Alex awoke to chirping birds.
He squinted against the sudden onslaught of light. Flinging his arm over his face, he tried to chase away the evil glare, but it was for naught. The sun was there to stay, and it seemed he was not to return to his slumber. He groaned and blinked, as his eyes adapted to the bright light of a healthy star, so unlike the sickly red hue his own had taken on at the end of days; poisoned by the mad gods rampaging energies.
He wondered what had become of the world—of Mónvell, for that was its name—after the last god died. The new gods had surely taken their place upon the pantheon, and hopefully, they would rule with a fairer fist than the last. Not that it mattered to him anymore. Wherever the rift had taken him, it was far away from that reborn star, and not in a million years of trying would he be able to make a rift back. For such things were based on luck and good fortune, neither of which he possessed.
Neither could he be sure Emily had come to the same world as him. He didn’t need to look around to know she was not with him, for Bifrost slumbered within him, broken until it could be reunited with its brother. But he could still feel the unmistakable pull of fate upon his heart, urging him to find her. Yet he did not worry. If he could still feel it, she was at the very least alive, and from the strength of the pull—most certainly on the same star. They would find each other again, as they had so many times before. But he did not stress the details, and if he was honest with himself, he was just happy to be alive. He hadn’t had a contingency planned for a god going nuclear, which—looking back—he should have had. The rift was made in a moment of panic, and that he had arrived in one piece was more than one could have hoped for. Above him the leaves flowed like water as the wind whistled among the ancient trees.
Taking offense to a root poking him in the back, he sat up and looked around. His surroundings were as familiar as they were strange. He sat in a small glade upon a sea of moss, its brown-green surface covering rich dirt and stone alike, whilst its moist underbelly left a large damp spot on his torn cloak, making it look more black than brown. He reached out and pulled at a nearby bush. Its leaves reminded him of one he remembered from home—its leaves making a passable tea—but they were not identical, for the leaves he held in his hand had twenty-two blades, rather than twenty-one. He checked a couple more until he was sure his first assessment of his situation had been accurate. He had indeed traveled to a new and different world, separated from his own by countless miles of dark, empty space.
He ran his fingers through his ruffled hair. Since there was no going back, he would have to make the best of this new world he found himself in. He stood up and brushed the dirt and moss off the back of his cloak. Wondering what he should do first his eyes wandered. The leaf covered trees were a vivid green and the wind blew warm where it could find a way to the bottom of the forest. Small collections of brilliant flowers bloomed where the sun reached the floor, drinking in its light. He did not look too closely, but if he had, he would have found a myriad of small creeping and crawling things wherever he looked. The forest was teeming with life. Which made the sudden chill that crept up his back all the more suspicious.
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“The rift was only open for a moment or two,” he muttered to himself and dove into his source. “They couldn’t have gotten through so quickly.” He cast a quick spell upon himself, letting him see the hidden world of magic. His gaze searched the glade until he found what he was hoping he would not. He swore under his breath as he found the tear. A remnant of the rift he had created when escaping the old god’s last act of madness. A great black crack in the fabric of reality. It began but a couple of feet from where he had woken up and tore a path through the forest. Malice and hatred oozed out of the rift, and dark, incomprehensible magic flowed like a river. He dove again into his magic, deeper this time, and put his hands up against the start of the rift. A perfectly white tendril of magic reached out of his hand and into the darkness. His palms grew deathly cold, as if he was holding them against the coldest of ice. But he did not flinch; did not remove his hands. For if he did, the magic would be broken.
The tendril flickered, and he poured more magic into it, searching for the thread that connected the void to his reality. It didn’t take long for him to find it; after all, he wasn’t… hadn’t, he correct himself, been the greatest magician of Mónvell for naught. With another push of magic, he severed the thread and the tear snapped shut before him, and with a cascade of light reality repaired itself. He rubbed his hands together to warm them up, he had closed the tear and stopped anything from coming through. But the tear had been long, and there were a chance voidborn could have found their way through before he closed it. For the third time he dove into his source and forced the magic to do his bidding, and before his eyes a semi-transparent red line appeared. Fluttering—as if moved by the gentle breeze—it vanished into the forest, leading the way to anything that did not belong in this reality.
He set off following the line, pushing his way through the undergrowth and stepping over fallen trees. The line vanished as he followed it, its edge always one step ahead, and whenever he had to take a detour to get around a cluster of trees or a large rock the line moved to stay before him, guiding him forever forward. After almost half an hour of walking he spotted a road through the thickets, and with some clambering he left the difficult terrain behind and marveled at the packed dirt path. It was no paved road, and he would much rather have been riding a horse, but it was a lot better than the forest. But the well-traveled road gave him pause. For it meant people, or at least some sort of society, and if the voidborn found people before he found them. Well, let’s just say he didn’t want more corpses on his conscious.
Starting again, he set a high tempo for himself, forcing his already tired legs to move forward. It wouldn’t do for him to arrive, only to be too tired to fight, but if he arrived to late it might not matter either way. But he did not need hours, for barely a quarter hour later he heard the unmistakable sounds of battle. And when an otherworldly scream pierced the calm, he knew he had found his targets. Digging through his pockets he pulled out a coin. Copper, with the face of emperor Reginald imprinted upon it; a dead emperor of a lost world. Yet Alex could not help but freeze for a moment. Reginald had given him everything he had. If not for his kindness, Alex would have wasted away as the homeless son of a dead whore. Another scream—this time of a man in pain—snapped Alex out of his thoughts. He formed the sign for Gecit over the coin, assigning it as a beacon, and dropped it on the ground where he stood. The coin embedded itself in the soft mud, and as Alex hurried towards the sounds, he swore to himself—just as he had done so many times before—to pay the dead emperor’s kindness forward.