Chapter 48: A World Beyond

Vestra closed her eyes and raised her face to the dying embers of the day’s sun. She reveled in the warmth, though she didn’t particularly care for dusk or dawn. The reddening of the sky reminded her too much of the constant red hue of her home’s sky, openly reflected in the few short-lived breaks of the near-constant dark clouds. She prayed to her god every dusk and dawn that the reddening of the sky would not be permanent. So far, her god had answered her prayers.

As she felt the warmth slowly fade, she re-opened her eyes and lowered her face. She quietly contemplated the gate. It was still and empty, but she knew her waiting was not ended.

She was unseen, watching from a few trees back within the tree line. The gate stood silently just outside the center of the valley perhaps a hundred feet from the edge of the trees. Its black outer shell looked exactly like the one in her world, but no fractured crystalline structures flowed across its surface. It stood tall and quiet, with seemingly impossible green vines growing over its outer edges. It appeared to be a seemingly useless antique from a long-gone age.

She knew better. She’d lost track of the days, but she knew she’d walked through this gate perhaps a week or two before. She’d stumbled as she passed through, everything about her suddenly feeling wrong.

On her hands and knees, she had kept her eyes closed as her stomach churned. She’d thought, at first, she was going to lose the contents of her stomach, but as time passed her stomach grew quieter. The rest of her, however, had continued its assault on her senses.

She’d felt... confined ... in a way she couldn’t explain. It had felt – still felt, though she’d since grown used to the feeling – as if her skin could not hold her, as if she were swollen everywhere. When she had been much younger, she’d turned her ankle once when she took a fall the wrong way, and she remembered how it swelled. Her skin had felt tight around her ankle and the pain was as much from her muscles as from the confined skin. This felt similar, though her muscles didn’t feel any pain.

Vestra had opened her eyes and nearly screamed. Her first hint that she was somewhere else had been the grass. It was a rich hue of green, unlike the brownish-orange grass from her home. It was thick and lush, not sickly like the grass at home. She had turned her head, marveling at how it seemed to cover everything. Every square inch of the ground was filled with it. It stretched all the way to...

... Trees? It took her a few moments to believe what her eyes were telling her. They were unlike anything she’d ever seen. The trees’ trunks grew mostly straight from the ground, not gnarled and twisted like the trees of her home. The trunk branched upward, raising its arms up in joy instead of twisting and meandering in pain and hatred like the branches at home. And those arms were adorned with lush, green, wide leaves, as green as the grass below them. The branches of trees at home were adorned with scarce, brownish needles growing in clumps out of the wood.

She had screamed then, as her eyes rose above the trees.

Blue. The sky here was blue, not the fiery red of her home. Like home, the sky was adorned with clouds, but these were puffy and white not the black, thick things she’d known her entire life. These clouds were the exception, not the rule as the dark gray ones at home.

The sky was completely lit by a fiery white orb she couldn’t stand to look at for more than a moment. As her eyes adjusted, it burned them, but she could see it was a yellow white sun that illuminated everything, not cast long shadows like the indifferent red orb of her home hiding behind the thick, burdensome clouds. This world felt open and inviting, not the closed, oppressed feeling her home world presented.

The sun here was too bright. She had had to shield her eyes in order to see anything, otherwise her eyes would water, and she’d get headaches. It had taken her eyes ages to adjust to the point they could squint back and make out the circular edges of the gate behind her.

The gate. It was both different here and the same. It was composed of the same dark, obsidian rock but where it had been an eighty-foot arch on her world, it was maybe half again as tall in this one. It was also more rounded, here, more of an oval than a true arch. It stood above the land slightly instead of within it, mounted on a platform of the same dark obsidian.

Brown vines and green vines grew along its edge, twisting along the sides like a vituper but without the fangs and poisonous venom. There were intermittent splotches of other colors, whites and yellows primarily but with a few reds and blues thrown in sparingly, but they were few and far between. The vines reminded her of the trees of her home except the tree branches had only been marginally thicker. It gave the appearance of both growth and death, and she shuddered as she stared at it.

At first, the gate had been filled with shifting, fractured facets. As she watched, though, a large flash of intense light and heat had burst from the Gate, temporarily blinding her completely. She felt a push of air sweep over her. Her eyes burned and teared, and she pressed her fingertips into them, trying to rub them clear. After several minutes, when her eyes would once again function marginally in the bright sunlight, the Gate had appeared as it did now – empty and lifeless. It was inert, like the rocky sides of a tomb.

Her eyes still hadn’t fully adjusted. Even now, though they were getting better at handling the harsh sunlight, she constantly had to fight headaches. She’d taken to covering her eyes with a piece of cloth cut from the lower edges of her skirt. At first, she’d had to bind two cloths over her eyes to escape the bright sunlight. Every day, she’d taken the cloth from her eyes for longer and longer periods of time, squinting her tearing eyes until the headache became too much for her and she had to re-wrap the cloth. While she couldn’t go a full day without the comfort of the cloth around her eyes, she now only needed one of them and even then, only for a few hours when the sun was at its height.

Beyond the grass and trees and sky and sun and Gate, there were myriad other differences here. Game, for example, roamed free and was plentiful. In her world, only the animals managed by her people could be considered plentiful. Even then, though, the meat from the game was lean and tough. Here, she found strange animals with long ears, rodents with long bushy tails and even larger animals with long faces and almost wooden, thick branches attached to their head. The roasted meat, though, from each of them, while varying widely in taste and texture, was sweet and succulent.

She’d been wandering since, unable to find anything but game trails and those shifted in unfamiliar patterns. There was no stone road, no worn path. It was as if the place were completely deserted.

Still, she hadn’t gone far. She couldn’t go far. A large, sheer, black wall, nearly as shiny as glass and harder than anything she’d ever come across, towered sixty or more feet above her. It completely surrounded the gate, ranging from about a half of a mile to maybe a mile and a half distant. From the Gate itself, it had been hidden by the trees. The meadow of the Gate formed the top of a small hill, with the trees falling away from it.

She followed it, though, in the days that followed. She’d walked along its length, circling around trees and bushy shrubs growing near and against it. She desperately searched for a way out, but she had not found one. The wall was large and black and solid and completely unblemished by any means of egress.

She cried in frustration when she was unable to find a way out. She beat at the wall with her fists in that frustration, but the wall didn’t even notice. It remained unbroken, surrounding the gate completely.

As she walked it, she frequently heard a strange lapping sound from the other side, the sound echoing distantly over the top of the wall. It was a strange sound she couldn’t place, a sound as if someone or something was constantly slapping against the wall with a strange, viscous hand. It haunted her even as she wanted desperately to see it. To know it. She longed to find a way over the dark, forsaken wall just to see what was on the other side.

The wall filled her with hope. Hope that there was a larger, vibrant world beyond it. It filled her with hope she had thought lost on the morning of her birthday.

The trees grew along the wall’s edge, and she’d climbed one or two, but they never grew tall enough to get her to the top of that wall. She could see it, always seemingly within reaching distance, but she could never get all the way to the top. She saw that even at the top – or maybe especially at the top – it was sheer and perfect. It had no handholds and nothing she could find to grip. As the days passed, she worried she’d never escape the land beyond the gate.

She wouldn’t starve. There was plenty of small game, if it all looked strange. The small, furred rodents were her favorite. Their meat was sweet, probably from their apparent diet of nuts. She’d had a few of the types of lizards and they weren’t too bad. The furred, long-eared animals were a bit of a delicacy, since they were often too fast to catch. She’d made a sling and caught a few of the small rodents by hitting them with small stones, but the long-ears were difficult to hit.

Cooking the meat posed a problem. She made her camp as far from the gate as she could, abutting a portion of the sheer, black wall. She knew, however, it was still within a mile of the large vertical ring. There were times she swore to herself she could actually feel the Gate pulling her back. It beckoned her and seemed to wedge itself onto her awareness until she realized she could, without fail, turn to find its exact location no matter where she went.

Fire was a concern. She was constantly worried a fire might draw attention to herself from anyone travelling through the gate. She was careful, keeping the fire small and putting it out as soon as she was finished. The priests and guards seemed to only come through at night, so she only used fire during the day, but she fretted over every wisp of smoke the fire emitted. Just because they’d only seemed to come at night in the week since she’d come through the Gate, didn’t mean they wouldn’t start coming through during the day.

She wouldn’t die of thirst, either. While not plentiful, there were some small, freshwater springs scattered about the surface. The water tasted sweet and pure, unlike the bitter water from her world. It was also cold, a wondrous change from the water to which she was accustomed. The only water on her world was buried deep beneath the ground and it was warm at best but usually scalding hot when pulled from their wells.

There were some caves just outside of the village in which she had lived, and her mother had taken her into them one day when she was much younger. She had marveled at the huge bowl of stagnant water deep within that cave, steaming and popping as if being boiled. She remembered wondering what demons were under the hard rock bowl, pouring fire to boil the water.

It wasn’t just the water that was better here. As a matter of fact, everything about this world was better than the one she’d left. The sun beat down, but it wasn’t the sweltering, almost all-consuming heat of the large red sun in her world. Just as this sun was yellow and bright instead of red and dim, its heat was gentle instead of searing. The air was sweeter here and wasn’t filled with ash. Life flourished, as could be seen from the rich, green trees which were common throughout the island. Surely this was truly the vaunted Vylun, the great Eden, the promised land.

She could have lived here alone the length of her days and not wanted for more even once.

Except, she wasn’t alone. Not always.

Days or weeks ago – she had lost track of the passing of days – she had watched as a spark of light had suddenly appeared within the great Gate. In the times she had watched after that first time, she wondered at the seemingly random place for that spark occurring. It would sometime appear high within the gate, sometimes low, sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right. Always it would spread in all directions from wherever it had started, the light etching the familiar facets of the Gate until the entire Gate was filled. Then, there would be a slight glow obscuring everything ... and then the multi-colored facets would be there, moving slowly and seemingly randomly, the slight glow of the Gate brightening the area with slowly moving shadows.

The Gate seemed to come to life only randomly and only at dusk or later in the night. She’d been fascinated by it all those times. It seemed to call to her before it activated, maybe giving her one last desperate chance to return to her world.

She would not return. She could not return. Even a day in this world was worth a lifetime in the other.

She had never before been this bold, however. She’d never allowed herself to be this close. She’d never before wanted to be this close. In the depths of her mind was the fear that if she ventured too close, the Gate would drag her back. She’d escaped her world and she promised herself she wouldn’t be taken back. She would kill herself first.

Through the shifting facets, the priests had come and with them, the guard. They seemed to come from a great distance, beginning as dark specks and slowly getting larger until they walked out of the gem-like facets. She’d always watched them from what she felt was a safe distance, listening as their boots drummed out their march on the obsidian and getting quieter as they walked off the small platform. She’d watched them mass in ranks and then scatter, moving away from each other. The first few times, she’d immediately gone unseen, certain they’d seen her even from afar.

Thankfully, she’d been wrong each time.

She had not been the cause of the men scattering. Instead, she’d watched them, horrified, as they took off their armor and the hard, thick padding beneath their armor. Quickly but carefully, they’d piled their armor beside them, their hands trembling in their haste. Almost fascinated in horror, she’d watched as, once naked under the Vylun sky, they changed. They grew large, larger than a house, their skin bulging out until it sectioned and hardened, the skin changing color and turning to scales. Their faces lengthened into snouts. Great wings grew from their backs and large, insidious tails slithered from behind them. Their arms became large and muscular and their legs thick and stout. From their hands and toes grew large claws. From their maw grew thick, menacing, sharp teeth.

She knew the word for what they were. It had been whispered in the religious texts. The O’lak-residere. The Soul Warriors, their souls so large and strong they were able to take other shapes.

The term both terrified and yet fascinated her. That first time, watching the priests and their guards change, she marveled that they could grow so much larger and stronger. She wondered at how large their souls must be. How strong they must be in the sight of god. Her awe had not diminished in the half-dozen times she watched them afterward. It still held a large facet of fear, however.

The holy books were right. The Dagowyn were so much more than they had ever known.

The creatures bore no resemblance to the people they’d once been. There were similarities to each other – all had wings and claws and snouts full of pointed teeth which gleamed in the light of the setting sun. Yet they were both similar and yet different, the colors of their scales differentiating them. She saw red scales, green scales and black scales. She saw blue scales and yellow scales, gold and silver and copper scales.

The holy books were rife with texts of the two forms of the O’lak-residere – one holy, one mundane. Most considered the words in the Books of God to be allegorical. They considered them stories about their spirits, their holy spirits, fed by the more mundane forms of their body. There was far, far more to the stories, she learned.

At first, she’d marveled at the differences, but it didn’t take her long to understand. The color of their scales matched the color of their eyes. The Dagowyn clans system was more than a social construct. It was physical, denoting the color of the scales of the beast they’d become.

She’d tried to change, hoping to use the large, winged form to fly over the surrounding walls just as the others did. Her problem was she didn’t even know where to start. She tried standing a certain way because the priests and guards had lifted their arms and kept their legs wide at the very beginning of the transformation, but it didn’t seem to help. She tried closing her eyes and concentrating as they did, but nothing happened. Nothing she tried made any difference.

She’d slowly, evening after evening, moved closer. She edged her way near, trying desperately to hear if the Priests had given them commands or amulets or something. She needed to know how they did it, needed to know if she could do it as well. She needed to know so she could escape this island and finally be free. She needed to be fully free of the threat of being found and returned to a world she no longer wanted.

Terrified, taking the tiniest of steps, she drew even nearer as the guard spread out in the clearing. She began to avert her eyes as they disrobed, the loud sound of armor clattering making way for the softer sounds of the hard padding beneath, but she refused to allow herself to miss any of this. She felt a slight heat burn into her at the man’s naked form, but she didn’t find him particularly attractive. His eyes were green and, though there was some muscling to his arms, his fat stomach folded over in front of him. She did spend a moment looking at his tiny penis but quickly drew her eyes back to the man overall. She knew they were preparing to change, and she could not miss it. Her eyes wide and staring, she refused to blink for fear she’d miss the magic moment where the change began.

She was either lucky or her god was smiling down at her, she wasn’t sure which. The man in front of her was obviously new, and she watched as sweat broke on his brow and his face screwed up. The others around him were changing, their forms slowly growing larger, wings slowly adorning their backs. Only he remained, and she was almost amused when she heard him grunt as he strained.

Then the form beyond him suddenly began to grow smaller. The beginnings of the green scales slowly reversed and dwindled. The hints of the great holy beasts everyone else was becoming slowly diminished back into human form. The man he became stood for a moment, shaking his head and blinking his eyes. Then, he drew a deep breath and turned to the pudgy, struggling man. He sauntered over, shaking his head.