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Author's Note:
This story is in extreme rough draft. I have four more chapters to post, but decided that each one would benefit from individual review because I think they have major structural problems. I just can't really put my finger on it. If you guys could give me a bit of help I would really appreciate it. Thanks.
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Worldcaster
Book 1- Battlefire
Chapter 1- A Cloak of Shadows
If the age of the world is to be measured by the history humans have shared awareness, within it we would be a brief spark on the existence of time, but barely a flicker in the universe. Human lives flare like bright flames in the night to burn hot with fury and then puff out as if they never were there. Civilizations are born and they die, time flows like a river but the world we live in is but a small rural stream compared to the massive watershed of eons.
Because of our nature we tend to forget the past. Soon it becomes buried and forgotten as if it never was. The heroes that defined who we are fade into myth, into a time magic was said to be free and wild. Perhaps it isn’t our history I traveled to, but the future and we are on the threshold of a new chapter in the epic tale of our existence. I don’t even know If I was on earth. All I know is what I saw and my part in its chronicle is a tale worth telling. Because heroes are part of us, whether we want them to be or not, even if their lives burned brief and quick in the tide of the universe and even briefer when compared to our own merest awareness as we learn at birth to craw, then walk then we learn about the world. My story starts shortly after that point on the streets of a city called Lancaster.
The midnight air was humid and sticky, but a relief after a blistering day in the sun. Steam rose from the asphalt of the streets as the brief summer rain that evening was boiled by the heat leftover from the day creating a kind of fog that hid the child as she held onto the shadows like a cloak around her shoulders.
In the distance she could hear the wail of the sirens as the large and strange vehicles arrived at the site of her portal. To any casual observer it looked like crater in the middle of the park, perhaps given a mundane explanation such as a meteorite or an exploded gas line. No one in this world had ever seen magic and because of that would never attribute it anything or to Taniban, or Tani as she liked her few friends to call her back in her home which had been stolen from her in a flame of horror and death.
If she would have known anything about this world she would have looked like what we would call an Elf, or even dressed for the part in a small leather jerkin with colorfully painted clay beads woven into the chest as armor and spelled to ward away deadly magical castings and curses. If she hadn’t been wearing the tattered remains of an arming cap anyone who saw here would have remarked about her curiously shaped ears that had a small point to them.
Tani was tired, her magic exhausted from the worldcasting spell that had flung her to the safety of this strange place. And she was scared. It wouldn’t be long before her pursuers would find out what had happened. She would have to cast herself again to lose pursuit once again, but she was too weak to do so. Terror and panic thudded in her body marching in time with the beats of her pounding heart. She needed a source. She needed someone who had latent ability she could awake. She didn’t care what havoc it would cause all that mattered was the safety of her cargo she carried. If they got it the universe would end.
Shadows piled around her, following her form, as she ran past tall and strangely built structures that glowed in the night brighter than any foxfire lamp or candle, and made her running form seem like a fast moving blot of ink slinking along the corners of their vision as people sat on chairs outside enjoying the relief of night that can only be appreciated after a long hot day that had melted asphalt.
No one paid any mind to her. I didn’t even see her as I ran in my faded army pt shorts and jogging shirt, at least not at first. Even when I did I really didn’t understand what I was seeing. My sweat soaked through and dripped off my weighted training vest I always wore, since I could no longer wear a full combat vest. That had been turned in when I had left the Army a year ago. It had taken a long time before I could run more than two miles again and I took pleasure in my new found power in my legs which only months ago had been wrapped in bandages and a brace.
I was free, from everything but my nightmares. My headlamp lighted my path before me so I wouldn’t trip over the spots in the dirty and broken street, that hadn’t had their street lamp serviced since I was in diapers.
My legs ached but I ignored them, as I had over many long years of military discipline. I ignored the cramp in my side that told me I had drank too much water at my last stop. Stupid, I told myself I deserved that cramp for being foolish. The bright light of my headband bobbed back and forth in front of me and somehow it became a searchlight as I played it over a large desolate desert plain dotted with pathetic attempts at bushes and large boulders. A glint and a flash and I hit the ground in reflex, my I gasped in surprise as skin was stripped from my bare knees, why wasn’t I wearing kneepads? Where was my rifle, I had to return fire and change my position. Did I drop it somewhere?
Bam… I was back to reality as my mind grasped at the fact that I was no longer in Iraq. I was in Lancaster Pennsylvania and I didn’t have a rifle anymore and as far as I wanted I never was going to touch one again. Groaning as I sat up and looked at my knees I noticed what a bloody mess they were. Instinctively I wanted to touch the wounds but I knew not to do that. I needed to wash it out quickly so It wouldn’t scab the grit of the pavement into it. Looking around for a faucet, I remembered that I had been running through a shabby part of town and most of the people in this part of Lancaster kept their gates locked and the lights on to ward off would be burglars.
This city had gone bad since I had remembered it as a child. Somewhere along the way it had turned from a pleasant, if sometimes rowdy neighborhood to a den of gangs and daily shootings. No one bothered me of course. I had taught them better than that in the first week I was back on leave a year ago.
They thought I was a crazy traumatized soldier who carried a large knife on his running vest in the hope I would get to use it someday in self defense instead of dishing out a simple ass stomping as I had on the group that had tried to mug me one night during a limping jog I had had when I still wore my brace and bandages. I’m still not sure if they are wrong.
Why the idiots thought a person jogging would ever carry a wallet I don’t know although upon pondering the situation later I think it may have been more of a territorial dispute than a monetary one. I had probably been lucky that they didn’t have a gun or a knife on them only baseball bats and a long metal pipe. Now I always carried my long K-bar knife on the front of my vest for show and my more well worn and combat proven ranger knife concealed in the small of my back under the training vest.
Yes I admit it, I’m paranoid. Two combat tours will do that to a person. Perhaps that’s how I saw her when so many others had missed that blot of shadow scampering down the street. More accurately I felt her. I knew someone was watching me. Instead of showing it I tried to identify who and where the set of eyes was peering from.
The first thing I did was turn off my light and blink to let my eyesight adjust to the darkness. I knew that the light was helpful but it was potentially lethal if it was a sniper, and it blinded me to see in the far corners of the alleyway and trash covered sidewalks that could be cover for attackers. I didn’t see her at first. But movement out of the corner of my eye is what gave her away. That and the faint rattle of beads on the sticky night breeze.
Any normal person would have run or froze up in terror but my instincts weren’t even the same as other soldiers. Months of pulling detainee duty on my last trip to the sandbox had made me as twitchy as a Doberman and with the same reactions as one. My knife in my hand, I faded into a dark corner my night sight had judged to be empty and I circled around the figure cloaked in darkness following a vine encrusted metal link dog fence trying to determine if it was a threat. She stood slumped against the corner of a building where the meter box was, offering a deep concealing darkness to hide in.
As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I gaped as I realized what I was actually seeing. Around her like a vortex of darkness spun a black cloud that faded with her every gasping breath. Her face was white as a sheet and she looked like she was in pain.
There was a thud as she hit the ground hard and the cloud evaporated as if made of mist.
