[Warbinger Returns Arc]

Chapter 01

The City in the Forest

The tear appeared in the morning, dark and wiry and framed by a pale circle that blocked the rising sun. Richard stared up at the purple opening with Geoff while the crowds forming in the streets around them grew. Then the gentle murmurs of the civilians turned into a distressed rumble as the edges of it began to fray, the tear pulled apart, and a beady eye appeared within.

It cast its dark gaze upon them, and Richard looked away instinctively as his heart seized with fear.

He looked back at the sky. The tear rippled as the eye vanished and the mingling reds and oranges of sunrise faded into a gentle blue midday sky.

Richard remained fixed on the tear, and that pale circle that framed it. Air rushed by him as though trying to lift him away until suddenly his feet hit the ground and his knees buckled.

“Shit!” he cursed, rolling onto his side. He squeezed his legs tightly in a vain attempt to stifle the pain, but it subsided in a few moments. A cry in the distance caught his ear and he pushed himself up to a sitting position. Violet strands of grass tickled his fingers.

He was in a forest.

The air was fresh and cool, but it had a slight smell he could only describe as sour. The trees must have been five storeys tall and had broad canopies that shaded the forest floor. Through clouds of black smoke he could see their curly leaves were a blue-green hue. His eyes followed the thick trunks down to the top of a building and his heart skipped a beat when he thought he recognized it. An apartment building, red brick on only two sides while the others were white. He did know it, and it had been behind him. Now it was slanted thirty or so degrees and had a massive tree growing through it.

And it was on fire.

Below the apartments, half a street began in the space between two trees and ended abruptly before meeting a wide creek dammed with parked cars. A tiny round critter rolled around near the stream. It had one limb that he could see; a tail-like thing opposite its face with four digits on it that it used to pick something up and put it into a mouth almost as wide as its entire body.

Across the stream the ground slanted upwards. His eyes followed a dirt path up until he lost it in the trees, but above the treetops the mountain’s sharp peak poked out like a silent guardian.

Past the half-street a man lay in the dirt, pinned under the street-facing wall of the Captain’s Cup cafe. The rest of the cafe was nowhere to be seen. He rushed to the man’s side as quickly as he could while massaging shock from his legs.

“Hey, man!” he shouted, kneeling shakily at the man’s side. Everything from the shoulders down was hidden beneath the wall. He checked the man’s wrist and neck for a pulse, but there was none. He checked again. Warm, quiet, unmoving. He hoped the man had at least died quickly, but there was nothing else he could do for him, not pinned as he was under that much concrete.

Straightening up, he took another look around the forest. Sections of buildings, street lamps, stray waste bins and vehicles dotted the alien woods everywhere he looked. He shook his head. Must have passed out, he thought. Must be asleep.

He’d get an earful from Geoff about it. But when had he fallen asleep? He still remembered getting up, bright and ready at four in the morning. His coffee—made at home, none of that Captain’s Crap—his morning jog… he picked up Geoff in the squad car and said good morning to his wife who had looked like she could use another night’s sleep. He remembered the tear peeling its way across the sky until it must have been a kilometre long up there, with that pale circle hovering ominously behind it.

He looked at it from the corner of his eye, but decided not to stare.

He heard the cry again. A pained, high-pitched wail from far away. His first thought was of Geoff’s daughter. She wasn’t downtown though. Had this only happened downtown? Maybe it was a dream, and he would wake up just before seeing who was crying. Another unfinished dream.

He headed to the apartment structure where he thought the cry had come from and examined a glass sliding door slanted against a shattered balcony rail. The ground floor of the building was just gone. Underground, or maybe it was back where it belonged. He shook his head, and climbed over the rail. The slanted door still blocked the bottom of the entrance so it gave him a bit more trouble than the rail to avoid the broken glass, but he managed to wiggle through.

The living room inside was mostly intact. Some broken glass from the windows was scattered around the floor, and a mug of something had fallen and spilled its contents around the legs of the sofa. The only illumination came through the broken balcony window. Otherwise, it was a normal room. Someone had been living here.

“Anyone here?” he called. Silence. He stepped carefully across the crooked floor as he looked for the bedroom, but found a small pantry first. Canned goods, pasta, preserves. Dog food at the bottom.

He found what he was looking for behind the next door he tried. A room with a large bed against the wall, grey sheets curled up on one side. He stepped around the small rug in the centre of the floor and stood at the foot of the bed. The sheets were puffed up. A half-deflated pocket where someone had just been. He pressed the sheets down. They were still warm.

A knot formed in the pit of his stomach and he felt himself begin to panic. This might be real. Wherever he was, some of the city came with him and left most of the people behind.

A distressed cry sounded again. He couldn’t tell if it was closer. He made his way to the apartment’s entryway and opened it to the hall. Water trickled down the angled corridor, barely visible in the tiny wedge of light that reached this far from the window. He pulled his flashlight from his belt and clicked it on. White walls with plain brown doors spaced evenly apart and smooth grey-blue tiles that would be slippery when wet.

Up or down, though? The circle of light revealed nothing of note in either direction. The fire was higher up, so he sighed and made his way up the slanted floor with one hand on the wall for balance. Along the way he noticed the apartment that was flooding opposite him.

He shuffled across to the door and took the handle. The knob rattled as he tried it, but it was locked. He knocked to no response. “Hello?” he called, but didn’t bother waiting. He held his arms out and delivered a kick to the doorknob. It didn’t give, and his other leg shot out from under him and sent him toppling with a thud onto his back. Must be a bloody Martyrsmith lock, he groaned, I should have noticed. There was no way he would get through one of these doors with just his legs and no way to balance. It would be easier to kick a street light over.

He rolled his head to the left and there was his flashlight, skidding down the hall without him. ‘Hey!” he shouted pointlessly after it. His fingers curled dejectedly as it splashed into the water pooling at the bottom. With another sigh he scrambled to his feet and slid down after it, swinging his arms in wide arcs to try and remain upright.

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When his boots hit the shallow water at the end of the corridor he stumbled forward into the wall. Not a painful landing, but sliding down the hall gave him a nostalgic sort of rush he hadn’t felt since he used to race bikes down steep hills. He took a moment to breathe before bending down and fishing the light out.

There was nothing quite like starting the day soaking wet in a building that was flooding on one end and burning on the other.

A pair of doors revealed a staircase in the gloom beyond their wire-reinforced windows. The door squeaked quietly as he pushed it open, braced with one foot against the other. A feminine voice echoed through the stairwell and Richard froze to listen. It came from below, but almost sounded farther than it had outside. He pushed through in a hurry and bolted towards the stairs, leaping down four at a time. He lowered his head against the water trickling down and used his momentum to carry him around the bend in the stairs with one hand on the rail.

One of the doors of the ground floor stairwell was stopped open so he climbed through quickly. As soon as his light hit the far end of the hall a voice called out again. Invigorated by the urgency of their plight he forged ahead, pushing himself up the hall using knobs for leverage and finding solid footing in cracks that appeared more and more frequently the closer he made it to the end. As he rounded the corner at the top of the hall his eyes widened in disbelief.

The corridor suddenly ended four or five metres ahead. It was just open to the outside. He climbed to the end and peered up past the severed edge of the building at the smooth cross-section. A whole wedge of the building was gone, but not all the way to the roof. It was like a machine took a bite out of it.

What remained of that corner of the roof had collapsed into a deep pit a below. It lay in scattered heaps with the largest chunk propped against a tall bank crested with more of the enormous turquoise trees. Thick roots snaked out of the bankside and curled awkwardly through the air. The ground at the bottom was packed with foliage and loose dirt with the occasional damp patch near the building where pipes had leaked. Scattered dirt and prickly bushes below gave him the impression that just as this building had been brought here, part of the earth may have been taken away, leaving the rest to fall into the hole.

He felt depressingly unprepared for whatever he was going to face in the near future, but someone was calling for help below. At least he thought they were. Their cry did sound distressed, but it was hauntingly alien. Gonna get yourself killed, he thought as he lowered himself over the edge. Gonna die in a blue forest. A bit of concrete failed to meet his expectations and broke, dropping him the remaining distance with a startling crack. He rolled as best as he could by tucking into a ball and landed roughly with his back in a sharp bush.

“Could still be a dream,” he said out loud, wincing as he picked a thorn out of his shoulder. “One that keeps on giving.”

He walked carefully around the bushes, turning his nose at the musty smell their many purple flowers let into the air. He pointed his light into every nook he could find, but realised he had no idea what he was searching for. The silence concerned him.

“If you’re out there, say something!” he called.

A whimper from his left turned his head. He rushed towards the sound, keeping his light low to illuminate any obstacles in his path. He leapt over a bush and stumbled to a stop near the rooftop portion of the elevator shaft. The bottom was crumpled like a can crushed by a car and the doors had popped off and lay separated in the dirt nearby. A pipe from the ruined structure above leaked gently tapping drops onto one of the doors.

He took note of the precarious way the building leaned on the tree through its middle. The lower branches were already catching flame.

He shone his light inside the elevator shaft. Rubble covered something white, pink and orange beneath. He squatted for a closer look. The orange cloth and pink strands shifted in the breeze, but the rest of it lay still. He pulled off rubble and tossed it aside until he could get a better look. It had a pointy, fleshy bit sprouting from what looked like matted pink hair. At the other end of it was some kind of long white appendage. A tail or a tentacle.

“I’m here to help,” he said. “If you’re the one who called out.” He returned to tossing away rubble. Whatever this thing was, it had better not try to eat him. It was small though, maybe two-thirds his size, but there was no way to tell for sure like this.

It began to stir, a gentle whine escaping it in a high pitch. The sound came from the end with a pointy thing. The shape of its head suddenly made sense as it turned to face him. A person—at least, the way he knew people—after all, with bright pink eyes that matched their hair and a smooth nose. It was their ears that were pointed. Their skin was pearl white, judging by the tail, but their face was coated in dirt and… creamy, silvery liquid.

His experience as a medic might help him dress a surface wound cleanly, but there was no way he could do more than that for such a foreign person with no knowledge of their anatomy. There may be nothing he could do to help them. The thought made his chest ache.

Richard quickly cleared the rest of the rubble away, thankful that the pieces were manageable. The little native—so he assumed—kept their eyes on him the entire time, silently watching like a deer caught in a fence, waiting to bolt the moment it was freed. But as he cleared the last of the rubble, he realised they would not be able to move. They were impaled on an iron rod.

“You can’t move.” He couldn’t have said why he bothered to speak. They made a sound in response, but he had no way of understanding it. But then they started to move, a quick swish of the tail and then a bend in the arm. They had two legs, he noticed, that had been buried under rubble and were still obscured by orange cloth, but those remained still. They wore something like a dress, with an opening on the lower back for the tail.

In human anatomy that bar would be right through the spine. Or close enough. The back of the dress was soaked with silvery fluid. Blood, he presumed. He shook his head. “There’s a bar right through you, but I don’t know enough about you to tell how bad that is.” He sat down where they could easily see him. Pulling them free could kill them, but leaving them was no better.

Their arm lifted weakly and they curled the fingers of their human-like hand. Large pink eyes locked on his face, they traced a circle in the dirt and then drew a line through it. They followed the image with another, this time a circle with a line above it.

“I don’t understand,” Richard said. Were these characters in their written language?

They waved their hand over the first image, and then hovered over the second. He met their eyes, anxious of missing some important cue as to the meaning of these symbols. Their eyes were watery, but intense like they were trying to will him to understand.

They said something.

He sighed at the symbols in the dirt. “You know, if Geoff was here, I bet he’d have figured you out in a second. He has everything figured out.”

They spoke again. Richard still didn’t understand. It was a snippy, delicate-sounding language. They gestured with their hand again… pulling, or grabbing, then drew another circle. But the line was only half through it this time.

He cocked his head at the new drawing. “I’d almost think you want me to pull that bar out.”

They slapped the ground with their hand enthusiastically and all the little circles were smudged out.

“Wait, you don’t understand me, do you?”

They hit the ground again.

“If you know what I’m saying, and you want me to pull that bar out… or,” he realised it was probably attached to something beneath them, “pull you off of it… then give the dirt a good three whacks. Just three.”

Three whacks just as he asked, but they winced from pain.

“Damn straight, now we’re on the same page.” He jumped to his feet, crouched next to them and carefully threaded his arms beneath them. “Whatever goes down when I lift you up I want you to know it was nice to meet you.”

After three quick, deep breaths he pushed himself up with his legs. His muscles tightened and they slid up the rod slowly. Scrap metal held the rod underneath, and as he lifted them the mess of tangled bits tried to come along. Whether congealed blood or something else, there was too much friction for them to lift off smoothly.

He filled his lungs and held his breath. One, two, three, he quickly shifted his weight and stuck his foot out to catch the scrap and press it down. The position was much more awkward, and now his right arm was supporting less of the weight. He lifted as hard as he could and finally the little figure came free. He stumbled back with the native in his arms.

Carefully he carried them out of the crumbling elevator shaft and laid them on their back on one of the doors. The wound didn’t look any better from the front. Tears trickled from their eyes, but they had remained quiet the whole while. As soon as he took a step back, they placed both their hands over the hole in their abdomen and their eyes drifted shut.

They hummed a simple tune and light that matched their eyes enveloped them suddenly, shining brighter until they were cloaked completely in the glow. Then it receded into their hands before flickering out completely. The only movement from them now was the gentle rise and fall of their chest.

Their dress was soaked with blood, but the hole that remained in it revealed smooth, unblemished skin. Magic? He sighed. Even his dreams rarely had magic in them.

Richard turned to look at where he knew the tear would be if not for the cross-section of the apartment building that blocked his view. Was Geoff out there somewhere, wondering where he was?