Hours later, the morning sun rose from its slumber to find Blake in the exact same spot where he’d first sat down the night before.  He hadn’t slept a wink, but he hadn’t been exactly alert, either.  It was more like his brain had become stuck, unable to process a coherent thought as he stared up at the alien sky in disbelief.  Blake was still largely convinced that this was some weird dissociative breakdown.  Even now, as the warmth of the light slowly coaxed him back to reality, none of this felt real.

Unwinding and pushing himself to his feet, Blake took a moment to stretch his body, which had stiffened up during the night.  Placing his hands on the small of his spine, he leaned back and let out a groan as several parts of his body popped in quick succession.  His hands moved south to scratch his ample posterior, only to pause as they found something else instead.  Instead of an abundance of flabby adipose tissue, Blake’s fingers encountered firm, smooth muscle.

Well, that sure wasn’t right.

For the first time since his arrival, Blake had both the illumination and soundness of mind to inspect his body.  What he found shocked him, perhaps more than everything else combined.  He was ripped.  Buff.  Beefy.  Shredded.  Jacked.

Gone was his sagging gut that stuck out from his abdomen like an overhang over a front porch, now replaced by the sort of washboard abs that he only saw in supermarket tabloids and late-night exercise equipment commercials.  Gone, too, was his considerable posterior, the nemesis of inseams everywhere, swapped out for a highly-developed gluteus maximus that looked like it could handle a thousand squats without complaint.  His corpulent thighs, his flabby arms, his double chin... all gone, overwritten by powerful-looking muscle and tight skin.

Now he knew this wasn’t real.  Being thrown into another world he could learn to accept, but suddenly acquiring a body that would make Hollywood action stars weep with envy?  That was a step too far.  A large step.

A glint of light from below the horizon caught his eye.  Blake looked over to find the sun reflected in a decently large puddle about forty feet down the hill upon which he stood.  Carefully, he made his way down.  The short journey proved to be more troublesome than expected; his shorts, fitted for somebody with a far girthier torso than the one he currently possessed, kept threatening to fall off, while at the same time his bare feet seemed to constantly find every pointed pebble they could as he went.  Tightening his belt to the absolute last notch helped—he’d tightened it reflexively the night before but hadn’t been in the right state of mind to process what that meant—but there was little Blake could do about the lack of footwear.  It felt like stepping on legos left and right, but luckily, he avoided cutting his soles.

The man looking back from the water resembled Blake for the most part.  They shared the same basic features: a round face with piercing green eyes, a long, narrow nose, and short dirty-blond hair that was, despite his best efforts, starting to recede.  Still, something was off.  For several moments, he stared at the face, trying to figure out what felt so wrong.  Yes, the pudginess was no more, but that simply meant that he resembled the Blake Myers of his high school days.

Suddenly, he had it.  His glasses were missing!  But... why hadn’t he noticed?  Rubbing his eyes in disbelief, he looked at his surroundings again.  To his astonishment, he realized that his nearsightedness, brought on by decades of staring at computer screens late into the night, was no more.

To say that this was all becoming too much for him to handle would be an understatement.  Blake had far too many questions and far too few answers.  Perhaps, he decided, it would behoove him to remedy that imbalance.  His gaze swept up the rocky incline to the still-open entrance to the bunker or installation or whatever it was.  If there were any answers to find, they would be found in there, not out here.

Just to be sure, Blake quickly scanned the land outside again, finding only rocky, shrub-covered hills that reminded him of the climate of the Mediterranean coast.  The only major difference was the foliage’s colors; instead of the green and brown he was used to, he could see a veritable rainbow of hues, from dark blues to bright reds.  Some of those came from flowers, but most were the leaves of the various bushes and occasional slight tree.  Unfortunately, a kaleidoscope of color was all he saw; despite his hopes, Blake could not find a single sign of intelligent life no matter where he looked.

Grumbling his way back up the hill, Blake once again wondered if any of this was more than a delusion of a sick mind.  The pain of the stones poking at his soft feet sure felt real enough.  Something also had to be said for the length of time the breakdown had lasted so far.  If time flowed at the same speed in reality as it did in this potential dream state, then that meant he’d been lying face-down on his dirty bathroom floor for so far going on half a day.  Could his mind even sustain such a lucid experience for that long without him blacking out?

The opening looked far different in the light than it had the night before when he’d been stumbling through the gloom in a half-daze.  What had seemed alien then now appeared almost mundane.  The smooth walls of the small entrance chamber, which he’d thought to be carved out from within the rock itself, were actually some sort of exceptionally smooth concrete.  The glowing panel was just that: a door panel.  What he’d thought to be glowing crystals embedded in the ceiling were... well, those were still glowing crystals in the ceiling.

As Blake slowly descended the staircase, he pondered just what sort of beings would create this place.  Was it really just humans?  Despite the odds, he found himself slowly becoming more and more certain that humanity was responsible.  Everything just fit too well.  The stairs were the proper size for him to step down, the hallways and doorways the proper height and width.  If it wasn’t humanity, then it had to be another alien humanoid species with the same dimensions and design sensibilities, and he’d always found that unlikely.  Just because all the other intelligent species in Star Trek were conveniently humanoid didn’t mean that was how it worked.

Reaching the bottom of the stairwell, Blake headed back along the single hallway.  To his surprise, he found that he’d walked by several side rooms in the dark the night before, but given how he’d managed to not notice his new body either, he wasn’t that shocked.  It only served to drive home how out of it he’d been at the time.

Glancing into the rooms as he passed, he found himself unable to make out much from outside.  The uses of the rooms were unclear, with machines he didn’t recognize gleaming in the dim light of the crystals above.  Blake did notice several indentations in the ceiling, suggesting that some of the crystals had been taken or fallen out.  It explained the low illumination, at least.

Blake didn’t bother to spend any real time with the side rooms because the main chamber beckoned to him from the end of the hall.  That would be where the answers hid, he thought.  He could feel it.

The main chamber looked much as he remembered it, though now, with a clearer head, he could better make out the general design flow of the assembled devices.  Cables thicker than his newly beefed-up bicep ran from machine to machine in both of the rows.  Following them, he could easily see how the connections ran along the rows, each machine connected to the next one serially.  Cables for each row ran along the outside of the platform upon which he’d first appeared, up the back wall, and into a pair of massive metal spikes in the ceiling that jutted down at a forty-five degree angle towards the center of the large slab upon which he’d first arrived.

Staring up at the two implements pointing down at the platform, Blake studied their form.  The first thing to cross his mind was just how “mad science-y” they appeared.  Every foot or so, small rods split from the poles like branches reaching out from a tree trunk, their points capped by seemingly random geometric shapes.  The myriad branches combined to make the poles look like the world’s most over-the-top cross between a television antenna and a weather vane.  Both poles terminated in a sort of trident, with three pointed, spiky ends of varying length threatening to stab Blake in the face.  The center prongs of each trident were the longest and came the closest to poking his eye out.

As complex as the total assembly seemed at first glance, the actual setup struck Blake as almost amusingly simple.  Power of some sort flowed through the banks of machines, along the cables, and into these rods, which then grabbed unsuspecting robotics engineers from the comfort of their toilets and dragged them kicking and screaming—mostly screaming—into this room.

Of course, that was all just the general overview.  The actual details were surely immensely complex.  Ripping holes in the fabric of reality could never be so simple.  Blake couldn’t tell how the power was generated, or how the devices were regulated, or any of the myriad other things one needed to figure out to turn any broad concept into a workable model, but already he felt some small amount of satisfaction.

There wasn’t much more he could say about the machines without taking them apart, something he was loath to do in case this all turned out to be real and he needed them to get home.  From the outside, they looked like largely featureless lumps of molded metal with the occasional knob or lever.  The only thing that stood out on each of them was the large hunk of quartz-like crystal that sat atop each, with two nodes of metal on opposite sides touching the ends of each chunk.

What, exactly were these for?  Idly, Blake reached out and touched one... and the world lit up.

It was like a trillion miniature suns, each smaller than a speck of dust, all burst forth with light from everywhere around him.  He reeled back in shock and surprise at the sudden, blinding brightness, but everything seemed to be moving in slow motion.  Finally, after what felt like an interminable wait, his fingers lost contact with the crystal, and he spilled backward and fell onto his rear.

Blake’s body trembled as adrenaline coursed through his veins.  He cast his gaze around the room, only to find the same, dimly lit area as before.  Everything seemed entirely unchanged.

So, what the fuck had just happened?

Slowly, his breath steadied and his heart rate lowered.  He got back to his feet and looked around again.  Still nothing.

It had all started when he’d touched the crystal, but what, exactly, was “it” that had started?  Blake looked over his new body and found it the same as before.  It was hard to tell what “normal” felt like when he’d only been in this new body for less than a day, but certainly, nothing felt wrong.

There was only one way to get an answer, it seemed: he would have to touch the crystal again.  For a moment, he weighed whether it was worth possibly risking his health for the chance at knowledge, knowledge that might not be even the slightest bit useful to him in the end.  He decided that it was.  Stuck in an unknown reality, he didn’t even know enough to know what knowledge was useful.  He could only do what he could to gather as much data as he could and figure it all out later.  Besides, he hadn’t actually been hurt, only scared; the only part of him to feel any pain had been his butt when he’d landed on it.

Steeling himself, Blake reached out again, this time laying his entire palm upon the top of the nearest crystal.  Once more, the world around him burst into light, but he was ready for it this time.  Instead of jerking back, he maintained contact and focused on the sea of lights before him.

Quickly, he realized that what he’d first thought to be a sea of lights all around, floating through the air, was actually nothing of the sort.  The myriad points were, in fact, confined to the machinery in front of him.  The crystal itself blazed brightly with the light of a billion specks, the lights within swirling idly as they slowly moved from the left end of the crystal to the right.  He watched, enthralled, as the lights flowed slowly from the crystal, through the right-side contact, and into the machine below.

There, the stream split into countless little rivulets that went every which way, many intersecting with each other.  The intersecting streams would constantly shift, the flow of some streams halting while others started to move again in a complicated dance.  From there, the tiny rivulets eventually recombined into one large river that flowed out of the machine and into a cable near the bottom of the device.

Meanwhile, more energy flowed in from a different cable, running up the side and into the left contact touching the crystal.  The engineer that he was, Blake couldn’t help but immediately see parallels to electrical circuits in the overall design.  In fact...

He focused his awareness upon a single intersection of energy lines within the machine, stripping out as much of the surrounding noise as he could until his mind was filled with just the two tiny streams.  The paths that the lights in each stream flowed confused Blake at first.  One of the two streams was relatively straight, while the other seemed to flow up to the first, wrap around it in a tight spiral, then flow elsewhere.

The two streams seemed to work in tandem.  They would both lie stagnant for a bit.  Then, the lights in the spiral stream would begin to flow and the ones in the straight stream would almost immediately follow suit.  After watching for what felt like minutes, he did not once see the straight rivulet flow first.

A thought, born from years of engineering experience and schooling, popped into his head.  Could it be?  Blake moved his focus to another rivulet intersection, only to find the second pair the same as the first.  The third, fourth, and fifth pairs also featured the same configuration.  The layouts of these streams were not random products of circumstance, he realized.  These intersections were intentional.

The flow of the spiral stream controlled the straight stream.  He didn’t know how it worked, exactly, but he didn’t need to understand that to recognize what he was looking at.  He was looking at otherworldly transistors!  Thousands of them!  The entire lump of metal was a computer, one running on something other than electricity!

Blake felt a growing tightness in his chest, a small but noticeable squeeze that shook him from his fascination.  Suddenly afraid once more, he tried to lower his gaze and check if something was happening, only to find that he couldn’t move!  Not only his head, even his eyes wouldn’t budge!

Panic grew within Blake now as he tried to lift his hand and found that it, too, was stuck.  He could feel the muscles in his neck, his eyes, and his arm contracting, but nothing was happening.  He was trapped, completely immobile, all while the tightness in his chest grew and grew!

Or... was he?  Blake noticed the tips of his big toes at the bottom periphery of his vision.  He hadn’t been able to see his feet at all at first.  Forcefully pushing his panic aside, he focused on his toes, watching as they ever so slowly rose into his sight.  He could move after all, it seemed—only incredibly slowly.  Meanwhile, he felt the pressure in his chest begin to recede just like it had arrived.

The realizations dampened Blake’s panic.  He stopped his hand, his fingers just about to lift from the crystal, deciding to continue like this for a little while longer.  He was still standing alone in a room that seemed like it hadn’t been occupied in centuries, after all.  He wasn’t in any external danger.

His eyes turned downward ever so slowly, his chin dropping even slower still.  Still, he made progress.  Soon, he could see all of his toes, then his feet, and then, finally, his chest came into view.

There was nothing there.  His chest seemed entirely untouched.

The tightness returned, slowing intensifying.  This time, however, Blake’s gaze and mind were both focused on the issue, and so he observed two things at once.  The first was that nothing had crossed his vision to strike him this time, though he’d been looking right at his upper chest.  The second was that the feeling wasn’t coming from just anywhere in his chest; it was coming from where his heart should be.

This wasn’t something wrong, he realized.  This was simply the sensation of his heart contracting.  A new theory presented itself, an alternate explanation for everything he was experiencing: time had slowed down—or, perhaps more accurately, his perception has sped up.  As wild as the thought felt when it came to him, it conveniently explained everything he was dealing with at the moment.

His movement wasn’t slow, his perception of time had just sped up so much that it seemed that way.  It explained why, when he’d jerked back after touching the crystal that first time, the period before the contact had broken had felt so interminably long.  Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t feel himself breathing either, and yet he’d been in this mode for what felt like many minutes.  If time were flowing normally, he would have passed out from asphyxiation by now, surely?

Forcing himself to calm down, waited for the third contraction.  When it came, Blake began to count in his head using the tried and true Mississippi method to simulate internal seconds as best he could.  He continued counting until and through the fourth heartbeat.  When it had finally finally finished, he’d counted more than three hundred internal seconds between the third and fourth heartbeats—over five minutes.

Five minutes between heartbeats.  Doing some mental math, Blake realized that this meant his thought processes had sped up to about six hundred times faster than normal!  It was like his brain entered some sort of hyper mode or something, some sort of mental overdrive.  “Hyper Mode”... he rather liked the sound of that.

With this emergency now solved, Blake finally settled back down and decided to return to his observation of the lights.  But first, he needed to move his head and eyes back to an angle where he could see more than his feet, the bare stone floor, and the soft glow beneath the rock.

He paused for a relative second, mentally blinking to clear his scattered thoughts and concentrating on what he saw.  Yes, there was a glow, an aura of sorts that appeared almost like an outline, coming from a large lump beneath him.  The aura appeared to his eyes as a weird color that didn’t exist in real life, a color that was both orange and green and both and neither, all at the same time, that Blake—in a moment of unbridled inspiration—decided to name “grorange”.  Blake didn’t know how he knew, but he could tell that whatever was giving off that glow was many, many feet below where he stood.

He could see a similar aura coming from much closer, however.  Another grorange glow emanated from the metal device he’d been studying moments before.  Like the other one, the aura appeared like an outline of the metal.  If he focused, he could “see” the entire shape of the machine through the outline, even the parts blocked from his sight.  Was he... sensing the metal in some way?  If so, how?  For that matter, how was he doing any of this?

A few relative minutes later, Blake finally lifted his hand from the crystal and let out a gasp as the world sped up to normal speed again.  Lowering himself to the floor in a much more controlled manner this time, he rubbed his eyes with his hands as he took large, desperate breaths.

This was too much.  All of this was far too much for him to handle, especially all at once.  Being thrown into a strange world that wasn’t his own was already more than enough for him to handle, but now he also had to deal with being some jacked Adonis who could see invisible energy, and think hundreds of times faster than normal, and sense metal buried underground hundreds of feet deep.  Nothing felt right.  His body didn’t even feel like his own anymore.  Hell, maybe it wasn’t his body at all!

Blake wanted to cry.  He wanted to scream.  He wanted to-

His stomach gurgled loudly.

-he wanted to eat something.  And drink.  Blake didn’t know if it was from the use of “Hyper Mode” or just from not eating anything for more than half a day, but he was absolutely starving.  He stood up and left the chamber, heading down the hallway.  As he did, a small object caught his eye that he’d missed twice already: some small pieces of crystal much like the one he’d touched just a moment ago, lying by the wall in the hallway.

Blake looked up and found an empty indent in the ceiling right above the broken pieces.  Clearly, the once-whole crystal had fallen and shattered upon the floor at some point.  Blake took off his t-shirt, an idea coming to him.  After sticking his hand into the shirt, he carefully reached down and tapped one of the pieces with his cloth-covered finger.

Nothing happened.

With a smile, Blake snatched up a shard, one about the size of his pinky, and dropped it into a pocket in his cargo shorts.  After putting his shirt back on, he steadied himself against the nearby wall and reached into the pocket, his now-bare finger coming into contact with the piece of crystal.

A million lights—far fewer than before—burst into view, flowing through various cables built into the walls and ceiling.  Blake smiled very slowly.  He now had a way to activate Hyper Mode whenever he wanted to.  He couldn’t say just yet why, exactly, he might want to, but he figured it couldn’t hurt

That done, Blake continued down the hall and up the stairs.  He’d come back here later, but for now, he needed to find some grub, which meant going back outside.  He needed a break to come to grips with all these strange discoveries, anyway.

The sun had barely moved from where it had been when he’d entered the bunker earlier, once more giving credence to his “brain speeds up, time slows down” theory.  Looking around again, Blake set his sights on a large clump of rainbow bushes growing a good distance down the slope.  He could see something that might be berries on one of them, a yellow-leaved, blue-barked plant towards the middle of the clump, though he would have to get much closer to know for sure.

Stepping lightly, carefully, and deliberately, Blake made his way down the hill and into the valley, keeping an eye and an ear out for signs of anything that might be dangerous.  He found little of note—too little, if he had to be honest.  He didn’t hear even a single bird call, insect chirrup, or anything else save the breeze blowing by his ears.  Thinking back to the night before, he realized that he couldn’t remember any sounds of animal wildlife then, either—not that he’d been entirely lucid for all of it.  The relative silence made him nervous.

However, nothing leapt out at Blake during his treacherous journey to the bottom of the rocky hill.  He arrived still anxious and all the more hungry, with feet that throbbed but still had not yet been cut by any jagged stone.  Taking a long, deep breath, he studied the subject of his interest.

At least five bushes were growing in a small patch of dirt, competing with each other for resources and space.  One towards the center, the yellow and blue one he’d spotted from near the bunker’s entrance, did in fact have berries.  Spotted purple and red, they hung invitingly from several branches deep within the tuft.  All he had to do was get through the other bushes and... the other bushes had thorns.  Because, of course they did.

Slowly and carefully, Blake pushed into the gap between the two closest bushes, taking care to move the branches aside with the tops of his forearms instead of his hands and watching where he stepped at all times.  For the hundredth time, he cursed his habit of removing his shoes when he got home.  If he’d just kept them on, like the rest of his clothes, this would all have been so much easier.

Finally, he arrived at his destination.  Plucking a berry, he paused just before he put it in his mouth.  What if it was poisonous?

Blake Myers had never been the outdoors type.  He’d never seen the point, really.  Why bother going outside to get a thousand bug bites and a sunburn when you could spend your time in a cool, climate-controlled, pest-free environment and explore the outside world through television and video games instead?  It had gotten to the point that, in the last few years, he’d developed a policy of checking areas his friends and family invited him to before agreeing to anything.  If it didn’t have high-speed cellular signal, he’d claim he was busy.

It was at this time, berry inches from his lips, that Blake realized he didn’t know much of anything about surviving in the great outdoors.  He sure as hell didn’t know how to test a berry for poison.  So what was he supposed to do?  Anything in this world could be poisonous; was he just supposed to not eat ever again?

“Fuck it,” Blake said for the second time in two days just before eating something potentially hazardous.  He popped it into his mouth and chewed.

Wonderfully sweet juices spurted over his tongue, eliciting a moan of pleasure.  If he had to give a description, Blake would say it tasted like a cross between a strawberry and a blueberry but with a wonderful tart to it.  Whatever this berry was called, it would surely be amazing in a pie.

Delighted with his first experience, Blake reached for a second berry, only to stop again.  Feeling about his mouth and throat, he waited for a few moments to see if he felt anything weird or bad, like his mouth going numb or his throat swelling shut.  No, he felt nothing of the sort.

What followed was a berry binge that would make a hedonist blush.  Blake savored each and every morsel, delighting in the succulent fruits and their fantastic flavor.  He was so busy enjoying himself that he didn’t even notice when the rumbling started.

Blake paused mid-chew as his mind finally registered the low rumble.  When had that begun?  He couldn’t remember.  He looked about, searching for some visible sign of the sound, but found nothing.  A deep, grinding, metallic growl, the noise sounded a little far off and seemed to be coming from somewhere up the hill.

“Oh, fuck!” Blake cried as he connected the dots.  “Fuckfuckfuckfuck!”

All caution and concern for his well-being vanished as he threw himself out of the cluster of bushes, the sharp thorns tearing at his clothes and skin.  Rushing up the hill, he took the fastest route he could see with no regard to the bottoms of his feet or anything else other than getting back to the bunker as quickly as possible.

A few short dread-filled moments later, Blake made it back to the bunker just in time to see the last sliver of the hallway disappear as the door clicked shut and he found himself staring at a nearly featureless rock side.  It seemed that the outer side of the door had been shaped and colored to blend in with the rock within which it stood.  If he stared at it hard, he could see the seams, but he knew that if he were to leave this place, it would be very hard for him to find the door again later.

“Goddammit!” he whined.  What was he supposed to do now?

Blake spent a good hour or more searching the surrounding area for a hidden button or something to reopen the door, but found nothing.  He even popped into Hyper Mode, hoping to see if he could find something by following the flow of light particles, only to still find nothing.  The lights were a little harder to see in the midday sunlight, but he could see enough to spot the door panel on the inside, yet nothing went anywhere on the outside.  It seemed he was locked out. 

Giving up on the search, Blake took a moment to inspect his body.  He could see the small tears in his sleeves from the sharp thorns and he’d felt them scratch his arms, but now that he looked, he couldn’t find a single mark on his skin.  Checking the bottoms of his feet, he was surprised to find that they, too, seemed undamaged.  He’d definitely stepped on some very sharp edges—and felt the pain that came with each one—on his way back up the hill, and yet it seemed he was no worse for wear.

Was he ultra-durable, on top of all the other bullshit that seemed to be going on?  Well, it wasn’t like he dared test it, should it turn out not to be the case.

At this point, Blake still found himself wavering between “this is all real” and “this is a terrible delusion”.  The litany of weird powers he seemed to suddenly possess pushed him closer towards the latter side of the debate.  Was this perhaps some sort of wish-fulfillment dream?  He wished he could say he was above that sort of thing, but if he had to be frank with himself, he was absolutely not.

Still, while that question remained percolating in his mind, his thoughts were more preoccupied with a second quandary: what was he supposed to do now?  Should he stay here, near the only sign of intelligent life he’d spotted so far?  Or should he strike out into parts unknown, hoping that he’d find better sustenance and shelter elsewhere?

Blake looked out at the sky, watching the isolated clouds float lazily along.  The weather seemed nice right now, but that wouldn’t hold forever.  There was no sign that the door would ever open again, no matter how long he waited.  As much as he wanted to keep searching for answers behind that door, it just wasn’t feasible anymore.  He’d have to come back some other time.

Blake took one more look around, trying to figure out where to go.  Finding nothing, he randomly chose to head south.  But first, there were still some uneaten berries left on that bush.

*     *     *

The terrain flattened out somewhat as Blake moved south but never truly lost its hilly nature.  All he saw, for miles in every direction, were low shrubs and grasses eking out an existence in the rocky terrain.

For the first hour or so, the entire land stayed so quiet that he could have heard a mouse fart.  Not long after, though, he heard a sharp trill to his right.  Blake jumped back in panic, looking for the threat, and found nothing but another bush.

A second trill emerged from the bush.  Now that he could focus his attention on the noise, Blake realized that the sound resembled a cricket-like chirp more than anything else—a bit off from what he was used to, but clearly in the same area.  His ears caught another trill coming from farther away in the direction he’s been heading and he felt the tension drain from him.  Just some bugs, nothing more.

As Blake continued onward, he began to hear more distinct sounds, from a variety of insect calls to even the squawks of a trio of birds far off in the distance to the east, the first animals to finally show themselves.  They reminded Blake of a mix between an emu and a peacock with a large colorful fan of feathers on each of their rears, except they looked to be less than two feet tall at best.  The moment they noticed him, they scampered away and out of sight.

It was like the land was waking up from a long slumber, and Blake was very much relieved to hear and see it.  The unnerving quiet was finally giving way to the noise of life.  He could finally ease off of his fears of being the only animal in existence and instead focus on other fears, like watching for any animal that fell into the “oh shit, that’s a lot of teeth” or “how the hell do they grow that big” categories.

Cresting another rocky rise, Blake finally came upon something different down in a valley—a forest.  Well, this area’s version of a forest, at least.  The trees weren’t green, nor were they exactly towering or imposing.  The foliage density was heavily on the low end of the spectrum, with relatively little underbrush, and the whole forest didn’t appear to be too large from his uphill perspective, but he decided it still counted.  It just felt good to find some sort of terrain that wasn’t ninety percent shrubs, grass, and rocks.

Clambering his way down to the valley floor, Blake entered the forest, running his hand along the bark of the nearby trees—smooth like the bark of a birch tree, but also purple.  He almost didn’t see the path at first, instead being too caught up watching two “hamster squirrels”, as he thought of them, chase each other across the nearby treetops.  In fact, if not for a tree root that almost made him trip, he might have walked right by it.

Either way, there it was: a path.  It appeared to be nothing more than a dirt trail—small, narrow, and poorly maintained—but he could see how it followed the most efficient route across the terrain before him.  This was no random path created by animals or chance.  This was a deliberate construction, one which screamed “intelligent life” and left little room for argument.

One direction led back to the area he’d just traversed, while the other headed further into the forest.  Having seen no signs of civilization back whence he’d come, he decided to follow the path deeper into the forest and beyond, his chest thumping in excitement.  This wasn’t like the ancient bunker in the hill, which looked to have been unbothered for centuries.  A trail like this would need recent use to exist.  If he followed it long enough, he was bound to find its creators, and with it, perhaps answers.

As Blake walked, he kept spotting obvious signs of damage in the plant life all around him—ripped vines, bushes broken, scratches on trees.  He found so many of these that he began to wonder if there had been some sort of flood or something, especially since all the broken plants had been broken in a way that had caused them to all fall in the same direction—the same direction he was currently headed.  Whatever had passed this way, it had done so fairly recently, as well.

Blake winced as he stepped on another thin, pointy root.  He checked his soles again and found them still uncut and unbruised.  He surely had some form of enhanced durability, he decided.  There was no way his feet would be completely undamaged after several hours of barefoot hiking without some sort of toughness boost.

He would have to look into it later, he decided.  For the moment, all he could do was keep walking.

*     *     *

The sun was dipping towards the horizon by the time Blake came upon what he’d been looking for.  The forest tapered off into a large meadow, and in that meadow, Blake saw what were clearly rows of crops.  Farms!

Not very impressive farms, however.  Quite pathetic ones, if he had to be honest.  While better than the terrain he’d traversed to get here, the rocky soil still didn’t seem like ideal farming land.  The fields themselves were an absolute mess; dirt and stones littered the ground, and what crops he could see looked mostly ruined, their stems broken and leaves crushed much like the underbrush in the forest.  Destroyed fences and their remains littered the landscape.  It looked like some natural disaster had recently swept through, like a tornado or something.

Further out, he could see huts built from clay, mud, and wood standing atop a small hill, with a larger, more ornate building in the center.  The discrepancy between the quality of the building and its surroundings befuddled him.  The ramshackle huts seemed to be cobbled together from logs from the nearby forest and whatever other materials the villagers could find at the time.  He doubted they offered much protection from the wind—or the rain, now that he thought about it.  The other building, however, seemed to be a single solid piece of stone, as if it had been chiseled from some even larger boulder.  Large, ornate columns each as wide as Blake’s torso decorated the front.  It reminded him of some sort of strange Greek or Roman structure, pulled from his world’s past and dumped into the middle of the most depressing set of houses he could imagine.

The stark realities of the lives of the people living here torpedoed Blake’s excitement before he even spotted one of them.  When he did spot a small group of farmers off in the distance, he felt even worse on several levels.  First, as he’d guessed from the bunker, the farmers were just regular, bog-standard humans—no wings, tentacles, extra limbs, third eye, pointy ears... nothing.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true; there was one obvious difference: hair color.  Blake could spot heads with colors from every part of the rainbow, from the standard shades of brown, blond, etcetera to more strange colors like blue, green... he even spotted a magenta.  It was like he was stuck in an anime.

More demoralizing, however, was the farmers’ appearance.  Even from many yards away, Blake could see just how emaciated they looked, even the children among them.  Their rough clothes were covered in patches and they worked with crude-looking hand-held tools made mostly of wood with the occasional metal bit on the end.  To Blake, it was like looking at something ripped straight out of the Dark Ages.

Well, now what was he supposed to do?  If he walked up to them with his modern clothes and six-pack abs, would they think he was some sort of god?  Or would they try to kill him for sustenance?

The decision was made for him as one of the farmers, an older man with a long and faded dark green beard, noticed Blake waffling at the tree line.  The man’s eyes went wide and he froze for a moment before turning to a nearby teenage girl and saying something to him.  The teenager stiffened and glanced Blake’s way before sprinting off towards the tiny village.

Blake set himself and started striding forward with his head held high, trying to project a confidence that he did not have.  The other farmers, other than the first one, all backed away with fear in their eyes, while the man took slow steps towards Blake.

Just as they came within speaking range, Blake realized something he’d stupidly overlooked until now: what if they didn’t speak English?  The odds of these people being able to understand him and vice versa were effectively zero. 

“I greet you, Apostle.  Welcome to our humble village.  Do you require something of us?”

Blake rocked backward as if physically struck and nearly fell flat on his rear in surprise.  The man spoke in a flowing, vowel-centric gibberish language that Blake had never before heard, but Blake somehow understood exactly what he’d said.  He didn’t suddenly know the language; no, it remained utterly foreign and unintelligible to him.  It was more like a third party had translated its meaning in his mind, an alien Google Translate pushing pure meaning into his consciousness.  While his ears heard nonsense, his mind understood.

Blake steadied himself, working to keep his stream of consciousness from overrunning its banks with wild questions and thoughts.  This had to be a dream, he decided.  There was no other way any of this could be possible.

“You... understand me?” he asked.

The man looked at him quizzically.  “Should I not?” he asked in his strange language, his eyes nervously glancing between Blake’s face and his biceps.

Looking at the smaller man’s body language, Blake noticed the way he sloped his shoulders inward and leaned forwards as he held his two hands together.  The farmer’s entire being screamed deference, as if he would do anything that Blake ordered him to.  Blake quickly decided to play along a little.  The man seemed to expect him to be in charge, and the others would probably expect the same.  If Blake acted according to their expectations, then that would hopefully keep them from deciding to cook and eat him later.

“Never mind, then,” Blake replied.  “I require answers concerning various matters.  Can you provide them?”

“I am but a humble farmer, but the Voice surely can,” the man told him.

Blake had no idea what a ‘Voice’ was, but he could practically hear the capitalization in the way the man had said it, so this ‘Voice’ was clearly important.  “Very well, lead the way.”

The farmer did, leading Blake through the fields and towards the village.

“Did something happen here?” Blake inquired.  “What happened to your crops?”

“A terrible disaster, Apostle,” the man despondently returned.  “A wave of beasts came from the forest, their number greater than I have seen in my life.  The fence could not stop them and they destroyed everything in their path.”

“That sounds terrible.  Will you be alright?”

“The winter will be tough, but Othar shall provide, as you know,” the man said.  Blake wasn’t sure who Othar was, but if he had to guess, he was leaning towards a god than a ruler.  The tone the man spoke the second half of that sentence had sounded like a prayer of sorts.

Blake did his best to continue to project his fake confidence and command as they entered the destitute village.  The conditions struck home even harder up close.  The straw roofing on the ramshackle huts looked like it would fly off when hit with even a moderate breeze.  Water pooled in various places, turning parts of the ground into thick mud that both of them had to avoid.  A small flock of birds that resembled a cross between a chicken and a pigeon wandered the village untended.  Blake realized too late that the bird had dropped their feces all over the area and he’d already tread upon some of it mixed in with the dirt and mud.

As he paused to wipe his feet, Blake could not take his eyes off of the huge stone structure standing just a few yards away.  At this point, he expected to see obvious seams where pieces were connected, but he could spot none.  Everything from the columns in the front to the walls and even the roof looked to be part of one continuous piece.  How had this structure been built?  And why was it the only one here, standing in the middle of a collection of paltry shacks?

As he and the farmer neared the building, Blake noticed the teen girl who’d first run to the village step out of the stone building and take off running down a narrow dirt road that headed southwest out of the village.  From what Blake could see, it was the only road in or out of the place.

Following the girl came a woman in her fifties or early sixties by Blake’s estimation.  Her long orange hair, tied in a ponytail, struck a sharp contrast draped over the clean dark blue robe she wore.  What stood out to him the most, however, was how relatively well-fed she was.  She looked positively normal and healthy, with slightly chubby cheeks and a soft face—a stark contrast to the others here.  Blake guessed that this was the Voice that the farmer referred to.  Was she the leader or ruler of the village?

The juxtaposition of the Voice and the others rankled Blake’s sense of justice.  While not a hard leftist by any means, his position on rich fuckwads getting the lion’s share of resources they didn’t deserve was well-documented.  It was abundantly clear at a single glance that this woman hadn’t done a lick of fieldwork.  These other poor people were slaving away and looked like they hadn’t eaten in weeks, while this woman got to eat as much as she needed without lifting a finger?  It bothered him, but... he forced it down before he said anything stupid.  If she had answers, then he needed her to be cooperative.

“Welcome, Apostle.  How may I serve you?  Please, come inside so we may speak privately,” the woman said, seemingly completely unbothered by his appearance—another difference between her and the others.  Was she used to seeing people who looked like him?

Blake stepped forward as she opened the door and held it for him.  He entered into something that reminded Blake of a combination of a church and a medieval monk’s study.  Several rows of stone benches lined one side of the chamber, each oriented towards a central pulpit.  A stone desk and several chairs stood on the other side, with a stone man-high bookshelf placed nearby it against the wall.  Papers and inkwells with quills sticking out of them covered the top of the desk.  Splotches of ink stained the stone in the gaps between papers.

Stone, stone, stone!  Almost everything was made of stone!  Why?  The only notable item he could find that was not made of stone was a pot hanging in a fireplace set beneath a chimney on the side of the chamber opposite the desk and books. 

All in all, the inside of the building conformed to Blake’s Dark Ages expectations.  He could see no sign of advanced technology here, other than the stone itself.  Like the building itself, each piece of furniture was a single solid piece, rather than having been constructed from parts.  He didn’t spot any signs of chiseling or other stonework.  Each piece looked as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

Were they molded, somehow?  Or had they each been carved out of a giant rock and then sanded so thoroughly that they looked this unnaturally smooth?  The amount of work it would take to do that for even a single one of these pieces struck Blake as utterly obscene.  His distaste for the woman intensified.

The Voice stayed outside for a moment to talk to the farmer about something he couldn’t hear before following him inside and closing the door behind her.  She gestured to a chair near the desk.  “Please, sit.  Are you thirsty?  I was just about to make some tea.”

Blake realized that he was, in fact, somewhat thirsty.  “I would like some tea, yes.”  He sat down upon a stone seat, finding its coldness refreshing after hiking through the warmth outside.

The woman pulled out a few small logs from a box by the chimney and placed them under the pot.  Then, as casually as breathing, she held up a palm towards her face.  Blake’s blood went cold as a sphere of flame the size of a baseball manifested above her hand with a whoosh of fire.

Magic.  He’d just watched magic happen.  Without moving, without speaking, without even a single hint of effort, this woman, this Voice, had brought fire into the world.  The flames burned just above her skin, not seeming to bother her at all.  He could see no fuel, and yet, the flames continued to flicker, hanging in the air with no support.

She was a wizard.  A mage.  A sorcerer.  There could be no other explanation.  The revelation cast a new light upon Blake’s understanding of everything.  He was looking at a society run by wizards, who clearly wielded their powers and status to control the unmagical peasants beneath them.

That was how this building and its stone furniture had been created.  That was why this one woman looked so much better fed than the others, and why they called her ‘Voice’ with a capital ‘V’.  This woman was powerful.  Who knew what else she was capable of?  What if she started shooting lightning at him or something?  Actually, just throwing balls of flame like the one she held was scary enough for him.

Beyond the socio-political ramifications of this revelation, however, came more relevant questions.  Were the people who’d built the bunker techno-wizards?  Maybe the tiny lights of energy were magic too?  Was he also a wizard?

All these questions and all this understanding flooded through his mind in a blink of an eye.  Thinking fast, he reached into his pocket and grabbed the crystal there before the Voice could do anything with the flaming ball.  The world slowed to a crawl, but this time, Blake didn’t see any lights other than those shining through his hand from the crystal he held.  The magic flame floating above the woman’s fingers didn’t change one bit.  It remained a normal-looking orange fire.

Blake released the crystal as the Voice turned her hand towards the wood.  Time sped back up and the fireball shot into the logs, setting them instantly aflame.

It seemed that his floating lights had nothing to do with the woman’s magic, though that didn’t mean he couldn’t do magic himself if he learned.  For the moment, however, he faced a conundrum.  The Voice, like the others, kept being very polite with him for some reason, and they had both called him “Apostle”.  Did that mean they assumed he was a powerful wizard or something?  What would she do if she found out he wasn’t?

The Voice caught him staring as she tossed several handfuls of ground leaves into the pot.  “I apologize in advance for the quality,” she said sheepishly.  “It is surely not as high as you are used to, but as you know, good marbana leaves are rare this far from the cities.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he replied.  He just hoped that whatever it was he would soon ingest didn’t make him retch.

“So, a stampede?” he asked to break the ice.  “Must have been quite the sight.”

“Yes, a veritable wave of beasts washed across our cropland just last night.  Not just one sort, either, but all manner of animals raced through our fields—arnots, yellow tranfen... though it was the wild garophs that did the most damage.  A truly regrettable occurrence, indeed.  Had we been prepared for it, we could have trapped and killed enough of them to offset our harvest loss and much more.”

“Prepared?  Does that sort of thing happen often around here?”

“No, this is the first I have seen such an event in my many years here.  First, we heard the growing sound.  Before we even knew what was happening, they emerged from the forest, an endless tide.  By then, it was too late for us to do anything but pray to Othar that the damage would not be too great.”

So Othar was indeed a god, one worshiped by wizards and common folk alike, Blake noted.

“Bertramar said that you came from the forest as well,” the Voice continued as she scooped liquid from the pot into an earthen mug.  “Did you find what caused this tragedy?”

“I saw the damage but that was all,” he replied, hoping beyond hope that he was not the actual cause of this multi-species stampede.  Everything had been running away from his general location, after all.  Could his arrival in this dream world have somehow frightened all the local animals into running away?  Surely not, right?

“Sorry about the delay,” she said as she handed him the mug.  “May it suit your tastes.”

Blake looked inside and saw a murky, greenish-brown liquid—not exactly the most appetizing concoction, though it smelled alright.  He gave it a sip and found it mostly pleasant, with a touch of bitterness that he could overlook fairly easily.  He took a larger gulp and let out a sigh of relief.  “Thanks.”

“Think nothing of it,” the Voice told him as she sat down across the desk in what was obviously her working chair.  “It is rare when an Apostle visits unannounced, but we are more than honored to help one such as yourself.  Now, how may we assist you?  Bertramar said you seek information.”

“Well... see, here’s the problem...”

The long walk from the bunker had given Blake enough time to consider what to say, should he encounter the intelligent beings he was looking for.  He’d considered various levels of truth and lies, simulating in his head just how much trouble he might be in were he to go down any one route.  In the end, he decided to take a rather uncreative tack, but one that would hopefully excuse all the questions he needed to ask.

“I woke up on a hillside this morning, maybe half a day’s walk north, with no idea how I got there.  I must have hit my head in a fall, because I can’t remember anything at all.”

The Japanese Role-Playing Game Protagonist strategy; cliché to the point of embarrassment, but probably the safest option for the moment. 

The Voice’s eyebrows shot up.  “You remember nothing at all?”

“Pretty much.”

“Your name?”

“Nope.”

“Your occupation?”

“No clue.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Not a bit.”

She looked at him, concerned.  “...quite the conundrum.  It is good, then, that you found your way to us.”

Blake wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected a hitch in her voice.  And had he imagined it, or had her hand trembled slightly for a fraction of a moment?

“Well,” she continued, “I regret I cannot help you with your name, but I can answer the rest.  First of all, you are clearly an Apostle.”

“You called me that before.  What’s an Apostle?”

“A great warrior—a protector of Otharia and hunter of evil.”

“I’m not sure that-”

“Nonsense!” she cut in.  “Only an Apostle would have such a... robust physique.  There can be no other explanation.”

“You said something about ‘Otharia’?”

“The Holy Empire of Otharia, of course!  The greatest nation in all of Scyria!”

“Ah, yes, of course.”

Blake couldn’t help but feel a roiling in his gut at the words “Holy Empire”.  He’s never been a fan of orthodoxy, and as for empires, well... had there ever been a good empire?  They were always the evil ones in stories.  Given the chamber in which he sat, it seemed very possible that the Voice was both the administrator and religious leader of the village, which implied some intertwining of the two in a way that made Blake anxious—so anxious that his stomach churned at the thought of it.

He gulped down more tea and set it down on the desk, catching the Voice’s eyes dart to the mug for a split second.  Something wasn’t right here.  Could the roiling he felt have a much more physical and sinister origin?  Surely not, right?

“So, uh, what now?  Do you have a map or something I could look at, perhaps?”

“Oh, you need not worry about something like that,” the Voice replied, another hint of nervousness peeking through in the way she stiffened slightly.  “Our map is old and rather inaccurate, I am afraid.  Apostle Yarec should be arriving shortly to take you to Eflok, where they will have far better material to help you.”

Yeah, something was definitely up.  “Well, in that case, I should probably get going,” he said as his stomach churned again, harder this time.  “I’ll meet the Apostle on the road.  Time is of the essence, after all.”

“N-no, please, there is no need.  You have been on your feet for a long time and still look quite thirsty.  You should rest.”  She got up and headed toward the pot.  “Let me fetch you some more tea.”

Blake’s suspicions upgraded instantly from unlikely to near-confirmed.  She’d poisoned the tea with something.  Given her mounting tension, he guessed that she’d expected him to exhibit some sort of sign by now—something more, at least, than an upset stomach.

“Sorry, I’m afraid your tea doesn’t agree with me as much as I would have hoped,” he told her politely as he stood up and strode quickly towards the door.  Blake would have been much more confrontational with another person, but he still had the image of the fireball in the back of his mind.  He didn’t need her resorting to something drastic if he could avoid it.

“W-wait!” she cried out as he opened the door and stepped outside.

Blake froze a single step past the door, freezing in place at the sight of at least twenty emaciated farmers—men and women, young and old alike—standing outside the stone church.  They each held farming implements in their hands, with the pointy bits facing his way.

“Now!” one of them yelled.

Before Blake knew what was going on, he found his legs swept out from under him as a net encircled his body and pulled him unceremoniously into the air.  He’d been so thrown off by the sudden gathering that he’d failed to notice the net lying in wait at his feet.  The sound of rope rubbing over stone accompanied his ascent and he looked up just in time to see a large stone at least half the size of his body falling towards him.  He twisted, but the boulder missed the net entirely by half a foot and crashed down in front of the entrance.

Utterly bewildered, Blake looked down and realized that the stone had multiple loops of rope tied around it, with one cord running up past Blake and looping around a piece of the building’s roof above.  He realized it was the counterbalance keeping him in the air.

“Good work, Bertramar.  I was worried I had not stalled him enough and the crenari had no effect,” he heard the Voice say.  “However, move this unsightly stone out of the way.”

“Of course,” the man replied.

Blake couldn’t believe his ears.  First, he was right; she’d tried to poison him.  Second, she wasn’t seriously going to make all those starving farmers lift that thing, was she?  It had to weigh over five hundred pounds, at least!

Blake looked on, befuddled, as Bertramar handed his farm implement to a woman beside him and stepped forward.  Bending over, he let out a loud grunt and, to Blake’s utter shock, lifted the stone off the ground all by himself.  Impossible!  How could a single man who looked nearly ready to keel over possibly lift something featured in World’s Strongest Man competitions, and do it so easily?!

 Blake barely even noticed how he and the net bounced up and down as the rope momentarily went slack, for he was far too busy recalibrating his understanding of this place for the second time in an hour.  It was laughable, really, to think that he’d considered his assortment of strange new abilities to be wondrous and off-putting just a few hours ago.  How silly it seemed now, in the light of the knowledge that everybody else here was some sort of superhuman!  What were floating lights, a beefy body, and extra durability when compared to fireballs and super strength?!

Apparently, he’d had it all wrong: this was surely not a wizard-dominated society.  Assuming that all the villagers had super strength—a not too unreasonable assumption, given that somebody other than that man had carried it up to the roof and dropped it—then the Voice would never be able to fight them all off if they wanted her dead.  Unless she had significantly more powers hidden away, she’d roast one or two of them at most before they ripped her head off with their bare hands.

How or why the Voice remained in control, he could not say.  Given the pews inside, his latest guess was that her command was based on religion or education, but he’d been wrong so many times in the last hour that he didn’t trust his hunches anymore.  None of that really mattered now, though.  All that mattered was that she was in power at this moment, staring up at him along with twenty of her followers as he dangled helplessly.

“Stupid Elseling, did you truly think you could trick us with such pathetic falsehoods while wearing such exotic garments?” she laughed as the villagers jeered.  “I do not know what possessed you to attempt to infiltrate our land so foolishly, but it will not bring you mercy!”

“What the hell are you talking about?!” Blake called back as he struggled to reorient himself so he could look down more easily.  “I just came to ask for a little help!  Some directions and clarity, that’s all!”

“Lies!” she snarled.  “You came from the forest, from the same direction as the beast wave!  You are the cause of all this damage!  You attacked us and you shall pay!”

“What?!  Are you fucking high!?” Blake screeched in outrage.  “Why the fuck would I do anything like that?!  How the fuck would I do anything like that?!”

“To torment the valiant people of Otharia, why else?  That is the nature of the Elseling, after all.”

“Look, lady, I don’t know what you and your cult think is going on, but I’m just a confused and scared man trying to figure out if he’s in a dream or not and having an incredibly shitty time doing so.  I haven’t done anything to hurt you, and I don’t want to do anything to hurt you—or anybody else, for that matter.  I just want to leave.  Just let me the fuck down and I’ll leave, I swear.  No mess, no fuss, no problems.”

Several of the farmers mumbled something to each other, only to be immediately shushed by the Voice.

“And the Dragonslayer spoke unto the people,” she quoted, her voice gaining a sudden weight and power to it that seemed to physically thump against Blake’s chest, “and he said, ‘Suffer not the words of the Elseling, for it will poison your soul with doubt.  Rend its body and desolate its spirit, for it is the greatest of your enemies.’”

“Heyheyhey, no!  No rending!  No desolating!  Let’s all just fucking chill and talk it out, alright?  You know, like civilized people!”

“What would an Elseling know of true civilization?” the Voice scoffed.

“Are you fucking serious right now?”  Blake stared at her in disbelief, a day’s worth of frustration, pain, and anger finally approaching its boiling point.  “Don’t tell me you seriously think this ratty-ass, dilapidated, pathetic excuse for a village counts as civilization.  I’ve seen porta potties cleaner than this shit!  You don’t have electricity or running water, your road looks no better than a glorified trail, you farm with fucking sticks for tools, and you can’t even seem to manage to fucking feed your people enough to fucking live!  Fuck, I’ve seen goddamned monkeys living better lives than you freaks!  This is what it means when Othar provides, huh?  Living your whole life in the dirt-”

“Silence!” she roared over him, her augmented voice thundering in his ears.  “How dare you belittle his name with such blasphemy!”

“You want blasphemy?” Blake spat back.  “Fuck Othar and fuck you, bitch!  Dude sounds like a fucking loser!  How’s that for blasphemy?!”

A bright orange ball of flame burst into existence in her hand, casting shadows through the twilight.  “You-!” she snarled, before catching herself.  She extinguished the flame and recomposed herself, reverting to the haughty attitude she’d displayed before her slip.

“You see, my children?” she said to the others.  “The Elseling is a manipulative enemy and must never be reasoned with.  It knows what will happen to it once the Apostle arrives, and so it tried to get me to give it a quick, merciful death instead.  Do not fall for its tricks!”

Before Blake could retort that burning alive didn’t count as a quick, merciful death, a young voice cried out from farther away, “Voice!  Voice!”  Blake, the Voice, and the villagers all turned towards the new voice.  It came from the teenage girl that he’d seen run off down the road.  Now, she ran back from the road into the village and stopped at the back of the crowd, huffing and puffing as she bent over in exhaustion.

“Did you succeed, Kerrin?” the Voice asked.

“Yes!  Apostle Yarec is on his way!”

Blake had heard enough.  He didn’t know who Apostle Yarec was, but they couldn’t be anything but bad news.  Especially not if he was, as the Voice had put it, a “warrior and hunter of evil”.  He had a much clearer understanding now of what counted as “evil” here, and it seemed to include him.

These zealots were not going to let him down, no matter what he said or did.  He would need to do it himself.  He needed to get the hell out of this place, and his best immediate hope was right at this moment when they were all looking away from him.

The ropes that made up the net in which he dangled were quite thick, approximately two inches in diameter, but looking closer, Blake could see signs of hope.  Like everything else about this village, the net had seen better days.  The ropes were covered in dirt and he could feel a bit of dampness.  With luck, they would be weaker than they appeared and he would be able to tear his way free.

Blake grabbed two ropes just above where they intersected and pulled, his large shoulders flexing with their greatly increased bulk and might.  To his surprise and delight, the ropes had weakened even more than he’d hoped.  With a loud ripping sound, he tore the ropes apart, creating a large hole through which he found himself suddenly falling.

For a moment, Blake panicked as he began to plummet face-first towards the stone foundation.  Flailing, he kicked hard against the nearby column, propelling him outward at the cost of what remained of his body control.  Spinning wildly, he crashed to the ground in an out-of-control tumble, barreling over one of the villagers, past the Voice, and into the throng just as the group turned back to look for the source of the ripping sound.  It hurt less than he’d expected.

“No!” the Voice cried as an orb of flame appeared in her hand.  “Do not let the Elseling escape!  Kill him if you must!  He must not get away before the Apostle arrives!”

Despite his bluster, Blake Myers was not much of a fighter.  He’d never liked the sort of macho tough-guy shtick that oozed out of the testosterone-soaked pores of jocks and other stupid men.  People who used violence to solve problems were losers in his mind, plain and simple.

Even now, surrounded by a small horde of farm-tool-wielding villagers, Blake did not want to hurt these poor deluded people, and even if he did, he lacked the skills to do a good job of it.  And yet, as he quickly looked around, searching for a way out, he found that it was the people surrounding him, the people holding the improvised but still dangerous weapons, the people able to lift him off the ground with one hand, that looked at him with the terrified eyes of a cornered animal.

Even after everything, they were the ones afraid of him.  It was sheer lunacy!

A woman with a hoe let out a shout and charged forward, her weapon raised high over her head.  Blake jumped to the side, barely dodging the swift strike as the woman’s momentum carried her past him.  If the way the woman moved was representative of the rest of them, he felt had the advantage in terms of agility and speed.  Avoiding one of their attacks didn’t seem too hard.  Sadly, he doubted he would be lucky enough to only have to deal with one attack at a time, and if he messed up even slightly on any of them, he’d be overwhelmed instantly.

As if to prove him right, just as a man thrust at him with a pitchfork, Blake saw the shadows in front of him grow longer.  Throwing himself into a semi-controlled tumble, he felt the heat of the fireball as it sailed in from behind him and landed where he’d just stood and burst with a blazing flash before vanishing, leaving behind a scorch mark on the dirt.

Stepping away from another pitchfork thrust and ducking beneath the horizontal swipe of a scythe, only for another villager to swing down with a shovel and slice through the outer end of his right shoulder.  Luckily for Blake, only the very tip of the shovel had made contact as it cut a long but shallow and superficial wound down his upper arm.  Still, it stung like crazy and told him everything he needed to know about how his enhanced durability would stack up against them.  If he let even a single one grab him, he was toast.

Blake rushed for a gap between two hoe-wielding women, trying to break through before he was overwhelmed.  The pair pulled their implements back, practically telegraphing their windups and swings, letting him utilize his superior speed and agility to get through.  After sidestepping the swing from the one on the left, he bent his entire body to the left to the point that he almost resembled a drawn bow, barely avoiding the swing from the woman on the right by no more than a few inches.  The move threw him off-balance, but it got him past the pair as they tripped over each other in the follow-throughs of their swings.

Something cold and wet smacked into Blake’s face before he could steady himself, sending him sprawling to the dirt.  For the briefest of moments, as water washed over his face and discombobulated him, Blake thought he’d been hit by a large water balloon.  He frantically rubbed his eyes with one hand as he pushed himself to his knees with the other.

Looking up, Blake met the eyes of a man likely around his age—the starvation made it harder to tell sometimes—standing about ten feet in front of him.  The man stared at him in stark terror, as if Blake was the one there trying to kill him and not the other way around.  Beyond the man stood just one other farmer, and beyond that, the open road leading out of the village.

The terrified man held his shaking hands out in front of his chest, his palms facing each other with about a foot of space between them.  In the middle of that space floated a ball of water the size of a ping pong ball and quickly growing.  So, he had basically been hit in the face by a water balloon after all.

Blake shoved aside the new questions that the existence of this second mage—clearly one of the farmers and no healthier-looking than the rest of them—presented.  He was far too busy realizing just how bright the area appeared and how stark the shadows suddenly appeared.  Twisting around on one knee, Blake looked back to find the Voice standing over him, her hands raised high.  Above each of them hovered a fireball the size of a small beach ball.

“May Othar’s Will be done!” she thundered, her face flush with victory.

Blake’s body reacted instinctively, his hands shooting forward, palms out.  They struck the woman in her midsection, and he shoved her with everything he had—which turned out to be a lot more than he’d believed.  The orbs of fire were snuffed out as the woman shot backward in a blur, her body flying through the air before slamming headfirst into one of the stone columns at the front of the church building thirty feet away.  A soul-chilling “crack” brought everybody to a standstill and they all watched as her body slid limply to the ground like a rag doll.

Blake gagged as he stared at the crimson blood smeared down the column, the sticky red liquid mixed with liberal amounts of pulped, reddish-brown brain matter and bits of bone.  He couldn’t stop looking at the woman’s blank stare, her unfocused eyes seeming to look right back at him even though she was very clearly gone.

Blake knew that he would never forget the sight as long as he lived, for as much as he wished it weren’t so, he couldn’t deny the truth any longer.  There was no way his brain could come up with that sort of gory, hyper-realistic detail for something he had never seen before.  If he possessed years of medical experience and training, or if he had lived through a similar gruesome event in the past, or even if he were a huge horror movie buff, then maybe, maybe everything could still be some sort of delusion—but he didn’t, he hadn’t, and he wasn’t.

This world was real.

Which meant that the people here were real.

Which meant that he’d just killed a real person.

In the end, misconceptions had doomed the Voice—not only concerning Blake’s nature and intentions, but also his own misconceptions about his body.  He’d felt stronger ever since acquiring his new form, but he’d always just attributed it to his suddenly tripled muscle mass.  He’d never bothered to test just how much stronger he was, unconsciously limiting his usage to levels consistent with a fit male in his prime, simply because that was what he’d believed his strength to be.

This was the result of his negligence.  The woman’s skull had not just cracked upon impact, it had caved in entirely, the upper back half completely crushed inward.  All because he’d pushed her.

He should have seen the signs, had he bothered to look for them.  Thinking back now, he immediately came upon an obvious sign from just a minute ago; he’d ripped apart that net far too easily, and judging by the dryness of the ripping sounds, it had not been anywhere as weak as he’d assumed.  No normal person, no matter how buff, could rip through ropes two inches thick with their bare hands, and yet he’d done it with astounding ease.

He needed to get away from this, as far away as possible.  He turned back towards the road and launched himself into a sprint.  The water mage saw him coming and quailed, the fight draining from him and the others like the blood draining from the Voice’s shattered skull.  Blake rushed past them in a blur, escape the only thing on his mind—escape from the village, escape from his terrible deed, escape from this reality itself.

He could have prevented this.  All he would have had to do was fucking jump over them and he wouldn’t have become a killer.  It was too late for that, a part of him knew; he would always be a killer now.

The scenery flew by as Blake ran and ran at speeds no person on Earth would ever be capable of.  His powerful legs, no longer shackled by his misunderstanding of his own capabilities, practically threw him along the wide dirt path as he tried to put as much distance between himself and his terrible deed as possible.  Panic and guilt overwhelmed him, driving him forward even though he had no idea where he was going and nothing he passed registered in his mind.  He barely even noticed the large wagon heading towards him until he reflexively swerved to avoid it.

Without warning, his foot caught on a stone jutting out of the earth as he passed the vehicle, one he could have sworn hadn’t been there a second ago.  Given his velocity and the sudden, unexpected impediment, Blake had no chance of recovering.  He tripped and tumbled, wildly out of control, until he crashed forehead-first into a nearby boulder.

Moaning in pain, he remained on the ground as he rubbed his pounding dome while the world spun.  He heard a footstep fall nearby, but before he could look, a second blow struck his skull, and all he knew was darkness.