Chapter 8 Door
Door
He'd been training the father wolves in small groups to perform this ritual for around four rotations now, so they would learn on a biological level to properly worship their overlords.
And he believed this latest generation had finally internalized how to time their offerings by the position of the sun in the sky.
The five father wolves in this rotation’s cohort each kneeled in the snow next to a tree, in front of which sat the fresh carcass of a human they’d caught, efficiently killed, and then set up for presentation against the trunk.
The bears were smarter, but the wolves were neater. There were no unsightly face maulings, accidental decapitations, or missing limbs. Only the gashes in the humans’ ripped out throats indicated that they were dead and not simply sitting against a tree with their eyes wide open.
“Good… good… slightly askew but acceptable…” Damianos said into each of the father wolves’ heads as he passed by their presentation tree. “Good… what is this?”
Damianos stopped abruptly at the last human, a male with long hair and a thick beard that would most likely give him indigestion if he didn’t bite his head off before consuming the rest of his carcass.
That was not the cause of Damianos’s disgusted halt, though. The male was slumped over on his side. Not neat at all.
He godspoke to the wolf kneeling beside the tree with the poorly presented body. “What have you done, foul beast? This is most displeasing.”
The wolf raised his supplicant head just enough to see that the male had fallen over.
His eyes widened, and he immediately began making excuses and pleading for his pitiful life.
“God… god… mercy… god… please… I have mate and two boy who become good hunter wolf for you after me!” he begged with those disgusting simian grunts and hand signs that the upright hominid hybrids used to communicate with one another.
However, Damianos was not in a forgiving mood this eve. Really, any eve.
He was already tired of training the hunting wolf hybrids as the Drakkon mission’s Royal Huntmaster, and he had not even been here for ten rotations. Damianos refused to abide excuses. Or a last meal that failed to be well-presented.
He interrupted the father wolf’s pitiful pleas with a godspoken command. “For this sloppiness, you will end your family line and make it so you can never father another with your mate.”
The wolf immediately stopped begging out loud.
However, his eyes continued to plead for mercy as he bounded to his feet and helplessly turned to stalk in the direction of his mate and children, who were kneeling at the edge of the judgment gathering along with the rest of the Zone 2 pack.
His mate immediately started screaming. She grabbed her two small children, both boys, and tried to run, carrying one and dragging the other by the hand.
Ah, this would be good entertainment. Last meal could wait, Damianos decided. He planned to walk over to the pile of rocks his supplicants had arranged into a throne and enjoy the show.
Unfortunately, a hail from his father appeared in his retinal screen before he could settle into his seat.
“Mission Overlord,” Damianos answered the communication with the most respectful hiss he could manage, considering the older male had interrupted the only form of entertainment this primitive planet afforded him.
“Royal Huntmaster,” his father answered in greeting before coming directly to the point of his communication. “A rather inexplicable thing is happening at the Zone 4 station. I have just received their new moon report in one-thousand duplication.”
“One-thousand duplication?” Damianos did not understand, yet he did. The oddest sensation came over him. As if he and his father had already had this conversation. “Do you mean to say that a copy of the same species viability report was sent to you one thousand times?”
“Yes, that is exactly what happened.” A consternated flame rippled through his father’s burn.
Perhaps he, too, was experiencing the same thing as Damianos.
His father released an irritated hiss. “I have messaged them, but Fenrir Prime simply apologized and said it was a mistake. I answered that I found it hard to believe such a mistake could be made, especially so very many times. I’m concerned that the Mission Geneticist may have been unduly influenced by his progenitor, and that this is a tactic to dissuade us from the coming hunt. So, I am calling—”
“To ask me to visit the Zone 4 station and investigate what happened,” Damianos guessed with that same strange sense of having heard these words before.
Somewhere in the distance, a shrill scream rang out. The father wolf had caught his mate.
“Your Reverent Father is not to be interrupted,” Damianos’s own sire chided. “But… yes. This is the reason for my unscheduled communication.”
Damianos sighed, releasing a great cloud of steam into the cold early evening air. He would have to replace the fifth father wolf, and it would take an intense amount of training to catch him up to his cohorts.
“I am rather busy at the moment, Reverent Father, but I will go at my first available opportunity.”
Silently, he added ….when I get around to it.
Damianos ended the communication before his sire could respond.
The father wolf was returning with his freshly dead mate slung over one shoulder and his no-longer-breathing sons strewn over each arm.
The salty liquid that humans and the hybrids sometimes expelled from their eyes for reasons Damianos failed to comprehend spilled in blubbering streams down his face.
“Good boy.” Damianos’s mouth lifted into a cruel smile. “Now, go jump off a cliff.”
“Any questions?” the Mountain Prince asked after he finished showing me around the Mountain King family’s fortress, which they did not actually live in themselves. “There’s an empty bedroom I could show you, far from where Aunt Brigid and the rest could hear us.”
We stood beneath the single staircase that led from the ground to the top floor. Portraits of former red-haired Mountain Kings who looked much like the current one lined its back wall.
But I was more interested in what was on the floor just a couple of feet away from the first step.
“Yes,” I said, pointing toward what I could only describe as a door in the floor. “What’s underneath there?”
The Mountain Prince followed the direction of my finger to the wooden door embedded into the floor. It had a bronze handle and a doorplate with an opening so large, I had to wonder at the key that would turn its lock.
“Dunno,” he answered with a shrug. “Maybe some kind of spaceship filled with god tech.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So you think your three gods were aliens?”
“Mayhap. Rumors abound. It could all come down to them being aliens. You’d have to ask the Shadow King about that.”
“The Shadow King who doesn’t believe in talking?” I failed to keep the skeptical disappointment out off my voice.
“Sorry I can’t be of more help, Dorie. I hate letting pretty females down, don’t I?
” He regarded me with a flirtatious crook of his head and a cartoonishly flirtatious smolder.
“But as I said at the start of the tour, this is more like a museum to me than a home. I’ve spent my whole life at the High Palace.
Understand, I’m only meant to give you this tour for the diplomacy of it all.
If you want, though, we can move our conversation up to one of the empty bedrooms. Get comfortable while we play the guessing game of what’s in the Mountain Fortress’s basement? ”
That second invitation had been enough to get me to back off. And I’d meant to follow up on the door mystery, but there were so many other mysteries on my “must check this out” list, I’d never gotten around to it.
A week later, holding a key that was definitely big enough to fit into that door in the floor, I deeply regretted not making it my number-one priority.
But no time like the present.
Someone from my time had given me this key. It had to be a message. Maybe one that led to answers about why I’d been shoved in that lake or, even better, an unbinding spell that would get me out of here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fated mates. My investigation into the gates had uncovered some of the most epic and romantic stories I’d ever researched.
But the thing was, I’m meant to be the one reporting on those kinds of stories.
Not living them out. At no time did I ever say to myself, “Oh wow, I’m so jealous.
I wish I could fall into a random time and get stuck there with a guy I just met, who was somehow supposed to become the love of my life. ”
After what happened with my maem and Da, I wasn’t even sure I believed in love anymore. They’d fallen for each other so hard and fast. It had been a story worthy of a romance holo. And what did it get Maem? A one-way ticket to a lifetime of grief.
I didn’t know if I was capable of letting myself fall for anyone that hard, even if he was supposed to be my fated mate.
Also, there was the part where he put a freaking knife to my throat last night. Which made him all the walking-red-flag emojis.
Nope, nope, not staying here for the live-action reboot of that animated Ice Age movie.
“FOUR! on the list of things to do if you’re stuck in time!” Kiwi chimed inside my mind. “Find an unbinding spell. Unbinding spells are like time travel’s version of control z. You utter it, and bip-bam-boop! You’re back in your original era, divorced from your fated mate.”
Yes, yes, Kiwi was right. I had to go looking for that door, but when I emerged from the grotto bathroom and rushed over to the double doors Aengus left out of, they refused to open. Even when I pushed them.
Poop emoji! Poop emoji!
What was I going to do now if I couldn’t—
“THREE! I mean it, friend, stop freaking out.”
Okay, okay, I needed to stay calm… while stuck in the Pleistocene Age with a strange being with some kind of Jekyll and Hyde personality disorder that might lead him to murder me in my sleep.
Don’t ruminate on that, Dorie. I pushed the panic down before it could resurface. Just think… think…
What did I know?
That I was in the Pleistocene Age, but somehow also still in Ireland in the Mountain King fortress, which was filled with god tech. So, okay, I’d seen two glowing doors in the rock wall, one of which didn’t appear until we got close to it. Maybe the one to the outside was still open?
Sticking the key in my jumpsuit’s conveniently large pocket, I took what felt like at least a full five-minute walk to cross the cavern to the approximate location of the door. But nothing happened when I touched the wall.
Poop emoji, was I stuck in here? Imprisoned? When would Aengus be coming back, even? And when he did, would he bring his knife?
I forced myself to stay calm as I walked along the wall, looking for a door, any door that wasn’t the grotto.
To my shock, when I neared the part of the smooth rock surface just a meter away from where I’d slept, a glowing green door appeared.
As if it had only been waiting for me to touch it.
And, when I got closer, the glowing door adjusted to just a foot above my head.
It slid open with a whisper of stone. Taking a breath, I walked through it.
Then froze in place when I saw what was on the other side.
Twenty feet of emerald green.
Razor sharp talons below and a crown of horns above.
A scaled body so large, I immediately understood why all the rooms I’d seen so far had such high ceilings and little furniture.
Suddenly, I knew the answer to my third question. The one Aengus had made me wait for.
Also, what are you?
A dragon. My maybe-fated-mate was a dragon.
He stood before a digital wall that showed a crystal-clear picture of the cavern I’d been sleeping in next to vertical rows of scrolling god tech language—green hierglyphs cascading like something out of that old 2D film The Matrix.
He was hissing, screeching, what I could only describe as rolling Predator-like clicking. Rapidly. Maybe speaking to someone I couldn’t see? If so, it sounded urgent. And angry.
I started backing away like a vintage meme of Homer Simpson fading into the bushes.
But then he cut off and froze. Right before he whipped his great green head around.
And looked straight at me.