Fortnightly Writing Competition: THE OTHER SIDE (Results)

[Baron]

Welcome to the Fortnightly Writing Competition!  The rules are simple: write and post an original short-story based on the theme within two weeks, and then vote on the submissions to determine a winner.  This fortnight's exciting theme is:

The Other Side



What is out there, on the other side?  What exists so near at hand, and yet separated from us by such a seemingly flimsy barrier, such that there are hints of and whispers that flit just beyond our sight and hearing?  What would happen if someone were to stumble on a means of touching the other side, or seeing it, hearing it, dreaming it, or even walking it?  Is the other side just waiting for us to join with it, or is it something terrible that should be left in its own plane?  Perhaps the gateway is in some sacred place or ancient talisman, or simply a matter of seeing or believing what was really there all along?  Perhaps there are teachers out there who sound a little crazy at times, but can help you through the process if you could only set aside your preconceptions?  This fortnight you will have to open your mind to see what is truly out there beyond us.

This fortnight you must write about THE OTHER SIDE, but I leave that open to your interpretation.  Perhaps it is death, or heaven/hell, or a twisted reflection of our own reality, or a dystopian reality where AI's harvest your human brain energy while keeping you in a coma where you dream of putting in 50 hours of work a week because no one would ever want to escape THAT....  But I digress - the other side could mean the other side of an ocean, a galaxy, a fence, a social barrier or construct; heck, it could even mean the other end of the those 4 inch pipes that shoot your poop out of your house to god-knows-where.  Alls I'm saying is that you have to have this sense of otherness just beyond a character's grasp, that they engage with either tangentially or entirely.

Deadline for submissions is Thursday June 1 midnight Hawaii time.  Extensions - should they be sought - will be granted on the basis of alluding to something much more sinister than a deadline that may or may not be stalking you from the haze at the fringe of your peripheral vision.

Good luck to all participants! 

[Baron]

Yeah, that's right, think deeply before writing.  Or better yet, do some first hand research through the looking glass by disappearing off the face of the Earth....

FIVE MORE DAYS! 

[Sinitrena]

I have something in the works, but it turned out to be a bit complicated. I might need more time, but I'm not sure yet.

[Mandle]

Something is crossing over here as well...

[Sinitrena]

I think I do indeed need a bit more time.

[Baron]

Extension granted!

New deadline will be Monday June 5, 2023.

[Mandle]

Awesome! Something in the works!

[Stupot]

Awesome! Something in the works!

Me too

[Sinitrena]

Warning: sexual language, slightly brutal (but consensual), also other violence and death


With my deepest apologies, I did not have time to proofread, so expect typos and minor inconsistencies.

The Nameless Kingdom

The dreams started at midnight. And they started while she was awake.

She had left her horse and most of the rations at the edge of the forest. The undergrowth was too thick, there was no getting through for the animal. The trees stood close to each other, so close that it seemed impossible for them to grow like that. Air roots, invisible under moss and fallen leaves, caught her legs and let her stumble. Some trees had fallen in the years and centuries since the forest had grown to its current size. They lay, half hanging, in the narrow spaces between the other trunks. Thick, dark leaves obscured the sun, leaving only shadows down on the ground.

Jamela fought through the thicket, which was bruising her delicate flesh and ripping her pale skin. Birds chirped in the branches high above her head and every now and then something rustled in the brushwood, but she was never able to discern where the noises were coming from. Not least because she felt like a cow stampeding through a royal ball. There was no way for her to be silent, no way for her to even tell her exact direction, no way to know if she was on the right path.

As if there was a path. Long ago, there must have been one. Long ago, somewhere deep in this forest, a castle kept watch over a city and several trade routes. Long ago, this was a kingdom, a kingdom between the principality of Narea, her home, and the empire of Garen to the south.

Her parents kept her awake. For days, every night, they argued, always the same arguments, always the same conclusion. No conclusion. It went in circles, and there was no hope.

An invisible force pulled her forward. At least, she told herself so. In truth, she was running, running away from home and running away from Garen, even though her path lead her towards it. She trusted her dreams, because she wanted to trust them, because the alternative was too unthinkable, too frightening. And if it was a false hope, as so many were, as so many people had learned with this one, it was still better than nothing and it was still something she could do. Waiting for the inevitable to happen did not change anything, did not save anyone.

Jamela brushed angry and desperate tears from her eyes. She must have fought against the thicket for hours by now, and still it felt like the edge of the forest was just a stone's throw away. Somewhere through the noise of the rustling leaves and her own strained groaning, she could even still hear the whinnying of her trusted mare. And the forest stretched for miles and miles. From the hills north of the river Kaj, the official border to the former Kingdom that nearly nobody dared to cross nowadays, she had seen it stretch on and on and on, over hills and to a mountain. And all was covered in trees. The terrain rose until the tops of the trees touched the clouds, Most of the time, they hung deep in the valley, but when they rose high above it and the air became so clear that you could count every individual tree in the distance, people said there would soon be rain, soon a storm would form over the Kingdom, the wind would rip through the forest, thunder would deafen the world and lighting would set the forest ablaze. But while all other forests would burn for days or for weeks, this forest was only ever left with a little dent in its structure. No forest aisles formed, just spots, black and burned, circular, perfectly formed. And soon, the forest took them back, covered them again with green leaves and overreaching branches.

They also said, that when a storm was brewing in the Kingdom, then a disaster was brewing for Narea, that doom was close and that hope was futile.

The sky was clear when Jamela arrived at the river. And like all her people would when they came close to the Kingdom, she started to count the trees in the distance. As she rode down towards the only bridge still standing, the one only used by adventurers in the vain hope to reclaim the Kingdom for human settlers, she had long lost the numbers, too high they were and too numerous the trees.

A storm was brewing over the Kingdom, and doom was stirring its pot for Narea.

"It's a good offer. It's better than war!" her father said.

"She would be a prisoner. And we would hand them not only our daughter, we would hand them the whole realm." her mother said.

For three weeks since the letter arrived, these same arguments circled through the house. It wasn't just her parents saying similar things, the servants did as well, from her governess to the footman, from the ministers to the cooks.

For now, their ships still fought off the fleet of the empire, even though some of the islands were lost. But the warships kept coming.

Narea was a peninsula. Once, it was part of the Kingdom, so it was told, once, her family reigned over vast lands, but now there was only Narea left and nature had taken back the Kingdom without a name. Once, long ago, it didn't need a name, once, long ago, it was all there was. Now, it was just the border between a tiny principality and an empire that wanted to have it all, an empire that wanted to become the new Kingdom, the real Kingdom.

The princes and princesses of Narea were the descendants of the Kingdom. Their claim was strong, but their forces weak, their numbers limited. A marriage proposal made sense, accepting it made sense. That didn't mean that anyone was really in favour of it. But time was running short.

Jamela slept in the nook between the trunks of two fallen trees. For the first time in weeks, she slept well. No matter how bruised she was, no matter how exhausted from crawling over brushwood and under tree trunks, no matter how many times she told herself that this was insane. She wasn't stupid, she had read the accounts of adventurers that had tried to find the seat of power before. Some had ended up in her home's library and so she knew that she wasn't the first to dream of the hidden valley deep in the forest, of the land still cultivated by descendants of the Kingdom, of the throne waiting in the great hall. Others had failed. She could not.

That night, under the sprawling branches of the trees, she dreamed of the hall again.

Jamela wore one of the dresses of old. The skirt's train brushed the hands of her subjects kneeling at the feet. They dared not look up, for she was the queen. Adorned with jewels that sparkled far less than the magic swirling around her, she drenched the whole hall in specks of light.

Her shoes clicked on the stone floor, until she reached the pedestal and the throne. There, the sound was cushioned by the thick carpet, and he knew to look up again. The queen did not spare a single look for him, so unworthy was he of her attention. He didn't mind, no, he almost embraced her coldness, her distance. She didn't care for him and he didn't have any responsibilities.

The bang of an explosion snapped him awake. Cursing, he stumbled sideways out of his cot and rolled once over the fur laying there to keep away the cold from the frozen grass underneath. Tamis scrambled onto his feet, then knelt down again and planted a kiss on the cheek of his still blissfully sleeping lover. He didn't even stir.

"Do you have to start this before dawn?", Tamis mumbled as the opened the flap of his tent, the two soldiers at the side immediately snapping to attention.

He looked in the direction of the mountains, though in the darkness of the early morning there was nothing to see there. The smoke obscuring the stars mixed with the clouds hanging deep over the valley. Somewhere, in the distance, the sun started the peak over the horizon, but it would soon sink into the surrounding darkness. The mountain range stretched from the north far to the east and so the sun only looked through the cleft between two peaks now and then. Even in summer, the valley often seemed dark and glooming.

Once, it was part of the Kingdom, but now it was a barren wasteland. The mountains were also a natural border to the greatest threat against the empire, Narea.

"When you need to get legitimacy, marry into the line of princes of Narea." a minister had suggested and his farther had agreed with a shrug. That didn't stop him from creating a different plan as well, though. Narea's people could claim a direct line to the Kingdom, Narea's people were descendants of the rulers of ling ago. Conquering them might not increase their legitimacy, but it would remove a threat.

On the ocean, Narea fought them off, but through the old and forgotten Kingdom there must be another path. Once, roads lead through it, but now?

Tamis stretched and took the cup of tea offered to him by one of the servants. He slowly walked in the direction of the mountain range, not knowing if he should hope they managed to break through the rocks or not.

"How's it going?" he asked the first soldiers he came across at the rock face.

Almost smooth here, it reached high into the sky here, solid as a metal shield. Many people had tried to scale the rocks, many had fallen to their deaths. Nevertheless, their first plan was to climb the mountain, their first plan was to drag soldiers after soldiers up the cliff and onto the high plateau that stretched for about three miles there before it slowly flattened into a wide valley. At least, that was what some old texts said about the terrain of the Kingdom. But these texts also said that there was a path through the mountain wall, wide enough for three carts to drive next to each other and to still leave enough room for people on foot.

Tamis shook his head. This was insane. It was insane that there was once a path here, it was insane that there was once a kingdom in these mountains, it was insane that this Kingdom ruled the world. It was also insane to try to march through here to reach Narea, it was insane to start this stupid plan just now, when there were miles and miles of rock to get through. It was insane to even try to conquer Narea and so unnecessary. The principality wasn't even in a position to attack or to challenge Garen's rule. And they didn't care to, either.

"We're getting there." the soldier answered, even though Tamis hadn't bothered to wait for a response.

The camp near the cliff only had a couple of tents storing the explosives while the soldiers slept in the same camp as Tamis. A few covered lamps illuminated a flattened bit of ground around a mouth in the rocks. After three detonations, it was hardly the entrance to an artificial cave yet. It was a dent under an overhang, making it seem like more work was done then it truly was.

Soldiers carted large and tiny stones away while the mining blaster inspected the damage done to the structure of the mountain. He only nodded once when he noticed the prince staring at him from a distance.

Tamis was not needed here. Not at all. Not for the work to be done and not to command the troops once there was any progress. He was here so that this undertaking seemed more important to the men.

In the last few days since he had arrived here, Tamis had started to wander along the cliff. Up and down, up and down he went past the rocks, sliding his fingertips over the black stone. Sometimes, he felt like a wild animal in a cage. He always felt like that a bit, but never in a physical sense. Here, he did. Here, the cliff seemed like an impenetrable wall that kept him away from his destiny. Behind these stones, he could feel the hints of magic that supposedly once pulsed through the whole world. Here, in the Kingdom behind the wall, magic was created, and here it died when the Kingdom fell. There were no accounts why it had fallen, only that the descendants of the rulers of the Kingdom had fled to Narea and that Narea's princes still to this day claimed the right to the Kingdom.

Somewhere behind this wall, there was still a queen on the golden throne. And if she could rule the world again, his father could stop caring about his stupid politics and his stupid fears and Tamis would not need to marry a girl he had never seen or spoken to, or one day rule himself. His lover, Nojen, was probably still sleeping in Tamis' tent and if Tamis wasn't destined to rule the empire and therefore need heirs, he could just while away his days, study music, dance every night into the morning, deep in Nojen's embrace...

As it was so often the case, his fantasies turned into dreams.

Nojen was playing the lute, singing in his crystal clear voice. The hall was decorated with drapes and flags in all colours of the rainbow, the symbols on them strange and unknown. They were golden or silver.

It was the first dance of the evening, the one reserved for the queen. She wore her dark brown hair mostly open that night, only a few strands were braided and adorned with silver chains and glittering stones. As she had not chosen a companion yet, she was alone in the middle of the room. Turning around, around and around, her arms high in the air, she seemed almost in ecstasy.

People watched her, and they also had their eyes respectfully downcast. She was the queen, the only the only, there was no doubt, not in their manners, not in her heart. She was the queen, she was the Kingdom, she was the world.

How much time had passed? How many days had she fought against the thicket? How many miles had she walked?

Jamela could not tell. Hardly any light reached the forest floor and the days seemed long even if she only walked for a few hours, so exhausting was the travel. Still, the terrain changed slowly. There was less under-wood now, less moss and less fallen trees. Instead, hard, sharp stones peaked through the plants from time to time. Jamela had stopped counting how many times she had fallen, how many bruises and cuts covered her body by now, how often her hair had gotten caught in the branches. After a while, she had cut it off, she had taken her knife, her only weapon because everything else was too unwieldy, and just sliced off her ponytail. Her mother would have chided her. But her mother wasn't here. Nobody was, she was alone.

And suddenly her path, as flimsy as it was, was blocked. Out of the forest rose a giant wall, sharp stones protruded from a cliff that threw its dark shadows onto the branches and leaves. Black rock formed a natural barrier right in the middle of the forest.

From afar, it had looked like the forest gently ascended until it grew on a mountain, but here, close to the centre of the woods, it was sudden and insurmountable.

Through the trunks, Jamela could see one of these strange clearings that was created by these freak fires she had heard about. On her way here, she had passed through a couple of them, rested her tired legs more than once on one, slept more than once under the bit of sun that managed to peak through this holes in the thick roof of the forest. Now, the one she spotted was not just a new respite for her exhausting journey, but also an opportunity to see her next obstacle a bit clearer.

Trailing her fingertips along the stones, she walked, or stumbled, or fought towards the clearing and for a moment it felt like other fingertips touched hers.

The other clearings had blackened ground from the fire and lightning, but here it was covered in moss. A green carpet welcomed her to the place under the autumn sun. Shadows danced on it as the branches gently swayed in the light breeze of this afternoon.

Even straining her neck, Jamela could not make out the top of the cliff. Nor could she see an end to it to the left or the right, even through the trees had stood back a bit from the stones. Some grew on the cliff itself, nestled in nooks and crannies, and the same moss she had come so accustomed to by now covered other parts of it. For someone standing close to the cliff, it looked like a giant mass of black rock, but from afar it mixed with the green of the surrounding area.

No conscious decision made her walk to the left, back the short distance she had come from her first encounter with the cliff, when she tried to look for a path through the mountain. She couldn't even be sure that there would be one. But her dreams had called her here and her dreams called her ever forward.

Compared to her journey so far, she managed to move quickly now. The trunks didn't try to hinder her any longer, no fallen trees blocked her path. There were still a few, laying rotten close to the cliff, but they weren't as thick and strong as those she had encountered before.

She reached a second clearing as the sun set for the night and her dreams took her to another walk through the palace. She was the queen, she was powerful, strong, she had to answer to no-one, did not have to marry, did not need to worry about her home.

And as she awake that morning, it was as if the sun had answered her dreams. It could not have reached far over the horizon, but a few rays already shone through the branches. They crept over the ground and reflected on the black stones of the cliff.

At first, she didn't notice it, at first she didn't notice how the light was broken there. There were many clefts in the stones, many protrusions and dents, but this one, this one was different. The darkness didn't end, the black stones didn't reflect the light at some point. Further and further into the mountain reached the darkness.

Jamela let her hand slide over the sharp edges of the stones. The cleft was narrow, but it reached into the mountain, further than she could see, further than she could feel from the outside.

Jamela had lost weight over the last couple of weeks. It had started when the talk of marriage began, when she felt sick to her stomach just thinking about marrying the son of this conqueror, but now that she fought against nature every day and ate little or nothing at all, she had become almost scrawny.

Four weeks ago, she would not have fit in the gap, hadn't even though of attempting it, had feared for her life and for her skin. But her skin was bruised either way and she hadn't come here to give up.

The gap was narrow, and it did cut into her skin. She had to turn sideways, her breasts and her arms and legs scraped against the stones. Stupidly, she had turned her head to the entrance, to the light when she entered the passage. It made sense, for the fraction of a second before she was ear to ear between the rocks and it was impossible to even think about turning her head. For a moment, she tried to go back, for a moment she wanted to abandon this try, but the stones pressed against her body, the edges cut her skin and she knew that if she turned around now, she would never get back in here again. Before every step, she pressed the air from her lungs, she flattened her chest and her stomach and like a cat, she managed to slip through, she got past the narrowest part at the entrance. After a couple of scuffled steps, the passage widened to about half her shoulder's width. It was still too narrow to walk through it properly, still too narrow to turn her head, it still ripped open her clothes and skin, but she moved forward.

After a few steps, the little bit of light from the entrance ended with a sharp line. No shadows danced on the walls, no leaves rustled in the distance. Jamela had only her sense of touch, in her fingertips and her feet, to sense the width of the cave, its corners and curves.

At some points, the stones had grown closer together, at others further apart from each other, but they never opened up so wide that she could turn her body or even her head. Still, every time she felt for the next turn, she found enough space to move forward. By now, it wouldn't even have helped her if her head pointed in the right direction. There was nothing but darkness around her, nothing but the cold stone pressing against her chest and taking her breath away.

At midday, light returned. It didn't come from the entrance that was long gone from her eyesight, nor from an exit she might hope to find at one point and that would have been impossible to see, but from up ahead. As narrow as the passage was, it was open all the way to the sky and when the sun finally reached its zenith, some rays managed to shine all the way to the bottom of the cleft.

Jamela was tired, exhausted. She had not drank any water, had not sat down, had not rested all day. How would she have been able to?

At some points in the passage and the seemingly impassable walls, wet spots penetrated the cold surface. The sunbeams made them glitter like diamonds. Jamela licked over the stones, slobbering up some of the moisture and she hung in the stones holding her body upright for a while. It was her only respite, before she had to move again. She knew she was lost of she got stuck, she knew she was lost if she got too exhausted to continue, she knew the path back was not better than the path forward. And she kept going, because at the end of the passage lay her only hope, and if there was none there she was lost either way. How it was possible that she had not got stuck so far, she could not tell.

It was late afternoon when the passage suddenly widened to a footpath. Jamela felt for the next sharp edge and then her fingers touched nothing, her shoulders touched nothing. Suddenly no longer supported by the surrounding stones, she fell to her knees and her head snapped around. It hurt, her neck hurt and for a moment, she lost all sense of direction, all feeling in her limbs and felt light-headed. Kneeling on the wet stone ground, she took several deep breaths and moist, humid, cold air and the smell of wet grass filled her nose. Everything seemed to have opened up with the passage, not just the stones around her, but her heart as well and her ears. She heard insects again whirring around her scraped ears and further ahead the rain pattering on a wet field. It was not the sound of rain falling on thick leaves and then slipping from them and dripping down to the ground, it was the constant prattle of full raindrops on the verge of hail.

The ground was slightly uneven, low where she was, higher towards both ends of the path. A little stream slithered over the ground, no wider than a hand's width and started to fill the little low point where she was kneeling, as if no god and no demon was willing to grant her a break.

Come, come, you are so close, her dreams seemed to whisper and there was no mistaking the call.

*

Forget the world, forget your father, dream, hope, dance! his dreams screamed at him.

A dent had turned into a cave mouth and a cave mouth into a tunnel in the last couple of weeks. The camp for the soldiers had moved ever closer to the entrance, replacing the tents for the supplies with those for people.

The explosions still shook the ground at all hours of the day and night. They were working in shifts.

News from the front was slim and it was always the same. The ships attacked but still Narea was holding out. Some minor islands fell into the hands of the empire, but some others were recaptured.

"I don't know what I would prefer," Nojen said and snuggled up to Tamis bare chest, "For us to break through here, for the fleet to win, or for you to marry and get this whole mess over with."

"No option sounds particularly enticing," Tamis said with a sigh and folded his father's letter in half.

"Maybe the princess is a beauty. Maybe she wouldn't mind to share you, occasionally. We could even all three -"

"Don't. I know you don't mind a beautiful woman in your bed from time to time, but I..."

"I know."

"Besides, I doubt she would want to marry to save her country. This is all so utterly stupid."

"It's politics, Tam."

"Fucking politics!"

"Well," Nojen cooed and stroked Tamis' thigh, "If you prefer a different kind of fucking..."

Tamis stood up suddenly, pushing the other man's hand away. "I should go inspect the progress. Ostensibly, I have work to do here!"

Nojen sighed. "You do that. You're in a dreadful mood this morning anyway."

Tamis' mood had gotten worse and worse over the last couple of weeks. The day before, the master ranger responsible for checking the structure of the rocks had told him that there were indications that they got closer to the end of the rocks, that the valley behind it must be close. He had no idea what kind of indications he was talking about or what that meant for the explosives they had to use. In short, he noticed once again how useless he actually was here. Ans that didn't even take into account how useless this whole idea was.

Torches illuminated the narrow tunnel through the mountain. Every couple of meters, a wooden beam supported the roof. The further Tamis went into the cave, the thicker the air became. Smoke from the last explosion still hung in the passage, coating the ground and walls in a thin layer of fresh dust. Other particles still danced in the flickering light.

Tamis dragged a handkerchief over his nose. The cloth had become just as dusty as all his clothes since he regularly visited the tunnel. For a few days, he had tried to brush the dust away, but by now he was used to it, on his boots, in his hair, under his fingernails. There was no escaping it.

Men passed him in the tunnel, dragging debris to the entrance, all of them just as dusty as him, most of them even more. They nodded at him, but mostly ignored him, too focussed on their work or not really caring about the emperor's son.

"Clear the halls!" a called echoed through the tunnel, almost immediately followed by the next explosion in a serious of too many.

The ground shook, the stones creaked and groaned, pebbles dribbled down on Tamis' head. For the fraction of a second, all air was sucked towards the end of the tunnel where the next part of the stones was crumbling, then it rushed past him in the opposite direction of the entrance. The torches flickered violently, then were pressed into a flamelet, then died or rose again into their normal height. Thunder boomed through the tunnel, pushing against every supporting beam and every part of the walls. It droned in his ears with immeasurable pressure, then it was gone again and all was silent, more silent then ever before.

So far, Tamis had avoided the explosions. This was the first time he was in the tunnel when one happened. The cave, already filled with dust, no felt almost impenetrable. It hung thick in the air, like a wall of the tiniest stones slowly sailing to the ground.

Not even the cloth in front of his mouth could keep the powdered stones away. They slid into his mouth and nose, they dried his gums and nasal mucosa. Tamis leaned one hand against the wall, doubling over for the lack of breath and coughed several times. His eyes were dry and watered at the same time, leaving him almost incapable of seeing. He wiped them with his sleeve, but that only made the pain worse.

"Fucking politics. Fucking stupid plans. Fucking soldiers." he cursed under his breath, only to cough again.

"Fucking explosions."

After a while, the dust began to settle again, creating another layer of grey on the black stones.

Tamis finally managed to blink his eyes free again. "Hopefully, this is all over soon," he mumbled as he stumbled further into the cave.

Surprisingly, the air became clearer the further he walked, lighter and less stifling. It almost seemed like a soft breeze swept through the tunnel, it almost seemed like the explosion's thunder had called rain down under the ground. Even the dust seemed heavier now, as if humidity had weighted them down.

Tamis vision was still slightly blurred, but the light of the torches seemed less intense here, even though they burned just as high and bright as all the others. But here, other light, natural light, took some of their power away.

The last explosion had opened the passage. Still it was blocked by larger rocks that needed to be moved, but there was a clear opening at the end of the tunnel.

The soldiers greeted him with a grin, hardly recognisable on their debris-covered faces, but Tamis didn't reciprocate. He didn't feel like smiling at all. Instead of stopping and celebrating with the soldiers, which they surely wanted to do, Tamis walked further towards the hole in the mountain. Many large rocks still blocked his path. They had broken off from the ceiling and walls and crumpled in on themselves. But there was a hole, just large enough to put his shoulders through, but certainly not for an army yet.

He didn't know what he expected to see. A city? A forest? More black stone?

What he did see was an almost empty pasture. The land was mostly flat, only interrupted by some hills that obscured the view to a large portion of the valley. A couple of domesticated animals – sheep or cows or maybe even horses, he could not tell – had run away from the explosion, leaving some disturbed grass behind. They were still visible on the peak of one of the hills, huddled together in fear from an invisible enemy.

Behind the hills, the hints of smoke rose into the air and mixed with the clouds hanging deep over the valley, speaking of some inhabitants of the former powerful Kingdom.

A part of Tamis had doubted that there even was a Kingdom, that they would reach anything but a dead end or directly the large forest in the south of Narea. But this valley was wide and cultivated, the grass cut short, no doubt, by the mouths of hungry sheep.

Some trees stood randomly here and there on the pasture, offering shadow in the summer heat and apples and pears in autumn.

Tamis sighed. He didn't want his men to march through this valley, he didn't ever want to reach Narea. It wasn't his choice.

With a sudden, almost violent movement he turned around. "Clear the rocks!" he ordered curtly and  returned into the depths under the mountain.

*

The air was chilly, but it still felt like she walked towards the warmth, even as raindrops started to drizzle through the cleft, even as the sun hid behind clouds. But she could see the sky, she could turn her head and see where she was going, look towards the end of the cave high, high up above. Even as the sun slowly crept towards the horizon, as the clouds embraced it further and further, there was still a bit of light that brightened her path.

And when Jamela stepped out of the passageway to the Kingdom, the hail had stopped and a last ray of sunshine illuminated a vast valley that stretched almost flat all the way to the horizon.

Fields of wheat shone golden in the last remnants of the evening sun. Jamela could not spot any people working the fields, but there was no doubt that they were cultivated. A fence separated one field from the next and a pebble path lead further into the valley alongside their border. It wasn't far from the cave mouth to the path.

The wheat had bowed due to the hail a while ago and now seemed to welcome the princess and descendant of the kings and queens of the Kingdom respectfully on their knees.

She felt like a queen. She felt like coming home. No matter how tired she was, no matter how bruised and wounded, she walked tall and with large steps following the path. In her dreams she had walked here before. In her dreams, the pebble path was a street worthy of a queen and the passage through the mountains was a wide road for waggons and armies. When she looked back now, the passage had disappeared in the uneven structure of the rocks. Knowing where it was, she could still make it out between the black stone and green moss where the tiniest stream flowed into the mountain.

In her dreams, it wasn't just the wheat welcoming her, it were the people, all of them, dressed up in their finest garments, celebrating the return of the rightful queen.

But the people weren't there and she looked nothing like in her dreams. She wasn't wearing a wide elegant skirt, her hair wasn't long and adorned with precious stones, her skin wasn't smooth and pale. Her skin was bruised, cut, bloody. Her clothes were ripped and dirty trousers and a muddy blouse. Her hair was short, full of twigs and insects, and most of all, knotted. She didn't look like a queen, she shouldn't feel like a queen. She looked like a peon, less than a servant's servant. She looked like an imposter.

When the sun had set and the moon had risen high in the sky, Jamela reached a crossroad. It was a full moon and the air was clear after the afternoon's hail and so she could see fairly well in both directions. To her right, a little village, bright lights in the windows and no wall surrounding the settlement, stood on top of a hill. To her left, the path first twisted downwards in wide serpentines, only to then lead straight towards and up another hill. On top of this hill, a giant single stone, higher than the hill itself, higher even than twice a ship's mast stood lonely and brooding overlooking the whole valley. It was not as wide as it was high and towards its bottom it was narrower still, while at the top it formed something resembling a pointed hat, all in all giving it the look of a giant cone.

This was the palace, Jamela knew. She had seen herself look down from one of the balconies that were cut in this natural stone that stood so lonely and nearly precariously on top of the hill. From her vantage point and distance and in the approaching dark, she could not see that this side of the rock was left to its natural appearance and that only the other side, the front, was adorned with columns and stone garlands cut from this extraordinary structure. Four floors could be found in the inside and on the top floor was the source of magic that had once given the rulers of the world their power.

This was where she had to go.

Jamela expected some kind of light illuminating the palace or some kind of city, maybe in ruins, at the foot of the giant rock. But there had never been a city there and the palace stood in complete darkness. No torches illuminated its outside, no lights burned in the windows. Even in the darkness and under the shadow of the boulder, the windows stared down at her cold and empty.

But the front of the building looked just like she had dreamed it, even if it was difficult to make out in the night. It seemed like one single, enormous portal, three columns adorning each side of the few steps leading up to the actual entrance, the last one one cut about a fourth out of the stone. A portico hung over an old and heavy wooden door, twice as tall as her. The door wasn't decorated, not with frescos and not with golden fittings. Even though it was old, it seemed newer than the building and frame it sat in. No one stood guard.

No one stopped her when she pushed lightly against the door and it swung open easily. The hinges didn't screech and they didn't resist her entry. But they swung closed as soon as she had entered the palace.

For a moment, complete darkness engulfed Jamela. She could still feel the size of the room she had entered, two stories high and as wide as the whole rock, and had she spoken into the darkness, her voice would have echoed from the walls, she was sure.

She stood there while cold air rushed over the body, over spin and her arms, tickled her skin and invaded her body through the many lesions her body had suffered over the last couple of weeks. It seemed to taste her blood, then the whole building seemed to sigh with relief.

Suddenly, she was wrapped in light instead of darkness. For the first second, it shot out from her skin, from her blood, then it swirled around her body, only to finally set on the walls in ancient lamps that still were positioned there as if no time had passed since the Kingdom was ruled by her family.

The palace had recognized her.

Jamela had to blink a couple of times to rid herself of the spots dancing in front of her eyes. The light was bright and powerful, unflinching, not like the sun where clouds often hindered its constant stream or like a lamp that flickered and burned brighter or darker as the oil slowly dissipated. This light was constant, unwavering, strong.

It illuminated a great hall, two stories high, decorated with garlands, flowers and ribbons, all cut from the same stone Jamela now stood in. Two spiral staircases began right next to the entrance, each going in the opposite direction, meeting only once at the height of one story on the other end of the room, and then again over her head in a wide balcony that was continued on the outside of the castle. Every couple of steps, alongside the whole length of the staircase, colourful portraits in golden frames, showing kings and queens of long ago, hung one after the other. Their frames shone golden, but here and there specks of the golden paint had come off over the years, making the sturdy wood underneath visible.

The hall had no doors on this floor. It was all an empty room. Once, petitioners had waited here and guards had protected the staircases, but nothing of this was left. Once benches stood to the side of the round hall, once weapons clanged when the royal bodyguards trained here. No, nothing of the erstwhile life was left, but the fading portraits of Jamela's family.

But she knew that this was not the place for her to be. Slowly, almost as if she strode like the queen she was, she followed the steps to her right. The balustrade was made of the same stone as everything else here, no, not made of it, carved whole from it like everything else. No seams were visible, no mortar necessary to hold fragile pieces together. This was all one, all one palace, all one world, all one with her.

And so the steps sang gently under her bloody feet and the balustrade played gentle music at her touch.

From the balcony at the end of the stairs, she could look over her Kingdom, and it almost seemed to her like she could see it. It was still dark outside, it was still the middle of the night and only some weak light came from the village in the next valley over. But she didn't only see the village, and she didn't only see it as it was now. She saw the armies that once stood under this balcony, unnecessary as every part of the world belonged to her, and she saw Narea, nothing but a summer home for her family, nothing but a place to spend a week or two to hunt and to dance and to feast, to swim in the ocean and eta from the citrus trees.

She also saw Garen, then nothing more than a free city, a place of learning and debauchery, a student's city. There, magic was studied, there they tried to decipher the secrets of her family's power, of her family's magic. Why the Kingdom could rule the world so easily. Of course, they brought all their insights right to the Kingdom, right into the heart of the Kingdom.

Jamela shook her head, shaking off the visions and dreams of what once was. She looked passed the past, not into the future either, but into the here and now, into the fleet still fighting off Garen's advances, into the halls of Garen's castle, where ministers discussed a doomed marriage and over the Kingdom itself where...

*

They didn't expect an army to come one by one from a hole in the mountain. Soldier after soldier slipped through and then took his position in the marching order. A moment ago the pasture was peaceful and empty, now it was filled with man after man in arms.

They had dragged the cannons through the tunnel as best they could, gasping and sighing with every step. The supporting beams were in the way, the tunnel was low and narrow, too tight for the horses to fit through. But two of the cannons did make it and now they stood in front of the army.

When the army was assembled, their swords at their sides and the provisions on their backs, Tamis walk in front of their files and inspected them. He didn't know what he expected after seeing them work day and night for the last few weeks. They had shown enthusiasm, but there was no doubt that better men were serving on the warships in the ocean, fighting, invading Narea. The men here were old, not veterans, just old, not combat hardened, just leathery. The only men with real experience were the men responsible for the explosives, but those were miners mostly, not soldiers.

It didn't matter. Their strength was in the surprise, in the fact that they could strike against Narea from the back, though Tamis could only hope, and didn't that the former Kingdom was easy to pass through and that there was not a second tunnel they needed to blast open.

Tamis nodded once at the commander, and the man ordered: "Forward, march!"

Soon, the order echoed through the whole army, repeated over and over again by the sergeants and the march towards Narea began.

It was late morning and the sun had just blinked over the hills, dipping the green grass of the pastures in a bloody red.

The sheep Tamis had spotted the day before had not returned to the mouth of the tunnel, leaving the scene before the army nearly undisturbed and the churned up earth under the soldier's heavy boots all the more apparent.

To the rhythm of the drums, the men set one foot in front of the other, and only Tamis didn't bother with the usual order of a well-oiled war-machine. He scuffled at points next to the soldiers or officers, at others behind them like a petulant child.

After a while, Nojen came to him and slipped his hand under his elbow.

"Look at it this way, if we do indeed conquer Narea, there won't be a need for you to marry the girl."

Tamis shook his head. "If we conquer Narea, it doesn't change a thing. People still expect me to sire an heir, people still look at Narea as the one and true ruler, people would still want me to confirm my father's rule by marrying the prince's daughter. All that changes is that they don't have a choice."

"But -"

"Of course, officially, everybody would say that it was the girl's or her father's choice – I don't even know her name!"

"... Jamela..."

"And the ministers and propagandists would probably come up with a story that we freed Narea, Narea's princes, the Kingdom's princess from – I don't know – an inner revolt? Maybe father will tell the people that we brought the family back to the throne of the Kingdom, now that we reached this fucking place. And nobody even wants this! Narea doesn't care about Garen, Garen doesn't care about Narea, and the people over there -" He gestured towards a group of houses in the distance where several people had gathered in the village square and were staring towards the army passing by without even acknowledging them – "these people certainly don't want us here. They want to live their lives in peace!"

"Tamis -"

"And what about our soldiers here?" Tamis had talked himself into a subdued rage. He spoke silently, so that only Nojen could here him, but his voice was filled with frustrated venom, "Do you honestly think they want to die for some stupid, unnecessary war? Don't you think they would rather be with their families? Don't you think the sailors wouldn't rather fish or trade or what the fuck-ever sailors usually do? And you,"

Nojen flinched at the sudden anger and stopped in his tracks.

"You would rather lie on the ground and have your asshole fucked bloody by me right now, don't you?

After a moment's hesitation, Nojen sprinted back towards Tamis and fell into step with him again. "You know me too well..."

"Yeah, I know everything about everybody," Tamis spit out, full of sarcasm, "All I don't know is how to stop my father from continuing with this foolishness. Why the fuck am I even here?"

"Because you're the prince and the men look up to you. Because they think this enterprise is less foolish with you around, because the fear the magic of the Kingdom less when they know that the emperor's only heir is with them?"

"You're too bloody reasonable, you know that?"

Armies move slowly, but the secret valley of the old Kingdom wasn't very wide. Nobody challenged their march. There were a few settlements here and there, but the army didn't pass through them directly and the people didn't dare come close to them. There were hints of messengers rushing away from them, deeper into the valley. But it was obvious that no standing army was ready to stop them, Maybe there wasn't even one.

No cities lay in their path. Fields and pastures, orchards and meadows were the constant observers of the mostly silent march.

In the evening, they pitched their tents in the smaller valleys between the hills and ate from the fresh fruits they found on the trees.

When they came close to a village, so close that they could look the people in the eyes, those stood with pitchforks in their hands and barking dogs at their sides.

Tamis' dreams had changed, his sleep mostly gone. He slept little, no matter how exhausted he was from the day's march, and when he slept he was plagued by nightmares, he was chased by monsters and skinned alive by invisible horrors. A wind carried him high into the sky, then dropped him in an unstoppable fall.

*

She was the nightmare. She was the monster in his dreams. With every one of her heartbeats, the lights darkened for a fraction of a second. She was close, she was close now. She had ran up the next flight of stairs, had not stopped for the throne room or the living quarters on the next floor. Her destination was the room on the very top, the small room that was forever reserved for nobody but her family, the one where a single silver crystal had been worked out of the black stone around it, that lay on a black pedestal that was once part of its hull.

They were here! She gasped and wiped fearful tears from her stinging eyes. They were already here, were here as well, were here, were here, were here...

She had to stop them. Now. There was an army in the valley, there was no time left. She was the queen, this was her Kingdom, and they invaded it, violated it with their boots and weapons, their cannons and blood.

If she couldn't stop them, if she couldn't control the magic here, all was lost.

Jamela breathed heavy from running up the stairs, even heavy from the fear in her heart. By the time she reached the landing, she was coughing.

A double door, as black as the palace's stone, made from the palace's stone, blocked her path. Golden fitting, a golden handle adorned the door, golden inlays told the story of the stone coming to this valley. But she saw nothing of that.

Jamela pushed against the doors, and like the entrance, they swung open easily.

Like everywhere in the palace, light filled the room with her entry. The chamber was small, no larger than a ship captain's cabin and with just as low a ceiling. There was no decoration here, not even the pedestal holding the ancient silver crystal had any carvings. It was plain, empty, and the crystal itself was a perfect sphere.

Jamela leaned with her hands against the double doors for a moment, catching her breath. But it was taken from her again when the crystal suddenly glistened with all the power of the world. She stumbled forward, almost fell on the crystal, her hands enfolding it completely. It had the perfect size for her fingers, it even had handprints from thousands of her ancestors touching it just like that in its otherwise smooth surface. It was cold, as cold as the ice it resembled, but with Jamela's touch it seemed to fill with life and with warmth.

Finally, it seemed to whisper in her head, finally, you return. Finally, you answer my dreams.

"Show me!" Jamela gasped, "Show me again!" and the world in front of her eyes changed.

The enemy's fleet lay calm on the agitated water. It lay in waiting. There, behind the horizon was the capital, there they would strike in the morning.

"No!"

Jamela wiped the air in front of her face and the wind carried through the double door and over the landing. It whiffed out of the window and blew over the mountain. It rushed over the forest and the peninsula, it stormed towards the ships.

She wielded the power of the wind. She wielded the power of the sea. Waves rose higher than the clouds, shooting up into the sky like massive geysers. They created a barrier between ship and ship, between island and fleet. The wind caught in the ships' sails, it filled them, it blew into them with unimaginable force, it ripped them apart and from their hawsers.

The sailors had hardly the time to wake from their sleep. The freak wind grabbed the boats, it flung them high into the sky, it let them fall down on the stone-like waves again. Giant boulders had been raised from the ocean's floor and the ships' hulls crashed down on them. The wooden planks splintered, the sailors who were lucky were thrown overboard. Others were shattered on the decks like broken mirrors, bones broken and skin and flesh ripped apart.

The sun came up over the horizon and shone through the window over the landing into the crystal's chamber. It warmed Jamela's hands and Jamela followed its beams to the sea, she followed it as fire from the skies, burning, all-encompassing. Were moments before columns of water rose from the sea, now columns of fire descended from the sky. It burned the remnants of the shattered boats, burning even the parts drenched in salty water.

And then, all was gone, all was silent again, all was calm again. The fleet was gone.

Jamela doubled over, holding onto the crystal with the last bits of her strength.

She had done it. She had claimed her heritage, she had destroyed the invaders. She laughed in one short, exhausted breath.

Jamela held onto the pedestal and hung over it like an empty doll and didn't notice the old woman standing in the double doors at first.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?" the old woman asked. When Jamela didn't answer, didn't even acknowledge her, she continued, "The tower is out of bounds, you should now this. The magic here is dangerous."

Jamela still didn't answer, but she heard the words. She looked up at the woman standing there. She was small, deep lines in her leathery face spoke of a long life. Jamela did not know what to think of her.

"We agreed to let the army pass in the council, didn't we? To close the passage again when they are gone? The wars of the outside are no concerns of ours."

Jamela shook her head. She didn't understand.

"Yes, it was a mistake to even let them enter. And maybe I was neglectful and didn't stop the magic from reaching to the outside again, but that -"

"I am not from here." Jamela finally panted. "I am Jamela, Princess of Narea, Queen of the Kingdom."

"You are not-"

"The army!" Jamela suddenly exclaimed when the words registered with her slightly delayed. There was still the army in the valley! And there was still the emperor on his throne.

*

After the hail of the last afternoon, where they were forced to pitch their tents early to protect both their black powder and their heads, the army began their day long before the first light of the day.

They marched mostly in silence as the sun slowly rose behind the horizon.

Soon, Tamis and Nojen, for now at the front of the army, reached the top of a small hill overlooking a small river. On the next hill over, a giant black boulder looked back at them like an enormous shadow in the early morning light.

The soldier's boots beat the green grass underneath with the rhythm of the drums. It sounded like thunder jerking through the ground.

Suddenly, the thunder was accompanied by a freak flash of lightning coming from the black rock. It  lead in a zig-zagging line line towards the sun and stayed there longer than a flash would usually enlighten the sky.

One breath, two breathes passed, as the clouds, dark and brooding, collected overhead in a whirl of shadowy strands. The world turned dark and the wind mounted in swirls.

Flashes of lightning twitched in the swirling clouds, illuminating the pasture for a moment stronger than the morning sun before. They were manifold, twitching and jerking in all directions but still far above them in the sky, as if they were getting ready, as if they were collecting their strength. Then one of them shot through the sky, not towards to ground, but to the south, over the army marching in the valley, further towards the mountain they had blown open, towards Garen.

The column of wind slowly lowered itself to the ground, stretching itself, becoming thinner and thinner, but not loosing any of its power. Lightning danced around its edges, eager to strike. And then the clouds emptied themselves onto the army. Blocks of ice, as big as a fist, as big as a head, bolted down on them.

One landed of the head of a soldier, knocking a giant dent in his helmet and felled him. Blooded dripped forth from his visor.

"Run!" Tamis called, though he was not sure where to.

And he ran himself, Nojen right beside him, towards the only structure in their path that might offer a tiny amount of shelter.

And at the same time the clear origin of this freak storm.

It wasn't far. But with impossible hail pattering down on them, as if it was chasing them, as if it was aiming, it nearly was too far.

Behind them, they heard the screams of their soldiers, the clanking of the ice on raised shields, on helmets, on the two cannons. It was metallic, the sound and the fearful taste in their mouths. It smelled of burning flesh when the lightning joined the hail.

Tamis couldn't tell how many men were still behind him, couldn't see it either when he turned around at the entrance of the boulder. The world had turned dark, the clouds had reached the ground, hung now in the valley between the hills like a black, churning sea. The froth were the flashes, the waves the hail. It was all nothing but a pit of death.

"Get in!" Nojen screamed as he reached his lover and another flash seared the grass at his feet, "Go!"

Sudden quiet surrounded them as they entered the palace, deafening silence. No screams reached them here as the doors closed behind them, no rumbling of the storm, no clanking of metal.

Tamis looked back at Nojen and saw the same fear reflected in his eyes he felt in his pounding heart.

"What... what was that?" Nojen stammered, but Tamis shook his head.

He just took na second to catch his breath, then he started to run up the stairs. The lightning had come from here.

A part of his brain noted that he had seen these halls before, that he had waited here in his dreams and that the queen resided above. Maybe it was her, who attacked his army. But it didn't matter to him, not in this moment.

Higher and higher he ran, over worn-out stairs and past the portraits of former kings and queens. On the top floor, he stopped in his tracks.

There she was, the queen of his dreams, though she looked nothing like her dream-self. She didn't look regal, she looked exhausted, hanging over a pedestal in the middle of a tiny room, holding onto it with the last remnants of her strength, holding onto a silver ball for sheer life.

The sphere in her hands pulsed with power, pulsed with the same flashes and with the same tornado he had just experienced.

"Is she..." Nojen gasped next to him, "Is she doing this?"

Neither had entered the chamber and neither had noticed the old woman standing on the landing as well.

"Yes." the woman answered with a calm tone.

Nojen didn't hesitate a moment longer. He drew a knife and threw it right at the heart of the younger woman.

It rotated once, twice, and then it hesitated in front of her, stood still as if it were frozen in ice.

"She is the Queen," the old woman said, as if offering an explanation, "Queen Jamela, Princess of Narea, Queen of the Kingdom. As long as she is connected to the stone, nothing can touch her body, only her mind."

And almost in answer, the knife clattered to the ground.

*

She felt them there, had felt them invading her realm, her palace, her space, had felt their fear and their hurry, had felt their attack. But all was meaningless.

She had followed her single lightning to Garen, had send it through a window and into the heart of her enemy. The emperor had grabbed his chest, then he had fallen to the ground.

Vaguely, she heard people speak in her realm, heard them over the screams of her vision, over the hissing in her ears from her exhaustion.

*

"Jamela of Narea?" Tamis asked.

"She came here in the night." The old woman prattled, "The barrier is too weak, I let it slip, let her slip past, let you slip in. She's not supposed to be here. You're not supposed to be here. The Kingdom shall never exist again. It is too much power, too much power in the hands of one person, of one family. This power is not meant for rulers, in the hands of a king, this power is tyranny. Everybody can wield the magic to some degree, I can, but only the kings and queens of once can use it to its fullest power. They are connected, we are not, I am not. I cannot stop her, I cannot enter, I was supposed to keep a barrier, keep us away from the world of kings and queens, of wars and politics. But I failed, I failed. The magic wanted her back, called her back. I couldn't stop it. The world has returned, the queen has returned. My Lady, My Queen, forgive me, forgive me my failings, forgive our ancestors the blasphemy, forgive us our rebellion, forgive us, forgive us, spare us, please, my Queen, please, I beg you, please spare us."

"No!" Tamis shouted and silenced her with a hand over her mouth. "No, shut up. This isn't right, none of this is."

He took a deep breath and steeled himself for his next words.

"Jamela?" he almost whispered, too silent for even his own ears to pick up the words. "Jamela?" slightly louder, "Jamela, listen to me.

*

Her head jerked up at her name, though she didn't see the speaker right away through her vision. Men fell, armours broke, but there, there in front of her stood one of her courtiers. This was a different vision, an older vision, a future one.

"Listen," the young coxcomb said, "Jamela, listen."

How dare he address her be her name?

"This isn't right. None of this is. All of this is wrong. You are wrong here. I am wrong here."

Tamis, his name was Tamis. Once, he was supposed to become her husband.

"You are of Narea, not of the Kingdom. They don't want you here, you're not supposed to be here."

She turned down his marriage with fire and blood. She was the queen.

"This war, it is fought for nothing, for nobody. Nobody, nobody wants this war. I don't, my men don't, Narea doesn't. The Kingdom doesn't Garen doesn't."

Narea was safe. The fleet was destroyed, her home saved.

Her home. Narea.

"The people here, they just want to live their lives in peace. Everyone does. Why is this so difficult? Why is it so difficult for everyone to leave everyone else alone. Here, this Kingdom, this Kingdom that once was, the people are perfectly happy here. Narea and Garen are perfectly happy with their own laws, their own rulers. To each their own. With separated rulers, with separate politics, with their own people."

They were happy, all of them. And then the war came. She wouldn't be here if not for the war, if not for a marriage proposal she didn't want.

But these words, they rang true. She had heard him say them before, so for him they were true.

*

"Garen – attacked – Narea." she ground out through gritted teeth, all the strength left in her body forming the words.

Tamis looked first at Nojen, then at the old woman, but he found no help there.

"Yes," he finally said, "Yes, we did. And I'm sorry, I really a..." He stopped himself, "No, I am sorry your home was attacked, I am not sorry for being of Garen and I'm not sorry for being my father's son. Take your revenge on me if you must, but spare my people and spare yourself the knowledge that you killed even more innocent people. These are soldiers outside, just soldiers. They are not the ones ordering the destruction of your islands, they are not the ones deciding. My father is, and I will do everything I can to stop this foolishness."

"Your father is dead." Jamela said flatly.

Tamis balled his hands to fists and bit on his lower lip for a moment, his face distorted in unexpected anger. Then, the muscles loosened up again and he said, "Then so be it. He had it coming."

"Tamis..." Nojen whispered with pain in his voice, but the prince ignored him.

"He started this war." he said instead, "He started it all, but I will end it and not with more blood. Here it will end, not with a marriage, not with one country conquering the other, not with hatred. It is over." He looked at Jamela pleadingly, "Please, please let it end. We return to our homes, we call back our armies, we leave this valley alone. They close the borders again, if they wish to do so and we, our people, everyone lives the life they want to."

Jamela hesitated a moment longer, her eyes sparkling silver in the magic of the crystal.

"No more war?" she asked, and she didn't sound like a queen, she didn't sound angry, she sounded deflated, like the girl, barely woman, she was.

"No more war."

*

Her hands burned silver as she took them from the crystal, but as soon as the connection was lost, the lightning and storm rushed back towards the boulder in the middle of the Kingdom. They swirled once, twice more through the crystal sphere, then they were gone.

Jamela's look was empty as she stared at her hands.

So many dead, she thought. "So many dead," she whispered. "This isn't what I wanted. I just wanted to protect my home."

Home. Narea was her home. "I want to go home."

She looked up and her eyes focused on the little group outside the chamber. "So many dead. I'm sorry. I just wanted to protect my home."

"I know," Tamis said, and he did. "I know. - We should," he hesitated a moment. The words felt strange in his mouth, empty, "return home. Each to their home."

"Yes," Jamela nodded, "home."

Tamis turned to the old woman. "You'll make sure that we can leave, that the magic will let us leave?" he asked as if it was the most natural question in the world.

The old woman nodded.

[Mandle]

...

[Mandle]

So, here's what happened:

Stupot and myself talked a bit about the theme and came to the conclusion that neither of us could think of anything to write about for it.

Then I remembered a text-based game that Stu had only completed the initial premise of, but that had always stuck with me.

I suggested that he could continue that story here. He told me that he didn't really have the time or inspiration, so I came up with an idea for a project. A project that would also fit the theme of "The Other Side"

We would write the story together: We would each write as much as we could of the story, and then save the collab file, and then the "other side" would write the next part, however much they could.

This was done completely blind for each of us.

It was so much fun being completely unprepared for what the next jump-off point of the story would be the next time the update from the other arrived.

After a certain "chapter", Stupot did create an AI graphic about a plot-point I was already aware of by that time, and so we turned that into the "cover art" for our story.

We also decided that there would be no clear delineation between which blocks either of us wrote, but there are probably tells.

At the end of our efforts, I actually DID do the final edit, but only changed the stuff that Stu and I agreed on AFTER the blind back-and-forth writing was done. Only fixed some of the glaring continuity issues and had to kill one of my darlings... for the greater good!

Enough rambling. Here is it:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Seven straight days of torrential rain had forced her hand. Surprisingly, she was alone in the launderette – a dire, badly-lit room located between two other failing local businesses of ambiguous nature.

Three front-loaded washing machines ran along the west wall, opposite the entrance, and two large dryers occupied the northern end. She tossed the last of the wet towels into a dryer, dropped some coins into the slot and started the machine.

Now, she was at a loss. The rain had only worsened, so there was no going back outside. A wobbly wire magazine rack held just one item, an ancient, damp, sun-bleached copy of Fly-Fishing Magazine. Lucy had been fishing once and had hated it but picked up the crumbling rag anyway and flicked through it.

A piece of paper fell out onto the floor. She picked it up:

"Surrender to the dark"

Suitably creeped out, she hastily plugged the scrap of paper with the scrawled message back into the magazine for the next person to find and decided to occupy herself by checking the other machines.

The first was empty. She put her head inside and said a short "Hello", briefly enjoying the muffled reverberation in her ears.

The second machine contained a child's sock. Lucy considered pocketing it but quickly realized how messed up that would be and left it alone.

The third washing machine had an "Out of Order" sign on it. She opened it, anyway, put her head inside and said "Hello?"
This time, her voice echoed for longer, as though she were shouting into a deep well.

It took her a moment to notice that the back wall of the drum was missing. In fact, the cylindrical stainless-steel interior of it seemed to extend way beyond where the back wall of the launderette could possibly be.
"Fuck it," she said. And climbed in.

After a crawl of twenty or so meters through the crenulated silvery tunnel, all the while telling herself that all this was unnatural and to just back her butt up and get out of the washing machine and bail, Lucy popped her head out from the other end, her curiosity getting the better of her, as always.
She looked out and up first of all and spat out, "FUCK ME!"

Above her, through the darkness, she saw roiling, stormy clouds and, within them, bursts here and there of electrical stutters that suggested lightning, although she could hear no thunder.

She glanced down quickly and saw shallow swells of waves on the ocean below, slapping against the jagged, stoney cliff that stretched up from where the metal tunnel broke through it. The waves were hitting so close below her that she felt and tasted their salty spray.

"Um." Lucy said, her stomach clenching. "Fuck this noise." She started to back up through the impossible washing machine tunnel. Twenty meters later, her butt felt glass against it. She craned back over each shoulder, but there was not enough space over either to see.

It took Lucy quite the minute or two to perform the ducking, rolling maneuver that got her facing the other way.

Then the horrific reality hit. The door of the washing machine had closed and locked behind her. There was no latch on the inside. Screaming, she bashed he palms, and then her fists, against the concave glass but it didn't budge and she had no purchase behind her to enable a solid hit without sliding backwards along the tunnel's slick stainless-steel surface.

The more she struggled to find a favorable position for each bash the further she slid away from the glass.

The only thing left to do was yell for help. Her own piercing scream reverberated and ricocheted around the tunnel long after it had left her mouth.

Just then, she noticed movement from the other side of the glass. The door to the launderette was opening. Thank goodness, I'm saved, she thought. She pounded on the glass but it only made a dull, damp sound, barely audible even on this side of the window. The launderette door slid open and Lucy could see that it was still raining outside. Then someone moved in, (a man, most likely, but it was impossible to tell) wearing a black raincoat with the hood up and dripping from the rain.

She tried hitting the glass again, but it was futile. She knew she had to scream again but was too awkwardly positioned to plug her ears.

"Oh well. here goes. Three, Two, One."

She closed her eyes and screamed again, louder than before, and instantly regretted it. Ears ringing, she opened her eyes and looked to see if she had been heard.

But the man was gone. At least, he was no longer in view. Perhaps he had gone round to the corner where the fishing magazine was.
She remembered the magazine, and the note that had slipped out of it just a short time ago. Surrender to the dark. Could that message have been meant for her?

She became aware of a change in the light from outside the washing machine. A wave of unease washed over her, and she positioned herself to better see through the glass.

Then, the window went dark. Hands thudded against both sides of the glass from the outside, a form obscuring the launderette's already dim lighting. She scrambled back in terror. Whatever it was, it was no man. It had no face, just a darkness hanging beneath its dripping hood. The washing machine door clicked and swung open and the being reached inside with a dripping wet arm. Lucy edged herself backwards down the tunnel as the creature climbed menacingly into the entrance. She became aware of the sound of lapping waves behind her as her feet found the end the tunnel, where it opened out into the unknown. The creature was shuffling quickly towards her now and she had no choice.

Surrender to the dark.

Without looking behind her, she pushed against the end of the tunnel and plunged backwards into the darkness below.

Lucy, within the dead-on five feet on her frame, felt her stomach contents flop over with what felt like an audible thud-slosh as she fell, and then gasped in shock. The coldness of the water was so intense that the gasp drew a gulp of it down her windpipe and she started to choke and splutter, her brow, nose and pursed-out lips barely above the waterline.

A shallow wave washed over her face, coming in so unannounced that she breathed in more of the brine through her nostrils before remembering to hold her breath. She panicked and sank. Now her sinuses were burning as well as her lungs. She waved her arms by her sides and scissored her legs and barely broke the surface again. One more downward flap of her arms pushed her head and neck above the threat of waves, and she drew in a huge breath of air.

Light swept across her wet face for an instant and then moved on. The beam had come from somewhere out over the insane ocean behind the washing machine but, her eyes now also stinging from the salt water, she couldn't see what direction it had come from, nor from how far away. There was a noise different to the slopping slash of the waves against the rocky cliff but she hadn't noticed it formally yet even though it was...

A hand grabbed her shoulder from behind in a grip that hurt!

She whipped her head around and looked back, the mysterious beam of light sweeping across the unvisited side of her face upon its return track. Her eyes were still readjusting from the first sweep but had recovered enough to see the raincoated 'man' now fully out of the tunnel. 'He' was in an inverted position and was gripping onto the jagged rocky cliff above the briefly-illuminated silver tunnel with his feet. But they weren't feet. They were something like a cross between taloned reptile claws and suction cups.  His still fully-raincoated arm stretched out over the gap of at least three meters to where its gloved, but normal five-fingered hand, gripped her shoulder like a vice.

Of a magnitude of at least three compared to the previous ones, a larger wave slapped against the back of Lucy's ginger cornrow braids, crashing around her screaming mouth as the chug-chug noise that had been steadily growing below her perception grew louder.

As Lucy felt herself being dragged back through the freezing water towards the spider-clinging raincoat thing, she whipped her head around back out to sea to where this new chug-chug-CHUG-CHUG sound was becoming impossible to ignore.

The beam of light that had only brushed her briefly twice before, now suddenly swung abruptly and stabbed her right in the eyes.

Everything was glare, sparkling off the turbulent wake she was leaving behind her as she was painfully reeled in by the raincoat thing.

The gray, wooden bow of a boat showed through beneath the starburst of brightness that occupied most of her vision.

A bare, human hand reached out through the glare, almost within grasping reach and a gravelly voice yelled down, "TAKE MY HAND, MISSY!"

Lucy reached up and snatched at the large, weathered hand and missed. She was still being dragged backwards. It was all she could do to keep her head above water as she flailed out again but the hand seemed further away than before.
"COME ON, MISSY!"

One more time, she lunged with everything she had and the massive hand grabbed her by the wrist, wasting no time in tugging her up the side of the boat. She felt as though she was being pulled apart – the rope in a tug o' war between the raincoat beast and the man on the boat.

Just then, she became aware of flashes of green whistling overhead and the grip from behind her loosened and broke. She was dragged unceremoniously over the side of the vessel and looked up to see a row of men launching balls of green light toward the thing on the cliff. She flopped herself over to see the raincoated horror pathetically cowering from the onslaught and just like that it disappeared in an explosion of water that rained down on both boat and ocean, and Lucy collapsed to the deck.

* * *

When she came around, Lucy found herself in a small bunk. She was dry and she was warm. Her vision was blurry and her body ached, but she was okay.
"We thought ye' wurra goner, there, missy?"

"W-what..."

"Name's Matthew. Captain Matthew. Crew calls me Dad, but you don't have to."

She looked past the captain and blinked a few times to clear her vision. Gawping back at her was the rest of the crew. She became self-conscious and checked her state of dress. She was wearing someone else's clothes.

"Go an' do some work, will you, boys."

"Yes Dad," they said in unison and scattered.

"I run a tight ship," he chuckled to himself, "in both senses o' the word. As you can see it's just me an' the boys, and not a lot of space. You'll be 'ard-pressed  t' stay here with us."

"Where is here?"

"If I kn'w the answer to tha', I wou'n't be on this fuckin' boat."

He handed her a metallic cup of warm water.

"It's tea... 'cept we've no teabags... I s'ppose you've got questions?"

"That man..."

"Aye, he's one o' them water demons. Not t' only one, mind. So, if he's after you, then so are the rest o' them."

"Didn't you guys kill him or something?"

"Back there? No such luck, missy. We jus' turn't him back to water... temporarily, mind. Be back, he will."

Lucy shook her head. "I must be dreaming."

"Well, you can try sleeping ag'in and see if y' wake up back in yer own bed. Y' won't. We've all tried. But you need the rest anyway, missy. I'll leave y' alone for a bit."

She was asleep before her head hit the bundle of dried seaweed that served as a pillow.

***
 
Lucy's nostrils awoke first, the silver studs in the divots of both twitching. The salty scent of something frying forced her eyes open. Her stomach growled. She hadn't eaten anything since her dinner of cup noodles at her shitty little one-room flat on Regminster Avenue in the equally shitty London borough of Wandsworth.

It felt absurd that she was even thinking about what had been her reality maybe 24 hours ago, probably many more but maybe slightly less, when the dried monstrosity of what looked like a cross between a puffer fish and a shark swung above her head between two hefty beams of the bulkhead her bunk lay against. It was what passed for decoration for whoever actually owned this bed, she imagined.
 
Lucy threw her legs off the side of the bunk, reached out and grabbed hold of one of the wooden pillars running down the middle of the narrow crew quarters, and groaned and farted as she hefted herself into a standing position.

The boat tipped sideways, and she instantly fell down. Being young, only in her early twenties, the fall wasn't as big an issue as trying to stand up again proved to be. Her muscles, acquainted as they were with easy city life and only getting a workout really on a weekend here and there in the mosh pits of underground nightclubs, were screaming at her from her recent dip in the soup and the tug o' war that had followed.

Calves and thighs singing an overture, Lucy bumped her way side-to-side up the rickety staircase, more a ladder, that led up from the crew quarters. She emerged through a somewhat rectangular hole in the tented aft deck that the crew of the boat used as their everything-else area when they weren't sleeping or fishing.

Around the iron hotplate over its pit of glowing coals sat... well, everyone. Dawn was not here just yet, but she would be arriving over the flat horizon of the sea presently by Lucy's bleary-eyed estimation.

The low, rolling swells of the now cobalt-hued sea might have been rocking the boat gently enough for the seaworthy crew to feel as if they were on solid ground as they tonged fried hunks of fish flesh onto their plates, but one of them had to grab Lucy's unacclimatized elbow and steady her as she stumbled her butt down into an available rough-hewn bucket-like seat.

Grins of amusement passed between the men. Lucy found a plate stacked with glistening white bricks of fish meat suddenly in her hand, and she grabbed one and stuffed it into her hungry mouth. As she mashed her teeth on the huge mouth-filling morsel between them, not wanting to waste a single second until it was down in her stomach, the taste reminded her of some kind of bizarre fusion restaurant blend of tuna, pencil-tip lead, and eyedrops.
 
It shouldn't have worked for her, but either she was so hungry that it did, or it was just actually good. She was in no position to tell.

They let her get half the fare into her before Captain Matthew, AKA 'Dad', said, "Well, Missy, does y' mind tellin' us y'r name or will we jus' be callin' you Missy from now 'til sunset be comin' ar'und ag'in?"

Lucy swallowed the gulp of tunapencildrops fish currently in her mouth and replied, "It's Lucy... ummm, thanks for askiiiing?"

The man on Lucy's right, brown-haired, wiry-framed, mid-forties, started laughing first, spitting out clods of fish with several more sandwiched between the gaps in his black, rotted teeth.

He wheezed out the last of his laughter and then suddenly pulled his brow down into a fake serious frown, held out his hand, and deeply spoke, "Junior Senior, at your command m'lady!"

The other men flew into explosive laughter.

Lucy, shocked by his mockery, yelled, "LOOK! I'M NOT REALLY IN THE MOOD FOR YOUR HORSESHI...". And then she surprised even herself by suddenly breaking down in tears and hitching and sobbing, "Lu-lu-look I-huh-huh-I cu-cu-can't e-e-even..."

Junior Senior put his arm around her heaving shoulders and said, gently, "It's okay, get it all out, Lucy. We've all been through it". And Lucy did let it all out, spurred on by this stranger's kind tone, tipping her plate and spilling the rest of her breakfast onto the deck.

Sometime later, after the PTSD reaction and introductions were over with, Lucy decided it was time to ask the really important questions, "How did you all get here?"

"Same way you did; Through that stupid out-of-order washing machine." said the blonde youngster known as 'Petey Pete'.

"But, that's stupid." said Lucy. "That machine can't have been out of order for... wait. How long have you people been here for even?!"

"Well, baby, I went into that machine in the August of 1967." drawled the obviously American hippie called 'Dave'. "Ask me the next one. I think I know what it'sa gonna be."

Dave's baby-blue eyes sparkled in his baby-fresh thirty-something face as she started to stammer out the question but then he asked it for her in his smooth-as-silk voice, "Why haven't we just gone back out through the tunnel, right?"

Lucy nodded and Captain Matthew took back the conversation saying, "Y' could'v ask'd that to 'Beautiful Bob', but he ain't w'th us any l'nger. Ya see, he did indeed make it out thr'gh yon tunnel."

"Why didn't he go for help or..." blurted Lucy.

"Well, he on'ly got two'r'tree blocks b'fore he saw that ev'ryone was a raincoat thing, or some ev'n bigg'r 'r worse 'n ways. T' world back there isn't wha' it was b'fore we came here."

Lucy, her eyes tearing up, said, "Then, what is... what d-did... whu-why have...". And then she broke down in sobs again, her crying eyes against the dampening knees of her new, rough linen trousers.

The final man of the crew, 'Lance Neighbor' by introduction, spoke up and said, "The night Beautiful Bob came back out of that fucking tunnel with half-a-dozen bottles of whiskey stuffed in under his clothes, we all drank ourselves silly. It had been our one hope of getting back. The next morning, we found him hanging from one of the beams over your bunk."

Lucy, her face drawn and shocky, said, "It's not my bunk."

'Dad' said, "T'is now."

"But, didn't you say there wasn't enough space?"

"Aye, there isn't. But something tells me you're gonna need our help... Or, more to the point, we're gonna need yours."

"What makes you say that?"

"Just a feeling, missy."

Lucy became acutely aware of some exchanges of glances among the men. Captain Matthew lowered his eyes and grimaced.

"What... What is it?"

"Ahh, it's nothing, Lucy. Really."

"Will somebody tell me what's going on?" She looked around for someone to answer her.

"Okay. Here's the thing." The captain re-established eye contact and sighed, "Some o' the boys were talking. And... they noticed a certain resemblance between yerself and Bob... And I agree, tru'betold. The ginger hair, the freckles."

Lucy's face went ashen, and Matthew leaned in towards her. "It's true, isn't it. That sly old dog. He never mentioned a daughter."

"Niece." Lucy corrected. "My Uncle Robert vanished when I was kid. We all thought his wife Aunty Hayley had killed him. But there was never any proof, and she always insisted he had just gone out to do some errands and never came back."

"Laundry, by any chance?"

Lucy shrugged her shoulders, "I guess so."

"Well, it's a good job blasphemy doesn't exist in here, because JESUS CHRIST."

"I knew it!" said one of the crew. The room became abuzz with excitement, though what exactly they had to be excited about was unclear.
 
"Petey Pete. Grab Bob's box for me, won't you?"

"Aye-aye, Dad," said the young man as he hopped over to a wooden chest and lifted the lid. He dug out a small box and handed it to the captain, who handed it in turn to Lucy.

"Maybe you can make sense o'these."

She opened the small container, revealing a dozen or so slips of paper. As she flipped over the first one, she immediately recognized it. It was the same as the piece of paper back in the launderette. The same paper, same ink, same handwriting, though the messages were different.

Escape this tortured realm.

No solace here.

Return to the beautiful place.

"They're all like that." Dad said. "He clearly missed home. We all do."

Lucy shook her head. "No, I don't think so. I didn't know my uncle well, but I know he had problems. He was a miserable alcoholic and his wife hated him."

"Aye, he loved the bottle. But the notes don't lie, missy. He wanted out of this place."

"No, you're reading them wrong. I found another note just like this, back... up there. He must have written them when he went back. For him, this was the "beautiful place", home was the "tortured realm".

"Wait. Let me get this right? Are ye saying... Are ye saying he lied about not being able to go back? The place being full of those raincoat demons an' suchlike?"

"Either that, or it was the alcohol talking."

The earlier buzz of conversation had subsided, replaced by a heavy silence.

Then, one of the crew spoke up. "So... does that mean we can go home?"

"I think we should try," said Lucy.

No sooner had she said that, than a piercing wail of a whistle tore through the air. Everyone's heads turned and the men sprang into action. Lucy stared out across the ocean, open-mouthed, at what looked like a vast tsunami heading towards them. But it was something else.

A voice shouted "It's them! Hundreds of them!"

"They've come for you, Missy! Let's get home!"

'Dad' turned away from Lucy, and started his speedy, pigeon-toed climb up the steep ladder from the aft deck of the tugboat-sized vessel to the narrow captain's bridge with its driftwood-like, asymmetrically peaked roof above.

While still halfway up, he shouted back, "JS! Man th' rudd'r! Pete 'n' Dave, t' battle st'tions!". As Junior Senior started to rush to the aft, and Petey Pete and Dave stood up and kicked their heels back hard on rusty metal pedals at the base of their log-head seats, Captain Matthews shuffled his feet around his orange plastic swivel-chair, and put a hand on its back so as to turn it enough so he could dump his butt in.
 
Then he allowed gravity and the chair's pole support to swivel him forward enough to grab the rusty lever on his left with one hand and grind it all the way forward, his other on the boat's wheel, yanking it hard to the left.

The log seats that Petey Pete and Dave had sat upon spun over, along with squarish sections of the deck's boards, and were replaced by bulbous, blackish iron cannon-looking things, both pointing the wrong way from the incoming scrambling mass of what had seemed a tsunami at first to Lucy's eyes.
She stood up and said, "FUUUU—Shit! What should I do, Dad?!"

Captain Matthews heard her over the growing chug-chug-chug of the boat's struggling, suddenly awoken motor, and yelled back over his shoulder, "Hang'n T'GHT!"  as he pushed down on the half-dome of the rusty iron button beneath his foot.

There was a "CLACK" and then the boat's motor said, "chug-chUG-CHUG". And then "CHUG-CHUG-CHUGCHUGCHUG!" from belowdecks.

Lucy barely had time to grab hold of one of the tent's guy lines before the boat started to swing in a tight, frothing circle, Junior Senior gritting his face at the aft rudder from the force his bulging biceps were under.

The chittering, howling, black front of the incoming wave of insanity started to build up upon itself from the rear, growing ever-taller as even larger and more malformed insect-slug-pistoned things crested and built upon the initial swell.

Even more suspiciously insane and bulky forms were on their own way up from behind the tsunami, the multi-facetted lighthouse-eyes atop their rippling silhouettes opening and slicing beams of orange light in spinning, narrow cones, when the boat's cannons finally faced the horizon-spanning cliff of enemies, and Petey Pete and Dave opened fire.

WHUFF-WHUFF-WHUFF went the dual cannons. Green orbs fled from their maws in high arcs over the ocean and into and over the growing wave.
 
"AIM F'R 'TS BASE!" yelled Dad down from the boat's bridge, and his two best gunners obeyed. The green shells, reminding Lucy of tracer-bullet footage she had seen in World War 2 documentaries, exploded in glowing plumes of mushroom-clouds at the base of the approaching wave and started to carve out a divot in it as the boat pulled around again close to the cliff.

Lucy, swaying, barely able to keep her feet under her, saw the stainless-steel of the curved roof of the washing-machine tunnel reflecting back the bursts of light from the boat's cannons.

The arc of slain enemies at the base of the wave had piled up under the pumping, green onslaught from Petey Pete and Dave, but now stalled in its growth, as more spiderish reaching legs and bulbous tumbling heads and other worse forms poured over their fallen brethren.

The aft of the boat bumped up against the rocks and Junior Senior, his face wracked with navigation effort yelled out, "GO! GO! GO, GET OUT!"

Junior Senior leapt over onto the rockface, dragging Lucy with him. As they scrambled up the rocks, she turned her head to see Dave and Petey Pete leaping over onto the base of the cliff too. Captain Matthew was waving furiously at them to keep going while he manned the cannons as best he could on his own, remaining on board to provide cover for Lucy and his boys.

The tsunami of insanity had wrapped around the vessel and had them surrounded in an tightening semicircle, but Dad was fending them off with perfect precision. Without a word, the men seemed to have encircled Lucy in a protective shield and it was then that she realized the water demons were only interested in her. As they clambered up the cliff, the crew formed an ever-tighter guard around her and the green streaks of light pumping out from the boat kept the enclosing ring of monsters at bay until finally they reached the lip of the washing machine tunnel.
The men immediately all knew their next assignment. Getting Lucy into the hole safely.

They heaved her up and she grabbed the bottom rim, then Petey climbed on Dave's shoulders and got beneath Lucy's legs just enough to lift her into the hole.

She managed to shift her body into a position to help Petey Pete come up in behind her, but something was wrong. An eerie rumbling sound began to emerge from below. The men had gone silent and the air was still. She peered down to the ocean's surface to see the men all doing likewise. All at once, a huge mountain of dissolving demon bodies erupted in a giant column of water which seemed to linger in the air momentarily before falling, smashing against the cliff face, taking Dave, Junior Senior, and Petey, tumbling down, screaming, with it.

But there was no time to mourn her new friends. Out through the tunnel's opening she saw a gloved, dripping hand reach up and come down, gripping the rim, and the familiar waterproof material of its raincoated sleeve.

The faceless demon effortlessly pulled itself up and climbed into the tube. It made no noise as it crawled toward her, forcing her back towards the launderette end of the tunnel. She reached the inside of the washing machine door, pushing against it and pounding on it fruitlessly. She heard the sound of the demon's raincoat brushing against the inside of the tunnel now and knew it was close.

Then, in the door of the washing machine, she saw a green flash. It took her a second to realize it was the reflection of one of Dad's strange orbs. And in the quiet pause that followed, the orb entered the tunnel, bounced around down its length, and ripped straight through the raincoat demon, instantly liquefying it. Lucy braced herself against the curling wave of briny, surging water, but it simply bustled around her harmlessly and smashed into the washing machine door at the end of the tunnel, sending it wide open.

Lucy wasted no time in scrambling through, as a flurry of new orbs were sent into the tunnel, destroying it completely in a cacophony of explosions and the crashing downs of collapsing metal and rock, blocking the tunnel and sealing it forever.

And then there was silence again.

***

Months passed. Lucy had mentioned her ordeal to no one. They wouldn't have believed her if she had. She sat in her shitty bedsit, surrounded by empty bottles and mounds of clothes piled up against the wall. She was going to have to do another load of laundry. But that could wait. She would need whiskey first. Which meant facing 'them'. They were everywhere now – working in the liquor store, stalking her in the street, knocking on the door claiming to be her concerned parents. But she knew what they really were.

In a moment of clarity, she became conscious of the pain in her fingers and she looked down and saw their red-raw tips and bloodied nails.
"No Solace here," she muttered to herself. "Escape this tortured realm."
She opened the door to her bedsit and left.

***

Back in the launderette, Lucy makes a beeline for the third washing machine and swings the door open. Inside she sees the shiny, brand-new drum of it, still with its intact back wall.

"Fuck." She slams the door and hefts the machine away from the wall for dozenth or so time.

"Return to the beautiful place," she says, and continues where she left off yesterday, scratching at the drywall behind the washing machine.

After yet another long interval for Lucy of time and fingernail destruction, the door of the launderette slides open, and a plump middle-aged woman ducks in out of the ongoing downpour.

***

"Oi! What you doin' there?!" yelled Indrid, her wrinkled brow drawing down in anger. These crackhead youngsters pissed the fuck out of her! She'd seen enough on the telly about their "marry-you-ana", as she said it, and their other drugs and was sick to death of it all.

Lucy glanced up over the edge of the pulled-out washing machine and made eye contact with Indrid.

The look of desperation in the frazzle-haired young lady's eyes made Indrid back off a step and a half.

Then the red-haired vandal stood up, dashed around the washing machine, and scampered past Indrid, the last vestige of the scamp's frizzy, gone-to-seed cornrows almost brushing her shoulder.

"What the actual EF?!" said Indrid, pulling her glance back from over her shoulder and setting her attention back squarely on the laundry task at hand.

She loaded her laundry into the second machine down the wall as she suspected that only the worst kind of unsanitary people in a hurry would use the first.
 
She set the machine running and then looked around. There was just a wobbly wire magazine rack in one corner that held only some awful magazine about the horrors of humans exploiting animals.

So "NOPE!" on that!

She wandered over to the only other thing of interest: the machine that the scratching junkie had pulled away from the wall.

Indrid ducked her head around to glance behind it, and her eyes widened.

The junkie had indeed been clawing away at the drywall here. But, in a perfect circle around the scratch marks, seemingly embedded through the wall, was the end of what looked like a washing machine drum. But not the normal, firm-edged end of one. The rim of the gleaming metal drum looked like it was putting out a crown of silvery tendrils all around its circumference, each like a vine reaching out for sunlight.

At the middle of the ring of stainless steel, Indrid saw that the junkie had broken through the plaster of the launderette's wall in a roughly triangular hole.

Sounds were coming through, faint wet sounds.

She crouched down and put her ear against the hole. Yes, it sounded like wet, slapping sounds, like maybe the wet hands of someone rapidly crawling on metal.

The sounds stopped just shy of the hole.

Indrid turned her head so that her eye was now looking through the triangular gap.

She screamed.

[Mandle]

We are in a weird situation here for voting now.

I would suggest that none of the participants vote this time, as, no matter how the votes are split, we all have to automatically vote for the other story, rendering our votes meaningless.

Once voting opens, I'm going to message a few people like I did a few times before and try to get some outside votes, although both stories are very long this time, so that might come to nothing.

In the event that no outsiders vote, I would suggest that Baron decides the outcome.

[Baron]

Well, I must say, this is quite unorthodox!  For your voting consideration, I give you:

Wash Day by Stupot and Mandle

The Nameless Kingdom by Sinitrena

Voting will be as follows:

    -Sinitrena can garner one vote for herself by providing honest feedback to S & M. 

    -Stupot and Mandle can earn one half vote each for themselves by providing feedback to Sinitrena.

    -Anyone else can spend one vote on whomever they think has written the better story (although feedback is always appreciated!).  Votes are to be cast publicly here in the thread, because I'm a "let 'er all dangle out" kinda guy. 

     -Should there still be a tie at the end of voting the esteemed and infallible contest administrator (moi) will cast the deciding vote.

The voting period will last from this moment until midnight Hawaii time Saturday June 10, 2023.  Best of luck to all entrants!

[Stupot]

What happened to you avatar, Baron?

[Sinitrena]

First of all, kudos for managing to write a story that works in large parts, despite not working together but rather one after the other on it and without any prior consultation. But...

And unfortunately, it's a lot of but.

It is immedediately clear that this story was written by two people. There are two rather distinct voices at work here, one more flowery and purple, the other short and succinct. I could tell where the author changed, because the tone changed. It is very obvious, at least in the beginning. Later, probably from reading each others parts, the voices converge somewhat. But the reader is left with a fairly inconsistant story (concerning the style, not the plot.) Working together on one story in this manner works better when each person writes the point of view of one character (take my story, for example. Had you two written that one, one could have written Jamela's parts and one Tamis' - and a different voice wouldn't distract from the story, but enhance it.)

As for the plot, I like the beginning, I like the end. The middle needs work. Basically all from Lucy arriving on the boat to the crew trying to escape the other dimension feels very, very rushed and illogical at times. The main part that I considered illogical was later offset and improved by the last three "chapters" though: the fact that the uncle killed himself, despite apparently prefering the world he slipped into. What feels rushed is the whole recognizing Lucy as a family member of their lost friend, then Lucy just immediately getting the supposed meaning of the messages, then them trying to escape.

I laughed a bit at the this part: "Ask me the next one. I think I know what it'sa gonna be."
Dave's baby-blue eyes sparkled in his baby-fresh thirty-something face as she started to stammer out the question but then he asked it for her in his smooth-as-silk voice, "Why haven't we just gone back out through the tunnel, right?"
This should really not be her next question. Why? Because she already has an answer: She tried to go back and couldn't. It is just logical to assume that they also tried and couldn't.
This is a question driven by the plot, a question the author needs answered in that moment, not one the characters should discuss right then and there. It might come up, yes, but not like that.

Questions like that, the sudden jump to recognizing Lucy somewhat and other things make the discussion on the boat feel a bit disconnected. Also, the rather too much detail given to the fish stew added to this feeling.

The story could have ended at different points:
"Without looking behind her, she pushed against the end of the tunnel and plunged backwards into the darkness below." That's actually a good ending, and I assume how Stupot's original text ended? I'm fairly sure I see a jump to Mandle's style right after that. So obviouosly, you wanted to continue here, and that would be very, very open ended.
Or here: And then there was silence again. So, with Lucy's escape. It didn't need the part about not being able to live in the real world again, even though it explains her uncles behaviour to some degree. It also changes the tone of the story. Before, with her escape, there was hope, now, well... Honestly, I would have liked it better without the end, especially because there are no explanations given for anything. We have to assume that Lucy did live through all this and it wasn't a drug induced fantasy, as Indrid thinks. So that means we never learn if the things Lucy sees now are real or not. We don't know what this other dimension is, why it exists, what the water demons want. There is nothing. The last three parts feel like an epilogue, not like part of the story, they feel disconnected.

There's also some very minor detail in the last part: Indrid? Did you mean Ingrid? Indrid seems to exict as a name for a character in the Mothman Prophecies, but not really anywhere else. And it's a male name there. Ingrid, on the other hand, is a common enough, maybe slightly old-fashioned female, germanic name. Intentional, or a mistake?

Overall, I think the story ended up as a very interesting mixture of Narnia and They Live! - which is, frankly, a weird combination. But it does work. It feels rushed in parts, disconnected in others, but it does offers a nice creepy feeling in the beginning and epilogue, while the middle could make for an interesting adventure.
I suggest a re-write. Working out the main plot points and themes, changing the middle so it doesn't feel so rushed and disconnected and offers some explanations (not all, a bit of mystery should stay in a horror story, but the ship crew does know more than they tell (or they should know more)), a clearer charactisation of the uncle and a bit more of a personality for Lucy, and most off all, a more uniform tone and voice throughout.

...

...

...

I think that's enough to earn my one point? 

[Baron]

What happened to you avatar, Baron?

Apparently it depends on which browser you are viewing the Forums in.  Are you seeing the blank avatar that won't load, or the one that's been hijacked by Russian hackers and is now an animated GIF that slowly undresses to reveal some extremely embarrassing tattoos? 

[Mandle]

Sini, I just got finished reading your story and the first thing I will say is that it was beautifully written. The next thing I will say is that I felt, during a lot of it, that I'd walked into an epic fantasy movie halfway through and was at the part where there was mostly a lot of nicely shot scenes of a character struggling through forests and caves and getting all messed up, and others blasting in a tunnel, and all that went on for quite some time, and then there was a peak of intense interest concerning the interaction between the prince and his male lover.

And I was suddenly intrigued by the premise that the prince was not interested in a female bride, even though his lover might be on a part-time basis, which was very amusing. I had just thought the characters and story had found its hook for me, and wanted to spend more time with them, but then it was back to slow panning shots of physical difficulties and massing armies, and I felt lost again.

The geography of the situation made sense a bit to me, but there was a bit too much getting to the conflict without a lot of character interaction to hold my interest through the "second act".

Then, we get to the battle, and the dialog between the two male lovers was amazing! That one line in particular! I'm sure you know which one. That line, and the prince's response, was great. A big Game of Thrones vibe.

Then there was an epic battle involving weather control which just fell flat for me again. Everything was so vague. I wanted to hear about individual soldiers being hit by lightning and their armour arcing the bolts to other soldiers, and their comrades screaming as they were thrown away from the blasts and then having to climb over the fallen dead. And that might all sound like I wanna see gore, but that's not what I mean. Well, it is a bit, but mostly I mean that I wanted an eye on the battlefield and know what was happening down there instead of just sizzles and the smell of burnt flesh.

If there's gonna be an epic battle then there has to be an epic battle.

Then, I liked the scene where the prince and his lover find her with the nuclear launch codes in her hand about to twist the key, and talk her down...

And then some old lady I've never met before wraps things up.

Sorry if I sound a bit harsh, but I did find it difficult to keep a grasp on what was going on. I think the scale of the story might have been too large for it to fit within a FWC format. If it were a novel, with more of the interesting character interactions that held my attention, then I think the concept could be awesome.

It just couldn't sustain my attention in this format through most of the runtime, sorry.

And I know you wrote it all in a rush, and in conclusion I think it is an excellent proposal for a 150 page novel.

Mine and Stupot's story suffers from the same factors, and your feedback pretty much mentioned all the flaws that we ourselves discussed but then ran out of time to do anything about.

We are actually thinking to revise our story into a co-written novella-length project. Who knows if that will happen or not, but yours would be an excellent book as well I feel, given a bit more focus on the characters and spreading the world-building over a lot more narrative real estate.

[Mandle]

Oh, and to clear things up a bit about Stupot's and my story.

Sini mentioned that she thought the cutoff point between Stu's "original story" and my writing the first time was when Lucy pushed off the tunnel rim into the sea, and then my "purplish" style took over.

This was not the case. For starters, nothing was prewritten from a story Stu had started on in the past.

It was only the premise of a game he started to make years ago where a person enters a launderette and finds a tunnel through the back of a washing machine drum that we used. And, in the game, the tunnel did not lead into a fantasy world.

Actually Stu did not know that it would lead into that ocean world when he wrote the first page and passed it off to me. His fist installment ended with Lucy going into the tunnel.

I took over and wrote the part about her finding the ocean world at the other end (in fact there was a weird flipped-gravity thing that I wrote where she looked down and saw the clouds and the waves were coming in from above but we decided to cut that in the final edit).

I wrote up to the point where she crawled back to the door and couldn't open it.

Then Stu amazed me with the raincoat-thing's entrance and all that happened next until Lucy "Embraced the darkness"

And then, yes, it was me for a bit after that, until Lucy was told to put her hand out by the voice from the boat. By this point I was deliberately writing in a weird off-kilter tone to make the "other side" seem otherworldly (hopefully).

Anyway, the initial switch in tone was because of that deliberate choice on my part, not because it was the first time we had tag-teamed the story.

Everything after that is kind of a blur as time was running out and stuff was getting written on the fly. We didn't know if there would be an extension even though Sini had hinted at maybe wanting one and we certainly didn't want to be the ones asking for an extension given the surprise project we were keeping secret to spring on you guys.

It was a rush! One of my favorite times ever writing in the contest. So much fucking fun!

[Mandle]

Oh, and yes, Sini... My choice of the name "Indrid" in the final bit was a semi-deliberate homage to The Mothman Prophesies (also a book about going over to the "other side", of madness or reality, or both) ... I mistyped "Ingrid" as "Indrid" (probably because I've read that book like 20 times) and then just decided to keep it as I liked it, and thanks for noticing... Will certainly be cut from the full novella version if it ever happens.

[Stupot]

Thanks for your feedback Sini. We were aware of a lot of issues, especially the lack of any kind of second act, and we had a lot of ideas for improvements, but ultimately were unable to implement most of that stuff, due to time. As Mandle said, we would love to expand it and address some of the issues. So watch this space.

Here's a little bit of feedback for The Nameless Kingdom:

Overall, lovely stuff. I enjoyed reading it on my new Kindle. You painted some beautiful imagery in my mind of the forests and the cliff and the fields of crops in the golden sunset and the unique palace. I've been playing Tears of the Kingdom and your descriptions are worthy of that pastelly Hyrule goodness.

You introduced some great characters with interesting dynamics but I had a bit of trouble keeping up with the background exposition as to who was fighting whom, where and why? I would need to reread the story to fully grasp all that. Though I n fairness that just says more about my attention-span than your writing.

If I have any criticism, it does feel slightly too epic to be a short story. You've got a young woman going on a journey to the seat of power to claim her birthright as queen of the kingdom. I know a certain TV show (and book) character that had a similar journey and it took her 8 seasons.