Kaleb had expected that perhaps there would be a shining light that blinded him as soon as he walked in, or that he’d fall into an abyss of unfathomable depth; something that would fit all the media that once depicted this kind of thing. It was only fair to hope for the familiar, even if it wasn’t pleasant. He hadn’t expected that the first thing he’d experience the moment he stepped in was the overwhelming amount of input that he’d have to process.

The faint noise of the crowd was the first thing his mind caught as his eyes translated what they were seeing. There were words floating in his vision, and in the background, there were hundreds of humans, and other things that he couldn’t recognize just yet.

The words in his vision flashed and he almost fell on his ass, letting go of their luggage. He looked beside him trying to ignore the distraction as he felt Jane’s hand slip his own. She was on the ground, probably faring worse than him in reaction to the flash of words. And his mother… his mother was nowhere to be seen. He looked behind him, and there was nothing but the portal. In a moment of panic, he tried to step back into it, maybe she was still on the other side, but the thing was suddenly like a springy mattress, throwing him back.

“Kaleb?,” Jane called. He glanced at her. From the way her eyes moved, she was trying to read what was floating in front of her while simultaneously looking around her, almost cross-eyed. “Where’s mom?” she said.

He didn’t answer. There were many people around them. Could she have mixed into them? The floating words were still impeding his vision, but he scrutinized the people around them anyway. What were those things? Those creatures? He almost settled his eyes on them to figure it out but he had other things on his mind. He spotted a kid, maybe twelve or thirteen, sitting on the ground and hugging his knees while watching the portal intently. Spontaneously, he approached him and crouched, “did you see us come here?”

The boy nodded. “Yes.”

“Did a woman come with me and my sister?”

The boy vigorously shook his head. “No.”

“What about just before we came? Did you see a woman, normal height, dark brown hair, in a beige shirt and jeans? She’s my mother.”

The boy shook his head again. “I’m sorry.”

Kaleb cursed under his breath, turning around and making sure to keep an eye on Jane while searching the crowd.

“We can’t find my dad either.” The boy’s words shook him.

Kaleb turned towards him again, kneeling. “What do you mean?”

“Excuse me.” A voice interrupted them before the boy could speak. “This is my son.” A woman came and stood the boy up, making distance between them and Kaleb.

Kaleb stood up, taking a step back and raising his empty hands. “Sorry. We just can’t find my mom. We came here together. He was watching the portal, so I thought he might’ve seen her.”

The woman hugged the boy close. She nodded. “A lot of people have had something similar happen. We don’t know why. But you’re not the first. I’m sorry, but we’ve got to go.”

Kaleb stood there, struck. He even forgot to check on Jane, prompting her to sneak up on him and slip her hand into his own again. “Did you find her?” she asked.

“No,” his hoarse voice came out.

It took Kaleb maybe half an hour to reconcile himself with reality. His mother wasn’t here. It took all his optimism to hope that she’d come out somewhere else nearby. It didn’t look like all the humans who went into the portals came out here. In fact, it looked like only a fraction of a fraction of them were here.

The oddities in these surroundings hadn’t escaped him, however. He’d just been trying to ignore them. Oddities like the uniformed bipedals that were stalking among the new arrivals. They had the spiked quills of a hedgehog all over their bodies, even their grey-skinned faces. But it seemed that they could be folded, since the mail-armored parts of their bodies easily concealed the quills under them. Kaleb suspected that they had gray fur amongst those quills, but he wasn’t sure until a pair of them passed near him and shoved him out of the way. Jane was still in his hand, and she stumbled back with him. “Hey!” he yelled, despite his trepidation; and they thankfully ignored him. He patted Jane’s back. “You okay?” and she nodded.

After he and Jane calmed down, they picked up their luggage and began to slowly move away from the center of the crowd, where the portal was. Kaleb did his best to avoid Jane’s questioning eyes. She hadn’t verbally asked him about their mom since he’d given her the incisive answer, and she seemed to have understood something from his tone.

When Kaleb reached the fringes of the crowd, he was shocked. They were surrounded with barriers of intersecting wooden spikes, with manned checkpoints wherever there were gaps. There, the uniformed creatures stood, searching people and their luggage. He noticed a different creature among the uniforms, a lizard-like bipedal. Though it was nothing like any lizard he’d seen on earth. Perhaps the closest thing was the triceratops when it came to the head. The thing had a head armored like the front of a tank. Ridges of bone and scale protected its aggressive face from anything short of an artillery shell. Its body was bulkier than its compatriots who were closer to humans in stature, and it was perhaps a little taller than them too. Wearing the same armor and uniform as the quilled creatures, it seemed they were all part of the same whole. They were speaking loudly in a language that he could not recognize, and neither could any human by the looks on everyone’s faces.

As he instinctively listened for anything he could understand, the tents caught his eyes. They were beyond the barrier and they formed rings around the cordoned off area he was in. The rings extended as far as the eyes could see, and he saw humans moving between them, dirty, with lowered heads. Desperate. “What is this?” he couldn’t help but mutter.

Someone, somewhere around him answered with a bitter voice: “A refugee camp.” And that’s when the first conflict started.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

A middle-aged man at the checkpoint had been grumbling while the uniformed guards searched his luggage, and then his grumbling had turned to a growling staring contest with one of the guards as they began to confiscate any bladed object within his bags. Kaleb didn’t even know what item sparked what came next. He only saw the man lunge for the hand of one of the guards as he was trying to take something out of the bags. The spines on the guard’s hand expanded suddenly, piercing the man’s hand, and then the guard kicked him down. Having had enough, the man pulled out a glock and began shooting. In-between echoing cracks of the glock, Kaleb heard screams including his sister’s at the sudden violence. He dived on top of her and stuck to the ground.

He glanced at the man again, and his gun seemed to refuse to fire anymore, even though he couldn’t have possibly unloaded his whole magazine. Kaleb had heard perhaps three or four shots. A flash of movement caught his eye as the lizard-like bipedal from before waved glistening arms in the man’s direction. The gun was wrenched from his hand, flying to stick to the creature’s hands.

The guard who’d hurt the man was lying on the ground in a pool of blood. A couple of his peers were trying to help him, while the rest were laying onto the man who shot him with heavy kicks, and some of them were pulling out their medieval weapons, axes, maces, and clubs.

A yell interrupted the guards as a blue-skinned, bald man in flowing white robes trimmed with gold came from a distance. He was struggling to be fast without actually running as if it would somehow insult him to do so. When he got closer, Kaleb realized that he looked younger than everyone else in the incident. He was perhaps only a bit older than him, if whatever his species was measured like humans.

From his robes, Kaleb assumed he was some sort of priest. He kept yelling at the guards, red-faced for about ten seconds, with them being uncharacteristically accepting of the abuse, until they decided to spread away from their injured colleague and gesture, as if to say ‘see?’.

When the priest saw the bleeding soldier, Kaleb could swear that the young man cursed loudly, even though he still couldn’t understand the language. The priest moved to crouch beside the bleeding man putting a hand on top of one of three wounds where bullets hit. Nothing flashy happened before he moved his hand to the next two wounds. Kaleb couldn’t see what happened to them on account of them still being covered in blood. But the hive of guards around him seemed to relax after this, and wounded guard stopped squirming.

The priest then stood up and went to the human who’d gotten the beat-up of a lifetime and had been about to get something far worse too. The priest seemed lost at what to do with him for a moment, then he started tracing the bones of his arms and ribs with his hand till the man yelled in pain and then ‘healing’ them if Kaleb wasn’t wrong.

After the incident, the guards seemed to be watching everyone with hawkish eyes. Kaleb helped his sister up as her eyes shifted between her surroundings, the guards, and whatever she was reading. Before he could think of searching for their mother again, Jane asked him, “Kaleb? What’s Refugium? And why does it say that I have no constellation?”

Kaleb frowned, but before his confusion could show, he remembered the text that had floated in his vision as he came through the portal. He had ignored it, and it had conveniently faded. Now that he started to think of it again, it showed in front of him, though not as vividly as it initially did.

Welcome to Refugium

Where Safety is Assured and Sanctuary is Granted

Web of Power: Unawakened

Constellation: None

Kaleb balked at the oddity of what floated in front of him, whether in form or context. It took him a few seconds to reread it and try to understand what it was. The only thing he could come up with was that Refugium had to be wherever this was. He glanced at the afternoon sky, and noticed two visible moons along with the sun. Yes, this definitely was not earth.

“I don’t know,” he finally answered his sister. To make sense of the bipedals, the moons in daylight, and the text in his vision seemed all but impossible. So he stopped trying.

He grabbed Jane’s hand and dragged her and their luggage back towards the portal, proceeding to ask around about their mother. However, his fears were confirmed as people denied seeing anyone with her description. That gave him his final confirmation that she was nowhere to be found, and now they had to figure out what the hell was happening here. The first step was to get into the camp and try to find out how everyone was surviving. On his own, he could do with anything, but with Jane to care for, he had to find a safe and sustainable stay somehow.

After a while, Kaleb figured he had to surrender to a search at the checkpoint between the portal area and the camp. So he took Jane and their luggage there, where the ever more suspicious guards stood, with their quills twitchy or outright expanded.

Kaleb was searched first, very thoroughly, the only thing that could have been more thorough was a strip search. Meanwhile, their luggage was being searched by a couple of other guards.

Kaleb moved up and Jane was next, the climate here was temperate so her thin clothes and tiny frame made it easy to discern that she wasn’t carrying much. The guard decided that he’d take a shortcut and shake her by the shoulders so hard that if she was hiding something it would fall out. A look of panic came over her face as the guard shook her violently and Kaleb found himself yelling. “Easy!” And he found himself beside her. The guard stopped and stared at him as if he were dead. He stepped into Kaleb’s breathing space and stared harder. Kaleb raised empty hands and softly this time said, “easy, okay?” He gestured at his sister. “She’s a kid. She has nothing,” he continued. Though he felt it was doing nothing to pacify the guards surrounding him. He noticed something white in the corner of his eyes and glanced towards the distant man in white robes who was glaring this way. The guards followed his eyes, seeing the priest. He soon found himself being hustled through the checkpoint along with Jane, their luggage being thrown behind them. Only, the guards hadn’t bothered to close the bags after searching them. He and Jane had to spend a few precious minutes in the vicinity of the prickly creatures, stuffing their things back into the bags.

What happened after was a blur. They were actually herded by an old lady, Amelia, who noticed their haggard looks after the encounter. She’d arrived with her three grandchildren, thankfully without losing anyone in the process. She provided them with a much needed explanation of how things stood.

The tents were, as previously mentioned by someone, a refugee camp for humans. Apparently, they’d all landed somewhere near a city. Things here were obviously medieval-esque. But there were also oddities that the new arrivals had confirmed were magic or at least magic-like. So, it seemed that he hadn’t been seeing things, not that he’d doubted his eyes, but he’d been doubting the meaning behind what he’d seen. He didn’t remember the name of the author, but he remembered the quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And he’d imagined that thinking that would make him feel less crazy, but it seemed that no technology was involved.

They were led to a tent, where they deposited their belongings. Then Amelia showed them a local merchant, blue skinned like the priest they’d seen before. He bought what Amelia believed he thought to be exotic items from the human world. She advised him to sell anything he didn’t need to the man, as they’d need the coin to feed themselves. Apparently, whatever religious institution that priest had been from provided a meal a day but nothing more than that. If this was indeed something like a medieval society, Kaleb reckoned this would be considered extremely generous. The tents were apparently provided by them too. Almost nobody had come prepared for camping, though it made sense to do so in hindsight.

Kaleb and Jane settled in the tent right next to the kindly gray-haired lady and her grandchildren, who turned out older than Kaleb had thought, their youngest twelve, and oldest seventeen.

And that was it.

They were now refugees.