In a large stone room there was a man sitting at a wooden desk, tracing his fingers over the lines of text with his right hand, as his left hand pointed at different spots on some sort of celestial map. His head feverishly moved back and forth between the two.
His body had burn marks over every inch of visible skin, looking as if it had been melted a long time ago by an intense fire. His eyes were blue, all blue, lacking a pupil and an iris. They radiated with an immense energy that made them have an ethereal look to them. Every few seconds a miniature arc of lightning would jump from one eye to the other.
The room was lit by torches on the walls that gave off a soft indigo blue light, very similar to the light emanating from the man’s eyes. This light made visible the maps and books strewn in various piles all over the room. Every pile was a different height, some stacked up from the floor while others were on desks and tables scattered randomly.
Some of the books were sitting there, open, as if someone was reading them, got distracted and then forgot about them. Many of the maps had writings on them, tracings from one star cluster to another, others were crumpled up and then left to rot.
The wall in front of the desk was one large map with little points of light, that could be galaxies or universes, with pale blue strings of electricity that pulsed between them. This map had the look of a mural constructed by a frantic conspiracy theorist. There were too many points of light connected by too many strings of lightning. The entire room had the look and feel of a slovenly teenager’s room.
The man sat back in his chair for a second, staring at his work before bursting into a soundless scream of rage, angerly shoving everything off the desk to the floor. In his fury he stood so fast that the chair he was sitting on flew backwards, smashing itself into tiny pieces against the wall on the other side of the room. The miniature splinters pluming out from the impact area before slowly cascading down to the floor.
He started pounding his fist into the table, continuing his soundless screams of frustration. With each strike small forks of lightning erupted from his hands, leaving miniature scorch marks in the wooden desktop as they faded.
It took some time before he started to calm down, when he did, he glanced over at the mess on the floor, then back at the wall where the pieces of the shattered chair had fallen to the floor and dropped his head in disgrace at his lack of control. With a wave of his hand, lightning burst out from the floor forming a new chair, and he sat down, burying his hands in his face with disappointment.
From behind him the air started to blur as an ethereal image of a man began to appear. The image finished coming into being, never achieving anything but a semi-translucent state.
The apparition said to the man, “It is time,” in a flat tone that conveyed no emotion and had no discernible accent.
The man removed his hands from his face, startled, as he turned to look at the ghostly figure. He then looked away as his gaze moved to the mess on the floor, looking for something in it next to the desk. He bent down and picked up a mask from the debris and placed it over his nose and mouth. Lightning sparked where it met his face, welding it in place.
It was made of a pale blue mesh cloth with a dull metal frame and a small yellow cat’s eye gem in the center and a purple gem where his chin was. He turned to face the image. As he spoke the gems started to glow with pale lights from each.
“Master, are you sure?” his voice sounding as if it was coming out of an old speaker.
“Yes.” His master said to him, “He is in the preparation room, but you must hurry. He will not stay there long. His energies are already fading.”
The man’s eyes went wide. He moved his hands around himself as if he were donning a cloak. As he did, lightning began cascading from his shoulders, down his back and up over his head. Eventually coalescing into a hooded robe of a brilliant electric blue with white trim and various gems down the hems of the sleeves.
He stretched his left arm out to call his staff to him. The staff was a grayish metal color with three gems at the top, a blue, a white and a red and one clear gem on the bottom.
As the staff moved through the air toward him, he looked at his master asking, “How much time will I have?”
“A day, maybe two, it depends on the strength of his soul.” The master replied flatly.
The man nodded and raised his staff up, all four gems lighting up brightly as he did, before slamming the end with the clear gem into the ground. The moment he struck the stone floor, he erupted into millions of tiny motes of ball lightning and disappeared.
Timothy was lying face down on the cool hard floor of the stone room. He remembered waking, briefly, some time ago before darkness enveloped him again, before falling unconscious.
Could that have been a nightmare? he thought to himself as he started to wake.
His eyes snapped open in horror.
Gina will be here shortly, I need to get dinner reeeaady… the last word fading out slowly in his mind as he realized he was not in his house. Am I still dreaming? he thought and started to push himself up.
As he got to his knees and started to look around, “What is this place?”
He noticed that his voice sounded weird. It was as if he was hearing it through a tub full of water.
He tested his hearing again, “Hello?” but got the same result.
Everything came flooding back to him in an instant. A loud boom followed by immense pain and then darkness. As the memories returned so did the pain, his head started pounding, his muscles went stiff and his skin felt like it was on fire as he fell to the floor again, curling into a fetal position.
He was not sure how long he had been lying there in excruciating pain before his senses started returning to him. The throbbing headache was the first to subside, allowing him to start thinking again. He began to look at the skin on his arms and legs, checking for burns, but there was nothing but smooth skin.
This is strange. With how bad my skin hurts I would have thought that I had burns all over.
Just as he finished that thought, the pain from his skin started to vanish. Still on the floor, he started to look himself over and saw he was dressed in what he was wearing the day before.
What day was it? How long have I been out? He contemplated.
“Well, at least I still have my clothes,” he said to the empty room with a grateful smile.
He tried to get up again, but his muscles were still stiff, preventing him from doing anything more than tiny movements. Thinking back to his martial arts training, he started to stretch as he was lying on the floor, beginning with his fingers and toes. It took some effort at first, getting easier with each passing moment. After about five minutes of stretching every muscle he could think of, he felt like he could move again.
Cautiously he rolled off his back and started to push himself up to his knees. Timothy was wary at first, waiting for the pain to return, but this time it did not. In fact, he was feeling better than he had before arriving in this place.
He realized he was no longer tired from the night before and the slight hangover had gone away. He finished standing up and began to look around, trying to figure out where he was.
The room was a large circular room made almost entirely of a sandy colored stone, save for the gold-colored square embedded in the center of the floor and the three iron-bound dark wooden doors affixed to the wall. Timothy randomly assigned one of the doors as north to give himself some sense of direction. This put one of the other doors in the southeast and the last in the southwest.
The room was lit by braziers on the floors a few inches from the walls spaced out about every ten feet. A large chandelier of crystal hung over the center of the room reflecting the light of the fire burning at its center. The way the light prismed through the crystals left small random patches of rainbow colors. As he looked up, admiring the craftsmanship of the chandelier, he estimated the ceiling to be at least forty feet high.
The walls looked like they had a series of mono-chrome paintings around the entire circumference that reached about ten feet up the wall. He looked down at the golden square in the middle of the room and noticed there were other etchings in the floor. As he backed up toward the wall he kept his eyes on the ground, trying to make out the design. Eventually backing up far enough to take it all in.
There was a large triangle embedded in the floor. Each tip pointed to one of the doors. Inside the large triangle there were smaller triangles at each tip, turning the center into a hexagon. Inside the hexagon there were three concentric rings, each with a single,
Letter? Number? He wasn’t sure.
It was not a language he recognized. Probably numbers. He thought, That would make the middle ring two, but which ring was one and which was three?
He shook his head, “That is a problem for later.”
In the center of the innermost circle was the golden square. He examined it, but there was not much to it. It was highly polished and did not smudge when he touched it.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Humf...” he muttered.
Straightening up, he made his way to the “North” door. As he approached it, he had the feeling that something wasn’t right. With all the weirdness that was going on right now he was able to push, yet one more weird thing, to the back of his mind and started examining the door.
The door itself was plain enough, though well made, but it lacked a door handle. The wood looked well kept, almost new, and none of the iron bindings were showing any rust. The molding around the door was a different story, the scrollwork was beautifully detailed.
Starting at the bottom left, it looked like it told a story of a man, or woman, it was hard to tell from the robe the figure was wearing. The figure was making different gestures as columns of fire spewed forth from its outstretched hand as a red gem glowed brightly from the other hand.
As he followed the artwork around the molding the hooded figure remained the same, but the gestures changed. With each new gesture was a different element, eventually transitioning away from elements to waves of force and mental attacks. With each different gesture a different colored gem would light up, and at times, more than one would illuminate. As he stepped back, he saw the colors fade from the scrollwork.
“That is odd.” he said to himself as he stepped closer once again.
As he did, the colors returned to the scrollwork, and he realized that the color was only coming from what he was directly looking at. Everything on the peripheral was the dark wood color. He repeated the process of stepping back and forth a few more times until he figured out where the color was coming from. It was the multihued patches of light coming from the chandelier.
Every time he looked directly at a part of the scrollwork the light seemed to float over it at the same time, the colors settling where they should be. Making fire red, ice a translucent blue and so on.
Backing up, Timothy took one more look at the door then turned to one of the others, this time the one at the southwest and walked toward it. As he approached the door it looked identical to the northern one, but as he examined the molding, the scrollwork was different.
This time it depicted a large forge in the bottom left. As he continued up the molding, the next picture was of a man standing over and anvil about to strike a sword’s blade made of a ruby like stone. The series of markings showed him striking the blade over and over again until it gave off a brilliant red light from the fires enveloping it.
The man in the picture then moved to a breastplate, repeating the process. This looked like normal steel except it had two gems over the heart, a blue and a white. The last series was of a woman crafting some sort of bottle. This bottle looked like a decanter with a white gem on the top of the stopper. Once she finished it, she handed it to a man and as he drank it white whisps of air started moving around his body.
“What does this all mean?” Timothy asked the empty room.
Timothy turned to the door at the southeast and started walking toward it but stopped about halfway as he started to hear a low crackling noise. Searching for the source of the sound, he discovered a single small mote of ball lightning drifting down from the ceiling.
He changed course and went to intercept it. His curiosity getting the better of him, he was unable to resist the urge to touch it. It gave him a small shock of electricity, nothing more than a static shock that one may get from touching a doorknob. This intrigued him even more and he decided to touch it again, with the same result. After a few more tries, with the outcome unchanged, he decided to stop wasting time and go back to look at the door at the southeast.
As he crossed the room that feeling of something being wrong hit him again. Timothy spent a minute or two trying to figure out the reason for his unease, but eventually decided to push it off, there were other things in the room that needed investigating. He finished moving to the last door.
This time he did not pay much attention to the door itself and focused on the molding almost immediately. Once again starting in the bottom left. There was a woman dressed in what looked like a gi with cut off sleeves and wrappings around her wrists. On the wrapping there were various gems attached to the knuckles.
She was standing off against an opponent in dark robes that were almost featureless. Once the fight began the artwork came to life, every time she struck the opponent with a fist or a kick a different gem lit up. Whenever a red gem lit, her fist was wreathed in fire, if a brown gem lit up, they turned to stone. The last picture showed a blue and a white gem light up as her foot turned to ice.
The next series was a man in heavy armor facing off against a horde of indistinguishable beings. The sword he wielded looked like the sword from the last door. It was a red ruby color, wreathed in flame, as he cut through the enemies, he left them burning from the wounds the sword caused. The breastplate was the same as the previous door as well and every time an enemy struck his armor an explosion of cold erupted from the breastplate, leaving the perpetrator encased in an icy prison.
The last series was of a woman with a bow that had a purple gem at the top and a clear gem at the bottom. She knocked an arrow and fired it down range at another one of the indistinguishable figures. The arrow erupted from the bow and struck the other entity with such force that it exploded her enemy into various bits and pieces that scattered around the battlefield. She turned her gaze to another entity that was hiding behind a large rock. As she did, she pulled another arrow and fired it. This time the clear gem started to glow as the arrow went ethereal, passing straight through the boulder and into the enemy.
Timothy stepped back to the center of the room. “Okay, I get it,” pointing to the north, “Wizard,” pointing to the southwest, “Smith or craftsmen,” pointing to the southeast, “Fighter. Or at least warrior.”
He sat down and started to think but was quickly distracted by the crackling sound again. It was louder and as he looked around the room, he saw that there was now a dozen, or more, tiny motes of lightning floating around.
“What is going on?” he said to the empty room. “If this room fills up with those things, I don’t think it will be good for me. What am I going to do? Hmm…think Timothy, think!’”
After a few minutes and coming up with nothing he decided he needed more information and went to look at the paintings on the wall.
And what was wrong here other than the obvious? his mind reeling and then he figured it out.
“Where is my shadow?”
At first, he thought that maybe it was a trick of the light. He was standing under the chandelier, could his shadow be under his feet? He quickly dismissed that hypothesis, there were too many other light sources. There should be some sort of shadow. He moved around a bit to confirm what he was observing. No matter where he moved in the room, his shadow was missing.
“Okay, so, there are an ever-growing quantity of little balls of lightning, I have no shadow, there are three doors, there are markings on the floor and the walls have paintings on them. What does this all mean? I have no idea. Keep looking Tim.”
GINA! Gina called me Tim. She was the only one. He thought to himself with a sad smile.
Just yesterday he was thinking that he may never see her again. Then last night everything went so right and now that thought crept back into his head.
“Timothy!”, he shouted at himself, “Snap out of it. You will definitely never see her again if you don’t stay focused. Get your ass back on the task at hand!”
Timothy’s resolve returned as he looked at the paintings around the room. He was trying to decide where to start when he realized that it wasn’t a series of paintings but one large mural that encircled the room. He looked for the beginning and walked toward the wall to examine it more closely. The colored light had the same effect on the painting as it did on the scrollwork around the doors.
The painting began to the right of the northern door with a celestial map of the stars. As Timothy continued along the wall there were two stars that started to glow brighter.
On second thought. Not brighter, closer.
As the two stars came closer and closer Timothy could start to see some fuzzy details around their circumference.
“Maybe they are not stars.” He said to himself, “they are starting to look like comets.”
He moved closer to investigate and saw that not only was there a tail on each of the points of light, but long necks and what looked like wings. As they came into focus, he was sure of it, these were two dragons racing toward each other. When they collided there was a large explosion with a bright flash of light that knocked Timothy backwards, causing him to trip over his own feet and stumble to the floor.
As he gathered his senses and began picking himself up, he noticed that he was now at the southeast door, though he did not remember walking the distance.
“Did the wall move? Did I continue walking along the wall without noticing?”
Shaking his head to clear his thoughts his gaze fell on the right side of the southeast door. As it did, he moved toward the wall again, transfixed as the colors settled onto the painting. He failed to notice the motes of ball lightning exponentially increasing behind him, there must have been a few thousand at this point, all starting to move to a central location. Timothy continued along the wall.
After the explosion of light, the two dragons began a battle that shook the heavens. The one dragon was an icy blue color with swirls of white shifting over the scales. The other had brown scales covering its body, each scale tipped in an orange red, the color of flames.
As the two battled their claws and teeth would rend pieces off one another, leaving them float in the space around them. The blue dragon pushed off the brown one, unleashing a storm of comets from its wings as it flapped them in the other dragon’s direction. The comets pelted the brown dragon’s body, causing scales to go flying off in every direction. A few even struck one of the wings, snapping it off, leaving it to drift in space. The brown dragon howled in rage as it used its tail to grab the other and pull it close.
As the bodies collided once again the brown dragon used its front claws to grab the other dragon’s maul and pry it open. Then the brown dragon’s scales went red as it arced its head back before it breathed a stream of molten rock and fire down the throat of the other one.
The blue dragon wrapped its wings around the brown dragon and ice started to incase it. As the ice enveloped the brown dragon the stream of lava and fire trickled out and stopped as its eyes went wide before slowly closing as if going to sleep.
In the next moment the side of the blue dragon’s neck burst out as lava, fire, air and water forced their way out. The blue dragon’s eyes got heavy, and they closed as well. The two dragons, intertwined in ice and claws, began to spin slowly. The spin propelled by the geyser coming forth from the side of the blue dragon’s neck.
Wooden door? Timothy briefly thought to himself before realizing he was now at the southwest door. He stepped back. How did that happen? I wanted to figure out how I got from the first door to the second before I continued.
Even as he had these thoughts his eyes drifted to the other side of the southwest door.
The two dragons soon became indistinguishable from one another as the geyser faded out. By and large, the material that had been ejected settled into a large set of rings around the two of them as they turned almost sphere like.
Timothy realized that he was watching a planet form and soon it looked like a distant cousin of the planet Saturn. The various pieces of debris from the battle started to orbit this new Saturn and appeared to coalesce into many different moons. Timothy began counting them, and as he got to the thirteenth one, it smashed into the dismembered wing. Shattering it into five large pieces with millions, maybe billions, of fragments from the moon and wing, orbiting this destroyed moon. Then one of the larger fragments smashed into the sixteenth, and final, moon. Causing it to have a large lake of magma with rivers of lava draining from its edges. Making the whole thing look like an enraged bloodshot eye, dripping streams of blood from the corners.
Eventually the other fourteen moons settling into their own colors. As the planet cooled it started to look more like earth with the rings of Saturn.
The view from the surface must be incredible! Timothy wondered as he reached the end of the painting.
Just now starting to consider how loud it was in here, he covered his ears and turned around. The sight was beautiful and frightening at the same time. There must have been millions of those little motes of lightning, all streaming toward a central location. After about a minute they faded out leaving a large ball of energy just off center of the room.
BOOM!
An ungodly loud bang shook him to his core as the ball of energy turned into, what he could only think of as, a rip in spacetime. A figure appeared in the tear, eclipsing the light from behind it, and stepped through. As he did the rip closed and the noise vanished in an instant.
“Greetings, my name is Rift.”