Mereque flew two hundred yards through the air, tossed like a doll by the power of the monster’s landing.

  His implants catalogued everything despite the spin: wind speed, topography, mud depth, heat signatures.

  Before the swamp swallowed him, he drew his weapon and fired twice.

  The first round barely grazed its target, but the second round clipped the creature’s left wing.

  A bone-chilling shriek split the sky.

  Then the mud closed over his head, spraying high enough to blind the beast.

  Small blessings, he thought.

  He surfaced, firearm already up, finger on the trigger for the kill shot.

  He had a better look at the monster now.

  Massive didn’t cover it.

  Eighty feet of crimson-scaled muscle, wings easily two hundred feet across, heavier than any creature had a right to be. Heat rolled off it in waves—his visor painted the beast in blinding orange and red. Whatever this was, it sure as hell wasn’t cold-blooded.

  The monster thrashed, snarling, clawing swamp mud from its glowing eyes. Blind and furious, it never noticed Ventrullis rising before it.

  Mud slid from the soldier’s armor as he stood. Silent. Steady. Rifle already up, crosshair locked on the monstrous skull.

  One squeeze and it would be over.

  A wall of wind blasted him flat.

  He was on his back, swamp water lapping at his helmet seals, head throbbing with adrenaline. The wedge hung above him like a silent god, black metal, no engines, no heat signature, just that low hum that rattled his back molars.

  Saved me? Or tagged me for retrieval? Or maybe elimination?

  His HUD stuttered, trying to classify something that refused every category. For one stupid heartbeat he wanted to laugh. Fourteen thousand years of human engineering and this was how it was all going to end.

  The beast thrashed, rubbing muck from its eyes. The construct’s lights pulsed in perfect sequence, it was code. Mereque knew code.

  Given half a moment, he was certain he could decipher it with relative ease. But that moment wasn’t now.

  Before he could consider his next action, a lilting voice slipped through his translator, soft as wind through reeds. “If you want to get away from those louts, you’re better off coming with me, take my hand stranger!”

  “Who… who’s there…?”

  He turned in confusion. A fresh sinkhole gaped beside him. A small hand poked out, three fingers and a thumb, attached to a red-haired girl with huge almond shaped eyes and freckles that danced like sparks.

  She was pale-skinned, dressed in green with hints of golden trim, with ears that slightly tapered towards the tops. They were pointed! He didn’t know what to make of that.

  The crimson monster cleared its vision and swung its head, hunting. Enraged. Steam curled from its face.

  Mereque grabbed the hand.

  Her fingers closed around two of his fingers, small, warm, impossible. Reality folded like wet paper, dissolving into pastel rainbows. The beast’s roar stretched, slowed, turned into a whale-song made of broken bells. Colors bled sideways. Swamp stink became honey and lightning. His stomach flipped the way it did on re-entry, only gentler, like falling upward into a dream he wasn’t supposed to have. Then the world snapped shut behind him and the swamp was gone, swallowed by living light.

  The sinkhole spat him out into a place that should not exist.

  In one heartbeat he was falling through black water and dragon-fire; in the next he stood barefoot in grass so green it hurt the eyes.

  The air tasted like childhood memories, honey and ozone and something that made him want to laugh or cry, he wasn’t sure which.

  His mind reeled.

  He still held the girl’s hand. Her grip was warm, impossibly small, yet it anchored him while everything else was spinning.

  Above them the sky had no sun. Instead, light poured from everywhere and nowhere, soft and golden and pink, as though the world itself glowed from the inside. Clouds drifted in slow, lazy ribbons of rose and lavender. When he stared too long, they rearranged themselves into shapes he almost recognized; castles, horses, faces he’d once seen in old colony picture-books.

  The ground beneath his boots rippled like water when he shifted his weight, then settled again. Flowers, actual flowers, not the gene-sculpted things he knew, opened and closed in silent greeting as he passed. One unfurled petals the color of fresh blood and exhaled a scent like his sister once wore on the day of her commencement.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Senna. He suddenly missed her.

  He tried to speak and tasted music on his tongue.

  “What the hell is this?” he managed, the voice sounding strange in his ears.

  The girl only grinned and tugged him forward.

  They ran, or floated, or danced, he couldn’t tell. His legs moved without permission, light as nimbus swells. Every step carried him farther than physics allowed. Grass blades stroked his calves like the whiskers of curious cats. Somewhere a stream sang a song that translated itself directly into memory: the sound of crystal rains on a Leopold hab-dome when he was seven, the smell of wet metal and the promise of better days ahead.

  Golden fish leapt from the silver water, each one trailing sparks that hung in the air and became fireflies. A tree ahead grew upside-down, roots clawing at the glowing sky while its leaves brushed the ground, whispering secrets in a thousand dead languages.

  The upside-down tree whispered something in his mother’s voice, three notes of a lullaby he hadn’t heard since he was a babe. He stumbled, throat tight, and the tree was suddenly right-side-up again, innocent.

  “That was a dragon chasing you! Lucky day I spotted you before it was too late. You would have made a nice snack for that one! Hurry now, keep up if you can!”, the girl said as she danced away across the grassy knolls, hand slipping free, her hair waving in the breeze behind, beckoning him to follow.

  “A dragon! Really? A dragon? Wait! Where are we going? What is this place!?”, Mereque called to the girl as he tried to keep up, his legs pumping wildly, while she seemingly moved farther away from him with every step.

  Impossible. Preposterous really. But a dragon was no stranger, he supposed, then the one-eyed giant he had spied during his first day here, or the feathered spiders he spotted two days after that.

  He saw them then, children with curling horns and goat legs chasing each other between trunks that bled starlight when scratched. One looked straight at him and waved, shy, before vanishing in a puff of dandelion seeds.

  For three steps the ground turned to warm beach sand, then mirror-smooth glass that reflected a sky he didn’t recognize, then soft white feathers that sighed when he stepped off them.

  A stag made of northern lights galloped overhead, its antlers dripping slow silver, became twinkling snowflakes that kissed the grass. Mereque watched it vanish beyond the lavender clouds and yearned to see it one more time. His chest ached with something too big for the word wonder.

  He had crossed light-years hunting for a myth called Earth, and instead the myth had reached up and swallowed him whole.

  Was he losing his mind?

  The girl’s laughter rang like bells. “Keep up, big soldier! You’ll get lost if you stare too long. Things here like to keep what they fancy.”

  He wanted to tell her he was already lost, gloriously, terrifyingly lost, but the words slipped away and all he could do was follow the red-haired comet pulling him deeper into a place that felt more real than the world he’d left bleeding behind him.

  There was a panic beginning to creep into the back of his head, the thought of never escaping this place was both intoxicating and somehow frightening. It shocked some sense into him.

  “Where are we?” he shouted.

  She laughed, suddenly beside him again, close enough that her curls brushed his armor.

  “Home,” she said, and pulled him toward a solitary tree whose trunk yawned wide enough for both of them.

  He stepped through.

  Reality snapped back. Gravity remembered him all at once. His knees wanted to buckle but he held firm; real sand, real weight, real salt wind slapping the cracked faceplate.

  The HUD rebooted in frantic red strobes, topography lines racing across his vision like it was trying to catch up with a world that had just rewritten itself. His hand was tingling where her small fingers had been, warm even through the armor.

  He stared at the ordinary ocean, ordinary sky, ordinary grass, and felt like a man who’d just walked on the surface of the sun and been handed back his boots. I just stepped through a fairy tale, he thought, and it let me live.

  He flexed his fingers, half-expecting the warmth of her hand to still be there.

  For the first time in forever he noticed how heavy his armor actually was; gravity felt offended, as though it had personally missed him while he was gone.

  A single firefly, no, a leftover spark from that other place, drifted out of a crack in his shoulder plate, circled his helmet once, then winked out over the waves. He watched it die with something that felt dangerously close to grief.

  Everything here was duller: the sand was just sand, the sky was only blue, the wind was only wind.

  “What was that place?” he asked, voice rough even through the translator.

  “That is where we live, my people and me, you can think of it as the other side of this one…”, the red-headed child answered.

  Mereque stared at the horizon where sea met sky in an endless fan of blues, and for the first time since he watched the Cazues burn, words completely failed him.

  “I’ve never felt anything like that before, it seemed so dreamlike, yet so real.”, Ventrullis gave voice to the wonder he felt.

  The girl stood ankle-deep in surf, grinning up at him.

  Her green dress should have been soaked, yet the cloth was dry, shimmering like it had been woven from new leaves and dawn. Sunlight, no, the memory of that other light, still clung to her freckles; each one glowed faintly, like someone had scattered embers across her cheeks. When she tilted her head, tiny motes of gold drifted from her hair and dissolved before they touched the sand.

  Mereque’s HUD tried and failed to classify her species three times, then simply flashed UNKNOWN in defeated red letters. He didn’t blame it. She looked like every story he had read as a child, when the colony lights dimmed for the night, come to life in glorious color.

  “Yes, your people never can walk in our land for long without becoming confused. But I didn’t think I had much choice with those two on your tail.”, her lilting voice was nearly mesmerizing in its cadence.

  “I’m grateful. Thank you for your help, my name is Mereque and I come from somewhere very far away. Who are you and… what are your people called?”

  He was certain he knew her answer before he heard it, but he wanted to confirm his suspicions, growing up in the Leopold colonies, many youths had heard about or read some of the same stories, tales of fiction, originating from old Earth.

  Well-known subjects of make-belief, spawned from countless human imaginations, over a period that spanned thousands of years. But they were not real, and yet, irrefutable proof dropped itself at his feet, challenging every preconceived notion he had known.

  He had seen gigantic things looming beneath the watery waves in his emergency descent, some much larger than the islands that were scattered across this world, impossibly humongous, hinting at dangers and horrors beyond understanding.

  “I’m Grace, my people… we are the Fay.”, she said with a smile, her eyes shining against a backdrop of sea meeting sky.

  The explorer from another solar system, who had been trained to deal with the most alarming and potentially dangerous of circumstances, found himself at a loss for words.