the first place instead of being hypnotized by some magical creatures. Wait for the authorities. Someone would come save him.
After this he was never going to disobey them again. He would never miss curfew and he'd certainly never come to this horrid place again. He was going to go home and hide in his room. He'd have to give some excuse to Camilla but he'd rather look like a coward and be alive than dead. Sorry, can't hang out with you, I'm grounded. No, no magic for me. I'm good, thanks.
Faint animal sounds echoed in the distance. Soft pulses of magic washed over his senses. Eventually, his legs cramped.
His impulse was to call his parents, but that was foolishness talking. His phone still didn't have service. The simple fact was he was alone here and no one was coming to get him. Sheriff Hueller and Jimmy would have no idea where he'd gone and would never be able to find him. And the longer he stayed here, well...
A snuffling sound came from nearby, followed by a low hiss.
Jacob clamped his hands over his face as his heart started thrumming in his chest again.
He'd already been through this. Panicking again wasn't going to do any good!
Okay. Focus, Jacob. Focus, please! Hadn't it just been yesterday he'd been lying on his bed moaning about wanting to have control in his own life? About how much he hated relying on his parents? Hadn't it felt good to be courageous against the Dream Tiger with Camilla? Well, now was the time to be courageous again. Now was the time to take control. He was the only one who could get himself out of here. He. Himself. Jacob Caibo. No one else.
Deep breaths. He could do this. He had to do this.
Okay, first thing was he could use his knowledge. He didn't know much about the ecosystems in this place but the animals all seemed relatively similar physiologically. They had eyes, ears, noses, mouths. Which meant they relied on the same senses as regular animals. Could they smell his scent, his blood, or would they smell his magic? Either way if that chimera was anything like a bear that meant its sense of smell was off the charts, which meant hiding from it 'out of sight' would mean almost nothing.
Jacob had heard it snuffling around nearby. The sudden realization hit him like a bag of bricks and the panic welled up again. He had to run. But how? And where? He had no idea where he was or where to go.
Wait.
The spell Jimmy had taught him. It augmented strength and resilience, but also speed. He could use it.
Jacob ground his teeth. He'd barely been able to cast it in practice with Jimmy. There was no way he could do it here!
A low growl sounded from the nearby intersection, followed by the click of claws on crystal. Christ, it was so close! Jacob's body felt like it had been electrocuted suddenly. His muscles jittered. He had to do something. Anything. It was just like hopping that stupid fence, he just had to do it and stop worrying about it and-
Jacob took a deep breath and flexed that magical muscle. Okay, next step. He moved it through his body. It did, and then snapped back into his head. Claws clicked close by.
Shit!
He spread it through his body again, closed his eyes, pictured green, and then willed his body to become strong. He felt the effects.
Jacob opened his eyes. The chimera reared up in front of the alcove, its beady eyes filled with anger. When had it gotten so close?! It roared and swung a claw down at him.
Jacob ducked to the side-
-and smacked the wall of the alcove. He grunted and stumbled back, momentarily confused. The chimera hadn't hit him. He'd just... moved so quickly he'd crossed the entire alcove before he could process it. It clicked that he'd totally forgotten Jimmy telling him about the separate perception spell.
The chimera's tail hissed and struck out at him. He dodged again and smacked into the far wall of the crystal corridor. He turned and ran.
His first step was like the leap of a long jump. He planted his leg and fell forward, losing his balance. It was like his mind was trailing in the air behind him, like real life video game lag. He managed to stay upright and throw out his other leg. The extra strength must have lent him some balance.
The crystal corridor blurred past him, stretching like it was being pulled into a black hole. His next leaping steps were shakier, his arms now swinging for balance. He stumbled forward and fell across a span of thirty metres. He smacked face first into the growth at the end of the corridor. Spiderweb cracks spread across the crystal. He bounced back onto the ground, disoriented but uninjured somehow. He looked back. The chimera was far down the corridor behind him.
Laughing crazily, his magic still somehow engaged, he half stumbled half crawled away through the crystals until he was certain he was far enough away. He passed a few other smaller creatures but blurred past them before he or they could react.
Then a familiar sensation washed over him. One similar to the flow of magical sensations around him, yet a step apart.
It felt like a human mage.
Jacob's spell dissipated as he scampered forward. He flexed his magical muscle again, trying to sense if it was Jimmy's green magic or Sheriff Hueller's deep violet. He came to the edge of a small crystal valley. The signal came from within.
The crystal valley was featureless apart from a single obelisk in the centre. Several small creatures were gathered around it. They looked like shell crabs the size of house cats, with crystal growths on their backs. They chittered and danced around the obelisk in a circle. The crystals on their backs glowed red, then orange, then yellow, then red again.
Jacob froze. A man crept along the valley floor towards the crab creatures.
It was the rogue mage.