Richie’s eyes fluttered open onto a white tile ceiling and a fan spinning from it at a lackadaisical pace. The place was lit by wall-mounted flickering torches, and a window was open to admit the cool breeze of the night outside. The air carried the omnipresent scent of sea salt, and in the distance Richie could hear the gentle sound of small waves. His body felt unbearably hot below his chest, and his grasping hands found the hem of a heavy blanket carefully laid over him. Richie groggily wiped the grit out of his eyes and sat up, rolling the blanket off of himself and looking around at his surroundings. He was in a minimalist but cozy space defined by a writing desk and chair in the opposite corner from his bed, a medicine chest and vanity mirror, and a few simple drapes positioned aside from the open windows.
“What the?” Richie asked.
Looking down at his body, he saw that he was shirtless, his otherwise bare torso covered only by heavy bandages. He felt his sides and realized that his ribs had mended.
“Well, it looks like someone’s finally awake!” a girl’s chipper voice announced the presence of someone else in the room with Richie.
Startled, Richie looked across the side of his bed to see the Brazilian woman, standing over him, sculpted abs on display as she wore only a yellow bikini and swimsuit bottom.
Richie stammered. “I, uh, you, but-”
“What’s up? Cat got your tongue?” the woman asked, plopping herself down to sit on the side of Richie’s bed.
Richie scrambled out the side and clattered to the floor, painfully thumping his tailbone and whacking the back of his head on a nightstand. He groaned and clutched at his pounding skull.
Leon stepped into the room from a door leading out to a deck and staircase leading down to the main deck of the city’s upper tier.
“Take it easy, whose slam do you think you took?” Leon asked.
Richie glared up at him. “You!”
“Me. If you want a rematch, it can wait till later, after you’ve recovered your strength. How are you feeling?” Leon asked him.
Richie looked at the blond man suspiciously, but glanced at his ribs in acknowledgement and begrudgingly answered “better.”
He stood on legs that felt like they had been in disuse for some time, and initially grabbed a bedpost to stabilize himself. “You guys took me to a hospital? My ribs are completely healed, how long have I been out?”
“Long enough.” Leon said, hanging up his red overcoat on a hook at the back of the door. “Please forgive the rough treatment, we’ve had to tighten security around this place.”
“Security?” Richie asked.
“That’s right.” the woman said, dangling her legs from the side of the bed like a kid. “You’re in Tide Town, and the people here are on edge lately. That’s why it was so quiet and still when you first showed up - everyone had locked up tight, hiding away in their houses to wait and see if you were dangerous.”
“Everyone? What is this place, some kind of shanty town on the outskirts of the sewer? What would people be afraid of out here?” Richie asked.
He looked up as Leon tossed him back his clothes.
“Sewer? Hate to break it to you, kid, but you’re not in Kansas anymore.” Leon said. “Tide Town is something of a place of respite for those who’ve lost their home worlds. This place is close to the bottomless darkness, leaving it at risk of invasion, but it also means that it’s within reach of those who survive the consumption of their homes. People drift here, collect here, like water in a basin.”
Richie rubbed his eyes out. “I must have hit my head harder than I thought.”
He frantically looked about the room, waiting and expecting the walls to melt away and the dream to crumble apart. He regarded the tan woman and realized he recognized her face.
“Hey, you’re Kokumo, the capoeira prodigy who took the MMA world by storm the last two years!” he realized in awe.
Kokumo pointed to herself. “I’ve won a few titles where you’re from?”
“Won a few titles? You’re undefeated!” Richie balked.
Kokumo looked at Leonto Leon with childlike glee.
“Now I know I’m dreaming. Or dead.” Richie scratched his head.
“Not yet, but you came pretty close. What gave you those injuries?” Leon asked.
“I got side-swiped by a big leprechaun of all things. Is that the kind of thing you meant by the darkness?” Richie asked.
Leon looked at Richie with an expression of unsure skepticism. “A leprechaun?”
Richie felt his face flush and his disposition become defensive. “Don’t judge me!”
Leon shook his head. “No. Our enemies are undefined, formless. All you need to understand is that several realms have been under siege for sometime now. The layers nearest the void are the most at risk, and many have already fallen into it, giving the shades a foothold in material reality. We’re holding the line here to try to push them back into nightmares where they came from - where they belong.”
“Leon and I wound up here after a megalomaniac with his fingers in their pie plunged our timeline into darkness. We’ve been looking for a way to restore it ever since.” Kokumo said, throwing a stir fry of prawns, bamboo shoots, and bell peppers together, grease sizzling and crackling in the pan over a cool blue gas-flame.
“Ok, I’ll play along with that premise. Can you even do that? Is it possible to recreate a world that’s been… eaten, I guess?” Richie struggled for the words to grasp the concept.
“Not by ordinary means.” Leon sighed, leaning against the wall with his arms folded. “And we haven’t had many chances to look into it anyways. Tide Town is a safety net for those drifting through darkness, but it also rests right on the surface - you’ll never see the sun rise here. The outcropping districts act like lures concentrating shade attention into a select few spots where they can be repelled. But we can’t hold the fort forever. The shades are relentless, and infinite in number. They will proliferate and keep coming back endlessly if nothing is done. We lack the power to end the scourge for now.”
Kokumo offered a plate to Richie, and he took it, eating quickly and ravenously.
“I never knew I was so creative.” Richie smiled. “This dream is really realistic and complex, and this food - it tastes good enough to be real!”
“Thanks.” Kokumo said.
Richie shoveled it all in as fast as he could, and then held out the plate for seconds. Kokumo gladly obliged, watching with beaming pride as her creation was scarfed down.
Leon looked at Kokumo out of the corner of one eye.
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“He’ll figure it out eventually.” Kokumo shrugged, amused.
“I thought this place seemed familiar.” Richie belched, then wiped the grease and stray grains of rice from his face. “My mind must have thrown San Francisco and Station Bay in a blender and painted it black. The tiki torches are a nice touch, and addadds some creative flair.”
Richie walked out to peer through the open window onto the sweeping seascape of the aquatic metropolis. Finding an unlatched folding door beside it, obscured by a curtain, he stepped out onto a varnished veranda looking out over a long strip of bay where a few personal rowboats were docked. He could see people now - sailors and seaport villagers mostly, mixed with a hodgepodge of people who looked like they could have been pulled variously from renaissance fairs and costume conventions - strolling about the docks, tending to their crafts, or pulling in hauls of netted fish from piers.
“Weird, I figured Cuppy would have been here.” Richie mused. “He’s really missing something neat.”
Leon approached Richie's back. “A friend of yours?”
Richie shrugged. “I guess. He was with me when the sewer… collapsed… oh shit.” he turned back to Leon and Kokumo. “What if we’re still unconscious down there, drowning as we speak? I’ve heard of shit like this, hell, I’ve been through it once already, where time slows down on the brink of death and a ton of shit flashes before your eyes. What am I doing? I can’t waste anymore time dicking around in this dream, I’ve got to wake up and make sure he’s ok!”
He tried pinching himself, eyes watering as he felt unexpected pain yet did not wake. He strode up to Leon. “Smack me, I need to wake up, like right now.”
Leon put a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, you’re not-”
Richie slapped a backhand across Leon's face. "Do it, bitch!"
Leon narrowed his eyes and nailed Richie in the jaw with a haymaker, knocking him flat on his back. Richie clutched at his face, groaning in pain.
Kokumo playfully kicked Leon in the ass. "Damn it, Leon! We just finished patching him up!"
Richie's eyes shot wide open there on the balcony deck, looking up at the stars and the bands of cosmic mist surrounding them, like the outer edge of a spiral galaxy.
"Oh dear god this is real, isn't it?" Richie gaped in surmounting horror.
"That's what I was trying to tell you, yes." Leon nodded.
"I've got to get back to Station Bay!" Richie frantically bolted for the door, only to be halted at the step.
Leon's rose whip lashed harmlessly but startlingly around Richie's waist and yanked him back.
"Hold it." Leon said. "Do you even know where you're going?"
Richie paused, looking down at the floor with his face screwed up in a look of concentration and critical thought.
“I can see the hamster wheel spinning.” Leon said.
“Uh, no, I have no idea how to get back where I came from. You’re sure I’m separated from my world by a whole-ass spacetime wall or whatever?” Richie asked.
Leon gestured to the vast, dark ocean whose shores were nowhere to be seen. “Be my guest if you want to try your luck sailing into the great unknown.”
Richie’s face fell, and he slumped against the wall, sliding into the corner. He brought his hands to his face, which grew paler. “This is insane.”
Kokumo playfully smacked the back of Leon’s head. “Where’d you leave your bedside manner, Leon?”
“With the obliterated fragments of my home and everything and everyone I cared about.” Leon said.
Sparta popped his head in from the porch to give Leon an offended grunt.
“Not you, of course.” Leon waved Sparta away.
Sparta gave Leon a lingering glare, but eventually padded away.
“Does… does he just roam around freely?” Richie asked.
“Where do you think I live that I can keep a lion cooped up 24/7? I was in a nomadic family before we got separated by the apocalypse.” Leon said.
“Noted.” Richie looked out the door after the sulking lion’s departure. “So there’s no way back?”
Leon shook his head. “I didn’t say that. People drift here, there’s a good chance they can go back. Most come one of two ways - dumb luck falling through the void like we did,”
Kokumo leaned against the wall beside Richie and patted a hand on the top of his head, ruffling his hair. “Or by the train station.”
Richie stared at them. “You’re fucking with me - a train station?”
“I told you, Tide Town is near the darkness. Aspects of reality are thinner here as a consequence. I can’t tell you where the tracks came from or why, but a handful of refugees arrived here and there by them, even as their worlds crumbled apart behind the trail.” Leon said.
Richie stood and cracked out his knuckles, then started stretching his quads. “Alright, point me in the right direction.”
“I wouldn’t suggest leaving just yet.” Leon said, regarding the moon hanging in the darkened sky, nearly full. “You chose a bad time to wake up for a long hike. The water levels aren’t the only thing tidal around here. The shades will be active soon.”
Richie frowned. “You keep talking about these shade things, but I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I told you, they’re formless spawn of the darkness.” Leon said.
“And I told you that none of that dribble made any sense!” Richie glared back.
Leon and Kokumo exchanged confused glances.
“If you didn’t get attacked by the shades,” Kokumo asked.
“- then how did you come up from beneath the waves?” Leon finished their shared question.
“What are you on about? You said it yourselves, didn’t you? That people drift here?” Richie asked.
Mutual confusion passed silently between the three of them for an uncomfortably long time.
“Everyone who didn’t come by the tracks came by luck, yes, but the choice to make that gamble was still their own. Both of us remember being plunged into a darkness deeper and colder than death, feeling our sense of selves and our awarenessawarenesses slip away and dissolve, until we seesaw a glimmer of light above us.” Leon said.
“Rough shit, would not recommend.” Kokumo nodded emphatically.
“Don’t you remember swimming to the surface?” Leon asked.
“No, I was just already there, I think.” Richie scratched his head, thinking. “Wait, if I’ve been here at least a couple weeks, does that mean Cuppy could be dead already and long gone by now?”
Kokumo gestured carefully to him to relax, a sympathetic smile on her face. “Easy, kid, not necessarily. The flow of time can vary wildly between-”
She looked up at the ceiling, ears ringing.
A low rumble came up between the floorboards, and built up to a tremendous crackle. A sound like a firework went off, whistling through the air as streaks of burning orange and gold burst out of the far end of the bay, engulfing docks and rigging in raging flame. An unfortunate sailboat in the way was split directly in half from beneath the keel by a column of fire plunging into the sky.
“The downtown area!” Kokumo cried out, then set her eyes in a look of determination. “Leon, I’m going on ahead, take care of the kid!”
Leon nodded, pulling his whip taut in his grip. “Go, I’ll catch up with you, just secure the area.”
Kokumo nodded, and sprinted out the door.
Leon looked back at Richie with alarmed eyes as he saw both their shadows begin to elongate and distort. Their limbs grew gangly and stretched far too thin, faces merging into shoulders and chest as an amorphous blob of inky blackness. Empty white eyes opened up where faces should have been, and a sound like an empty gourd rattling in the wind echoed through the room. Richie felt a chill go down his spine without knowing why.
“What’s going on?” he looked at Leon with a pleading expression despite himself.
“We’ll finish the conversation later.” Leon spread out his stance, wrapping the length of his whip around the knuckles of a gloved hand.
Then their shadows began to lift up off of the ground as though they were solid shapes, and stretched to the ceiling rafters, towering over Richie and Leon. Their limbs unfurled into grasping cat-like claws, and their legs bent into backward-facing knees like those of velociraptors. An impossibly thin waist and torso hunched over them, the bulge of brittle rib bones pushing out against the skin of their emaciated frames. A ridge of sickly spine pierced out their backs like recurved, razor-like spikes. Rudimentary mouths unzipped themselves with a sound like ripping velcro, spilling lulling tongues of half-evaporating black mist that hung past their chest, the misty tip split in half like the darting tongue of a snake. The mouth had no jaw to speak of. The lights began to dim, flicker, and die altogether, as their flames and illumination were literally drawn into the aura around the twin shadows.
“It’s not the eclipse yet!” Leon grunted. “What gives?”
Richie shrank back from the writhing shadow creatures. He felt just like he was looking into the empty hood of that mysterious wraith back at the apartment, his skin breaking out into a sheen of clammy cold sweat. His heart was pounding in his chest, and he felt a nauseated wave of vertigo wash over him, as though he were precariously balancing over the ledge of a great bottomless drop.
“What the… what the fuck are those?” Richie asked.
“Can you fight?” Leon spared a split-second glance at him.
“Is there an option B?” Richie gulped.
“Nope.” Leon said.
Richie’s dragons began to glow lightly and hiss.
Their timing was impeccable - the shades lunged like giant crouching black widows.