The sun peeked over the bristly tops of the trees along the ridgeline to their East. Its golden early-morning rays streamed through their branches, laying warm tones and shadows across the forested hills. Jeremy bounced in the truck as they climbed their way toward the hollow where the portal was located. They were off the park's main roads, down a pot-holed gravel road that did not look like it had been graded since it was built. They needed to get out and haul a massively heavy, rusted, and creaking metal gate out of the way to get onto the road in the first place.
To one side of the road, the forest looked normal with a heavy understory from which the columns of trees rose, fading into their own shadows in the distance. The thick forest did not let you see very far in front of yourself. The kind that it was easy to imagine a yeti or some other cryptid peering out from the bushes or running between the trunks.
On the other side of the road lay a scorched forest. The understory of viburnum and whatnot stood brittle and naked, with only a few singed and wrinkled leaves clinging to their branches here and there. The ground and bases of most trees were blackened by the fire, although it appeared that most of the trees’ crowns remained intact if not a little desiccated from the heat.
“I thought they were letting the fire burn through everything.” One of the soldiers wondered aloud. “How come that side of the road didn’t burn?”
“McGraw, how many times do you have to be told to be aware of your surroundings?” Another soldier leaned over and tapped McGraw’s face to get him to look out the window. “What is on the other side of that ridge?”
“More trees?”
The second soldier scoffed and leaned back in the seat to look down his nose at the rest of the truck. “If you’d have been paying attention when we pulled into this place, you would remember that there was a little back road on the right just before we got to the gate for this gate. There’s probably some hunting cabins or a neighborhood or something on the backside of that ridge.”
“He’s right.” The driver, a soldier who was not a part of the squad going into the portal but was working at the satellite camp, piped up. She glanced back at them through the rearview mirror. “We’re on the edge of the park’s property. This road was one of the fire lines they used to backburn down that hill two days ago when this area was hot.”
Jeremy sat in the back of the truck, clutching his helmet in his lap. The teams of soldiers had a familiar camaraderie that he found difficult to insert himself into, so he mostly found himself staring out the windows as they wound their way further into the park. After another forty minutes or so of driving down a road that probably used to only take ten, they arrived at their destination.
There was a satellite camp, just as they had been told. A tent stood beneath the overhanging boughs of trees with shriveled leaves on their lower branches. Alongside it, several trucks were parked in a neat row. When they stepped out of the truck, the ground crunched underfoot, and the air smelled of stale smoke.
“Well, I guess that’s it,” McGraw, who Jeremy was beginning to realize was one of the chatterboxes of the squad, said. He looked toward a pulsing, circular sphere of energy that hung between the trees a couple hundred yards away from the tent.
“What’s it?” Another soldier finished pulling on her gloves and shielded her eyes to make a show of peering through the trees. The portal was impossible to miss, given the odd blue glow and tiny sparks and bolts of electricity emanating from it. But her show of searching was enough to rile McGraw up.
“Right there,” he pointed, “Right through those two trees. Next to the one that has almost a right angle in the trunk. How can you not see that.”
“Oh, that.” She turned away, grinning like she’d won something, and McGraw made a face at the back of her head.
Jeremy listened to their banter but was more interested in squinting toward the portal. They were still far away from it, but he could swear he could see a red overlay tinting its blue color purple and a white ring encircling the sphere of energy. He was surprised to see an overlay, rubbing his eyes and trying to determine if it was a trick of the shadows from the trees overhead or the energy sparking out from the portal itself.
He'd been under the impression that the overlays were associated with living things. Plants, animals, people, and monsters who could perform magic had overlays that revealed information about their skill level and unique personality traits. But, if this portal entrance had an overlay, it would logically follow that it was alive. Jeremy’s gut twisted, and he felt much more anxious about going through it than he had let himself feel up until this point.
“I’m surprised that it’s right near the road,” said the soldier who’d pointed out McGraw’s lack of spatial awareness earlier. His name was Timothy, according to his uniform. “I expected to have to hike into the woods.”
The driver, Campbell, came around the truck and gestured for them all to follow her toward the tent. “They only found it because of working the fire line.”
They shuffled along to follow her, Jeremy trailing behind as he stared off into the trees toward the portal entrance. He frowned and thought that when something truly did not make sense, he should look at the assumptions he was making to see if any of them were false. The largest assumption was that the overlays were indicative of a living being. Perhaps this was not true. Sure, he had associated them with living beings, but what they were indicative of was their magical abilities. So, perhaps they could exist anywhere there was a concentration of magic, such as in a living person. This would make sense, given that he also saw the runes for spells.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“There could be more of them, then. That we don’t know about, right?” Timothy asked. Campbell gathered them outside the tent to wait for the other truck to arrive with the rest of the squad. They could see through the entrance to the tent that there were a few card tables set up with people working on laptops and rubbing their chins as they contemplated maps. A radio crackled every few minutes while they communicated with the command center or the civilian fire operation, still mopping up the other side of the park and ensuring that the fire was under control.
“There certainly could be,” Campbell told them. She gestured into the tent. “Right now, they are trying to scan the portal's energy signature to figure out if we can get a signature that can be used to identify them in drone flyovers of this and other forests.”
“Have they been found anywhere else?”
Campbell got an apologetic look on her face and opened her mouth to undoubtedly tell them that information was classified. Perhaps understandably so, given that Jeremy had yet to see anything about portals on the news or online. If they could keep civilians from learning about this for a little while, the military might be able to figure out how to deal with them before they became public. Then, they might avoid a disaster like their handling of the gates was turning out to be. Although, Jeremy was not sure what else they could have done. Still, it seemed a little silly that the squad going into one of the portals could not know if there were others.
Before Campbell could say anything, the other truck ambled up and parked beside the rest. The second team of soldiers, who would stay by the portal exit if everything went according to plan, spilled out and strode toward the tent. Mwai jumped out of the passenger seat and zeroed in on Jeremy.
“Miller, meet me in the tent,” he commanded, making his own way there. “The rest of you check your gear and prepare for one last briefing.”
Jeremy followed him into the tent and waited while Mwai checked in with the people operating the computers and shaking their heads over various readouts. Eventually, he turned to Jeremy and gestured between him and a woman holding a laptop in a tough-looking carrying case.
“Miller, this is Hale,” Mwai introduced them. “She is compiling a report about the portal. Hale, this is Miller. He is the one who can see a visual representation of magic. The two of you will go to the portal to see if Miller can pick up anything from outside. Be back at the tent in about twenty minutes.”
Hale smiled at him, then led the way out of the tent. She was surprisingly young, much younger than Jeremy would expect of someone in charge of compiling the information about the portal. Once they were a few steps away from the satellite camp, she turned to him and chuckled. He raised his eyebrows as she balled her fingers by the side of her head, then splayed them out, making an explosion sound effect with her mouth.
“This is crazy, am I right?”
“Uh…” Jeremy honestly had gotten over the initial craziness of everything by now, although working with the National Guard was still significantly out of his wheelhouse. There was only so long you could hold onto the strangeness of magic returning and the world unraveling before looking around and wondering about how crazy everything was got old. Now, he just wanted to understand what the heck was going on and maybe figure out how to adapt to it. “Yeah, it’s pretty nuts.”
“I mean…I haven’t even gotten my degree yet.” Hale stepped over a decaying log that had a row of little ferns growing on it that had somehow managed to avoid getting scorched by the fire. “But now they’ve like commandeered every available person into some job or another. I’m just glad that I’m doing something cool like analyzing this thing.”
She gestured to the portal as they approached it. Now Jeremy could see that it did, in fact, have an overlay, complete with runes and a singular glowing ring. The tip of his boot got caught on the log as he followed her over it because he was so focused on peering at the runes.
“Is it really true that you can see magic?” Hale asked. “I think there is a whole project right now with people trying to analyze spells as they are cast to see if there is any electromagnetic signature or something associated with them. One of the other people working as an intern with me told me about it. But being able just to see it is so cool! Anyway, what do you see?”
They had reached the portal, or at least as close as they could get. About ten feet around it, in all directions, circled a rope to prevent anyone from getting any closer.
“Can you see from here?” Hale asked, crouching down to balance her laptop across the tops of her thighs. She peered up at him through a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. He leaned on one of the stakes holding up the rope and squinted at the portal. The trouble was not being too far away, but the fact that the brightness and swirling nature of the pure energy making up the portal hurt his eyes to look at.
“Yeah, I can see it from here.” He reached into the side pocket on the tactical pants he’d been provided to pull out the nice pen and notepad they had given him upon request. He flipped to a new page and began clicking the pen.
“The overlay is a dark red color, which from my observations so far means a low level, but there is a white ring surrounding it.” He told Hale while drawing the runes. “My hypothesis is that the overlay changes in color as the creature grows more powerful until eventually they end up with a ring, at which time the color resets, and then the process starts again.”
“The creature?” Hale repeated as her fingers clacked across the keys.
“Well, until I ran into this portal, I only saw overlays like this on living creatures.” Jeremy told her, “People, trees, goblins. But maybe they can actually be indicative of highly concentrated magic. I’m also able to see the runes and colors of spells, so it's not too far-fetched.”
“Or that portal is technically alive.” Hale pointed out. They both stared at it for a couple beats.
“I’m not sure how I feel about that, so I’m going with the first hypothesis,” Jeremy said. He ripped out the page with his sketches of runes and handed it to her, then began quickly copying his own set. “These are the runes that I can see. I’m still working out what they mean for people. I’ve got no clue what they would indicate for that thing.”
“That’s fine. That’s fine.” Hale looked over the paper, eyes flicking from rune to rune. “All of this will hopefully be a huge help no matter how little you know. You can observe more than we or our instruments can see, so…”
She tucked the piece of paper into a pocket between the screen of the laptop and the top of the protective case, then snapped the whole thing shut and climbed to her feet. She waited for Jeremy to finish copying into his notebook, and then they made their way back to the tent.