Ttaa 22) Refugees.
It wasn’t a terrible idea. At least from their end.
The people of Relham were facing a terrible, unexpected fate. The twilight of their gods had come when the Child of Light and the Child of Darkness, the youngest, and only recently born children of their respective pantheons faced off to end the eternal war between the Court of Light, and the Court of Darkness. The two competing pantheons of gods had fought for control of their world since its creation.
The death of one of the children had long been promised as a means of banishing the gods of their respective pantheon from the World of the Shadow War, leaving it to be ruled by the victors from then on.
The Court of Darkness was a little sketchy but by no means exactly the bad guys, no more than the Court of Light was entirely the good guys.
But… The Children killed each other. At about the same time.
The people of Relham saw the fight between the Children in the sky as gigantic ghostly images. The Child of Light would have won since she skewered the Child of Darkness with her spear, right through his cold black heart, but the Child of Darkness clawed his way up the spear to drive his sword through her heart as well.
Both Courts, as promised, were driven from that world.
That intensely magical world. That world which needed gods just to keep it running.
The sun rose the next day, pale and white, but cold. Its light brought no warmth with it. Snow began to fall that night.
People began to freeze to death before the next dawn.
Most people capable of traveling between worlds had fled before that second night, but Relham had a school for wizards, and the Lord of Relham was married to its master's granddaughter.
He begged the Archmage to save his whole city, along with as many people from the surrounding countryside as he could contact, and help haul them inside the city's walls.
All well and good. He stepped up and tried to do right by his people and save as many lives as he could. Not knowing how many he was going to kill in the process.
The entire city was translocated, and that precise word, translocated matters. There was no gate, no portal, no teleportation. Translocated meant that the city of Relham transferred to someplace as large as itself, while that place in turn was transferred to Relham’s location on a dying world.
The place that it switched with was Irving, New Jersey. A good sized town in the Pine Barrens known for it going on a century old experimental botanical greenhouse. Population, Twenty eight thousand.
The first I knew of it was when my sister appeared in the living room with a swirl of light that reached right through the walls of the bathroom, and I heard her call my name in a low, emotionless voice.
I finished up my business and cracked the door open a bit so I could look out as I began to wash my hands. That’s when I saw the haunted look on her face as she stood there shivering. “Imo?”
Rinsing off quickly, I clenched my hands into fists to squeeze out some of the dampness and swiped my hands down the front of my pants as I crossed the room and pulled her in for a hug.
She was freezing cold and stiff at a board in my arms as I looked around the room for any sign of what the hell had happened. Her staff was hanging in the air behind her, lower to the ground than normal, and it had water beading on its surface.
“What happened? Imogene?”
She began to shake, and try to talk, but the tears, and sorry to mention, snot, were choking her voice.
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After a bit, I picked her up and carried her over to the couch to sit by me, and after a while, she began to explain.
She had felt the translocation from several states away, with something that big it was no wonder. After rushing over to see what the hell had happened, she saw all the roads leading to the edges of the ice covered walls of the city and guessed what had happened.
“I got over there, to where the town had gone in just a few minutes here time, but it was long enough there, too long… everyone had froze.”
I rubbed her shoulder for a moment, and she began to… well report. In a monotone emotionless voice. "There were signs of fires, big ones that I found people… their remains all around. It must have been days over there for them. I had to use a spell to breathe since even the air had begun to freeze…"
She cried herself out, and I carried her to her bed. When I tried to get up, her hand reached out to grab the strap of my Ready2Go bag. So I had to sit there and text her boss instead of calling.
[ Irving NJ on other world. Cold enough for air to freeze. No possibility of survivors. Imo is a wreck. Give her time ]
Special Agent Adams replied after a moment.
[ We need her.]
I gave her my answer. After rewording it four times to keep it simple and direct.
[ I’m armed ]
My sister got seven hours before she woke up and I fed her a hot meal. Bacon, eggs, toast with preserves, and baked beans, a combination she had acquired a taste for somewhere.
After she got out of the shower, she gave me a look. “I need you with me for this. There needs to be a witness. Someone not working for the people in power.”
I nodded. Then got dressed in some stuff that I won’t admit to having.
The state police had already surrounded Relmar and the New Jersey National Guard was setting up, with some helicopters from the air force ferrying in people as well.
Imogene showed off her NSA ID, then left to get her team, leaving me standing there with a black and mesh vest over my gray thrift store overcoat with the word “Reporter” in block letters on the reflective strip on the back.
The state cops looked me over. Then at each other, before the cop in charge approached me. “So. The little one who just popped in here with you and then popped out again works for the Government.”
I nodded. “Yep.”
She mused that over. “And she ain’t exactly human?”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Our mother was. Her shit of a Father wasn’t. But she spent most of an hour last night crying about what happened to the people from Irving before she exhausted herself enough to pass out. Is that human enough for you?”
The cop's eyes began to water. "They’re dead then?”
Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. It was cold enough over there that the air froze over. They would have quietly passed out well before…”
The woman sniffled. “I knew people… Thanks for telling me... something. I got people to talk to.”
That was the leak by the way. I take full responsibility for it. Waiting for someone to announce it from a podium after a few days wouldn’t have made it any better.
My sister returned with her team. All of them were heavily armed, and none of them questioned my presence.
Special Agent Adams had what looked like a real portable flag pole with a golden point on top and a professionally made white flag that she waved in front of us as we approached the gates to the city. A swirl of Imogene’s white colored magic circled around our ears and mouths.
Translation magic. A standard spell for a World Walker.
She had made a simple looking silver earring for me that does it all the time, a clip on since I refuse to get mine pierced.
We got into the city after a bit of a delay and were escorted past the elated but nervous people of the city.
The Archmage, Toberan, had died in the casting of the spell that saved his city but killed the people in the downtown area of Irving that was within the footprint of the Relham city walls. A trade off which had saved about thirty thousand people from their world at a cost of nineteen thousand of ours.
It would have been less, but it had been a school day.
With the Archmage dead we might never know why he chose to bring the city to Earth, or if he knew he would be sending other people to their death to save his own. Or even if that was something his spell required in order to work.
Toberan escaped justice, if there was any kind of justice for something on this scale, but his grandson in law, Baron Luric Relmar surrendered himself into Special Agent Adam’s custody. He was trying to take full responsibility for everything before begging for mercy for his people.
I had thought about hitting him, I don’t think anyone on Imogene’s team would have stopped me, but I could see the guilt, and the horror in his eyes. Even if I broke his jaw, suffering for what had been done in his name would have made him feel better.
He also renounced his title, passing it on to his eldest daughter, Laren, to represent the people of his city as they settled into their new life in the US.
It's not like we could send them back. I mean, Imo could, since the energy from the spell that brought them here was still active. But what would it accomplish, other than killing even more innocent people?
Right now the city is still surrounded and closed to casual visitors and the media under the excuse of a quarantine. But it's more to keep the families of those who had been in Irving from looking for payback.
It’s hard to even get the trucks with supplies in with all the protesters.
I didn’t witness that, instead, over the last few hours, our time, I’ve been busy.
Spending days in Irving, that world's time, preparing the dead, and witnessing.
There's a special trick to collecting someone's remains when they were that frozen. You had to be careful or… parts snapped off. Or worse, shattered.
Special charms gave the volunteers air to breathe, and protection from the cold, although with the atmosphere so thin heat didn't radiate away from you all that much.
Later, at my suggestion, authorized collectors would recover keepsakes, photos, computers, and even the remains of pets from people’s homes at the request of their owners or their families. It won’t matter too much how quickly time passed over there compared to here. Nothing is going to go bad in that cold.
I wanted to talk about it in my last group meeting, but it was too soon.
It’s something I could talk about, facts wise, but now something I know what to feel about. Not yet