She couldn’t explain how exactly she was able to drift off to sleep. It might have been the windless plains, only gently rolling here and there to offer a nice place to lie down. It could have also been the soft warmth of the mounted sun atop the metal pole that rose half a mile, or so she guessed, above the Angler’s lazy excuse of a house. In truth, it was probably the chains of exhaustion that coiled around her sense of self. Now that she was out of imminent danger, all the energy she’d spent snapped back like a rubber band and dragged her eyes shut. Free to rest, free to dream…


    A hazy memory came to. Her hundred hands reached out, carrying her across ruined streets and up the side of shattered houses that lined the former neighborhood. She paid the rubble no heed even as it scratched her palms and drew blood from cuts drawn across her skin.


    She was running, because there was nothing else she could do.


    A black fog settled over the suburbs. It was the day the clouds fell, dark, ominous, and altogether suffocating. Here, she could not see the sun anymore. There was only the low visibility she could produce herself, clutching onto a flashlight. Her lifeline spread the curtain of darkness only partially. Beyond a few meters she struggled to make out anything.


    Waves of a soundless scream broke on her arms. The intense feeling of panic foamed against her body even as it flowed past her. She didn’t have time to process her compatriot’s death rattle. Caromis could only run for her life, letting her friend’s final spike of fear seep into her mind, where it mixed with the simmering terror deep in her gut. She clawed through the thick haze with an unmatched ferocity that surpassed any bout of anger she’d ever had, the desire to cling to life pushing her to desperation. But it wasn’t enough.


    Pasty white skin pulled taut over gaunt bone reached out, two giant hands as tall and wide as a house. The fog parted before her to give her just enough time for the recognition to flash across her face, jaw dropping ever so slightly. Then the hands came together, the rush of air being forcefully vacated filling her ears as the palms came together. Both met in a tremendous clap-- and then she was gone.


    She shot awake with her hands on her face, instinctively making sure she was all there. Caromis stared down at her arms, all four of them. Twenty fingers total. She willed them away with a sigh, letting two limbs shrink until they could retract into her skin as if they had never existed in the first place. As practiced as she was it took only seconds, though she was still embarrassed to let it slip in the first place. Human vessels were imperfect and that would forever be unfixable, so she couldn’t avoid absorbing a bit of those flaws; that was the explanation she told herself for the hiccup. Thankfully no one had seen her for that brief period. The Angler hadn’t shown themselves, still fishing, and there was no one on this island to notice.


    The nap made her feel a little better. Caromis would’ve much preferred to continue sleeping, but that nightmare dissuaded her otherwise. With nothing else to do, she figured that doing a circuit of her new home (temporarily) would be a better use of her time than doing nothing.


    If she had to guess, the isle was about a mile in radius. Might have been a bit bigger, but without the proper tools all she had to work with was her eyeballs and educated guesswork. It also seemed to be basically perfectly circular, like something had scooped the island out of the ground with a ginormous ice cream scoop. She’d confirmed it with her own eyes too, awkwardly peering over the edge to check how the side looked. The whole time she kept at least four hands grasping the grass behind her at any given time, fearful of slipping and falling into the abyss again. Even coming face to face with it a few scant meters away frayed her nerves, and she thanked the barrier in her mind for keeping out the dark.


    That did push her to consider the barrier itself. She didn’t know exactly what was responsible for the glittering wall of light, but the conspicuously bright ball impaled on the metal pole in the center of the isle seemed like a half-decent hypothesis. Breathing in, she let a few more arms sprout from her sides, helping to haul her onto the rickety shack the Angler called home. The pole was impressive, being nearly a meter in diameter, so she lengthened her arms and wrapped them around the metal. At this awkward angle she could sort of shimmy up the side using several pairs of arms.


    An hour of climbing later, she’d finally reached the top. A mile off the ground, there was only a slight breeze that blew in the same general direction without change. At this distance, the heat emanating from the orb matched the warmth on the ground nearly one-to-one. If it wasn’t obvious enough, she could actively sense the energy flowing through the construct, foreign yet familiar. This was magic, and very high quality at that. The same kind of energy was what she used to grow her extra arms. She placed a hand on the ball’s surface to confirm, feeling both the cool smoothness of its shell and the way that it coursed with… She couldn’t quite remember the word. There WAS a word for the energy that filled the artifact, but it remained frustratingly just out of reach, much like most of her memory.


    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    The rest of the island had its own share of oddities. First to note was the weather; there were clouds present. While there was water, it didn’t seem nearly enough to create the large, fluffy cotton balls that decorated the ‘sky’. Stranger than that was the world beyond the dome, which was entirely black save for pinpricks of light that twinkled in defiance of the stark darkness that surrounded each. She blinked-- did one just vanish? She didn’t consider herself a genius by any means, so she shrugged it off and shelved it in her mental cabinet for later. There were plenty of other things to investigate, like the forest.


    A copse of oaks and maple trees stood clustered by one side of the island, packed into a tighter area than someone might assume. These silent sentinels grew strangely, all of them sporting a slight lean roughly six degrees in one direction. More bafflingly, they all collectively chose to lean towards the great Skyball (Caromis’s working name for the pseudo-sun). Driven by bored curiosity, she ventured into the thicket, scraping against rough bark and stubborn shrubbery on her way in. The minor cuts and bruises were no issue, rapidly sealing before she noticed. After several minutes of this relative drudgery, her foot bumped into a stone solidly planted in the ground, consumed by the overgrowth.


    Parting the buses for a clearer look, she could just make out the rectangular-ish shape of the rock, which turned out to be a tombstone. Unfortunately, a tree had taken the liberty of wrapping itself around its face like a barnacle, preventing the gravestone’s owner from being identified. Still not in the best shape, she elected to ask the Angler about it later rather than spend energy ripping the tree out of the ground and peeling it off the stoneface.


    Aside from that, a lone obelisk stood alone on the other end of the island. Wavy lines drew some kind of border on the lower and upper ends of the rectangular prism, both tall and resembling a thick rod (if it was square shaped instead of circular). At the top, a square pyramid topped off the peculiar construction, four stylized suns just below it on each side. This, too, coursed with magic abound, energized just as much as the Skyball. The monument differed from the previous subject of investigation in that the surface of the stonework hummed with a heat she would have expected from a hot faucet.


    Eventually she swung back to the Angler, hoping for some kind of explanation. As expected, they were still there, occasionally pulling on their rod in hopes of another big catch. A pile of growing refuse a few paces away indicated that it was mostly busts right now. The Angler didn’t turn to greet her, neglecting to acknowledge her presence until she spoke up.


    “Hey, Angler. I want you to tell me the truth,” she said.


    “About what?”


    “I’d like to know about where all this,” she waved an arm behind her, “came from.”


    They remained silent for a few moments, but acquiesced in the end.


    “It was a gift.”


    “What do you mean?” she asked.


    “I had a friend in the past. I always wanted my own place to fish, so he made this place for me.”


    “But what about all this? This darkness outside, surrounding us?”


    “I don’t know. I just woke up here one day and everything was as it looks.”


    She chewed at the nail on one thumb, frustrated. “How long ago?”


    “There are no clocks here. I lost track of time.”


    Caromis tried her best not to visibly deflate. Brief hunger pangs prodded her out of her sad stupor. Truthfully, she didn’t really need to eat, but it sucked to go without food for extended periods of time. She definitely felt hunger even if it couldn’t starve her out.


    “Okay. Well, do you have any food?”


    “There is fish in the icebox if you are hungry in the house.”


    She sighed. “Where is that?”


    Following their directions, she eventually found the device in question partially buried under random objects fished from the depths. Brushing off the riff-raff, she ran a hand over the magically-inclined fridge. It ran cold purely through the nameless energy running along its surface. When she grabbed the handle and pulled up, she was greeted with fish. A lot of fish. There were cod, salmon, trout, and even bass. And those were just the species she remembered, for there were at least several more she couldn’t name. Despite not being cooked, she had no patience to sit around and prepare them, and thus merely scarfed down a couple in quick succession, bones and all. For someone like her, a bit of raw seafood wouldn’t do any meaningful harm.


    When she closed the icebox, the tip of something pointy caught her eye. Reaching behind the large container, she yanked out a thin rod, resembling something you’d give to a beginner. Somehow it still possessed all its fishing line, reeled up as if prepared for this exact situation. She held it in both hands for a second to study the make, then made up her mind. A bit of rooting around through the discarded junk that littered the pathetic building awarded her with a bobber to attach to her hook. She gave the dusty, furnitureless living room one last glance-over before exiting with a half-empty tackle box in tow. A torn painting fell off its hook with a clatter when she shut the door.


    The Angler must’ve had a sixth sense. They spoke up while she strolled down from their hut on the barely-a-hill, tools in hand.


    “You found my old rod.”


    “Yeah,” she said, “I think I’ll try fishing. Not like there’s much else to do.”


    They whispered in dissent. “You will have to be patient. Very patient.”


    “I want to go home, but I think I’ll have to be patient with that too.” She sat down in the grass near them. “Either way, I’ll have to learn patience.”


    “Okay. Good luck.”


    She spent a while like that, casting her rod into the abyss in the hopes of finding something useful. Even though most of her time was spent just watching her line, she wasn’t upset; there was something calming about the act of casting her bobber into the dark and hoping for a tug. Slowly the Skyball dimmed, plunging the isle into an imitation of a moonlit night. In the end, she did not catch anything significant; the big fishes would come later down the line.