Week 1, Day 0 , Noon.
"Okay, Cealith, so are you here on your own, or is there anyone you actually know?" I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking.
"Not really." He gave a small shrug. "I haven't seen a single familiar face so far, though I did end up talking to a group of humans. What about you? Anyone you recognize?"
"Sadly, no." I rubbed the back of my neck. "You're the first person I've talked to since I landed here."
"If you want, I can introduce you to them." He was already half-turned to go. "I was heading back anyway."
"Thanks. That'd help a lot."
"Come on, follow me." He held out a hand to pull me up.
I took it, got myself upright, and brushed the dirt off my jeans. Cealith headed downhill without waiting to check if I'd follow, so I stuck close to his shoulder the whole way, not wanting to lose him in all these people.
The trees ended all at once, and the field opened up wide, the sun coming down harder now that nothing stood between us and it. People were spread out across the whole clearing however the last few hours had scattered them. Some humans just sat with nothing left on their faces. A few were still shouting at each other over nothing I could follow. One voice somewhere kept calling a name that never called back. Off to the side, elves had drawn into small, tight clusters, spines straight even now. Dwarves cut through the middle of it in short, heavy strides, jaws set, clearly ready to shoulder past anyone too slow to move.
As we walked, my mind snagged on one thing and stayed there.
How was I supposed to introduce myself without sounding ridiculous?
I ran through lines in my head and hated every one before I'd even said it out loud.
Hi, I'm Aleks, nice to meet you.
That one landed empty, even just in my head.
Sorry, I don't really know what I'm doing either.
That one was worse. More pathetic than the first, somehow.
I hated that this was where my brain had landed. The world had ended, or at least mine had, and I was still stuck worrying about how awkward I'd sound saying my own name.
"We're almost there," Cealith said quietly.
"Yeah." My voice came out softer than I meant it to.
A few minutes later he slowed down and stopped near the edge of the treeline, far enough from the center that the noise wasn't crushing anymore. The shade made the air feel cooler here. Three people sat on the ground in front of a small clearing they'd claimed for themselves, two boys and a girl. The second they spotted Cealith, all three came half up onto their knees, and something in their faces eased at seeing a face they knew.
They'd built something that barely counted as a camp, but it already beat most of what I'd seen out in the field. A layer of leaves padded the dirt underneath them. Stones ringed a bare patch where a fire would go later. Sticks and thicker branches sat stacked off to one side, more than they'd need for tonight alone.
"Hey, hey, you're back!" one of the boys called out, already halfway to his feet. "Is it safe? The water, from the stream, did you actually drink it?"
"Seems fine." Cealith wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "I took a few sips. We'll know soon enough if it was a mistake."
"Doesn't help us much." The other one didn't even look up right away. "You're an elf. We're not."
Cealith nodded toward me. "This is someone new. Human, and he drank from the stream too, so he can tell you himself how it sits."
The girl leaned forward and her eyes went over me fast, top to bottom. It wasn't hostile, exactly, just thorough enough that I felt measured by it. Long black curls, a sharp nose, makeup that had somehow survived whatever had happened to us, baggy jeans, a cropped black top: none of it belonged out here, and neither did she, not yet.
She smiled. "Hi. I'm Amina. Eighteen, from Morocco. And you?"
I opened my mouth, and for a second the only thing that wanted out was the line I'd already thrown away twice. Swallowed that one down instead. "Aleks. Sixteen. I'm from Germany." A beat too late I added, "Nice to meet you," and immediately regretted it, since apparently that line hadn't landed any better out loud than it had in my head.
"Okay, so you're officially the baby of the group," one of the boys said, laughing before he'd even finished the sentence. "I'm Daisuke, by the way. Seventeen, Japan. Welcome. Oh, and there's another German girl around here somewhere, she's out gathering firewood right now, she'll be back later, you'll probably like her, I don't actually know you yet so who knows."
Daisuke's hair stuck up in messy black spikes that clearly weren't going anywhere. Behind thick glasses, his eyes looked tired, though his voice hadn't given that away at all.
"Nikita." The guy beside him said it flat, arms already folded. "Nineteen. Russia."
No smile. Pale-blond hair cut short, a leather jacket with the collar up even with the sun beating down on all of us. Whatever he was supposed to be afraid of right now, none of it showed.
I nodded at all of them and realized I hadn't moved in a while, just standing there being useless. So I asked the only useful thing I had. "What do you need help with?"
They were racing the light to get a camp up before dark. Nobody knew how cold the night would get here, or what else might be sharing these woods with us. Even if the weather held, nobody was eager to spend the night on bare ground surrounded by people we'd known for a few hours.
They put me on shelter duty with Amina, Daisuke, and Cealith. We gathered leaves and moss for padding, then dragged branches together and lashed them with vines and strips of bark into a rough frame. Nikita worked on the fire by himself. He said his grandfather back in Russia had taught him to do it with a bow-drill, but that it would take time. The German girl's job was hauling fuel, and she'd already started before I ever got here.
We moved fast, because the sun was already high, and I didn't want to still be building something useless once it got dark.
I headed deeper into the trees, scanning the ground for branches sturdy enough not to snap the second we leaned on them. Staying focused on the task was deliberate. The second my mind wandered, it went straight back to Earth, to my parents, to the alley.
That was when I saw someone in the distance, walking toward me with her arms full of sticks.
This had to be the German girl they'd mentioned.
I jogged over. "Hey, need a hand with that? I'm new, they said you were on firewood duty. Those look heavy."
The girl stopped so fast the sticks slipped straight out of her arms and hit the ground.
"Aleks?" Her voice came out tight, barely more than a breath.
I froze.
My brain got there before the rest of me did. Carmen. The same Carmen from the supermarket, the girl who used to be my best friend, the one who was apparently Brad's girlfriend now.
Her face had gone pale, her eyes red and swollen, rimmed raw from crying that had clearly gone on for a while. She barely blinked. Each time she did, her eyes snapped straight back onto my face and stayed there, holding on hard.
For a second, something in my chest loosened. So not everyone I knew back home was dead.
Then right behind that thought came another one, colder. Where's Brad?
Before I could get a word out, Carmen crossed the last step between us and threw both arms around me. It wasn't gentle. She held on hard enough to shake, her sweater soft under my hands, the smell of rain and vanilla shampoo coming off her hair. I went completely still, because it had been a long time since anyone touched me without meaning to hurt me or make fun of me for it.
Then she pulled back just enough to speak. "It killed him, Aleks." Her voice cracked on his name. "That creature. Right in front of me."
My hands came up slowly and settled on her back. I felt her breath speed up, felt her shoulders shake under it.
Brad was gone.
Relief hit me first. Fast, and ugly, and gone almost as soon as it landed, replaced by my stomach twisting up with guilt right behind it. I hated myself for feeling either one, and I didn't even want to admit it to myself, let alone out loud. Horror was what I should have felt for her. Pity, maybe, if I was any kind of decent person. What I actually felt was relief, and shame on top of that, and something colder underneath both that I didn't have a name for.
I wasn't a good person, and I'd known that for a long time already. This just confirmed it.
"It's going to be okay," I whispered, though I had no idea if that was even true.
Carmen pulled back just enough to look at me. Her lips were trembling, and her eyes moved over my face, searching for something I didn't have an answer for yet.
"How did you survive it," she said, "if Brad didn't?"
The question stopped me cold. I didn't have a clean answer, only fragments that refused to line up. There'd been the creature in the alley, the spear, wings I still couldn't explain. After that came a voice that knew my name, a fall, and waking up under a sky that made no sense. None of it sounded believable, not even to me.
I stepped back and made myself look calmer than I felt. "Let's get back to the others, okay? We shouldn't be out here alone."
She nodded and wiped her face fast, then bent down for the firewood she'd dropped. I helped her gather it back up, and we started walking.
We didn't talk much on the way. She kept swallowing hard, working to hold herself together. My own head was stuck somewhere else entirely, running the same loop: the store, Brad laughing at me, Carmen's eyes sliding off me and down to the floor. None of that matched the girl who'd just had both arms locked around me a few minutes ago. I couldn't keep up with how fast everything had flipped.
Halfway back, we both stopped at the same time.
Something stood between the trees up ahead.
A stone doorway, black and polished, taller than I was, with spirals cut deep across the whole face of it. Nothing about it looked weathered, no cracks, no moss growing in the grooves, every carved line still sharp and clean. This hadn't grown here on its own. Somebody had built it and set it exactly where it stood.
"What's that?" I muttered.
Carmen stared at it, eyes wide. "I don't know," she said quietly. "But it looks built. On purpose."
I took a careful step closer, hands staying at my sides. The patterns weren't random, that much was obvious even to me. Not one speck of dirt sat in any of the grooves. Even the edges were smooth, no rough spots anywhere I could see.
"We need to warn the others," Carmen said.
"Yeah." I answered. "We shouldn't go in. Not until we've at least got some kind of gear."
We backed away and headed for camp.
When we got there, everyone looked up. Amina noticed Carmen's face immediately.
"Looks like you two know each other," she said, and her voice softened.
"Yeah." Carmen's expression hardened again the second she remembered why she was here. "Listen. Aleks and I found something in the woods. A stone structure. It looks like an entrance."
Cealith stepped closer, eyes narrowing. "An entrance." He said it back slowly, considering it. "Do you mean it leads somewhere, or that it's just a marker?"
"It looks like a doorway." Carmen shook her head. "I don't know if it opens, but it's shaped like it's meant to."
The firewood thudded down at my feet. "It doesn't look natural. Somebody built it."
Daisuke stared at me. "And you want to go check it out? Right now?"
"Not right now." I caught myself rubbing the back of my neck again, same as before, and made myself stop. "But I don't want to just... ignore it either. If it's dangerous, I'd rather know where it is than wake up one morning and find it right on top of our camp. We get basic gear first. Then we figure out what to do about it."
Amina dropped onto a fallen log and stared at the ground. "What even is this place," she said, quiet, mostly to herself, then let out a breath. "Whatever we just got dropped into."
Nikita didn't say anything. He was watching the treeline instead, and the look on his face told me he was already running through what he'd do if something came out of it.
Then a roar tore across the sky.
It was so loud, so sudden, that both my hands slammed over my ears on their own. Pain shot straight through my skull. For one second I was sure my eardrums had actually burst.
Everyone's heads went up at once.
Something massive was crossing the sky above the clearing, wings stretched wider than the whole camp we'd just built. Scales caught the light down its whole visible length, and a tail whipped the air behind it, long after the rest of it had already passed overhead. The wind it threw off hit us a second later, hard enough to send dust and loose leaves scattering across the whole field.
My brain handed me the word before I'd asked for it.
Dragon.
It crossed the clearing and kept going, gone into the clouds within seconds, and for a long moment after, nobody in that camp moved at all. Even Nikita's face slipped, just for a second, fear showing through plain before he smoothed it back into nothing.
My knees gave out under me and I sat straight down in the grass.
"Holy shit," I said, still staring at the empty patch of sky where it had been.
Six months, the voice had told us. Unite. Survive. Nobody had mentioned anything about dragons being part of the deal.