In epicus veritas.

I looked on earth and saw it void. I looked to heaven and darkness.

Chapter 1: Forever a Changing World

They call me Rifter. I am not of this world. This land is home to many where I am the alien. The fear and the terror of me are on every beast and bird. I am lost. I am fallen. I am changed. I will avenge. The enchantment rises.

* * * * *

Silhouettes and shadows, whispers of shape made by light, make a dance of real and imaginary shades to contrast and flutter across the wall. A red-orange blend of glowing forge and guttering lamplight cast moving pictures and abstract shapes around the expansive room. The show of chaotic patterns scrolls over dull and sharp rocks of the cave’s interior. Crystal grains sprinkled throughout stone walls enhance the complex designs.

A blue-white aura, new and brilliant, spills into the chamber from the outside world, lights a cone of mist expanding inward and brighter. Gentle eddies in foggy air push and pulse the hot and denser ether of the cavern back toward the other realm, the places without, the world not like this one. The forge’s heat raises waters from quenching pools, swells the air, conjures transformation. This unnatural fog curls away from the cave mouth into the night.

Flash, and darkness. All is lost in the black. Hammers cease. The bellows gasp.

Boom. The rumble shakes dark spaces that separate worlds and gods and ideas of men.

The forge and its lamps reappear. Shadows of men return with the old light. The cave sucks in sparkling mist from beyond as the forge bellows recapture their breath. The working atmosphere within the mountain resumes a slow, rolling cycle toward its escape from earth and stone. One silhouette stretches forth, drawn out from the mouth of the master smith’s chamber by the world returned to shadow.

* * * * *

The flash somehow felt tangible, tactile. The light disappeared. The impact jarred Rick’s chest. He could not breathe— no air to inhale or exhale. He imagined feeling his brain slosh in a direction opposite from his skull, sponging up the collision. At the same instant, he had the impression that something anchored him, that immense pressure allowed not one hair’s width of motion. He heard the crash…or explosion, or thunder. Then he did not hear it. His eardrums had blown or some great vacuum sucked away the medium of sound. Even with stalled hearing, the rumbling resonance threatened to vibrate his limbs into separate pieces.

Confusion came from catastrophe.

Where am I? Rick wondered as he drowned in the depths of unknowing panic. Floating, hanging, falling, what?

Still blind and deaf in this new and restricted reality, Rick felt the skin tingle on his bare arms and legs. Every strand of hair embedded along his skin decided to imitate the prickling quills of a porcupine. Needles skittered over his body. Except that he hung on a single breath, the cataclysm would have caught it in his gut. He knew the sensation, so quick, should hurt, but his reeling head registered no pain from the rest of its body. A returning physicality pulsed first from his extremities, crept along skin, through bone and muscle, pulling signs of life back through his ensorcelled being— tendrils of imaginary forces coiling around fingertips and toes, twirling ribbons of hot and cold around hands and feet. Both apparitions burned, reaching up arms and legs to his core. This rush of senses came as a unique experience to Rick and he still could not locate himself in any known place: home, work, anywhere.

A bomb: Someone hit Seattle. A volcano: Rainier had decided to resurrect from ancient history, without warning, like St. Helens. An earthquake: Gas mains burst into massive, engulfing explosions. They might all explain the wafts of smoke and sulfur diffusing into Rick’s nose before taking his next breath.

Brimstone. Jim. I was talking to him; where’d he go?

Rick caught up with himself as gravity grabbed him. His fall to cobblestone pavers was a drop into his king-size bed compared to the eruption of that concussive power already unleashed on him with the blinding flash that had reset him— mind, body, and soul. Details came back from his blackout as if long forgotten. He had been standing; now he lay more or less horizontal. Little pains, minor irritations prodded and harassed him. He sucked in filthy air and hacked it out with dry grit. He sprawled across rubble and people. Feeling body parts beginning to wriggle and twitch— parts not connected to his own, feet and hips and elbows of friends caught in the same disaster— brought some extra power to his pulmonary convulsions, startled by terrible tangibility. Were all those anatomical features attached to their owners? In the blankness of his environment, Rick’s visual cortex revolved through hundreds of photographic memories recording carnage of various battlefields and catastrophes before he wiped them away with a conscious clamping down of his will. He needed to locate everyone at Jim and Mary’s pool party before the destruction had come, but he still saw nothing and could only hear his own blood rushing past eardrums.

He had not thought to speak, to shout for one of his friends, to call for help. His overworked heart scavenged oxygen at its functional limits. He raised himself from the living and inanimate debris by ratcheting increments, pausing every few inches to confirm his state. Once standing, Rick worked through each joint in a fluid, diagnostic motion that tested his ability to start search-and-rescue. Instinct propelled him to action even without visibility.

His ears opened. They rang and stung as he heard gasping and coughing, groans and whimpers; the blackness surrounding him lightened to grey. The crying ones wound themselves into frenzy, joined by disparate wailings and then one dominant siren screamer. Her noise formed no discernible emotion. Anger, fear, pain, all of them? She just screamed and breathed and screamed. The sound shrieked so peculiarly that Rick imagined the woman made a rational decision to yell one note as long and as loud and as many times in a row as possible, maybe just to prove that she could, maybe just to be different. But he knew it was not deliberate. Rick had heard that sort of anxiety expelled in just that fashion before at the scene of a fatality, and his memory of the single-minded panic in that other woman’s face flashed to his new reality. The woman near him now was neither rational nor functional, though perhaps reasonable in some respect for reacting to a singular, ominous fact: the cataclysm, whatever it was, had revealed everyone here to be fragile humans made helpless.

Confusion added chaos.