Wielder

Chapter 11 - Dressing the Part

When Michael woke to Alie gently shaking him awake, he expected to find himself in his bed. Or on the couch. Or, at least, in his own home. A headache throbbed at the front of his skull, trying to pull him back into the land of dreams. As horrible as they were – magic becoming real, a gateway leading to another universe, running from the authorities, fighting demons – at least they were dreams. Eventually he would wake from them, and he could take joy in telling Alie a crazy story for once.

Except, when he opened his eyes, he was nowhere near the familiarity of home. The sky above was the wrong color. The air carried the smell of decay. The ground beneath him was hard and unforgiving.

Panic turned his blood to ice.

"Everything's fine," Alie whispered, resting a hand on his shoulder reassuringly. "I'm just waking you for your shift."

"My... my shift." Michael blinked at her, his mind racing to comprehend what she was saying. "Right. I took the morning watch."

She nodded, a tired smile pulling at her lips.

His spiked heart rate slowly returned to normal. With a sigh, he ran a hand through his hair and sat up. "Alright. I'm up."

"Great. Let me sleep in?" Without waiting for his response, she wrapped herself up in her sleeping bag and curled up with her back turned to him.

He stared into the endless dead landscape and listened to the sound of her breathing.

It was all real. The Realm, the magic, the flight for their lives: it had all really happened. He wasn't sure how to react. Dread and wonder and shock all seemed to equally drag him into an endless stream of questions. In the end, they all boiled down to just a single major, unanswerable one: how?

There was no shift of heavenly bodies in the sky to indicate when night turned to day. The purple-black horizon brightened into more of a purple-grey, but it wasn't much better. It barely even brought light to see by.

Darrel stirred before Michael decided it was time to wake him. The thief groaned when he woke, stretching and yawning as he sat up. His wild hair had not tamed in his sleep. He glanced at Michael, giving a sleepy wave. Then, after a moment to process what he was seeing, he sat bolt upright and all signs of sleep vanished from his eyes.

Michael stiffened. "What?"

"Were you staring at me the whole time I was asleep?"

Michael schooled his features to give nothing away. "Why?" he asked casually. "Does that bother you?"

"Yeah. It does, actually. It's creepy." The scowl on Darrel's face filled Michael with satisfaction.

"Well," Michael said, "then you'll be happy to hear that I was too busy keeping watch to have time to creepily watch you."

Though he seemed relieved, Darrel still wore a frown. "What is it with you? It's like you're making a point just to irritate me."

"Well, you did get us involved in your crime and lead us into a death trap world filled with monsters, so I think that's grounds enough to torture you."

"Look, if I had known it was going to get this bad, I wouldn't have bothered."

"I'm sure you wouldn't. Maybe you should think about that the next time you consider dragging innocents into your personal problems."

Glaring, Darrel threw back the cover of his bedroll and rose, storming off toward the fallen beast that lay behind them. "I'm going to relieve myself," he muttered over his shoulder.