“Now how did Donivan find this?” Mark asked, all of us glancing around at this beautifully elevated forest. Its own little paradise in the mountains. My earlier suspicion that it was not accessible from below was proven true. We were on a floating plateau, connected to the base of all three mountains, and up twenty or thirty meters from the actual forest floor.

“It seemed he did do some exploring,” I said.

“Or he took a bad fall.” Maria scoffed, still wiping off dirt from her face and hair. I would probably be dealing with this fiery mess for a few days. Water off a duck’s back… Water off a duck’s back…

We walked forward carefully, regardless of the fact Jessica had given us no indication of enemies. The lighting here was bad, not only did the mountains block out a portion of the sun, but the thick vegetation hadn’t been cleared in an age, hundreds of years even.

As we did our best to triangulate, nothing out of the ordinary popped out at us. There were trees, and more trees. There were no caves, no dens, or pits, or treacherous falls. Eventually though, something did appear.

Jessica called our attention to an old stone well, one that appeared hundreds of years old. The wooden roof that had covered its mechanical parts had been thoroughly destroyed. Instead, there was a rusted old handle attached to mostly rotted wood. The rope was nowhere to be seen, most likely fallen into the well long ago.

“Is this the portal?” Maria asked. This thought hadn’t occurred to me but we had spent the better part of an hour searching this small plot of land, with our speed and insight… we had covered almost all of it and had discovered nothing but this.

“Judging by the position…It must be,” I said, “I will check.” I turned and looked at Spikey #1, my zweihander-wielding skeleton general. With a nod, he put the zweihander on his back and leaped into the well without fear. He could be resummoned, after all.

The splash we expected to hear didn’t come, instead the silence made me more excited. Was there a portal resting at the bottom? I took a moment to share his experience, and after realizing that he was still falling, wiped a bit of cold sweat from my head. I shouldn’t tell them.

Eventually, after four or five long seconds, there was a splash ever so faint. I confirmed it myself, that my general was ok and now in the dark in a deep cavern below. He spotted the portal! A dim glowing portal in a cavity not far from where he landed. My excitement was tempered by one significant observation: it was different from the one we entered, not translucent and reflecting. Instead, it burned red and menacing.

I didn’t want to voice my reservation about the nature of the portal. We were going through the portal regardless of where it was, or what it looked like. That was the determination we had as a group, and nothing I told them now would change that.

“The portal is down there, so I’ll go first,” I offered. Sending Anna and Maria again would probably have me on thin ice for the foreseeable future, better to just get it over with now. Before anyone could offer any logical reason to not jump, I was already on the edge of the well wall. With a slight push, I slid off and disappeared below.

I was mentally prepared already. The growing darkness and the dimming of the stone around me would have had a much bigger effect if I hadn’t known what was coming. Even so, I felt like I was jumping into the maw of a great beast.

Suddenly the embrace of the stone well disappeared and the dim lighting along with it. Darkness surrounded me on all sides and even with my special eyes, it was so dark I could only just make out the grey of the cavern walls as I fell. A moment later I hit the water, and it was not as soft a landing as I had hoped.

Instead, it felt like slamming into concrete. The air in my lungs ejected itself immediately, and I desperately scraped for the surface before breaching it, filling my lungs with oxygen. My eyes quickly acclimated to the darkness, and eventually I could see the low hue of the portal in the distance. I swam quickly, doing my best to block out the creepy thoughts of what creatures might lurk in a dark abyss like this.

The next person didn’t jump for at least thirty seconds. I could see them falling this time, my eyes fully accustomed to this interior. My vision in pure darkness shifted to something black and white, each dark structure being just a different shade of grey. It gave me depth perception and allowed me to easily pick out structures in the dark.

A red silhouette appeared from the cavern roof, and I immediately recognized Jessica. Her body in my night vision was glowing red with heat, and then it quickly cooled to a low orange. The water temperature must be barely above freezing. “Over here!” I called out to her and she quickly swam to the shore and sat beside me.

“Kind of fun…” she confessed. It seemed she was of the thrill-seeking variety.

“YOU DARE THROW US IN?” I heard Maria’s voice echoing as she fell, and then a splash, Anna followed right behind her. These two were rowdy and growing rowdier. I wasn’t sure if it was something we needed to address as a group, or it would calm itself down once we returned to Earth.

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This dungeon had been somewhat of a getaway from the daily terrors. I hoped once we returned to that level of anxiety and danger, Anna and Maria would naturally lose this learned trait of theirs.

“Over here!” I yelled at them. Eventually, after dozens of chillingly cold minutes, we were all ashore in this massive underground cave. The portal glistened menacingly in front of us, like a fiery abyss ready to devour us.

“What are we waiting for?” Jessica asked, and then walked confidently through the portal, all of us swiftly following behind her.

I was the fourth one to pass through the portal, and despite my first time being relatively uneventful when arriving here, I couldn’t say the same thing about this time.

Your ability has—

“Aghh, what the hell?” I heard Richard groan as I spawned out of the portal. I was five or six feet in the air and plummeted like a rock on arrival. There wasn’t even a chance to put out my arms to cushion my fall as a sickening dizziness assaulted my senses.

I landed hard, and my vision swam as the ground and the sky reversed directions and swirled in front of my face. A mess of green and red and brown in my vision represented the contents of my stomach, the only blessing being that I had managed to expel the contents onto the ground and not all over myself.

The dizziness wouldn’t stop, and only after I closed my eyes and sensed my surroundings with my body did it start to dissipate. I could feel the cool earth below, the jagged vine that stabbed uncomfortably into my shoulder blade, the smell of moist earth and a fire somewhere smoldering in the distance. It grounded me, literally.

Jessica was the first to recover, and out of a cracked eye I watched her quickly assess our surroundings and stand up. My undead as well had spread out on instinct and taken up a defensive posture. It took a minute or two before I could open my eyes completely without fear of vomiting. There’s nothing left anyway.

“Did everyone make it out?” I looked around at my cohort, now unstably crawling off the ground and finding their bearings. The taste of my last meal and stomach acid unpleasantly masking my breath, and the smell of everyone else’s slowly permeated the area.

“I’m he—” Alan started and then caught the vomit in his throat. The sound alone had Glenn and Mark curled over again, and that started a chain reaction that sent Alan over the edge again. I nearly started hurling but quickly closed my eyes and concentrated.

The responses came slow after that, but after a dozen minutes, everyone was sitting up with open eyes. Our bearing was wobbly, and it was Jessica who continued the conversation. “Let’s move first.” She was pinching her nose as she spoke.

Priority number one was to get out of wherever we were. The stench of our weakness was now strong in the air, and it was anything but fresh. I looked around carefully as Jessica led us in a random direction, taking in whatever I could.

I didn’t know where we were currently, but the scenery reminded me of the gnoll forest. I assumed we were spit out of the dungeon where we went in, or at least nearby, considering the dungeon had been inside a massive pit filled with water. Dropping us out there might not have been very convenient.

Tall trees towered into the sky all around us. The canopy they created blotted out the sun and left the entire area dark and dreary. It felt as if an invisible miasma floated along the floor, and the daunting fog didn’t help to deter that picture forming in my head.

Even worse was the prickling feeling stinging the back of my neck. Sixth Sense left me feeling uneasy. It was the feeling I got when something bad was going to happen, and imminently at that. I had received a few messages when leaving the dungeon, but this prickling feeling was the reason I hadn’t allowed myself a moment of distraction to read over them.

Jessica had a stern look on her face as well. She would have told us if she had detected anything, but over the months of battle and training as a hunter, she had developed somewhat of a sense herself. I could see it in the way she carried herself. The taut muscles of her upper body were ready to explode in a moment. “I feel like I’m being watched,” she caught my looking at her, “but there’s nothing around.”

“I feel it too.” I grasped the back of my neck and felt the goosebumps forming over my skin. In fact, almost everyone had an uneasy feeling, and it wasn’t just the brain fog and fading dizziness; yet there was nothing around us.

“Doesn’t it look kind of red?” Maria pointed at a distant tree trunk. The sun illuminated the tree through gaps in the canopy. “Like the color of blood?” Her face grimaced.

“That… it’s just the sunset, surely,” Richard replied. “You’ve all never seen a red sun?” Even he didn’t sound sure of himself.

“Since when does the sun set before noon?” Maria snapped back. It also didn’t make sense for the setting sun to be so high in the sky at this time, it would be on the horizon and the red hue of its glow would never reach the trunk it highlighted.

Jessica carefully studied the canopy above while the two bickered. To me, and probably everyone but Jessica, the view of the sky above was too patchy and incongruent. The shadows of the branches and leaves from below meshed into one solid blur that made it hard to tell where the sky started and the shade of the canopy began.

Eventually though, Jessica spoke, “I don’t know why… but the sky is crimson.” No one knew what that meant, but I guessed based on how I felt right now it wasn’t a good thing. “Let’s… keep going.”

“We need to know what’s happened,” I said, “form up for a fight.” My undead spread into a proper formation as everyone pulled their weapons and assumed their positions in our best formation. We moved at a snail’s pace through the forest, and eventually found the break we needed.

We crested a hill and could see the remnants of a battle. In fact, it was the place where we had been surrounded and were forced to brute force our way through with Richard and my summoned undead acting as a battering ram.

Just past this point though was where the open field outside the western section of the gnoll realm was. I could see it through the maze of trees just half a mile in the distance, a break in the trees that led to an open field, and I knew that there we would get our view of the sky.

Nothing scary popped out at us as we walked. In fact, it was utterly uneventful and that made me even more uneasy. As we approached the end of the woodlands, the red hue became more ominous, more apparent.

Only when we were at that edge of the forest could we see the divide. Just a few feet out of the forest was a world bathed in crimson. The red hue of the sky stretched far and wide, infecting everything it touched with an ominous lacquer of blood.