New Lands

The chanting was growing more insistent. Gregory gripped his dagger's sweat-slicked hilt and concentrated on his breathing, remembering everything the order had taught him. The cultists in the next room were oblivious to his presence and hadn't noticed the missing guards, whose bodies were cooling in a supply closet.


Chanting in German, Gregory willed strength to flow into his body from the surrounding office space the cultists had taken up residence in. A scream from the next room informed Gregory that it was time to act, to finish this. The Order had tasked Gregory with chasing down a weak lead on the logonomicon, the book of Truth. Gregory wasn't quite the junior most member, but it was apparent at the outset that the order did not put much stock in this lead. They were wrong. Gregory felt his concentration slip slightly as thoughts of his former partner and friend came unbidden to his mind.

Of all the deaths over the last week, his was still the most painful. They'd been cocky and Roger, his partner since initiation, had gotten torn apart by a dark summoning that the cultists shouldn't have been able to call. Things had spiraled from there and now it was up to Gregory, magus of the third order and last living member of the Order of DiGioni, to stop the cultists from completing their dark ritual. Clutching his dagger, Gregory crept to the thin office door that separated him from the ritual site. Chanting again in German, Gregory firmed the thought and focused his will into the doorknob, which rapidly began pitting and breaking down. Within moments, it was dust at his feet and Gregory had a small hole to peek into the room. 

From this limited vantage point, Gregory could see three masked and robed cultists standing in a large circle. In the center they had erected a frame and, from it, hung their sacrifice, Sister Jaime. She hung from her wrists, blood running from where the wire binding her wrists dug into the flesh. Her hair was a snarl of tangles and her face a patchwork quilt of cuts and bruises. Her habit had been shredded, its few remnants hanging in grimy tatters against her naked, abused body. Gregory felt his breath catch in his throat as all of the evidence of abuse and torture registered to him. They had defiled and despoiled her as part of the ritual, broken her physically and emotionally to appease their dark god, to make her an acceptable offering. A brazier of coals was below her, but she was oblivious to it. She stared at nothing as the cultists nearest to her raised his voice, guiding the chanting into its climatic finale. Gregory didn't know what their ultimate goal was, but every teaching of the order screamed to him of the dire consequences that such a ritual could bring. 

 Without warning or pause, the lead cultists turned and drove the blade he'd had hidden in the sleeve of his robe into Sister Jamie's chest. She tried to scream, but all that came out was a shrill mewling. A part of Gregory's mind registered that they had cut her tongue out. With a savage jerk, the knife was ripped down through her belly, spilling her guts over the burning brazier in the center of the ritual circle. Instead of being doused, the brazier roared to frenzied life, it's flames devouring Sister Jamie's viscera almost as soon as it touched the fire. Her eyes rolled back till only the whites showed and, with a few convulsive twitches, sister jaime's soul was fed to the darkness as the fire of the brazier consumed her flesh.. Gregory tasted blood in his mouth and realized he had bitten through his tongue in his contained fury at such vile and senseless horror. He had to move, now. 

 With a kick, he sent the door crashing inward. A couple of the cultists stumbled in their chanting, their reverie broken by his sudden entrance, but most were too absorbed in their dark rites to notice. Gregory shaped his thoughts and, with a sharp word spit from his bloody lips, he flung raw force out towards them. To the untrained eye, the cultists simply started gushing blood from gaping wounds that had appeared out of nowhere. Even with these cultists out of the picture, there was still a dozen or more robes standing around the circle. The chanting didn't falter, instead it grew to a frenzied pitch even as more cultists turned their attention towards this interruption. Gregory threw more shards out and more cultists fell, their gore splashing across the carefully inscribed lines of the ritual circle. Gregory felt answering shards rip into his shields, but his will held for the moment. Gregory thrust his focus at the cult leader, but was almost knocked off his feet as the energy was harmlessly deflected back at him. The cult leader looked straight at Gregory as his chanting reached its crescendo and, with a smile splitting his face, plunged the knife he had used to disembowel Sister Jaime into his own eye. Gregory felt reality beginning to tear around him and barely began to scream before the world vanished into blinding whiteness.

******

 "Next stop 5th and Pine. 5th and Pine, next stop" the bus driver's voice crackled out of the tinny speakers. Alex reached down and scooted his backpack out from under his seat and reached down to grip a strap. Two stops to go, then his vacation was officially over. It had been an impromptu thing, one of those perfect alignments of opportunity and motivation that happen so rarely. Alex had just broken up with his on-again -off - again girlfriend, there was a three day weekend, and he had been awarded a hiking permit. A little walk in the mountains was just what Alex needed to clear his head, so he had packed up his kit, hopped a bus to a friends place, and borrowed their truck to drive up into the cascades. It had been a short, but invigorating trip, but Alex was already feeling that good mood slipping as he got close to home. He was going to have to do something about the situation with Janey. Alex was fairly certain she was waiting for him at his apartment, like she always did after one of their messy breakups.

With a sigh, Alex let his eyes wander across the other bus passengers in an attempt to put off those thoughts for a bit. There were a couple college age looking girls quietly sitting together, talking in low tones over a smartphone screen, an older gentleman reading an honest to god newspaper, a younger guy nodding along to his over-sized headphones with numerous tattoos peaked out from the collar and sleeves of his shirt, and a twenty-ish woman sitting by herself in the back, drawing designs on her jeans. Alex idly wondered what sort of lives his co-riders were returning to, or running from. "Sorry folks, we're being asked to take a detour around a traffic accident up ahead, but we'll get you to your stops." The bus driver's tinny voice once again crackled over the speakers. Alex watched out his window as the bus turned down this street and that, navigating Seattle's mess of a roadway to get them around whatever traffic snarl du jour was going on. Alex was mildly glad for the delay, he leaned back in his seat and watched the city roll by his window. 

"What the fuck is that?!?" A woman in the back of the bus screamed. Alex looked where she was pointing and felt his thoughts short out. They were passing an industrial park that looked abandoned, it’s grass areas overgrown and doors boarded over. Incongruously it's windows were blazing light. As he watched, the roof tore open and a column of light blasted into the sky. Everyone held on tightly as the bus braked to a sudden stop and continued to stare at the spectacle happen right in front of them. "Please go, please go, please go." One of the collage girls was repeating this in a small voice, the strangeness too much for her. Without a sound the light blossomed out, enveloping the building and rapidly spreading further. Everyone screamed as the light crashed into the bus with the force of a surging tide and Alex felt the world turn upside down before consciousness escaped him. 

******

 Ur-Grillik sniffed the air. The forest was quiet and his band of hunters moved though it without leaving any traces or making a single sound. Ur-Grillik was proud of his band, which he had been the leader of for six countings of the dark moon. He was brutal and demanding, and the band only had six members who survived his wrath, but what remained were the best his tribe had ever produced. The fingers of various enemies hanging from his belt bespoke of their prowess and today he intended to add more to it. The band moved on the human settlement today. Ur-grillik had scouted it out himself, marked the houses that might offer resistance and which held the younglings. Younglings didn’t have much meat, but they were a finer fare and Ur-Grillik intended to dine richly this night. He lifted his fist and the band froze around him.

Something was wrong.

Ur-Grillik couldn’t articulate what he felt, but the world suddenly tasted…wrong. Even when the flash of light enveloped he and his band, none of them made a sound. In the split second before losing consciousness, Ur-grillik felt a pang of pride that his hunters feared breaking his noise-discipline more than whatever was happening. Then blackness rushed to stamp out the light.

 Sound slowly filtered back in and Ur-Gillik shook his head to regain his senses. His band lay scattered around him, along with downed trees and churned dirt. A number of his band lay in obvious death poses, limbs and necks at improbably angles or pierced by branch and shard of stone. Ur-Grillik pat himself down and, with relief, found nothing but scratches and aches. Standing, he looked around and tried to makes sense of what he saw. A building, but alien and wrong, lay canted at a angle just to his south. Trees and stone seemed merged with it’s walls, like it had melted and reformed around them. Continuing to look, Ur-Grillik noticed more foreign pieces of the landscape that had not been there in his previous scouting trips. Tall metal poles with glass orbs sticking from the ground at odd angles, chunks of too flat stone scattered around, gleaming husks of what seemed like covered wagons or beetle carapaces. This stunk of sorcery and Ur-Grillik had no wish to cross paths with any sorcery with his hunting band already wounded and disoriented. With a bark, he rounded up the surviving members of the band, slitting the throat of a member who was too lame to travel with them, and they quickly set out back to their tribe’s caves. This mystery, and the human settlement, would have to wait.