The incessant buzz of the fluorescent lights in the small kitchen bathed Liam Carter’s world in a stale orange. Above the yellowed fridge doors, the clock informed anyone who cared to look that it was a quarter past three.

“Just one more week,” Liam reached up to cross out another square on the calendar that hung on the wall of the box he called a kitchen. “This time for sure.” The words held no promise; at some point, they had become a meaningless mantra. Had it started a year ago? Two? Five?

The wheeze of the coffee maker was a half-hearted whistle to wake him from his stupor. Liam placed the cup onto the tray. Its interior looked like a geological strata survey, marking ages past. He probably could tell how long it had been since he'd last scrubbed it by counting the rings.

“I should clean it,” he said.

Instead, he pressed the button and filled it to the brim. The steamy liquid heated the mug, stinging his hands. A light sip burned his tongue; the pain dulled the ever-encroaching sleep that threatened to ruthlessly shut his eyelids.

The mere consideration of when he had last slept was dismissed. He only had a few hours to finish his quota. He just needed to focus a bit longer, then he'd get a break. Then he’d get some sleep.

Cup in hand, he shuffled his way out of the kitchen, down the narrow corridor, and toward the living room where his laptops eagerly awaited his input.

Yet… was his mind playing tricks on him, or did the trip back seem longer than usual?

The writer slowed his steps, raising his gaze from the inky blackness in his cup to a point where the corridor came to an abrupt end. A perfect line separated his apartment from the cracked white paint of his hallway into an abyss of nothing. Liam stepped back to stare; it was as if someone had put up a fake vantablack wall, just one that happened to have depth… somehow.

Was this a hallucination? He reached out, finding no resistance or an invisible wall, only his arm vanishing into the blackness, and a dry warmth on the other side. It occurred to him that he might have lost his arm had this blackness been dangerous. Though, maybe if he had, he'd get to extend his work's deadline…

Work.

Work.

He looked back toward the kitchen, to the stack of calendars, then back to the void ahead. And without another thought, Liam Carter stepped through the black veil.

There was no floor, but he did not drop; instead, there was an intense tugging sensation that encompassed his whole body. There was a distinct feeling of acceleration, but no point of reference to warn him how fast he was moving.

Then the world came back.

Sunlight and sweltering heat buffeted his face; his eyes shut, half-blinded by the intensity. His nose was next, immediately under assault from an explosion of bitter scents; his ears were bombarded by a cacophony of unintelligible voices from every direction.

Blinking away tears, Liam gripped the cup and tried to orient himself.

Someone bumped into him, shoving him several steps forward. Rough, scaly hands kept him from stumbling to the ground.

“Aardyin-Al,” the person spoke the unintelligible words in a guttural voice.

The face looking at him was akin to a lizard, with pale brown scales; its head was reminiscent of a short-snouted crocodile, yellowed eyes betraying some semblance of cognition. The creature? Person? Was dressed in white and brown robes, layered and fastened tightly to a human approximation of a bodybuilder, one half a head shorter than he was.

“Thank you,” Liam tried not to stare too hard, fascinated by the dutiful nod the croc-person gave him before walking off, merging right back into the crowd.

At a glance, there were no fewer than a dozen different species dressed in an equally diverse set of robes. Whites and browns dominated the clothing styles, with flowing cloth and loose sleeves being preferable over the alternatives. Most were bipedal, human-ish in some fashion, displaying animalistic traits such as fur, scales, and feathers. But here and there Liam spotted the odd quadruped, distinguished from the animals by being clothed like the others.

And the animals.

Carriages pulled by three or four horse-sized dogs with flattened, serpent-like skulls and covered in silver feathers. Brown-winged, bat-looking creatures the size of goats carried baskets overhead. A monkey with two tails and glossy red fur curled up on the shoulder of a ten-foot-tall minotaur dressed in a massive yellow toga. Birds in browns, whites, blacks, and reds flew in a flurry of feathers.

Liam’s heart skipped several beats; his mind struggled to keep up with the wonder unfolding before his very eyes. Reaching into his pocket, he sought his phone to take a picture, if only to confirm that what he was seeing wasn't some kind of hallucination.

It was empty.

“Ah,” he glanced down at the only two pockets in his bathrobe; the one that had contained his phone was ripped. “It appears I've been pickpocketed.”

It was such an absurd idea—maybe it was just extreme exhaustion—yet he couldn’t help but bark out in laughter.

Wherever this place was, whatever was going on, in this one moment of exhilaration, someone had taken the opportunity to steal the only object in his possession. Maybe he should've… what?

Prepare for a portal in his home? An incredibly vivid hallucination?

Liam just laughed harder, uncaring of the crowd as it began to give him a bit more room.

“What to do...” Combing his fingers through the tangled black mess that was his hair, the smile plastered over his face just couldn’t go away. “Is there a brochure somewhere? A tourist information spot?” He chuckled. “There’s no popup telling me to go kill a demon lord, so I guess this counts as a vacation?”

When was the last time he’d taken a trip, anyway? There were things he needed to do, of course; he was penniless and in a foreign land, and chances were no one knew a lick of English either. But that could wait. Liam needed to take in the sights, drink it all in. He also might have been slightly delirious from the lack of sleep, but that wasn't anything he could tackle right now anyway.

His pink slippers shuffled against coarse dirt and sand, dragging him through the streets. There was no real sense of direction; Liam was wonderfully lost, looking up and around at the sandstone and mud bricks in search of wider streets so he could have a better view. It took him a fair number of attempts, with several dead ends and narrow alleyways eventually leading him to a spot overlooking a bazaar as well as a fraction of the city. Everything was made of the same brownish sandstone; buildings were perhaps two or rarely three stories in height. The rooftops were flat, covered with dried palm leaves or brightly colored cloth.

A loud squawk from a rat-like yellow parrot drew his attention upwards; the creature indignantly screeched as a broom-wielding lizard swatted at the thing. The half-bald vermin hastily beat its wings until it gained altitude and perched itself at the peak of a minaret dozens of meters above the skyline. The thin tower was like a needle pointed at the sky, covered entirely by white and blue tiles that formed intricate geometric patterns, ascending to summits wrapped in a rainbow of cloth and gold. There were many more such structures, sprinkled about the city with no apparent pattern to their locations. Something about them tickled at Liam’s frayed mind, but there wasn’t much reason to stop moving.

Down at the street level, the bazaar stretched out, with merchants hawking their wares, calling out in tongues he couldn’t make sense of.

A burgeoning sense of déjà vu enveloped Liam; here and there, he kept hearing words that almost felt recognizable, as if they were spoken in a language he'd only ever bothered to learn a few words of. It would've been ignorable if not for the very scenery in front of him also having that sense of estranged familiarity. Determined to figure out what the source of this was, he hastily shuffled down the street towards some wider avenue. Stinging eyes danced through tall archways and crowded streets in search of… something.

He wasn't sure exactly what he was looking for, what piece of the puzzle was missing, but he'd know it when he saw it.

The sea of earth-toned walls gave way to a broad avenue split in half by a gargantuan checkerboard aqueduct, a marble snake thick enough to swallow buildings whole. The architectural monster slithered in a straight line from one horizon to the other. The shade of this engineering marvel teemed with diminutive portable stalls. Every column that held the monument aloft had wells and fountains at its base, each fed by streams of water pouring out of carefully placed pipes. It was a marvel of engineering, and it was around these fountains that everything moved.

To Liam’s right, jutting out of the horizon, was a cliff, a rust-colored tepui that rose into the sky like a mutilated mountain. Atop this carved cylinder was a dome of gold, glittering brightly under the unforgiving sun. And near where each pillar arched so that it could support the massive river-carrying stone, were a series of intricately carved knots. Each glowed in faint gold or silver, shimmering with power as the very air warped around them. They could only be enchantments, meant to bridge the gaps where physics might have otherwise ruthlessly destroyed this wonder of engineering and magic.

He knew this place!

“The life-givers of Al-Zahra.”

Almost in a trance, he approached the architectural behemoth, a structure of enchantments, steel, and stone, and one of three rivers that had been wholly redirected over thousands of kilometers just for the sake of sating the thirst of this singular city. Liam's eyes were glued on the beautiful arches overhead, his mind whirling over pages upon pages of worldbuilding documentation, not noticing the heavily cloaked figure rushing through the crowd as they collided. Though Liam was a fair share taller, he was also quite skinny, resulting in them both tumbling over.

He barely managed to ensure the remainder of his hot coffee spilled onto the ground rather than on himself.

Groaning and pulling himself up, something rolled past Liam.

It was a golf-ball-sized ball of something seemingly made of glitter and all the colors of the world, a substance that twinkled and shifted in kaleidoscopic patterns. He absently picked it up, feeling the dough-like texture and marveling at how he couldn't manage to focus on any singular shape or color before it was gone, replaced by dozens of others. The only thing that came to mind about what this could be was aether, the very same substance that was used to form the enchantments currently looming a few dozen meters overhead.

Turning to the other figure, it was at this point that he felt the tip of a dagger pressing against his ribs.