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It was Kev and I against at least six of my fellow classmates. First major schism since Coach Murph lost it. But Rick and I killed him dead, what was one more mercy killing of one of our number who’d cracked due to the heat of this place and pressure of surviving out here.

The pair of us made the trip up to the unfinished temple within a few hours. Just constant marching off the beaten path. Kev knew his way around the rainforest well enough to avoid most of its hazards.

A quick stop at the second of the river bend’s water temples produced nothing but a bit of fish for rations. Aminia really was avoiding the bend like the plague.

By sunrise the next day we reached the unfinished temple. The large moon moving parallel to the world plain took up the entire western sky now. Despite this, the tides were kept at bay with a series of wooden levies. Did the Rick and his volunteers build all this themselves?

It was not a perfect dam. Lower pools were flooded while the raised walkways were high and dry. And within those flooded pools were the bodies. Dozens, hundreds. Drowned too recently for comfort, their limbs bound and tied to the floor.

Standing in the middle, amidst a faint glow emanating from the walkways, was Richard again.

“It’s a simple matter of scale,” Richard said as we approached. “Moving people ten miles across an island is child’s play. To span the distance between universes, the cost goes up exponentially.”

“What the hell have you done?” I asked.

Kev spat out the Laval word for murderer. Fair enough, but not helping.

“Found us a way home.”

I pointed to the pools. “At what cost?”

“For a onetime warp of all of our surviving crew?” Richard asked. “A few tens of thousands. Shouldn’t be a problem: the Stormheaths have quite the population density.”

“Richard!”

Rick looked me square in the eyes for the first time in months. “What? Don’t want to come. That will spare a few thousand.”

“Time to stop,” I said.

“You’re the one who gave me this mission,” Rick said. “I just barely have enough to warp one person now. Of course it would be best to run additional tests, ensure the warp sends us back exactly where we were on that lonely state road. We’ll need to keep sacrificing people here for quite some time before I’d recommend trying the warp ourselves.”

The rune began to cast a familiar purple glow over the sacrificial pools.

Rick finished drawing some last element of his runic magic into the floor with his feet. “What’s yet to be determined is how did the ancient elvan afford the sacrificial cost for these spells?”

I brandished the war bat. Kev did the same with his club.

“Richard, this isn’t happening.”

“Oh?” Rick frowned. “If anyone wants their parents to know what happened here, something needs to be sent back.”

“Not at this cost.”

Rick’s five human henchmen, men I’d worked with on the team and fought with on the plains, walked into the platforms and made their way to us wielding clubs, daggers, and one pickaxe.

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Two of us on a narrow platform against five men of equal strength. At least we had terrain advantage; they could only come at us from so many directions, and single file. Still, being surrounded is never a good position to be in.

We batted our foes off the platforms. I wasted no time in beating the first man to charge at me square in the head with the war bat. But we were no closer to reaching the center and Richard.

“You’ve gone native, quarterback,” said one of the men.

I mostly just swore at them in response.

Kev and I were slowly pushed further back towards one of the larger pools.

“There’s really nothing stopping humans from being sacrifices too,” Rich mentioned offhand, as if a pitched brawl wasn’t taking place twenty feet away. “Early experiments were with birds. They worked all the same.”

“Why use people?” I asked, my war bat clashing against the pickaxe.

Richard shrugged, looking up at the overlarge moon. “Getting back to Earth has always been my primary concern. The locals are simply not my concern – just more efficient to use a higher mammal than local wildlife. It’ll hardly matter once we have a route home.”

“You’ve murdered dozens already,” I was losing my footing at the pit’s edge.

“Closer to three hundred. Not that it matters. Once we’re back, this place will be like a bad dream. We show up back at the roadside, and within a year or so there will be scarcely any evidence we were ever here. It’s not too late. C’mon, Mike.”

A cackling war-trumpet sounded at the temple’s edge.

The chieftain of the Laval had arrived, in full force. Battle-hardened Laval clansmen surged into the pathways that formed the runic text of this defiled temple. There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred. Richard’s four remaining lackeys suddenly felt cowed. Kev and I took the initiative to waylay three of them, then Kev wrestled with the burliest while I charged at the center.

“Richard!”

Sharp pain erupted from my abdomen. A tiny pair of hands were holding a long ritual knife. The shiv easily pierced the padding on my improvised football uniform.

“Rita, dear,” Rich said. “He’s trying to keep you from going home.”

“She doesn’t remember home,” I said.

Rita released the shiv, then nodded sheepishly.

“She remembers her mom, yes? Mikey’s trying to keep you from seeing her again.”

With the knife still inside me, I lunged at Richard. Only to be further waylaid. That first guy I’d beaned clear in the head was back out of the pool and had his hands around my neck.

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“Keep him busy, Shane.” Richard made a modification to his floor etchings with his shoe. “Laval are no matter. I can disintegrate anything not standing in the central circle with just a bit of modification...”

“Our guys are still out there.” His henchman said, motioning at Kev’s battle.

Rich shrugged. “They have twenty seconds to get in here.”

I throat-punched my assailant to no avail. Shane was always one of the burliest among us.

Just as my vision started to go dark, the mountain of man was struck clear in the mouth by a jet of water. Like being struck point-blank with the full force of a firehose. He fell to the floor, where the jet twisted to continue its assault.

Flying above the scene, a column of writhing water from the Torrent at his back, was Aminia. He had a crystalline greatbow in his hand roughly his size that refracted moonlight.

“Get out of my waters,” Aminia cried, uncharacteristically fierce look on his face.

A second arrow flew from the crystal bow, instantly becoming a twirling maelstrom of pure water pressure throwing off steam into the night sky from the pure condensed heat of it all. It was headed straight for the center platform. Directly at Richard.

Vision red, I lunged at Richard anyway.

The stream of water broke the floor beneath our feed, and we both spiraled into another of the stormland’s sprawling natural cavern system.

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Water cascaded down the newly opened hole, filling out its lowest level. The two of us landed on a cliff above a still-deeper chasm. The only light came from a thin beam of moonlight coming from the hole we’d just fell through, and a bit of luminescent fungus.

Richard was up on his feet before I even registered that we’d landed. He held a jagged, handmade dagger, which he swung down at me.

“Football pads are made to withstand blunt impacts,” He explained with a surgeonlike nonchalance. “They’re not meant for knives, swords, or guns. Guess it’s a good thing the people of this world beat each other across the head with clubs like cavemen.”

The knife cut into my hands as I struggled to keep it at bay.

Richard’s eyes were dull and disinterested. The longer I resisted the dagger the more he scowled.

“You’ve already lost, man.” Blood trickled down my palms.

“If you put this up to a vote, can you honestly say our buddies wouldn’t vote to start killing off a couple of neighbors?”

I juked left, letting the blade imbed itself harmlessly into stone. A throat punch shut Richard up long enough to force him back and get to my feet.

A screaming figure blindsided Richard, socking him several times in the nose but dealing little damage. Rita must have fallen as well.

“Stop fighting!”

“Rita, stay back,” I said.

Richard batted the eight-year-old away. She hit a stone wall then collapsed to the floor.

Newly enraged, I lunged forward and with a two-handed punch send Richard reeling to the edge of the cliff. I did not let him recover, leaping towards him and beating him down again and again while he was prone on the floor. I stopped only when Richard’s face was bloodied beyond recognition. I was certain one last blow to the head would kill him.

“It’s over,” I said. “If this is the cost of going home. It’s not happening.”

Richard babbled out something I couldn’t understand behind his shattered jaw, then with one last kick freed himself from me and pushed himself down into the abyss below.

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“Step into the cascading water. Be not afraid. I’ll pull you back up.”

This command emanated directly into my ear in Aminia’s typical singsong vision-granting fashion.

I picked up Rita. Blood pooled in her eyebrows, just below a fleshy headwound. Though she’d stabbed me some five minutes before I couldn’t hold anything against the poor girl. She’d need medical attention far more than I did.

“Get back up here. It will be okay,” the voice reassured me.

I stepped into the waterfall as requested. All at once the water reversed course, and like a common elevator I was pulled up back to the surface as if by a chain of invisible hands. Don’t ask what an elevator is; it isn’t important.

The Laval were marshalled out in the wetlands beyond the temple, having retreated to the edge of the massacre site shortly after dispatching the rest of the traitorous humans. The average Laval warrior looked upon the site, the two remaining humans, and even their former clanmate Kev with disgust. Their clan-chief, though, gave me a knowing nod. Wish we’d managed to meet more often for negotiations in the intervening years.

Aminia went to work immediately, healing Rita’s head wound and my various cuts and abrasions with just a bit of applied river water and a wave of his hands. Didn’t look sanitary, but hey, miracles seldom take those things into account.

“Thanks, Aminia.” I rapidly caught my breath, strength returning the second he touched my knife wound. “Are we… sure he’s dead?”

“Richard? Hard to say.” Aminia crouched down near the pit, arms wrapped around his knees. “Certainly not going to commend him to the torrent. He’s falling through the subterranean channels now. Out of my jurisdiction. Good riddance, honestly.”

For all I knew Rick had been punted down a bottomless pit. Nobody could survive that. And there was no way to pursue him even if I had the means or desire to continue the fight.

“It will be some time before I can properly manifest downstream of this place,” the river god said. “If you’re ever in need of conversation, return to the headwaters.”

I got up and walked out of the temple under my own power. The stab wound and abrasions faded fast, as if they were old training drill wounds. Rita slept peacefully the entire trip back to Secondhome. Kev and I got her back to Maria for a checkup. There was only scant evidence she’d ever been struck in the head. Everyone tried their best to avoid talking about the events of that night and what Richard had put her to work doing for all those months. She was old enough that she likely still remembers. Still, Rita’s adjusted surprisingly well to all this. The first of our crew to be technically ‘local’ to this world, I suppose.

As for managing Secondhome, I buried myself in my work. Plenty of outlanders had questions about what Richard’s event had to do with any attempt to get home. I was honest, though it meant we lost another ten members who objected to my decision to put a stop to the experiments, or otherwise had quibbles or doubts about my version of events. Ran off into the forests. Some are still out there while some went overseas in search of answers. Three are dead, one more was never heard from again.

For my part, Secondhome had grown to several times the size of our original group. Outlanders were barely one fourth of our number now, less if you didn’t count half-and-half descendants. By any standard, I had to be responsible for the entire settlement, not just those who were on our football team over three years ago now. I certainly couldn’t sacrifice our local neighbors purely for our own gain.

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What else did we miss? Ah, yes. The circumstances around your birth, Ma’at.

A year and a few days later, I returned to the headwaters for some quiet contemplation.

“Welcome back.” Aminia was waiting.

The largest moon was directly overhead, the first of a three-day eclipse that would bathe this island in twilight. The river swell was at its maximum, the headwaters strong enough to carry away anyone without an invitation.

“It’s been a year,” I said.

“A year and a month, by the Lavalian calendar.” Aminia invited me over.

I updated Aminia on life downstream. He knew most of it.

“Hector’s kids are three already. Even if there was an ethical way home... we’re not bringing them. Not at that age. Group has wives, husbands. Having elvan or even other-islanders walking around central Texas doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

“There’s a tinge of loneliness in all this,” Aminia said.

“I have no family here. Barely have friends that aren’t hamstrung by the whole ‘quarterchief’ thing.” I sighed, sinking into the water. “Nobody to talk to.”

“I’m here,” Aminia said.

“Yes, you are.”

I closed my eyes. The spring water was pleasant and warm, rejuvenating, even.

“Not sure how Earth-clans would take this, but there is a way I could bless you with the gift of family.”

“Eh?” I opened my eyes again, looking at the river god with a skeptical eyebrow raised.

Just what is he tryin’ to pull?

“It’s nothing fancy. But with your permission, come back in three days and the spring will provide a child for you.”

No real way to react to that.

“What, like, any child?” I asked.

“Oh, he’ll be yours. He’ll just be born of the river and blessed by the Torrent. I’ll be able to watch over him so long as he stays within earshot of the flowing river.”

Another anchor keeping us in this world. Well, I was curious as I was flustered.

“Y’know what? Very well, do it.” I sighed. “I mean, so long as you’re not kidnapping one. Lord only knows what you’re scheming.”

Three days later, I returned to the headwaters. There, Mathew arrived, fully formed out of the center of the spring. You looked like you were already a month or two old. But you most certainly had outlander features, chief among them my eyes. Not sure quite how it worked mechanically and all, but there you were. A regular miracle.

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