The next day went much like the last. Iris arrived shortly after dawn to open the store, sat for hours at the counter reading adventure magazines, and internally groaned each time the bell chimed. Ada again arrived early, and was once again overflowing with cheer. Iris took the same route through town that she took every day.
At the edge of town there was a beaten path, wide enough for a carriage though seldom traveled by one, which led towards a cluster of cottages not far from town. That was where Iris lived, in a small rented room on the second floor of a cottage that she shared with three other villagers. The owner of the cottage was, grossly, Phineas Quell. There was something particularly sickening about paying over half her meager wages back to the same man who paid them to her, but it was that or live in the woods.
As she dodged the path, instead veering onto a foot trail barely visible from the road, her mind wandered to fantasies of building elaborate tree houses and renovating caves. She insisted to herself that she would have done it by now, if not for the lord's guard that would likely come remove her once she was discovered. In the empire, all land was owned by someone -- if not by a property holder then by the lord of the region. These woods were owned by the lord, and permission had been given to villagers and tourists to travel through them and even camp overnight, but permanent dwellings were strictly prohibited. Iris scoffed to herself at the audacity of lords to lay claim to nature, as she had done many times before.
She dreamed of escape, of a magic portal erupting open on the trail before her and gleefully leaping into it to a place far away, beyond the empire's edge where true freedom could be found. Of course, she likely wouldn't survive long without any magic, but she always had magic powers in her fantasies.
She followed the trail, dodging spider webs, stopping to say excuse me to a passing frog, hopping over a small creek and stepping over prickly vines. Soon the encroaching understory beneath the forest canopy faded to patches of grass fighting to grow in the dirt that quickly gave way to a sandy beach. She reveled in the fresh breeze blowing over the pond and brushing past her face. She found her favorite sitting spot at the base of a tree that had stubbornly grown on the very fringes of the forest, like it had bullied its way into the beach's territory. Her favorite walking stick leaned against one side of the tree, where she always left it. She dropped her bag, pulled off her sandals, and delighted in the cool, crunching sand between her toes. After a moment of savoring the feeling, she took a seat on the ground and leaned her back against the tree.
On most days she was too brain dead after a day of work to do anything but sit at home and wait for the day to be over. Some days that was all she did in the woods, too, but often she'd pass the time by practicing her rock throwing, tree climbing, or some other survival skill. For now, though, she felt like reading. She pulled the Glacial Mountains issue of Sir Abram Brant's Wild Adventures from her bag and picked up where she'd left off at the end of her shift today.
After slaying the harpy and fashioning a glider from its wings, Sir Abram Brant had waited out the blizzard and sailed through the air around the mountain in search of his sword. Catching a glint of sunlight beneath him, he had swooped down and landed on a ledge nearby. The glider would serve him no good in going back up, however, and he had next began his treacherous ascent back up the mountain. Iris picked up in the middle of his lengthy description of the dangers of climbing in the region, the differences between scaling rock and scaling ice, and the various perils in the ascent and descent of both.
Unlike at the store, out here the only interruptions were her own errant fantasies of undergoing the same harrowing survival situations as the author. She imagined soaring through a blizzard, crunching into thick snow to retrieve her gleaming sword, then steeling her resolve to climb the seemingly insurmountable mountain before her. Her eyelids grew heavy as her fantasy began to get away from her, and she slowly drifted off to sleep as she imagined the small, cozy mountains around her were actually the icy behemoths of the Glacial Mountains.
"Holy fuck!" Iris shouted as a loud, deep tearing sound woke her. The sun had completely set and the familiar lazuli moon in the sky bathed the beach in an eerie blue light. She caught her breath, glancing around for the source of the sound. She checked her magazine, her clothes, then her bag, but everything was intact. Stowing the magazine in her bag, she quickly donned her sandals and stood to hurry home. Then, she stopped.
Iris was no stranger to having internal arguments with herself. Sometimes her mind simply pulled her in two directions, and in this case one direction told her to flee for the safety of her home, while the other yearned for adventure. Of course she should go home, she had no idea what time it was and had no business being in the woods after dark. Besides, even if she didn’t have work tomorrow, she still needed to preserve her sleeping schedule. That was before even considering what might have made that strange, inexplicable sound that had woken her. But then, strange and inexplicable things didn't happen to Iris often. In fact, she couldn't even remember the last time one did.
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Her head turned towards the woods behind her tree, far from any of the foot trails she knew of, and she pondered what might have made the sound. Her memory of it was already fleeting like a dream, and for a second she struggled with the thought that it probably had just been a dream. Still, she pressed herself to remember any details she could. It had sounded like something ripping and tearing, certainly, but had also sounded distorted and warped somehow, almost like it was underwater. She turned and looked into the dark, gentle waters of the pond. A few ideas popped into her mind as she remembered various different aquatic monsters that Sir Brant had encountered around the world, but she shook them out of her head. The pond was too small to have any monsters in it without someone having noticed by now. She was also pretty certain the sound had come from behind her, from the woods.
The canopy blocked out most of the moonlight, leaving the forest dark and foreboding. Peering past the first few trees felt like staring into an empty void. She noticed a glint of moonlight breaking through the trees in the distance, however, and decided it was as good a lead as any. She grabbed her walking stick from where it leaned against the tree, inspecting it briefly with a tap against the tree to check it was still solid. Satisfied, she turned and set off into the trees, using the stick to push aside errant branches and brace herself during sketchy footwork.
The glint of light soon grew into rays that cast between the tree trunks as she grew closer. If the brightness hadn't been enough to reveal it wasn't moonlight, the shimmering and flickering that she noticed next certainly was. Her heart thumped in her chest as she realized she might have actually stumbled across something genuinely weird. Suddenly, her indulgence of childish fantasies turned into uneasy trepidation. She pressed on, deliberately placing each step through the twisted roots and bramble vines that tried to trip her. She tried to be quiet, but found it nearly impossible in the thick brush. That didn't matter for long, because as she grew nearer to the light her head was filled with a forceful humming metronome that emanated from the light source.
She came upon the source much faster than she anticipated, rounding a tree and finding herself just a few feet away from it. She was staring at what could only be described as a hovering ripple in space. It looked like someone had torn a jagged wound through reality itself, and the forest had warped around it. Iris couldn't even form thoughts in the moment, let alone theorize about what she might be looking at. Instead she stared at it slack jawed as she circled around it.
She could see now that it wasn't the forest itself that had been warped, but the image of it. From all angles, the space around the edges of the tear seemed to suck in the forest as if she was viewing it through some strange, warped glass. The tear itself was impossible to perceive -- literally, Iris tried to discern what she was looking at but it was as if her mind was incapable of converting the sight into something comprehensible. It felt like the moment during an optical illusion before the mind realized what the eyes were seeing, but that realization never came.
A memory flashed through her scattered mind. A sketch she'd seen in a magazine called the Magic of Adventuring. The artist had explained that he was doing his best to capture what he described as an uncapturable sight, and now Iris realized exactly what the artist had meant. If she was right -- if she was truly seeing what she thought she was seeing -- then Iris had just found the first step on the path to becoming an adventurer, the source of all magic and might in the empire. She had found a Thread of Power.
Iris reached out towards the ripple in reality. As her hand drew closer, her mind drew closer to comprehension. She couldn't feel her heart anymore, its beat drowned out by the deafening, all-encompassing rhythmic hum of the pulsating apparition. The world around her was sucked into a vortex, leaving Iris floating alone in a black void.
For a moment she thought she was falling and flailed helplessly in an attempt to right herself. But there was no air rushing past her face, and her clothes weren't flapping in the wind. She looked down at herself in confusion, and saw nothing.
She blinked -- or at least felt like she was blinking -- while her brain tried to catch up. She was in total darkness. She started hyperventilating, only to catch the breath in her throat as she realized she couldn't hear herself breathing – and didn’t feel any air rushing into her lungs. Whipping her head around, she frantically searched for anything. She called out with silent yells, tried to swim in the invisible, intangible fluid in which she thought she must be suspended. She felt another presence in the void.
Crashing in from all sides faster than a blink of her eyes, reality returned to her. It popped into place around her after the same warped stretching as when it sucked her into the vortex, as if it shrunk back down around her from somewhere beyond.
She felt her heart pounding, her ragged breaths tearing at her throat, the tears welling in her eyes. She was alone in the forest, and it was dark.