The Flood He Invented

Chapter 1

Water dripped from the sagging bark roof of my hut, landing with a sharp hiss right on the edge of my campfire.

A puff of bitter gray smoke rolled straight into my face.

I coughed, waving a hand in front of my nose, and shoved another crooked branch into the weak flames.

The wood refused to catch properly. Everything at the base of this colossal tree stayed soggy twenty - four hours a day.

My boots sank half an inch into the dark, mossy mud right inside my own shelter, and the chill of the forest floor seeped through the rubber soles, numbing my toes.

I pulled my frayed jacket tighter around my ribs and stretched my palms toward the pathetic orange glow, trying to bake the dampness out of my knuckles.

Living in a crooked lean - to wedged between the massive roots of an ancient oak was nobody’s idea of luxury.

The bark walls let the draft through every gap, and my mattress consisted of piled ferns covered by a single wool blanket that smelled like wet dog.

Still, I huddled closer to the embers, glaring at the glistening mud by the entrance.

Through the gap in the woven branches above the fire pit, a patch of heavy slate - gray sky peeked through the dense yellow leaves.

A dark silhouette glided across that pale gap, cutting through the lazy waves of fog on wide, silent wings.

The figure banked sharply, circling the massive trunk just below the upper canopy.

A gryphon. I rolled my eyes and jabbed the burning logs with a stick, sending a shower of orange sparks into the damp air.

Probably my insufferable stepbrother. Knowing my luck, he had been circling up there for an hour, waiting for an excuse to drop down and annoy me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to be alive.

Breathing clean air without a rubber filtration mask digging into the bridge of my nose beats choking to death in a ditch.

I was twenty - three when Earth started dying.

Nobody got a slow, cinematic warning. One month the news anchors were arguing about carbon taxes, and the next, the biosphere collapsed like a house of cards.

Crops rotted in the fields, the power grids fried under the strain, and society tore itself apart over the last cans of peaches and clean water filters.

Within half a year, the cities turned into lawless graveyards buried under dunes of greasy gray ash.

Stepping outside without full gear meant coughing up blood by sunset.

The sky stayed charcoal black at noon, and the wind carried enough toxic soot to strip the paint off abandoned cars.

How my mother managed to track me down in the middle of that apocalypse remains a mystery.

We hadn't spoken a word since my eighteenth birthday - the exact morning she threw my duffel bag onto the front lawn and changed the locks.

Not that living under her roof before that milestone had been a picnic.

By the time I was fourteen, I spent four nights a week crashing on friends' couches or sleeping in the backseats of beat - up sedans just to get six hours of quiet.

My mother treated cheap vodka like a food group and had a revolving door of loud, sketchy men trailing in and out of our kitchen at three in the morning.

Coming home meant stepping over empty bottles and dodging whatever creep had passed out on our sagging sofa.

When she finally kicked me out at eighteen, I considered it a graduation gift.

So when I pried open the rusted side door of the Sector Seven underground bunker to check the air scrubbers and found Brenda standing on the concrete steps in a stolen hazard coat, I didn't exactly throw my arms around her neck.

She reeked of stale gin even through her cracked respirator.

Within thirty seconds, we were screaming at each other over the roar of the wind.

She demanded I let her into the shelter; I told her to go pound sand and find one of her barflies to leech off.

The ash storm hit while I was trying to shove her off the concrete landing.

Greasy gray flakes blinded us, coating my goggles and filling our throats with the taste of burnt metal.

My mother grabbed my wrist, shrieking some drunken guilt trip about family blood, while I yanked my arm back and coughed until my ribs ached.

Then the emergency beacons by the bunker door shifted.

The dull red signal lights flared into a blinding, unnatural gold.

Before I could wrench my wrist out of Brenda's grip, the light expanded, spiraling outward into a massive, burning ring that tore the air apart.

A wandering portal. The golden ring lunged forward like a hungry mouth and swallowed us both whole.

Gravity vanished, replaced by a stomach - churning drop through a silent void.

A heartbeat later, we slammed into a bed of wet yellow leaves, tumbling head over heels into the center of a gryphon settlement.

If I thought Earth had gone crazy, the next ten minutes proved me wrong.

Giant winged beasts dropped from the sky like feathered boulders, surrounding us in a circle of clicking beaks and flexed claws.

I scrambled for a sharp rock, ready to take at least one monster’s eye out before they ate us.

Instead, the biggest, gnarliest gryphon of the pack - the local Warlord - pushed through the crowd, took one sniff of my mother, and froze like he had been struck by lightning.

Maybe the fumes of cheap Earth liquor fermenting in her pores worked like catnip on alien monster predators.

Or maybe two toxic disasters simply recognized each other on sight.

Whatever the biology behind it, the Warlord fell head over heels on the spot.

Before I could even brush the wet moss off my knees, Brenda realized this towering monster ran the whole territory.

She smoothed down her greasy hair, batted her eyelashes, and wrapped the terrifying beast right around her little finger.

Within a week, she was mated to the boss of the forest, wearing draped furs and acting like the queen of the canopy.

Living among gryphons takes some getting used to, mostly because they look like nature threw a lion and a giant eagle into a blender and forgot to make the result attractive.

There is nothing sleek or handsome about them.

They walk upright on two massive, backwards - jointed lion legs covered in coarse tawny fur, ending in heavy paws that never touch a pair of shoes.

Their torsos are broad and human - shaped, packed with slabs of dense muscle under a coat of short, golden - brown pelt, and their human - like hands end in thick, curved black talons capable of ripping bark off a tree trunk.

Massive wings in shades of rust, copper, and autumn gold fold against their shoulder blades.

From the neck up, any trace of humanity turns into pure nightmare fuel.

They have no hair - just layers of stiff, overlapping feathers covering their skulls and necks.

Their faces are a brutal mashup of man and bird of prey: harsh, angular cheekbones merging into a sharp, hooked beak made of dark horn, flanked by round, unblinking predatory eyes that track every twitch of a muscle.

Add a long lion tail with a heavy tuft of fur at the tip swishing behind their knees, and you get a colony of eight - foot - tall carnivorous gargoyles.

And out of the entire feathered freak show, the worst one by far is my new stepbrother, Plumak.

The guy has zero concept of personal space.

While the other gryphons mind their own business up in the branches, Plumak lurks around the lower trunks like an oversized, winged stray.

Every time I step out of my hut to fetch water from the stream or gather dry kindling, I hear the heavy rustle of feathers overhead or catch the flash of amber eyes through the ferns.

He hovers and he watches. But worst of all he drops dead squirrels near my woodpile like I’m supposed to thank him for a raw rodent, and he finds five different reasons a day to check if my fire is still burning.

Aside from the winged stalker, the Yellow World isn't the worst place to end up.

The air is crisp and clean, carrying the rich, earthy smell of wet pine needles, wild mushrooms, and damp soil.

Lush yellow ferns as tall as my shoulders blanket the forest floor, and the giant trees hold onto their gold and copper crowns year - round.

My lungs have finally stopped rattling when I wake up.

Still, the endless dampness is driving me up the wall.

A permanent ceiling of gray clouds blocks out the sun, keeping the forest trapped under a fine, lazy mist that rolls through the woods day and night, turning into a drizzle whenever the wind shifts.

My socks haven't been dry since we fell through that portal.

To make matters worse, some kleptomaniac keeps raiding my hut.

At first, I thought I was losing my mind.

Last Tuesday, my spare gray sweatshirt vanished off the wooden peg by my bed.

Three days later, my left wool sock disappeared right off the drying stick near the fire, followed by a faded blue bandana and the shiny aluminum spoon I happen to have on me when we fell through the portal.

There are no footprints in the mud outside except big feline paw prints, which tells me one of these feathered bastards is sneaking in here while I’m down at the creek and helping himself to my wardrobe.