Ethan
As he sprinted around a soft bend in these endless silver streets—as another moan ripped through the air, sending fresh cracks spidering through the pale stone walls—he caught the sound of a man crying out in pain. In horror.
Stanley Holiday was there, in the hallway, trying to wrestle off one of the Guardians of the Mountain.
The thing had a talon sunk deep into Stanley’s eye.
As Stanley screamed, he lost his grip on the creature’s other arm and fell backward to the floor.
A moment later, the Guardian buried another talon in his throat.
Stanley didn’t scream for much longer after that.
“If there’s any justice in this world, that one used to be his mother.”
Ethan spun, heart hammering.
Ryan Phan emerged from another window across the road.
Not that Ethan recognized him at first. This Ryan appeared to have aged by a decade, maybe more, in the few minutes since Ethan had last seen him, and he’d picked up the scars to prove it.
The Ryan Phan standing here was missing an eye, an ear, a finger.
His hair had faded to a dull gray. And his clothes—some kind of tunic and long pants in a material Ethan had never seen before—was somehow familiar.
“What happened to you?” Ethan said.
Ryan only nodded over Ethan’s shoulder. “Have you figured it out yet?”
Through the window behind him, the Guardian ripped something flabby and pale from the floor. Stanley’s arm.
Ethan said, “What did you mean, you hope it’s his mother?”
“The ceremony doesn’t just hold back time. It transforms the people it’s trapped here. It creates its own Guardians.”
“You’re telling me that those things used to be… people?”
Ryan nodded. “They appear whenever the ceremony is active and the city could theoretically be reached. They protect this place. They slaughter anyone they find. The stone eggs were created to allow a few select individuals safe passage back home. Anyone else is fair game.”
Through the window, the creature in Stanley’s room was finished with its work. It rose and tore back out into the dark, SHRIEKING loud enough to make Ethan’s mind stutter, even after hearing the sound so many times.
Ethan said, “You seem to know a lot about those things.”
Ryan raised his right hand, revealing the strange implement he held. It was a staff—if you could call it that—with a wicked curved blade at its tip. Bone white. Vaguely organic.
The man flicked his wrist, and the long claw at the end of the weapon curved open wider, like a bird stretching its talons.
A faint echo seemed to come from the blade as it moved. A familiar SHRIEK.
“I’ve had some practice with them,” Ryan said.
Ethan looked at Ryan’s clothes, his scars, his blade. “You look like you’ve been to a war.”
“I’ve been looking for Penelope.” This wasn’t, Ethan noticed, a denial. The man gestured to the streets, the rows of buildings with their blank windows. “You can go through one gap and come out another. Don’t try it for yourself. You never know where you’ll end up.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
Ryan adjusted a strap on his strange garment, rubbed a finger on what looked like a bloodstain. His one eye seemed afraid to look at Ethan. “You really don’t want to know.”
At the city’s center, the column of silver light let out another terrible moan.
Ryan said casually, “Move.” Ethan started running almost before he realized the danger he was in.
The great building in which he’d just watched Stanley Holiday meet his maker collapsed behind him, releasing a nasty barrage of cracked stone. Ethan took a nick behind his ear.
That could have been much worse.
But when Ethan turned back to thank Ryan, the man was already standing at another building’s window.
A moment ago, Ethan would have sworn that window was nothing more than a plain hole in a stone wall.
Now, through its stone frame, he saw a strange wasteland.
A jagged ridge of bony mountains. A black sky.
A single flame on the horizon—redder than any fire Ethan had ever known.
The sight scared Ethan in a way he could never explain. “Is that… the future?”
“A possible future. One of many, if you don’t figure out how to deal with Te’lo’hi. Or Jack Allen.” Ryan braced a hand on the window’s frame, preparing to leave.
“Wait a second—come with me. I’ll need your help. He—”
“I’ll catch up with you later.” Ryan nodded over Ethan’s shoulder. “You should run.”
Ethan turned back just in time to see the road on which he’d walked suddenly crack and split and cave in, crumbling away into a coursing stream of pale silver light. The energy in the air grew even hotter, sparking on his clothes, almost like his shirt was trying to ignite.
The road kept crumbling a few feet at a time, heading Ethan’s way. No time to think. He turned, sprinted, and saw that Ryan was long gone, the window onto the lonely world with the bloodred fire now empty of anything at all.