To stop the beast, Rettew created even more beasts, hoping they would be the key to capturing it peaceably. The griffin, hippogriff, chimera, sphinx, and many more beast were created in his endless chase.

  Eventually, the fear and terror the hydra instilled into the world was directed at the crazy man that kept following it, sowing even more chaos in its wake. This renown awakened the divine blood within his veins, and he ascended to demi-godhood as the god of passion, half-baked plans, and animal husbandry.

  Little is known about his personal life, but his neighbors from the town that first exiled recalled he’d often say. “When things get out of hand, make more hands.”

  -Excerpt from Wicket’s Guides to the Pantheon.

  —

  Kole couldn’t recall Amara ever running so fast in the short time they’d known each other, to the point he suspected that she might have taken some sort of alchemical enhancement.

  They chased after her out the door, easily following the trampled path she left behind in the grass. Kole focused on watching the ground for hidden sink holes and pits, so he hardly noticed when the eight-foot tall green grass vanished, suddenly replaced with an endless span of brown knee high grass.

  “No!” Amara shouted from ahead.

  Kole looked up, taking in the surroundings. Gone was the blue and cloudless morning sky, replaced once more with the sky of floating islands.

  “Oh Flood,” Kole cursed.

  “The rift was one way!” Amara said, “I tried to come back!”

  They all looked behind them and saw nothing but more grass with mountains in the distance.

  “Ah Krool,” Rakin cursed. “Any more bad news?”

  “The tracker just lost its signal,” Amara said, holding it up.

  “As soon as we entered?” Kole asked.

  Amara shook her head.

  “It was pointing that way,” Amara said, pointing out into the empty fields. “But it went away just before you guys arrived.”

  “Are we trapped?” Doug asked, “Because I’m supposed to meet Mouse later, and I don’t think she’d like it if I were trapped in a pocket realm.”

  That comment broke the tension, and everyone—even Amara—laughed.

  “What's so funny?” Doug asked. “She really doesn’t like being stood up.”

  “We’re fine,” Zale said, pulling something out of the small bag she wore when in armor.

  “I brought the Dahn door handle before you idiots ran off into the unknown,” she said.

  “So, we can go back now?” Rakin asked.

  “No!” Amara shouted, and Kole felt himself agreeing with her.

  What's wrong with me? he thought.

  “I’m not really looking to get lost in a pocket realm either,” Zale said. “I don’t know about you four, but I was looking forward to the end of year dance, and I don’t want to miss it because I’m being held captive by the remnant of the Midlian Empire.”

  Kole was disappointed at the prospect of returning, but his mind grabbed hold of something else she said.

  “End of year dance?” he asked. “What’s that?”

  Zale turned to Kole and furrowed her eyebrow.

  “How do you know about that? It's literally all any of the students are talking about.”

  “I uh, only mostly talk to you four—and Gray I guess,” Kole said. “And I’ve been busy the last week.”

  “Even I know about it,” Amara said.

  Ouch, that's not a good look for me. Wait...

  “Are you involved in making runes for it or something?” Kole asked.

  Amara beamed, “Yeah! I’m coordinating the rune lighting. It's going to be colorful.”

  Ah, well that makes a lot more sense.

  Zale took the handle and moved to pull the door open, but the handle didn’t budge.

  “Oh no,” Zale said, pulling at the rod but it wouldn’t move. “I can’t open it.”

  “Let me try,” Rakin said.

  Zale let go of the rod, but instead of floating, it fell to the ground. Rakin lifted it, inspected it, and then tried to mime opening the door to the same lack of effect. The rod locked in place and couldn’t be moved so long as someone was trying to pull it open.

  Everyone tried in turn, but no one could open the door.

  “This is different than last time,” Kole observed, trying to not panic but focus on the magical problems at hand.

  “Yeah,” Zale agreed. “Last time it was hard to open the door, but it opened some.”

  “It seems like we are in the same place,” Kole said, gesturing at the familiar yet alien scenery. “Could it be a distance thing?”

  Zale shook her head.

  “No, it's harder to open the door in pocket realms, but unless something is blocking it, we should be able to get back.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “So...” Doug began, looking at Kole and Zale. “I’m probably going to miss my date tonight. Right?”

  “Probably,” Zale said, but then gestured around. “But maybe you can find a weird alien wildflower to make up for it.”

  Doug lit up at that idea and began looking around. As Zale, Kole and Amara talked out their theories on why they might be trapped Doug searched and found a wildflower he thought would work.

  As they continued to talk, he got bored, and began to practice his spatial magic, attempting to teleport the flower from one hand to the other.

  It didn’t work.

  “Ummm, guys,” Doug said, interrupting the conversation that wasn’t going anywhere.

  “What?” Zale asked, trying to hide her frustration.

  “I think something is blocking Spatial magic,” he said, pointing to the flower. “I can’t teleport it.”

  ”Oh,” Zale said.

  “That would do it,” Kole agreed. “But I think I can confirm that.”

  He pulled out his spellbook, flipping to the spellform for Conjure he’d just copied over. He couldn’t cast the spell yet, but he didn’t need to for what he was about to attempt.

  He pulled just the intent for the Font of Space out of the center of the spellform and opened his bridge in his mind. He pictured the Font, like he would at the start of casting a spell, but when he did so, the tenuous link that normally formed to pull the spell to the Font didn’t appear.

  Opening his eyes, Kole said, “He’s right. It’s blocked.”

  They all tried checking whichever magics they had access to and found that only the Font of Space was blocked.

  “Could this be a coincidence?” Rakin asked, looking at Kole, but Amara answered instead.

  “No,” she said. “No, there is no natural phenomena that would only block a single Font. In the rare instances this does happen, whole regions of the Arcane Realm are blocked.”

  “So we can stop it,” Rakin said, nodding and rubbing his hands together, eager at an outlet to vent his ever present simmering anger.

  “It doesn’t look like we have much of a choice,” Zale said. “Anyone against following the direction of that tracker and seeing if it leads to a way out?”

  “I’m okay with it, so long as you lead,” Kole said, and then added, realizing that could have been interpreted differently than he meant. “Or anyone—just not Amara.”

  “Aye,” Rakin said in agreement, and they set off into the plains.

  “We should have brought food,” Kole said, after walking for what felt like hours.

  “There’s burrowing animals all over if ye want one,” Rakin offered, and Kole couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “I’ve seen plenty of weird rabbit things,” Doug added.

  Kole looked around, as if he’d been missing something obvious, but didn’t see anything.

  “I’m more concerned about water,” Zale said. “Who knows how long we are going to be here.”

  “There’s got to be water somewhere,” Doug said. “I can try asking.”

  “Asking who?” Amara asked, joining in.

  “The rabbit things,” Doug said, as if it were obvious.

  They agreed to try it, and Doug went off to find a rabbit thing to talk to—or maybe eat. Kole felt a little weird about how casually Doug switched from wanting to eat to wanting to converse with the creatures, but he was trying not to judge. He’d be fine eating them, but he also couldn’t grant them some level of sapience by his mere presence.

  Sometime later, Doug came back with an orange-red furry bundle hanging over his shoulder.

  “That doesn’t look like a rabbit,” Kole said.

  “Fox thing,” Doug said holding it up. “The rabbit things told me where to find this.”

  At first glance it appeared like a normal fox, but then Kole noticed that what he thought was a bushy fox tail was actually the head, and what he original thought to be the head was... another head.

  Doug got to work gutting the creature as he shared what he’d found out.

  “There’s a river that comes down from those mountains,” Doug explained. “There are also people here, but I don’t know what they look like. The rabbit things didn’t have eyes.”

  While he worked, he kept cocking his head whenever he found something within the creature he hadn’t expected.

  “I hope you like liver, this thing has like, four,” he said when he started laying the butchered meat out on a large stone.

  “How are we going to start a fire to cook this if there’s people here?” Kole said, and then realized the question to be dumb.

  “Bah hah ha!” Rakin laughed, as he picked up one of the livers in his hand.

  His hand began to glow with heat, and the organ cooked in his hand. After only a minute, he took a bite, and then grimaced.

  “Maybe a longer, lower heat,” he said, chewing the burnt meat.

  Through trial and error, they figured out a system for Rakin to cook the meat, where he heated the stone the meat sat on, treating it like a skillet.

  While they cooked and ate, they laid out a loose plan. They’d go toward the river and then follow it at a distance with Kole’s Fade ability active until they found signs of people. If the people weren’t giant ants, they’d consider talking to them.

  “I’m turning this off,” Zale said, deactivating her illusion bracelet.

  “You don’t have’ta ask us,” Rakin said. “I don’t think ye should ever use it.”

  “It’s easier walking through a city when people don’t flee in terror or throw stuff,” she said.

  When the illusion shut off, he looked from Zale to Rakin, but he was unsure why. There had been something about both of them that he’d subconsciously sensed as being the same, but now that was gone. They were suddenly different in some way he couldn’t put his finger on.

  Weird, he thought, putting the notion aside.

  “Is it ever going to get dark?” Kole asked, looking at the ball of fire up in the sky.

  Just as in their last visit, the giant floating masses in the sky floated around and behind the sunlike object, showing the scale of the object not to be as large as it first appeared.

  “Doesn’t seem like it,” Rakin said.

  They took a small break and then set off towards the river, following the crude directions Doug had been given. Once they found it, they filled what they had with water, took long drinks, and moved back a safe distance from it and followed it upstream. The river wasn’t particularly large, only a dozen feet across, but it was the third largest river Kole had ever seen—or the smallest, depending on how you looked at it. Kole had, after all, only ever seen three rivers.

  They continued for another few hours before Rakin told them it was time to stop. By then, the mountains in the distance were much closer, and the grass they’d been walking through had started to thin out.

  “It’s night,” he said.

  “How can you tell?” Doug asked, squinting at the bright light.

  “Internal clock,” Rakin said, tapping the side of his head.

  Doug disappeared as they attempted to make a camp with no suppliers. Rakin used his Earth magic to create depressions in the ground to hide them from sight, and the rest stood around trying to look busy since they had nothing else to do. Doug came back shortly with another of the strange two headed foxes, a pair of the blind bunnies, and something that looked like potatoes.

  They chatted quietly as they ate, trying to distract themselves from the idea that they might be trapped in this alien realm. Their conversation was interrupted when Gus let out a squeak and ran into the coveralls that Amara wore.

  “Big bird!” Amara said, looking around for a place to hide of her own.

  All their eyes went up to the sky, and Doug found it first, pointing toward the mountain. Once it had been spotted, Amara pulled out a telescoping device like a spyglass and looked through it.

  “It’s a winged person!” she said.

  “Huddle close,” Kole commanded even as he began casting a spell.

  Instead of entering his vault, Kole sent a part of his mind into the Arcane Realm, where it appeared besides the Font of Illusions. Following his sorcerous instincts, he drew from the power, shaping it into a form that was both alien and familiar. Alien because unlike a wizard spell, he couldn’t tell you what a single part of it did, yet the spell was etched into his very being, and he couldn’t forget it if he tried.

  It seemed to take him a minute, but when Kole' brought his attention back to the world, hardly any time at all had passed. He reached out, and a semitransparent gray dome appeared around them, absent one moment, and suddenly there the next.

  Even knowing what it was, and having cast it himself, Kole was surprised at the sudden appearance. He’d summoned an illusion of one of the giant rocks they’d passed in this field, and from within it looked like a lumpy magical shield.

  They sat in silence with bated breath, waiting for something to happen. Gus risked a glance outside as the spell was reaching its expiration and reported that the flying creature was still overhead.

  After Kole recast the spell for the first time, the sound of chewing broke the silence. Everyone turned to see Doug, who’d begun to eat the potato-like root he’d dug up.

  He looked back at them confused, and then as if he got it, held the nibbled food out offering to share. When no one took him up on the offer, he shrugged and took another bite, going back to eating.

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