“What is it?” Karen had only made it a few steps away from her dead car before stopping to stare in wonder. Whatever it was, it was huge. A big, swirling mass of red and purple with the top stretching up to rival the steeple.

As she stepped through the mouth of the alley, the gate disappeared behind the colorful townhomes. She’d always disliked neighborhoods like this, preferring a more sterile and uniform aesthetic.

“Can’t I go home first? Can you at least tell me how to start my car?” The short hike was already making her a bit winded.

To punctuate that, a pair of throaty gunfire blasts sounded in the not-too-distance. A knocking series of reports sounded after that.

Her mind respected that urgency thing, but her body… her body was telling her no. After a short time, the steep hill took its toll, and just before they reached the next street Karen was leaning heavily against a privacy fence. The weathered wood flexed a bit against her weight. The glowing ball had led her up at a pace she couldn’t keep, and she followed it automatically, never considering the tiny pace car was only in her mind and could appear anywhere at any time.

What is happening? Why is this happening? One of the benefits of being winded was being forced to silently ask her questions.

Wouldn’t a dozen quilts stitched together be an unusable million-pound lump?

That’s what’s causing this. Reality is breaking apart into smaller and smaller pieces until it’s not detectable anymore and it’s taking everything with it. It’s part of the natural creation and destruction cycle, or so they say. The people who control this whole thing don’t exactly have a newsletter.>

People who control what thing? What people? Hands on her head, she was struggling to get her breathing in order.

Karen wasn’t really certain what to make of this. She was certain that she wanted to move on in spite of her breath being not quite caught, and indicated as much. She’d hardly taken a dozen more steps before she began to feel unease. Not the kind you get from forgoing any strenuous activity for years and then walking up a steep hill, but the kind you get when returning home after sneaking out only to find the light is on in the living room.

The tiny ghost agreed there was a problem, and helped to fix it with a mild tone of panic.

Karen, to her credit, did make an attempt at doing as the spirit asked. After staring into the darkened wood and fixing the grain in her mind, she squeezed her eyes shut and attempted to concentrate on nothing. Trying not to think of anything is an exceptionally hard thing to do, and almost impossible when you have a particular thing not to think about.

It was a scant few seconds before her still ringing ears caught a sound near her. Tap tap tap. The urge to look at what was causing the approaching sound was irresistible, so she made the urge go away completely by looking. The cat was huge. Its tongue slid out to lap a maw already wet with blood.

Karen had seen a panther at the zoo once. It had been lazing in a tree, tail swaying back and forth. She remembered the mottled black fur that looked almost identical to this beast. But mostly she remembered the eyes. Golden eyes that stared back, somehow both disinterested and incredibly intense. They had focused on her, laughing and hateful, just as this one did. The laughing was very real now, louder than the dense tapping claws of its steps.

The little orb winked out.

The cat stalked forward, claws clicking step by step. She raised the gun in shaking hands. It paused. Golden eye went wide for a single moment, then it was gone.

“What was-“

BOOM! The home across from her blasted apart and the force of it hammered Karen into the fence and down to her butt. She sat stunned for a moment as splinters of debris rained down all around. The tiny chunks of building that did manage to strike her hardly even registered. Tiny, stinging bits of masonry could not be farther out of her mind at the moment. She only had eyes for the person slowly rising up into the sky from the ruins.

It was naked, though modesty might not be much of an issue for it. It was covered, head to actual tail, in red scales. Its lizard face was pointed upward and it yelled out something she couldn’t understand, never stopping its rise skyward. Then she saw the object of its hissing ire. A woman in all white. She yelled something unintelligible back and the pair stood, or rather floated, neither looking particularly happy to see the other. The skybound faceoff drew out, leaving Karen to stare in wonder.

There was no way to tell who struck first. Ignoring who struck first, there was no way to even tell what happened at all. A flash of white impacted against a flash of red and then the flying pair were gone.

The flashing lights did not leave long to consider it. A moment after the pair disappeared a shockwave of terrible force knocked her back. Terrible force being the brutal thing it is, what followed immediately after was a blur.

The fence she had been pressed against was flattened. Rather, the parts of it that survived, were flattened, a good portion was blasted apart. They were easy to spot from the branch of the tree she’d found herself in. Extricating herself from it wasn’t difficult, the tree had been knocked on its side as well.

She could, though she felt thoroughly abused, and made her way out into the debris strewn alley as quickly as her bruised body would allow. The pistol was gone, launched somewhere during her impromptu tumbling lesson. It hardly seemed important compared to what was now above the city. Huge black streaks, like someone had cut the sky open with a knife, hung where the pair had been fighting. It was like someone had poured black ink onto the blue page of the heavens, and that blackness seemed to stare back as she looked into it. It was a decent motivator for being anywhere else.

Parts of shattered masonry and splintered wood served as little detours to weave around on the previously clear concrete. It was too much. Not the debris, but everything. The whole experience. She couldn’t even pay attention as the ball explained how they were so powerful their blows literally ripped holes into the sky. She’d become numb to it, not even asking questions until they managed to crest the hill.

---

“Is it safe?” The portally thing swirled in the same mix of red and purple she’d spotted from back near her car. The impression it gave was a bit like a hyperactive lava lamp.

Karen watched the little lump of light as it completed a speech she secretly considered to be a bit self-righteous. Was the consideration secret? Earlier that day the spirit said it had acquired all of her memories. Did that include future memories? If it did know, it seemed not to mind that she thought it was an asshole, and this was made worse by its insistence that most of its personality was from a bond with her. If it did know her thoughts on it, that meant her opinion didn’t matter, even to herself.

“So, I, ah, just cruise right through it? Like a goopy door?” She brought a hand up to touch it before reconsidering and pulling it back toward her chest.

She glanced back. From the top of the hill she could see the entire neighborhood and off into other parts of the city. Smoke was rising up from many of the buildings already, drifting up lazily toward the tears. Those terrible, black rips in the sky like a starless night cutting into the morning blue were almost as frightening as the noise. Knocking gunfire. A woman screamed. Something inhuman cried in triumph or horror, she couldn’t tell which. Far in the distance, something she couldn’t see boomed like thunder. Nope, fuck that. To stay standing in front of the swirlydoor would only give her more time to muster her cowardice and waffle on a choice, so she took two quick steps and crossed the threshold.

The stupid lightbulb had been right. It really didn’t feel like anything. It really didn’t feel like anything. No senses, no thoughts, no anything. She didn’t consider it to be unpleasant because she didn’t consider it at all. Until she did. It was only a single thing. A solitary impression. Destination. Making her pick was irresistible. Not in thoughts or in words. It wasn’t the answer to a question. It was an impression given for an impression given. Mraxis. Exactly as she’d been told.

There was no delay or bright tunnel or stretched out lightspeed stars. Any of those would have served as a polite warning. A ‘hey, something is about to happen!’ Instead, what she got was a face full of mud.

Karen had not been delivered face first into the mud. Worse than that, she’d taken a step forward and collapsed bonelessly into a muddy square. Gates that slip you through the fabric between realities were pretty disorienting, and she’d forgotten she had feet.

The glowing orb twinkled during his gleeful delivery, ignoring her spitting and sputtering.

Sputtering that petered out as she looked up. It was some kind of village. It wasn’t large. It was actually quite small. Fat bricks of fired, red clay formed the walls of all the buildings. More red was tiled on the roof in a wavy pattern. The narrow streets were unpaved and wound their way out of the village and off into wooded hills and distant peaks. It looked rustic. Cozy. Karen hardly noticed any of it. She couldn’t help but be caught up on other things.

The traffic on the street was sparse, but it was all fantastic. There was a man who was eight feet tall if he was an inch, and three times her weight at least. He wasn’t even the only absolute unit visible. A human sized bipedal insect thing was walking down the street wearing surprising normal clothing. Surprisingly normal considering that if it wanted a t-shirt it would be forced to special order an ꟻF-shirt. Something that looked like it had the face of a moth was visible through an open window, hard at work on some unseen task.

“Whoa.” She sat there for a while, knees to the ground, soaking in the strangeness of it.

“The Empress Eugenie welcomes you to the Harvess Empire. Please present yourself to inspection and customs.” At first it seemed like the spirit had spoken, but that idea passed quickly. Whoever was talking was winning a one-man competition for flattest delivery. Even the Russian judge voted ten.

Speaking of tens, Karen finally found the source of the voice. On a wooden platform next to the gate sat the silver fox in question. Not a literal fox of the fluffy variety, but a man of the want to jump bones variety. One of his hands was holding a book he was nose-deep in, while the second was hard at work writing into a different book that sat on his desk.

“Name.” He spoke again without looking up from the book he was reading.

“Ah, Karen Gillespie.”

“Akaren Gillespie.”

“No. Karen. K-a-r-e-n.” She had the sharp impulse to file a complaint, but she wasn’t certain there was a system for that here.

“Species.”

“Human?”

“Planet or plane of Origin.”

“Earth.”

“Do you have any magic or implements with a city-wide scale of destructive potential?”

“No?”

“Are you carrying any nonnative flora or fauna?”

“No.”

“Sign here.” Still not looking up from the book of what Karen assumed was the Mraxis equivalent of Harry Potter fanfiction, he spun the other book around to face her. The pen was presented outward for her to take. She had fully intended to snatch up the implement, sign, then find a reasonably comfortable place to cry, but ran into a little problem.

Karen, when she was young, had taken a physics course at UC Santa Cruz. Go slugs. During class one day, in lieu of taking notes, she had drawn a doodle of an anthropomorphic apple pie eating a slice of itself. If this man had presented that drawing for her to sign it would have made more sense than the fucked to death pile of jumbled mess that was scribbled out across the page.

“I can’t… what is this?”

His reaction was instant. The book he was reading snapped closed. A sigh, longer and more exasperated than the situation warranted, was blown haughtily from his nose. The kind of bridge pinching sigh that really lets a person know how over someone’s shit they are. He began fishing something from his desk, mumbling as he did so. ‘bumpkin,’ was the only portion she caught. Eventually a ring was dropped into the crease of the open book. The iron loop was slender, smooth, and unadorned.

“Initial here. Standard translation magic. Also, the ring has a storage space of three hundred and thirteen ounces.” Before the words had left his lips, he was back to reading his book. He tapped the second book once and began filling out some new paperwork.

The contracted spirit made himself useful for the first time since arrival.

“Even more stupid units?”

“Sounds sexual.”

It was then she noticed her rude Adonis had stopped reading to give her a quizzical look.

“What? Can I fucking help you?” She wasted no time in escalating.

“You’re covered in shit and talking to yourself.”

The vein on her forehead threatened to pop as she mentally cycled through her rolodex of angry responses, settling on a brutal classic. “I want to speak with your manager.”

“Complaints are filed at the Department Where Intergate Customs are Managed in Prince Eugene.” He went back to his book. Leaning the chair back onto the rear legs was as sure a dismissal as it seemed he’d put the effort into giving.

If it was possible to hate someone to death the man would at least have a headache. Wanting to be away as quickly as possible, she slipped on the ring. The scribbles visibly untangled themselves into English. She signed, initialed, and stormed off as hard as she knew how. With the pen.