Xavier awakens to screaming and the worst headache he has ever had.  He groans, and reaches up to rub his head, hand coming away sticky.  He opens his eyes, staring at the blood on his hands before looking past his hand to the room beyond.


    The screaming was coming from Balere as she stood over him, covered in blood from a plethora of cuts covering her.  The room beyond was covered in gore and looked like a giant had spent some time throwing someone into the walls, based on the craters left in them.  A strange green ichor stains the floor and walls of the room, puddling on the floor where it runs down the walls.  Lodged in the wall across from him was the head of the creature that had been attacking them, missing the rest of its body and flattened.


    Groaning again in pain, he climbs to his feet.  Or tries to, as a sharp pain radiates from his feet.  Collapsing back down, he stares at his foot.  Finding a piece of glass embedded in it he pulls it out, grimacing against the pain.  Finally the screaming stops as Balere turns towards him shaking, eyes wide in panic.  Collapsing to her knees, she begins to babble mostly incoherently.


    "I...what?  I thought...Ithought...Ithoughtyoudied.  Wha...Whats going on?  Is...Is...Is it behind me?!"  Her eyes lock onto his, barely held in check panic, refusing to look behind her.


    "Bits of it are.  Like its head stuck in the wall there.  I think I see one of its arms over there by the closet door.  What happened?  I remember some magic looking barrier forming when I tried to block it from hitting you, and then the bat exploding and blowing its arm off.  Then I blacked out."  He was way too calm about this.  That can''t be a good sign.


    "Not the bug thing!  The big monster that showed up and splattered it across the room!"


    "I don''t see anything else in the room here."  He stands and steps around her, heading towards the window and collides face first with *something* that he was unable to see.  Warm flesh presses against him for a moment as he bounces off whatever it is, and he feels the breeze of a massive breath ruffle his hair.  He freezes.


    "I don''t see anything, but you wouldn''t be talking about whatever this invisible thing is that I just walked into, would you?"  Balere turns, slowly, towards him before quickly looking away again and nodding.


    "Well, I definitely can''t see anything, but I can definitely feel it.  It just seems to be standing in my way though."  Xavier backs away slowly and tried to see through the window to outside, where he can still hear noises and sounds of things breaking.


    "It keeps trying to talk to me,"  Balere whispers, "How does it know my name?  How do I understand it?"


    "Maybe it knows what is going on?  Were you able to call the police before...?" He waves at the room around them.


    "Line was dead.  Now the phone is busted."  She tosses some pieces of what was once a phone at him and begins to mutter quietly, but he is unable to understand her words.  While it sounds like a language, with pauses and breaks for responses, the sounds are alien to his ears.  Xavier watches her for a minute before looking hobbling over the remains of his sisters bed and peering back out in to the hallway.


    Not seeing anything, he sneaks down the hall to the bathroom, where he grabs a first aid kit from under the sink and makes his way back.  As he is stepping into his sisters room, there is a quiet pop and a light breeze from within the room, and his sister picks herself up from the floor, quietly muttering her under her breath, "No weirder than making a shield out of thin air I guess..."


    "It doesn''t know what''s going on.  Or if it did, it wouldn''t tell me.  All it said was ''The Conduit welcomes fresh worlds under its umbrella'', whatever that is supposed to mean.  And to call upon it again if I had need of it.  Then it... poofed out of existence."


    Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.


    "Figures.  Well, lets get out of all this glass and bandage up.  Then we can see if we can figure out what is going on.  I don''t think its safe to be here.  As if this wasn''t an obvious enough sign."  He motions at her room again with a disheartened chuckle.  "Steve got pulled through a hole in the air after living fire spiders chased him out of his house.  And something.. big was looking in the hole for a front door we have looking for ''shinies''."  He helps her across her room and they retreat back into his bed room.


    They spend a bit in the dark, not that it seems to bother either of them, picking pieces of glass out of themselves and bandaging up the obvious injuries in relative silence before Balere breaks the silence.  "Are we going crazy?  I can see in the dark, what was that monster, how did either of us do what we just did?  That thing said I summoned it, like it was magic and that was normal or something.  I think I could do it again.  There is this feeling in the back of my mind, like a nerve i didn''t know I had.  I think if I pulled on it, I could bring that... thing back.  You made a shield out of light and exploded.  How?"


    "Maybe the world is going crazy.  This all sounds crazy, but I don''t feel crazy.  Then again, I wonder if a crazy person would feel crazy...  Now that you mention it though, I think I could to.  I need something better than a bat to work with though."  He trails off, realizing he had a similar sensation, now that it was pointed out to him.  "I''m going to go get that bat, if its still in one piece.  Better than nothing.  Then we can see if we can find out what is going on."


    Pulling on some shoes over his bandaged feet, he steps back into the room and finds the bat laying on the floor near where he had dropped it.  The top of the bat was scoured clear of paint and any decals halfway down the bat, but it was mostly undamaged otherwise.  A couple of dings from hitting things, but not the crumpled mess that he expected, give the explosion had blown an arm off of the creature and knocked him out.  Not the weirdest thing to happen so far tonight.  Shrugging, he heads back to his room.


    "You ready?  I dunno what is going on, but I don''t really want to sit here and wait for the next thing to attack us."  Balere nods and stands up, sliding some shoes on herself before packing up what was left of the first aid kit.


    "We should stay out of site if you saw more out there.  We got lucky with whatever that bug thing was, but the smart move would be to not fight the monsters roaming the streets."


    "Agreed, lets go see what we can find."


    With that, they crept back out of his room and down the hallway to the front door, or what was left of it.  Listening from around the corner, Xavier was unable to hear anything moving out on the street and peeked around the corner.  Nothing moved that he could see, with the exception of Steve''s house burning down across the street.  It was a full inferno now, and he was able to see through the house into the backyard, thanks to the holes that it had carved through the walls. It has to have been at least a half an hour, and no fire response.  So definitely widespread enough to effect emergency services.


    Taking a deep breath, he creeps around the corner up to the hole in the front of the house and looks out onto the street, taking in the sight.  It is...destroyed, for the most part.  Cars line the road, torn apart, chunks of their insides missing as something scavenged them for bits.  Steve''s house was far from the only one on fire, and several of them, like his, had holes in them where something or someone had punched through walls, windows, and doors, and if they were only a small inconvenience, and pulled bits of the inside of the houses out to sift through them, leaving belongings scattered across the yards around him.


    A massive footprint in the yard in front of him catches his eye, several feet long.  He can only assume from whatever that large creature was that was looking for shinies in his house.  As he tears his eyes away from it, his gaze is drawn towards downtown, where he can see something rising up above the shorter building, something that was not there yesterday.


    Rising among the buildings downtown, big enough to be seen from several miles away, a large gate stood, seemingly opening a tunnel into the air of reality itself.  Formed of what appeared to be massive blocks of concrete, it stood a couple of hundred feed tall, revealing a tunnel that continued onward, also sheathed in concrete.  Past the gateway however, he could not see anyplace for that tunnel to be in the ''real world'' around it.  As he watches, something flew out of the portal before turning and flying off into the darkness.


    "Was that a dragon!?" Balere''s voice screeches from behind him.