Chapter 01

Colors swirled and collapsed upon each other. Hot and cold wind blew across Hal’s face from different directions. Before his disoriented mind could discern up from down, the ground rose up and smacked into his face.

Luckily, the soft grass cushioned the fall. Hal wanted to lay there for a while longer. He wanted nothing more than to shut his eyes and will himself to wake up on his couch back in his studio apartment in Seattle.

This is just a bad dream, he told himself, I’ll wake up soon.

But the reality, the truth of the situation, did not allow for such wishful thinking. It kicked down his flimsy barriers of denial in the form of a snorting, snuffling animal bumping into his hip.

Hal opened his eyes and shouted in alarm at what he saw. A two-headed wild pig of some kind with a mohawk of spiny white hairs was investigating him.

Hands pressed to the grassy ground, Hal pushed himself up to his feet. He turned to keep the beast in his line of sight and backed away slowly. The strange creature regarded Hal curiously, two pairs of eyes watching him with too much intelligence for his taste.

A howling cry echoed somewhere to his left in the distance and the pig creature squealed in fright. By the time Hal looked back in the creature’s direction, it had kicked up a dusty trail and was in full retreat.

Okay, drugs then, Hal tried to reason. If this is real, then I’ve been drugged. People have had bad trips before, right? Maybe that last fare slipped something into my drink. They did insist on riding shotgun with me and my drink was uncovered. But why?

The howl sounded again. It had a discordant, ethereal quality that raised the hairs on the back of Hal’s neck. He found himself putting one foot in front of the other in the opposite direction, glad he had collapsed on his couch fully clothed. He had been too tired to even remove his shoes.

He was in some autumnal landscape. Brown sere grass crunched underfoot. Hills covered in a riot of golds, oranges, and reds filled his vision. Copses of tall trees, oaks maybe – though he doubted he could tell most tress apart – dotted the hilly countryside.

With no immediate destination in mind, Hal continued down the hill and into the sheltered valley. He climbed the next hill and felt a wave of relief when the howls sounded again but seemed farther away.

This second hill was taller than the one he had woken up on. As he pressed through the saplings that sprouted between the thick trunks of the trees, he spotted a distant village.

Not a town, nor a city, not even a suburb. A village. The kind you’d see on a quaint tour of Europe’s rural countryside.

Questions swirled in his addled mind. Everything still felt jumbled and his mouth felt cottony. 

If I’ve been drugged, then I’ve also been moved… but that makes no sense. There’s nowhere near Seattle that looks like this that I know of. It’s far too dry. Besides, there’d be a thousand hikers snapping selfies to show their followers how “outdoorsy” they are.

The only thing that reminded him of Seattle was the dreary sky. Dark storm clouds scudded across a gray, lifeless ceiling. What little sunlight shone through was muted and watery.

Pieces of recent memories flitted back to him in sharp-edged fragments. It felt like something he saw in a movie. Only, he knew without a doubt that it had been real. He knew, too, that this place was real.

His dreams always had that fuzzy quality to them. But this was too mundane. Too grounded. A chill wind knifed through his red flannel shirt as he ventured out from the relative quiet of the hilltop to descend to the village below.

While cold, the brisk wind revitalized him. He pulled out his cracked cellphone, unlocked it, and tried to pull up his GPS.

The screen glitched and flashed. When it came back, his Maps app was blank. Usually, if he was remotely near his apartment it would still show him the general area. 

There was nothing.

Hal cycled through several more apps, trying to see if anything worked. So long as it didn’t require an internet connection, it did. Photos worked, his smiling face appeared next to strangers and friends alike. More strangers than friends, he had to admit.

As he swiped through his pictures, he came across one that pulled him up short. It was a picture of the Assassin… in a treehouse. And he wasn’t alone. The tall man squatted on a small plastic stool and sipped from a tiny teacup, one pinky out. Across from him, looking perfectly pleased, was the most adorable little otter also drinking from a teacup.

Hal blinked and swiped to the next photo. There they were again. He swiped again and again. Each image was like a frame in a flipbook. As he swiped, they put down their cups. Poured more hot tea and continued sipping.

After the twentieth photo, the otter seemed to notice the camera. It leaped toward it and covered the lens with a paw. The next images were black.

And then his normal photos resumed. Hal tried to swipe back to the dozens of photos that should not have been on his phone. But when he did… there was no trace of them.

It was hard connecting with people after he dropped out of college. But his drunk late-night fares were always eager to take pictures and talk about all their problems. With promises of friendship and plans to hang out that always evaporated with the morning light.

He shoved the dour thoughts away and focused on his predicament.

I’m somewhere unfamiliar. No cell reception. No food or water. The air smells weird, everything seems off about this place and there’s a village ahead. Oh, and yeah I saw some crazy fucking guy murder some baby-faced guy who looked like he was cosplaying as a Greek god.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and forced himself to take a deep breath. The village ahead was nestled between two of the larger hills in the distance. As he made his descent, he could keep it in sight as long as he took a slanting path to his left.

Try as he might, Hal was having trouble remembering precisely what happened in that large room. He had smacked into the hard marble floor of the place in much the same way as he arrived here.

But the rest of it was all jumbled with fear, pain, and haze. 

The image of the Assassin stood out clear in his mind, though. The jean jacket, red hoodie, red sneakers, and fingerless gloves stood out crystal clear. But for the life of him, he could not remember the face. There were only glowing eyes, that strangely reminded him of old TV scanlines, under that hood.

Hal had the strangest feeling like the Assassin wanted to help him. Though he couldn’t imagine how. It was another mystery he hoped to solve in the town below.

As the town grew closer, more of the strange meeting began to unravel. The Assassin used Babyface’s dead arm to brand him. He clearly remembered the savage pain, though his left forearm felt perfectly fine now.

Pulling his sleeve up, Hal’s breath hitched in his throat. He had a glowing tattoo. Not just any tattoo either, it was astonishingly intricate. He was so consumed with the mark on his otherwise unblemished skin that he nearly ran right into a boulder as big as a horse.

There was no redness. No tenderness. 

When he poked the skin, it felt as normal as any other part of his body. The only difference was the glowing golden ink that caught the pale light of the midday sun and reflected it in a gilded shimmer.

The tattoo was a series of triangles with intricately inscribed lines within each shape. It resembled a twenty-sided die, a d20. Except it was flattened and spread out. 

Without the strangeness of the Assassin and Babyface, he might have been able to believe that he got drunk. And so inebriated, got a tattoo of the triforce he always secretly wanted but never had the courage to follow through on.

The six extra right-angle triangles surrounding the four in the center refuted that idea. Not to mention the triforce had an empty spot in the center. Not another triangle filled with curious marks.

Pushing his sleeve back down, Hal pressed on toward the village hoping to find answers there.

Hours had passed since he first checked his phone for a signal. He was fooled by the initial distance to the village. While it couldn’t have been more than a few miles away, those miles were over tremendously hilly terrain. Where a single mile of walking might only cover a quarter of that toward his destination.

After descending the final hill, the village spread out ahead of him. A low stone wall served as its border. Not even tall enough to stop somebody from stepping over it.

People milled about in strange clothes that made Hal wonder if he had somehow stumbled upon the ren fair. Men walked about with swords belted to their hips and in similarly strange clothes.

But rather than an air of frivolity and fun, everybody looked dirty, angry, and eager to be about on their business.

So it came as a welcome surprise to Hal, checking to make sure there wasn’t at least a Wi-Fi signal, when a broad-smiling man motioned him over. The man stood between two leaning buildings – more like rough shacks – away from the main dirty road thoroughfare. 

Once he got close enough that Hal didn’t need to shout, he held up his phone and pointed to it. “No signal around here, huh?”

It was a common enough ice breaker and relatively benign. So his shock was complete when the ruddy-skinned man – still smiling – reached out and grabbed his wrist. Hal was jerked off his feet and with superhuman strength, the man flipped Hal over and dragged him deeper into the darkness.

Stunned and dazed, Hal fought for breath that wouldn’t come. He wheezed, feeling hands darting all around him, turning out pockets and rolling him over until he was face-down in the dirt.

By the time Hal gathered his wits enough to understand he was just mugged, the man was already gone. The whole affair couldn’t have been more than ten seconds. Not that he could check. His watch and his phone were gone. Along with whatever else he had in his pockets.

Groggy and still reeling from what happened, Hal got to his feet with the aid of the nearby splintery wall. People walked by, a few glanced his way but were quick to mind their own business. Did nobody care he was just mugged?

A fire lit in his belly and bruised as he was, he rushed out of the shadows of the two buildings and onto the dirt road in pursuit of his mugger. It took him seconds to realize he wouldn’t find him with all the foot traffic.

Still, Hal kept up the search for several fruitless minutes. He had a hard time remembering what the guy looked like apart from his face. He would never forget the broken capillaries on his bulbous nose nor the man’s ruddy complexion that contrasted with his bizarre yellow eyes.

With no money, no ID, and no means of getting home, his only hope rested with a police officer or a sheriff of some kind. If this was a ren fair, they would have one, wouldn’t they?

In the back of his mind, he knew something was wrong but he refused to admit it. But there were too many crazy things that had happened to him to refute. And so, like the rest of the well-to-do Williams family, he blocked it out and shoved it into a dark corner of his mind.

Once he was safe, alone, and had plenty to drink, then he could try to face it. But not until then. That was the Williams way, after all. Provided he didn’t attend any family gatherings in the interim, it would be fine.

A tall, broad-shouldered man with a mop of greasy black hair stood watching the crowd of people go about their business. A guard, he guessed judging by the stained dark-blue uniform he wore. 

This part of the village looked better than the rest. With dirty, pitted cobbles that shifted underfoot, and buildings with signs on them, it was a definite step up from where he had been mugged.

Which wasn’t saying much.

Somebody had changed the lettering to some archaic font, to the point he couldn’t even read it. But the images that were carved and painted alongside the words served well enough. There was a tavern, an inn, some kind of general store he guessed to be the gift shop, and another shop he couldn’t identify.

Hal approached the guard. He wore a deep-blue tunic, its tarnished brass buttons had clearly seen better days. The sword he had belted on his hip looked old and dirty with several deep nicks.

The man’s bright gray eyes caught Hal and stayed on him as he approached. No smile from this man, no form of greeting. Hal cleared his dry throat, remembering suddenly that he had been walking for a couple of hours without food or water.

Hiking a thumb back the way he came, Hal said, “I was just mugged over there! He stole my phone and my wallet.” Hal described what he could remember of the man.

The man looked down his long, many-broken nose and squinted at Hal. He spoke in a strange dialect he never heard of. It sounded like a cross between French and Arabic.

Hal shook his head and spread his arms out wide, trying to mime that he didn’t understand him. The guard reacted to the display with immediate prejudice.

Before Hal even noticed the movement, the guard grabbed his left arm and squeezed painfully hard on his wrist as if feeling for a hidden dagger. Confusion passed the man’s face. He gave a casual yank on Hal’s left sleeve, the hearty flannel ripped as easily as tissue paper.

And out from that rip came a faint golden glow.

The guard’s gray eyes were dazzled by the display. He gingerly parted Hal’s torn sleeve to view the golden tattoo in full. His eyes went wide and he began to gibber incoherently. Though everything was incoherent to Hal, this felt different. The man’s voice was pitched high in abject terror. 

A dark stain spread across the guard’s pants. His lips flapped uselessly trying to form words but only a stream of babble came out. Hal was frozen by the display, unsure how to take the sudden turn.

Their eyes met. Hal’s dark brown to the man’s light gray. The man shook and stepped back, his hands flew from Hal as if suddenly burned. He turned and fled, wailing and laughing in turn.

Confused, tired, and afraid, Hal hurried away as fast as he could.

At first, he walked. But the many stares and pointing fingers of those that had witnessed the strange display followed him and he wanted to be gone from this horrible place. So he jogged, and shortly put the scene and the growing crowd behind him.

Fear pushed him on. Hal continued to jog, wheezing the whole way, as he broke into the low foothills with thick copses of dark trees. He only stopped once he had crested the second hill.

He leaned tiredly against the bark and tried in vain to catch his breath.

It didn’t surprise him as he looked down toward the village he had just fled from and spotted tiny flickering torchlight heading his way in the darkening afternoon. 

A storm rolled in soon after Hal began his continued flight into the wooded foothills of this horrible place. With no idea where he was and no help forthcoming, Hal was forced to rely on his survival skills.

Of which he had none.

He didn’t know which plant to eat. Which plant would kill him, and he suspected that many of the plants were unknown to even the most esteemed botanist.

The rain drove him on, pushed at his back and soaked his clothes. His boots were the only thing that remained dry. He had bought into the whole hipster trend when he moved to Seattle and the pair of expensive hiking boots had kept his feet dry this entire time.

Every other part of him, however, was soaked to the bone.

Despite the dreariness of the rainstorm, it seemed to have a stronger effect on the villagers that had decided to chase him. They never got close enough to see more than a fleeting water-logged glimpse of their quarry, and with the rain dampening their torches they eventually gave up.

Hal kept going regardless.

The trees became larger, the land more unruly, but no longer hilly. He thought he heard the sound of running water but through the wind, rain, and darkness he couldn’t locate it.

He cupped his hands in a feeble attempt at catching the rain to quench his cracked lips and parched throat. His gait became leaden and clumsy. The uneven ground tripped him more often than not.

Eventually, fatigue and fear claimed their due. Hal nearly collapsed when he finally found a reasonably dry section of underbrush beneath the sheltering roots of a large tree he could curl up beneath.

Sleep fell upon him in an instant. His dreams were filled with more running. This time from terrible beasts. Monsters that reached out and wanted nothing more than to devour him whole. 

When he awoke, the rain had slowed to a drizzle and in the tiny hollow he had found, he was almost warm. As consciousness returned, he nearly screamed at the dozens of insects that were crawling all over him.

Hal had not slept in a warm comfortable place. But rather a nasty, dirty hollow with a roof of roots and an oozy smell he couldn’t clear from his nostrils.

Fear lent him strength and Hal quickly got to his feet, brushing and smacking at his arms and legs to rid himself of the crawling things. He shivered, more from the bugs than the cold, and immediately set off again. He hoped he was going in the same direction he was traveling the night before.

It took him some time to find his bearings. How long, he couldn’t tell. Not anymore. The overcast, drizzly sky gave him no clues as to the sun’s position. But he did find the direction he was walking last night and, more importantly, he found a river.

Whether it was the same one he had heard on and off throughout the evening, he couldn’t be sure. And he didn’t care.

The river leaned down into a trough and trickled over a bed of bright river stones every color of the rainbow. It was barely five yards wide and shallow enough that he could wade through it up to his hips if he so chose.

Hal dunked his head into the cold waters. Refreshed, he cupped his hands and drank his fill. For once, he felt a measure of safety. There were no ominous noises, no beasts to hunt him, no monsters like his dreams. And no insane people chasing him.

The guard had, quite literally, lost his damn mind when he saw the mark on Hal’s arm. But it meant nothing to Hal. And with his sleeve ripped, it wasn’t going to be easy to hide it if he meant to venture into another village.

Which he knew he needed to do if only to find some dry clothes and food. He wasn’t any good at foraging and the gnawing pit in his middle demanded he eat something.

Hal smeared a handful of river mud over his mark. It was thick enough to block out the glowing light and he was filthy enough that it no longer looked out of place.

It was pitiful protection against prying eyes. He needed to find a village to get some food and warm clothes somehow. But if these people were as backwaters as he suspected, they’d have their clothes drying out on a line.

And while he was trading his dirty, soggy clothes for dry ones, maybe there’d be a pie on the windowsill.

Yeah, right, he thought with a snort, rising to his feet. That’s about as likely as finding a door back to my apartment.

If he had to survive in the wilds, he would be dead. If not by some random animal, then by eating something poisonous. 

And so, with a belly full of fresh water, Hal continued on. His stomach wasn’t fooled though, and soon began to grumble and groan loudly for something substantial.

Halfway through that day, Hal came upon another village. This one smaller, more of a farming community it looked like to his untrained eyes. Large fields in squarish patches ringed this side of the little village but he saw no crops. Only strange blocky impressions in the ground he could see a mile or more away.

This village, like the one before it, was tucked away between sheltering hills. But the land between them was relatively flat and the forest butted up against several homes. Many of which, he saw through the gaps in the trees, did indeed have clotheslines full of garments.

He had no way of knowing if the villagers here would be hostile. And after the last two interactions, he didn’t care. He no longer labored under the illusion that this was some sort of renaissance fair gone wrong.

Briefly, he entertained the notion that he was drugged and dropped somewhere in Europe. But that made about as much sense as the reality he tried to shy away from. That he was somewhere else. Somehow, someway, he was in a different land.

What little instincts he possessed screamed at him that this was distinctly other. There were too many idiosyncrasies. Too many minor differences that added up to create an alien world that only looked like home on the surface.

He could no longer deny that he was far from home. No matter how much he wanted to.

Not wanting to risk it, Hal waited until the light began to fade into dusk. While he waited, he skirted the edge of the forest to the closest homes. They were more rough timber one-room shacks than actual houses.

It was less than ten yards to the nearest clothesline. Flapping in the faint breeze he saw a dark cloak, some white medieval shirts, and dark pants that looked worse off than his jeans. 

The hills on either side of the small village cloaked the wooden shacks in gloom well before the sun fully set.

Just enough light for Hal to see by. And hopefully, enough to grab some clothes and maybe some food.