[The Twining] 1. Tribulation (Patreon)

[ thanks all for giving this a chance! early feedback is extremely welcome. this chapter has already been workshopped and edited (thanks sontag), but i'm always open to making it better. if the issue is premise, you can let me know but i probably won't be able to make revisions to the entire book's premise lol. ]

The Twining was a delicate part of reality that demanded respect. Practically anything could disrupt the thin sliver of space that glued the planes of Eboncall and Dawnblade together. The rule taught to outsiders and young children was to tread lightly, leave no traces, and do no magic.

Civilization tended to avoid the Twining by necessity, though several fortified crossing points allowed for the passage of travelers, tradesmen, and merchants. The busiest crossings were supported by permanent military forts with a thousand or more soldiers.

Goldbounty was the largest town that Isen knew of on the Twining. Technically, it wasn’t on the Twining, but at 2 miles away from the scar of scintillating gold that marked the divide, it was close enough to put the sanity of its founders into question.

Its name promised a waypoint of opportunity. The reality was rather different.

The military barracks and facilities were ugly bricks that jutted from the earth, probably formed by some earth mage paid only enough to stay for a week. Hiring such a mage wasn’t typically that expensive, but the military would have needed to pay the mage to approach the Twining, providing proper escort, and then its soldiers would have needed to protect the mage while they stayed in the area. Everything added up.

Normal people who dwelled in the patchwork city that radiated out from the base charged more for services or goods, but so did everyone else around them. Everything cost more, especially since Goldbounty was reliant on imports. Farming or even hunting so close to the Twining was a ludicrous endeavor. Even water needed to be shipped in, rainwater insufficient to supply the burgeoning population.

Still, most people refused to leave, like wheels stuck in the mud. Only those passing through Goldbounty had a future.

And Isen wasn’t one of them.

Yet.

The sun was a radiant marble in the sky, painting the landscape in rosy hues of gold. Isen lay on a rocky outcrop, his torso pressed flat to the rock and covered by dry, itchy grass. He shivered as a wave of wind crashed over him and flexed his foot, finding comfort in the rope that he’d tied between his ankle and a stout tree. The Twining wasn’t the only danger in these parts—the plains were often ravaged by tornadoes and harsh winds. He normally never left the protected vicinity of Goldbounty, and didn’t know if boys could really be picked off the ground and thrown skyward as easily as the stories said, but he’d decided to play it safe.

He’d heard that the military was expecting a special guest, someone important from a distant land who sought to study the Twining. Isen wouldn’t have believed the information if he hadn’t heard it firsthand. He’d lived in Goldbounty as long as he could remember, but he’d never heard of anyone studying the Twining before.

The most incredible thing was that the guest didn’t need an escort. They would be going by themselves, and all travel would be halted for the day while they did some kind of experiment. An outsider forgoing an escort implied either competence, arrogance, or stupidity, but halting all trade? That indicated extraordinary wealth.

Isen knew he didn’t have a place in any of this—he was a boy, passably literate, only slightly malnourished, but still a child. That was what a rational person might say. But Isen knew there was more to the world than fact and reason. He’d always had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. It was an inexplicable sixth sense. He just knew when something important was going to happen and had a general sense if something was dangerous or fortuitous.

Something was going to happen here, today. Something more important than anything else he’d ever seen, something that would change the direction of his life.

He ignored the bitter pang of danger as he kept his position, unflinching. As long as he kept his position and maintained a low profile, he should be fine.

An hour later, the special guest arrived.

It was a woman in a dark brown traveler’s dress with thick, skintight pants disappearing into leather boots. Isen almost questioned whether she was actually the person he’d been waiting for. She didn’t look particularly wealthy, nor did she seem especially powerful. She approached the Twining slowly, as though she might miss it, or cause it to run away.

Isen almost snickered at her careful movements. The Twining was impossible to miss and never moved. A golden corona hovered above the hairline fissure in the ground, shifting at its own tempo, heedless of the wind or anyone who passed through.

When she finally reached the Twining, she sat down right on the gap, closed her eyes, and… fell asleep?

Is she meditating? Isen knew mages sometimes meditated to absorb the energy of the world, but what this woman was doing seemed especially foolhardy. Was she really trying to absorb the energy of the Twining itself? Didn’t that count as doing magic?

Isen couldn’t think of a better way to invite disaster.

Defying his expectations, nothing happened. He shifted in place, staving off boredom by imagining different shapes in the shimmering corona.

Suddenly, the woman’s eyes snapped open. She held up a hand and the corona retreated from her fingers, but not before she pinched part of it.

How could someone… pinch the corona? It was like pinching sunlight.

“Light aspected abyss energy,” she muttered bitterly. “How many years have I been looking for you?”

Next, she withdrew a bag from her belt and pulled out a small cobalt sphere. After being placed on the ground, it expanded into an ornate pill furnace, like the ones the most affluent caravans transported. Isen had never heard of a pill furnace that could change size. It was the first concrete sign that the woman was more than she appeared.

She’s not trying to create pills on the Twining, right?

The woman pulled out a host of alchemical ingredients.

His sense of danger rose, his hair standing on end.

With a casual gesture, the woman manifested a flame on her open palm and blasted it at the furnace, directing it to swirl in a controlled spiral. The flame was the same golden color as the corona, though crackled with dark lightning.

Light aspected abyss energy.

And as the woman worked, the Twining didn’t show any signs of displeasure. The world was stable.

It looked so easy, but Isen knew what the woman was doing was impossible for most people. Mages typically controlled a single element, maybe two, and he’d never heard of one controlling abyss energy.

Time passed. An hour, then two. The woman’s expression grew increasingly serious as she worked the furnace, sweat beading on her brow.

Finally, with a snarl, she slammed her hand on the furnace, causing it to compress back into a sphere. She blasted it from all sides with heat from both hands, the furnace now floating in the air.

Then, suddenly, she stopped. A grin stretched over her face and she laughed, collapsing to the ground.

Far above, the clouds roiled and darkened. The woman’s eyes snapped open, her smile faltering. A whisper fell from her lips, only audible because the world had fallen silent. “Tribulation.” She sprung to her feet, her movements graceful and swift as she gathered up everything she’d come with. Her eyes widened, mouth aghast, as she beheld the crackling clouds.

Then, she ran, faster than the wind.

Lightning descended upon the Twining. Isen covered his eyes. The wind stilled, then reversed direction, sucked toward the radiant scar, strong enough that it tore Isen from the rock.

He cried out in panic, but the rope held fast, preventing him from flying off. The unnatural wind was a nearly constant force, siphoning him toward the Twining. He hovered in equilibrium between the force of the wind and the pull of the rope. He physically couldn’t look away as the Twining cracked open.

From the gap stretched a long-fingered, clawed hand, pure white. Slightly bigger than a man’s. It struggled against the battering wind, pulling itself up—

Lightning struck, banishing the hand to the depths from which it had come.

More pale limbs grasped at the edges of the tear, grasping at the fabric of reality, only for lightning to punish their transgression.

The sky was completely dark at this point. The clouds were concentrated in a line that followed the woman’s path of retreat, lightning striking the ground more and more often at different points.

The formation of another tear seemed inevitable.

The entire scene was so outlandish, Isen laughed. He laughed into the outrageous sounds of thunder striking the earth and tearing reality, laughed at the calamity that the innocuous looking woman had brought upon Goldbounty. Had she known this would happen? Had the soldiers? There was no way anyone would have permitted her to conduct her “experiment” knowing this would be the consequence, not for all the wealth in Dawnblade.

The first creature to escape the lightning was as small as a mouse, a white blur of legs and tail that streaked across the plains. The wind threatened to toss it into the sky, but the monster barreled through. Seconds later, tens of diminutive, unfamiliar beasts clawed their ways from multiple rifts. More and more streamed out, desperate and full of fear. Some of them lost their footing and were pulled back in, but most escaped.

The Twining’s corona shuddered as a massive, scaled hand smacked into the ground on the Eboncall side of the divide. Lightning struck, but the scales seemed to absorb it.

Isen watched in a detached daze as the limb pushed the Twining’s gap further apart, widening it for its own passage and allowing for a flood of monstrous entities to escape. These had a dangerous air of hunger and were heavy enough to resist the wind, allowing them to move with purpose.

Several stopped beneath Isen and shrieked, louder than even the thunder. It was a pack of humanoids with white skin, sunken chests, and furred heads, with long snouts of sharp, misshapen teeth. They prowled on all fours and fought the powerful gale to stand upright, snapping at his legs.

Isen kicked his free leg furiously, his heart hammering. What could he do against monsters like this? What could anyone do? The soldiers could fight them off, but the monsters were escaping in great numbers, too many to contain.

One of the slavering monsters leapt higher, its claws descending toward his knee. It missed. Instead, the claws sliced through the rope holding him back.

Isen hurdled through the air toward the Twining. Time seemed to slow, his heart racing in his chest.

Was coming here a mistake?

He quashed the feeling of doubt. Goldbounty was doomed by the woman’s hubris. If he hadn’t come out here, he would’ve died anyway, gruesomely, without knowing why.

He shed his uncertainty and regrets. His sixth sense had been right—this was an opportunity. Even if he survived and lived a full, long life, nothing would ever hold a candle to this tempest. Live a long, dull life, or a short one filled with wonder.

He’d choose the latter every time.

He was laughing with exhilaration as he plunged into the Twining’s widened gap.

He smacked into a hard, scaled body, the breath forced from his lungs. He could barely see, but he wasn’t an idiot. This had to be the body of the massive monster trying to escape. But honestly, massive seemed like an understatement. He didn’t know where the monster’s body ended. It filled the entire space, sloping steeply downward, its scales each the size of a dinner plate.

He coughed, then inhaled sharply, catching his breath. As he scrambled to his feet, a smaller monster blindsided him. He careened onto another monster that yelped like a dog as it cushioned his fall. Isen rolled down the great monster’s back and grasped at the scales to slow himself. He tried to make sense of his surroundings, but the light was even dimmer here, little more than a pinprick.

Monsters were all around him like flickering shadows. For now, they proceeded toward the gap with single-minded focus, but what about later when the tear closed?

There were two paths forward, as far as he could tell. The first was to climb back out of the tear on the back of the scaled behemoth. The second was to flee deeper into the lightless depths.

All reason screamed for him to return to the surface, even if his chances of climbing up against the monster tide were miniscule. He’d never heard of anyone entering one of the Twining’s tears before. He’d certainly never heard of anyone escaping from one.

But his gut told him that the path to the surface was doomed. Danger and opportunity lay deeper in the dark.

He hissed as a feline monster clawed his neck with its hind leg, nearly slashing his face. His hand snapped up, compressing the wound. Blood coated his fingers.

He needed to make a choice now.

Gritting his teeth, he slid forward down the back of the scaled behemoth, legs out in front. It’s like I’m sledding, he thought. He’d only ever sledded on tiny hills of snow, barely a slope to them.

As he accelerated, he knew that losing his balance might mean flying off the monster’s massive back and slamming into the bottom of the dark. He swerved around a monstrous ram that seemingly appeared from nowhere, like a ghost, and almost lost control. Somehow he knew just the right way to regain his balance. It was the instinctive boon of the sixth sense.

If I could see clearly, would I have the courage to continue? he wondered, his body shaking with adrenaline.

He decelerated as the slope of the monster’s back evened out. I’m on its tail, Isen realized, thankful that the scaled beast didn’t have sharp spines down its back. A monster tried to leap over him but clipped him with a cloven hoof, pushing him off the side.

His stomach lurched as he was airborne for the second time today. He tucked in his arms and landed hard on the ground. He groaned in pain, his ears ringing from the above-ground cacophony and the bone jarring fall.

But there was another sound all around him, the resonant stomping of hooves and paws, and earth-shaking vibrations, like thousands of monsters running all around him, rushing to ascend the scaled ladder to the light—to the surface.

A stampede.

What he thought might be a horse’s hoof slammed down next to his ear. A few inches over and it would have crushed his head like a melon. He couldn’t even see it, the monster that had passed him by. He couldn’t see anything.

I’m going to die here, he thought. The sixth sense reared its head, screaming of danger and opportunity.

Opportunity, he realized. There’s still a path forward.

He sensed the descent of a monster’s foot before it struck, twisting out of the way. Run, he told himself, his body shaking. Run!

He staggered to his feet and took off blindly, tears streaming unbidden down his face. His ears were fuzzy, his eyes useless, his nose overwhelmed by the unfamiliar scent of blood. He could only feel his feet pounding on the ground and the breeze of monsters’ passage.

He focused on the only thing that made sense, the only beacon of hope in this pit of darkness.

The sixth sense.

[ next chapter will come in a bit. thanks again for giving this a shot, and let me know your thoughts on this opening! ]