Through the Rift 1 (Patreon)

This month, @Matt Labanc requested that I write a story about a human falling into an HC world. You bet, let's give this a shot!

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When I first regained consciousness, I felt disoriented. But as the world slowly began to solidify around me, that’s when I noticed just how much I hurt everywhere. I felt like I’d been crushed in a trash compactor. Every joint, every inch of my skin ached.

But I was alive, and I could breathe. After a mishap in space, those two things are the most crucial. I could smell smoke—fire is one of the biggest threats to any mission—but the smoke smelt … wrong.

The two most common fires in space smelled of burning plastic—very bad—or burning solvents—even worse. What they never smelled of is … woodsmoke. But I could have sworn I smelled a campfire.

Had we crashed back down to earth in some remote location? Cho was an expert in wilderness survival. Had she pulled me clear of the wreckage and made a fire to keep us warm?

I drew a deep breath and smelled … manure. I didn’t recognize the smell precisely. We weren’t on a dairy farm or a pig farm—I’d know those two smells anywhere—but all farms had that musty poop smell. Turkeys perhaps? Some sort of poultry?

I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, my vision improving a little. I was indoors, but not in a house. A barn perhaps? A lean-to? There was too much draft of cool air, too much smell of raw lumber.

The room was small, perhaps fifteen foot on a side. I was lying in a cot of some sort, but big, bigger than a cot, it was the size of a bed. Not a big bed, but a single, maybe larger.

On the other side of the room, a tall, golden figure stood over a wood stove. I could hear the wood crackling, smell meat searing. My focus was slowly improving but whoever it was remained golden. They had broad shoulders, long dark brown hair, and they were dressed entirely in gold—not metallic and shiny, but that marigold color. A track suit perhaps?

I tried to talk and managed only a groan. The track star growled something. I heard him take a heavy pan off the stove and laid it down on a wooden surface. He turned.

I blinked. I focused harder. But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t force the image to resolve into something familiar. A long-haired person in a track suit? No. A lion standing on his hind legs? Perhaps.

The longer I stared, the more my host looked like a lion. I suppose I should have been frightened—and had it been an actual lion, I certainly would have been—but a lion standing on his hind legs and cooking breakfast over a wood stove? No. Clearly, my body wasn’t the only thing that had been beat to shit in the wreck. I must have taken quite a blow to the head too.

“Cho?” I whispered. I don’t know why I bothered. Cho had black hair not brown, was short, slender, and wasn’t a lion. Aliyah had black hair too. She was taller than Cho, but she wasn’t a lion either. That just left Lukas. He was tall and broad, but blond. Also, and I realize I’m being redundant here, he’s not a lion.

The lion—who clearly wasn’t Cho, Aliyah, nor Lukas—grabbed a pitcher from a small table, filled a clay cup, and brought it to the bedside. Then, he knelt beside me, put a huge paw-like hand behind my head, and helped me drink some water. When he pulled the cup away, I tried to sit up, but the lion just pressed me back down with a golden hand that spanned the entire width of my chest.

My brain tried to concoct an explanation for what I was seeing, but the best it could come up with was that Earth had transformed into Planet of the Lions while I was gone. And that was, frankly, too idiotic for me to contemplate.

“Where am I?” I groaned. I laid my head back against the thin pad acting as a pillow.

The lion answered.

He must have. The growling sound he made was far too long to be just a simple animal noise, and it had far too many changes in tone and texture to be anything but words, but it was wholly unfamiliar. Even when you hear a language you don’t know—like Chinese, for example—where everything sounds alien and strange, it still sounds like they’re saying words. You can hear a string of individual words that were strung together to mean something more.

But I wasn’t getting any of that here. I was hearing a growl that was clearly communication, and I couldn’t even tell where one word ended and the next began. I was lost.

“Well, if this hallucination of mine wants to do the whole stranded-on-an-alien-world cliche,” I sighed, “I suppose I’ll play along.” My right arm hurt too much to move, so I lifted my left and tapped my palm twice to the center of my chest and said, “Martin.”

The lion stared at me a long while, so I repeated the action once more. “Martin.”

Another pause while the lion’s lips silently formed different shapes as he tried to repeat back the sound.

“Martin,” I said a third time.

He growled.

Wow. Not even close.

“Martin.”

Growl.

“Martin.”

Growl?

I shrugged. This was going to take some work.

Then the lion aped back my actions. He tapped his chest twice with a hand and made a different growl sound.

I stared at him. He … seemed like a good-looking guy as lions went, I guess. My niece, Theresa, was in love with all of the world’s big cats, and she was always sending me photos she’d find on the internet. I still couldn’t tell a jaguar from an ocelot, personally, but lions and tigers were both easy. No big cat looked anything like either of them. And if there was one thing I’d learned by looking at a million pictures of lions was that you could always tell the difference between a lion in captivity and a lion in the wild.

Wild lions had faces that were covered in scars. This golden fellow whose name was clearly a growling sound, had a completely scar-free face. He had blue eyes and a brown mane tied into loose braids.

The lion tapped his chest again. He growled.

I drew a breath and let it slowly out. He tried to say my name, and so it was only fair that I tried to repeat back his. I closed my eyes and then opened them slightly so I could peer back up at him. “Growl?”

The lion roared so loud that I nearly crapped myself. Eventually, the roar devolved into a wheezing, growling parody of laughter.

I tried three more times, and though my host learned to keep a straighter face, I don’t think I got much closer to repeating his name correctly.

I tried sitting up again, and he pushed me down once more. So, with my left hand, I resorted to signing out what I was saying.

“I (pointing at my chest) fell from the sky (fist dropping down to my chest).”

He stared a moment before nodding. With a growl, he pointed at me and repeated the sign of a fist falling. He added a sound in his throat that I could only presume was supposed to be that of an explosion.

“I need to find Cho, Aliya, and Lukas,” I sighed. Then, I began again with signs, “I (pointing to my chest) go (stick legs walking)—”

He stopped me there with a shake of his head. He pointed to my chest (I) pointed down at the cot (stay in bed).

Again, “I (chest) go (walking fingers) search (shielding sun from my eyes) friends (held up three fingers).” The lion seemed confused, so I counted off my fingers, “Cho (one) Aliya (two) Lukas (three).”

He stared me in the eyes for a moment, tapped my chest lightly twice with his fingers, and stood. Then, reaching to a top shelf, he pulled down a piece of unbleached cloth before returning to my side. He laid it on my chest, and I looked down at it. The square of cloth had been folded in thirds, so the two sides covered the middle like a crepe.

I looked up at him, so he unfolded it for me.

Inside, there were three small locks of what looked like human hair—two black, one blonde. All three locks had been tied in a simple knot to keep them together and separate. The straight black hair had to be Cho’s. The curly one must have been Aliya’s. The blond, Lukas.

I blinked and looked him in the eyes. “What are you saying? They’re dead?”

He stared at me a long while and then folded the cloth back up.

My eyes were starting to tear up. Testing experimental spacecraft was dangerous. We all knew there were risks in this. But I knew Cho, Aliyah, and Lukas. Those three were unstoppable! I’d be training with them constantly for the past six months. There was no way that they were dead when I was still alive. It just wasn’t possible!

I looked at the lion. How could I believe they were dead just because a lion had three little locks of their hair?

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KiDQ-c6cQ-oLzo0BccmkkhZVqTyxaRndTqOpF7jKkYg/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?