As the ground beneath his sleeping bag started to rumble and shake, Benjamin groaned and asked himself how this day could possibly get any worse. Instead of making a few more good memories with his friends before they all got on with their post-college lives, this weekend was quickly becoming one part bug bites, one part sunburn, and three parts regret. 

If that had been the whole list, he could have said that he’d dealt with worse. However, now that natural disasters were being added to the mix, that might no longer be true. Being in a tent in the middle of nowhere meant there weren’t any collapsing buildings to crush him to death, of course. Who knew if the ground was about to open up and bury him alive, though. All he’d wanted to do was sleep, and now, he’d have to lie here for hours in the cold, wrestling with his complicated emotions instead once the shaking stopped.  

The rumbling was intermittent, and every time he thought it was about to finish, it started up again. Thirty seconds was enough to finally force him to roll over and open his rain fly for a look around. Despite being in California for years, this wasn’t like any earthquake he’d experienced before, and he wasn’t sure what that meant. 

Avalanche, maybe? He thought as his alcohol-addled mind groped for an answer. Gas line explosion? Assholes with fireworks? When he finally looked outside, his mouth dropped open as he realized the answer was option D, the end of the fucking world. 

The heavens were on fire with a green aurora that covered the whole sky in sheets of translucent emerald and chartreuse light, and the stars had gone insane. For a moment, the rumblings of the earth beneath him were utterly unimportant as he stared upward instead. 

Up here in the Sierras, the night skies were crystal clear. They’d been the best, and perhaps even only good thing about this awkward trip so far. 

 Now, though, the stars were glitching out. Hell, the whole word was. The fires in the sky weren’t quite as bright as day, but they were brighter than the full moon that was currently somewhere behind him. That let him see all the strangeness that was happening around him in painful detail as he groped for his camera to start taking pictures.

He could see distant trees starting to vanish, and the deep black silhouettes of the granite peaks that surrounded them morph and twist into unfamiliar shapes. That made no sense, of course. Granite didn’t flow - it shattered. 

It was one thing for the stars above him to wink out. This has to be the aurora, and those lines might be a meteor shower, he thought, and if that’s the case, then maybe dust clouds could be obscuring stars and… No matter how he tried to explain it to himself, it wasn’t going to make sense. 

However, just because it wasn’t making sense didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Stars were literally vanishing. They were winking out of existence ten or twenty at a time, and the new ones that appeared looked wrong. Instead of the cold blue-white light he was used to, these new ones had a golden hue that looked almost malevolent when they were stained with the green aurora. 

“What the fuck is going on?” Raja yelled, not quite out of his tent. “I’m trying to get some sleep, and someone’s lighting off fireworks? Is that you, Benji? Matt?”

As his friend started to speak, the few original stars that were still there began to smear across the sky in streaks of chromatic aberration. For a second, Benjamin thought it was some kind of prism effect from the aurora, but if it was coming this far south, then that had to be a geomagnetic storm. His mind raced as he took pictures, but even as he contemplated that potability, he realized that it wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t a full prism. It was some sort of red-shift Doppler effect. Something relativistic was happening. 

It was like a time-lapse video on an acid trip, and his mind rebelled at the very idea of what he was watching. As a YouTube video, it would have been compelling, but right here, right now? If it wasn’t a nightmare, then Benjamin was sure they would all die as the ground beneath their feet exploded, and the Earth was consumed by a coronal mass ejection that burned the whole world to ash. 

Even if that’s true, though, I’m going to die filming, he thought as he held up his phone to continue capturing the madness. 

Strangely, though, that was the peak of the activity. A few seconds later, the aurora was flickering and fading, and the new stars stood fixed in their positions. Even the ground finally ceased rumbling. In the end, he stumbled out of his tent wide-eyed, looking around without even caring that he was wearing nothing but his shorts and shoes.  

Benjamin was hardly an astronomer, but even he could see that the sky was full of brand-new stars. Polaris and Ursa Minor were gone, he realized as he heard his friends getting up and walking toward him. 

“That wasn’t fireworks,” Benjamin said, with a shake of his head to Raja as the shorter man approached him. “Not unless you’re referring to the cosmic variety.”

“What do you mean,” Raja asked?” I only saw the end, but—”

“What are all you assholes doing out there to wake me up!” Ethan yelled as he yawned loudly. His tone implied that he’d slept through the whole thing, which would have been about right for him. 

Other campers were stirring at their own campsites, too, but Benjamin was more concerned about looking for clues as to what in the hell had just happened. The RV on the other side of the clearing was still there, and the cars were…

“What do you mean?” Matt asked, coming out to join them.

Benjamin turned to answer him, but when he saw Emma a few steps behind him wearing little more than shorts and a t-shirt, he suddenly remembered why he’d been so pissed off earlier about the two of them and turned away and sought to suppress the ugly surge of emotions that the happy couple inspired. 

He wanted to tell them about the light show or show him the snippet of the video he’d taken. Instead, all he could think about when he looked at either of them was the announcement of their engagement earlier that afternoon, and thinking about that still pissed him off too much to think about. 

Let someone else explain what’s going on to the lovebirds, he thought angrily as he looked around at the other campsites. He tried to develop a few theories, or at least rule them out, but for the moment, all he could say for certain was that whatever had happened hadn’t been in his head because it had woken everybody up. 

That’s when Raja pointed out the RV, or what was left of it, and said, “Look at that shit, someone is going to have a real bad day. I think maybe a sinkhole opened up, or…” 

It was on the far side of the campground from them and resting at an odd angle. It was only after staring at it for a few seconds that Benjamin realized it wasn’t just leaning. Somehow, it had been cut in half somewhere toward the middle. The front half was still sitting where it had been, but the back half was missing, and that was what was making it sit at an awkward angle while its frame rested on the ground and its windshield pointed up to the sky at a 45-degree angle.

They were going to go investigate when Ethan shouted, “Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to my truck?”

Unlike the RV, the cars were parked less than a dozen feet away, so Benjamin was surprised he hadn’t noticed. His Prius was still sitting there undisturbed, and Matt’s Cherokee that sat just behind it was fine, too. Ethan’s new Tacoma had been cut cleanly down the middle half long ways, though. It had been parked just to the right of the other vehicles, and now the right half was missing entirely. 

In fact, thinking about how the facts were lining up, it was almost like a big circular piece of their campground had been picked up and set down somewhere foreign. Cars and tents were sliced precisely, half an RV was just gone, and trails and roads simply dead-ended where they met an imaginary circular line and were replaced by tall grasses. 

While Benjamin contemplated what that meant, everyone immediately clustered around the truck. When he finally started to study that, he didn’t like what he saw, either. It was lying on the gravel, with its missing side face up. While Ethan was worried about whether or not insurance would cover this, and Raja was taking pictures and talking about how crazy it was, Benjamin was much more concerned with how cleanly the engine block had been cut through.  

He knew from his internship it would take a laser or a water jet hours to do that. Still, somehow, he was certain that the whole process had only lasted for as long as it had taken for the stars to go insane, which had been a minute at most. 

“Guys,” Benjamin said nervously, trying to figure out how to relay all this to them without freaking anyone out, “I think some real crazy shit has happened. Like maybe we’ve been teleported—”

This time, it was a pillar of green light erupting not far from the campsite that interrupted him. It shut everyone up, and for a moment, all he could do was look at the emerald blaze, which was so intense it bordered on white, and forced himself to shield his eyes. 

Soon, the fountain of fire parted, revealing a doorway, and almost as soon as that appeared, people started walking through it. With the glare, it was impossible to see any details, but Benjamin wasn’t looking at the people. He was looking at the fire and videoing it since he already had his phone out. 

Moments after the last person walked through the strange gate, the flames vanished completely. However, by then, he was already searching through the video to see if his eyes had played tricks on him. Zooming and pausing showed that they weren’t. 

The embers and sparks that the unnatural pyre spat out were more than that. They were letters, or symbols, or something. Benjamin couldn’t really tell because they weren’t from any alphabet he’d ever seen before, but he supposed it could be Cyrillic. 

He was still looking down at his phone and obsessing over these details while he attempted to process them when Matt said, “Those guys have fucking swords. This is about to turn into a Renaissance Faire or a horror movie real quick, guys; what do you think we should do?”

Benjamin looked at Matt just in time to see Emma cling to him in a way that was so stereotypically girly it made him roll his eyes. He was about to say something snarky about it, but then he looked past the cute couple to the approaching troop of Lord of the Rings rejects and decided that maybe Matt had a point. 

“If we all just get in your car and floor it, there’s no way they can—” Benjamin started to say.

“Everyone stay calm and come this way,” a voice rang out from the black-robed man in the center of the group. He wasn’t shouting, and yet it was still impossibly loud. “You are in grave danger standing so near the woods, but we will protect you.”

There was a strange reverb in his words that made Benjamin’s head feel fuzzy and the hint of an accent that implied that English definitely wasn’t this guy’s first language. Benjamin wanted to argue that the dude obviously seemed like a villain, and nope the fuck out. He wanted to turn around and run for his life. He wanted to do a lot of things. 

He couldn’t, though. He couldn’t imagine doing anything but doing what he was told, and even though he was certain that was a terrible idea, he started to follow his friends down toward the strange group without a care in the world while his suspicious thoughts seemed to dissipate on their own.

Until now, he’d been dealing with his fading buzz and his annoyance at Matt and Emma, but in an instant, all that was gone. Instead, it was replaced with a feeling not unlike being high. Part of him knew that was a bad sign and that this wasn’t like him, but it couldn’t make the rest of his mind care. Still, he struggled and squirmed against the feeling of absolute trust, but the most resistance he could offer was to ask, “Are you guys sure we should be doing this?”

“It’s fine,” Emma said, “This is a dangerous situation, and we have to trust him, Ben, so please try to relax and don’t do anything weird.”

That cut him off at the knees quickly enough, and all he could do was walk down the slope in dejected confusion as more and more of their fellow campers joined them. The Bryson Meadows Campsite had been pretty big, so there were at least three dozen people slowly walking down the slope when all was said and done. That group consisted of everything from young couples to college students like them all the way up to retirees living their nomadic RV lifestyles. 

And almost all of them were in their underwear. That was a lot less awkward than it should have been, though. Normally, Benjamin was very sensitive about letting anyone see him undressed, and he usually went swimming in a t-shirt to hide his lackluster physique. For some reason, this was fine, though, and he didn’t care that he was wearing nothing but shorts. 

As they approached, the black-robed man’s assistant was doing something with his hands. Then suddenly, a large pavilion tent appeared in a shower of glyphs and sparks. These weren’t the deep greens of the last spell that the men had cast. They were cerulean and… 

Wait. It was only after that thought that Benjamin realized it; these guys were casting magic like it was going out of style. The implications of that boggled his mind. Teleportation? Summoning? Did that mean they were in another world now? Was he okay with that?

That made it even more ominous when the black-robed mage pulled open the tent’s doorway and said, “Alright, everyone, right through here. That’s right - line up over there. The sooner you are reprogrammed with your systems, the sooner we can retreat back to the safety of the city and integrate you into our great plan.”