Dusk Hunters on HotGuySecret
News on the Flow
A low rumble and a powerful vibration woke him up. Glass shattered nearby. Rolling out of bed, Orion quested for his shirt, his eyes bleary from sleep. His patience snapped from sheer exhaustion. This had to be the fifth time a tremor forced him awake in the past two weeks. His only consolation was that at least this time it was early morning and not in the dead of night.
Someone give the earth medicine, or knock it out, or something. Please.
Voices cried out from beyond his room, out from the cracks in the window shutters, and some of both called his name. He glanced around the room a moment, surveying the damage.
He glanced furtively at his shattered blue-glass sculpture. He groaned. It was coveted by many a young man for its various uses. Now it was destroyed, just ruined there, leaking its virile sapphire liquid into the wooden beams on the floor. Sprouts of young, living wood bulged out from the most saturated spot, where the fluid was infusing so much life into the planks the tree was making a resurrection. Oh, damn it, not now, he pleaded, gritting his teeth a bit when a tiny glass shard pricked his foot. A part of him knew it would be wise to clean it all up now, regardless of future quaking, before a forest regenerated.
“Orion!” a voice called from right below his window. It didn’t sound like the owner was in the mood to wait.
“In a minute!” he shouted, and turned from the fallen blue-glass while it made his floor come alive. Living floors and houses were not unpopular but required a talented grower to oversee the wood’s revival. Otherwise it could result in a very, very expensive deforesting job.
That potion was supposed to be for making me grow, not the damn house! All that haggling, money and fermenting… for naught. The plank sprouted limps and leaf buds.
“Orion! Answer! Are you alright? Oy!”
He cursed again under his breath and dodged around his fallen and scrambled cloud puzzle—it’d at least been bolted down to the shelf, but the quaking knocked the whole shelf unit on its side. The puzzle pieces shifted and writhed like fog curling through an alleyway at twilight. 24 seasons…
“Get out here son! Your mother thinks you’re dead!”
“I’m coming out, hold on!”
…Twenty-four painful, tedious seasons to successfully solve his cloud puzzle, and now it was ruined.
Pausing by the door, he looked down to remember he wasn’t even dressed and quickly went to lift his clothes chest back up, shoulder muscles straining as he hugged the wide piece of furniture and lifted it upright. Another tremor came. It rocked the chest while he opened it. Clothes spilled out.
Another shout, this one from the door, followed by someone outside rapping at his window—he shouted a wordless, angry retort and scrambled to pull some panthose, which reached down to crimp right below his knees with a beaded string band. And then pulled on a short tabbah, half pant legs, halve skirt on its right side. He tied it off and pulled on an opened sleeved vest. As an afterthought, he grabbed a pair of clogged sandals, just in case there was broken glass about outside his room. His calloused feet prevented shards from stabbing deep, but it wasn’t worth the pain right now or the effort to clean up blood along with everything else.
Flinging the door aside, he ran around his younger sister, Rohiah, assured her he was fine and dashed through the hall outside to join everyone congregating, apparently, at his window.
Everyone was talking at once near his mother’s notorious laseanthre patch, his father Torion, mother Tamantro, and an ever growing throng of close neighbors: Johth, Jhose, Jho, all part of the Jeh clan, Jahth, not a relative, Orion—another man from across the green who shared his name; they were cordial but not friends. Orion hadn’t forgiven when the other youth had gotten into stealing. Their shared name confused the sheriff, and he’d almost been whipped instead of his neighbor. The other Orion had stopped it with a confession, but not before Orion suffered a permanent stripe from his left shoulder to hip.
Rohiah followed him close behind. The other siblings were younger and were, by the sound of it, crying or shouting in the common room inside, tended by his other younger sister Ginom.
After assuring his parents he was fine, Orion pulled his arms away from them and turned to inspect the damage to their home. The house was not tilted, but the chimney, all one piece of stone, leaned crooked and threatened to topple, having been pried from its bracings somehow from underground.
A part of the land behind his house, some thirty feet or more, rose high up at an angle, almost sixty degrees, at first glance guessing, almost like a shark fin, or a piece of clod forced up by a garden shovel thrust into the earth.
“There’s more of them, Ori, like that,” the other Orion said, pointing back over his shoulder. “Several barns and storehouses near my home are ruined. The havisobs and Cesiblakes suffered bad. Some injured, some dead.” His voice fell to a quiet hush with that last word. He looked away.
“It’s getting worse,” the local entebiter, whose purpose was to interact with the surrounding regions as a kind of diplomat or spokesman, said with a resigned sigh. His name was Jouhsta. He folded his hands over his gigantic biceps, draping sleeve swinging snake-like with the motion. “We’re getting reports of it all over.”
“The world’s ending, isn’t it? Why is this surprising to people?” the other Orion asked.
“Don’t know,” he replied, grunting.
“But this is the first time the land has come apart like this,” Tamantro said, tossing her burgundy-streaked black hair.
“The tremors weren’t even that big this time. But look how much moved.”
Jouhsta said, “I told you all before that this was happening in other nearby regions and especially other continents. This is normal elsewhere.”
“Bet this will get those Avinicenganri a trip,” Johth said, leadingly. He wriggled his eyebrows.
Several people laughed, though there was precious little humor to it.
“They’re already out of control.”
“They’ll start firing on each other now.”
“Are they going to start crucifying each other now?”
“It won’t be them we have to worry about,” Jouhsta warned in an increasingly displeased voice. “I’m getting word even now from the Commons Flow: Prarshavi moving north.”
“Powerful continent-spanning countries are of greater concern to me than Prarshavi, Jouhsta.”
“If Borolaris or Avnicenganr decide to come here, what are we going to do?”
“Hold it, I’m talking with the Prarshavi entebiter.”
“We should go check down the greenway. Others might need some help. Orion, come on.”
Orion waved at his same-named neighbor as he left with his own father, and then tuned out the chatter. He stretched and then started leaning into a deep backwards bend. If he was up, then he might as well start his morning training. That involved an intensive calisthenics routine, a climb up the sheer face of a cliff near the local mountains, All that would take place near the aforementioned cliff… he’d been waiting for a day to climb when tremors weren’t happening. He guessed it might be best to give up on it. There was no point in injuring himself or getting killed for sheer stubbornness alone. It wasn’t like he’d not scaled cliffs before.
He elected to take a long run to the trapezium and work there. He was just about to let his father know, when Jouhsta marched up to his father with a grim look. Blue light flashed from his ear to his left eye, a visible sign of his connection to the Flow. Orion remembered that he was supposed to take lessons on that this week.
Orion’s father had been a ranger and then a militiaman, and then later on became a guard for the local armory, which in the past decade had become a much more important task than any might have thought in the man’s childhood. Orion had taken to the boyhood training his father made him endure, until it was first nature. No fool was Torion. He also insisted his son test his cleverness and increase the breadth of his knowledge. Torion had never done so, to his regret, and set his son to learning all he could of any Art or Craft magical, especially of the Commons and its Flow of information and correspondence. That was particularly of great value now, given the state of the world, and yet Orion believed the Commons wouldn’t last long. It was an information web, one that the warring countries, especially the desperate ones, would destroy eventually.
It had already been disrupted at the equator, in the Hoan continent, by the Federation of Tribes. The F.O.T. originated from the continent of Borolaris, in the far southwest. That they’d bothered attacking a land that wasn’t even near them, just to disrupt any evacuation attempts on the part of the Hoan, spoke very, very ill of their intentions.
The end of days was nigh. Indeed, it was not nigh anymore, it was all around them.
Orion looked back at the piece of upthrust earth. It looked benign on its own. He remembered his room and its ruined contents. Just then, a young oak tree burst through the roof over his room, and flung aside tiles and attic paraphernalia. Its limbs spread wide to embrace the sun, and grew thick leaves.
Orion lamented the quakes. They were far from benign. They were, far, far worse than live trees growing into your attic. The earthquakes around the continent of Senannon had nearly leveled the land and turned it to naught. The oceans were also drying up, it was said, evaporating into mighty storm clouds chained in place over the southwestern ocean by thick-woven nets of lightning. And it was growing. What would survive such a storm?
It hadn’t rained in ages in most places. But that was fine, there were innumerable means of by magic to move ground water. But that didn’t alter the truth. Nature was dying.
And the gods new it.
“Torion, Orion,” Jouhsta said, addressing them with a note of authority, “A sinkhole consumed almost the entire landmass in the Locshmah region. That’s only about two hundred miles south of here. The whole region. All its people. Nobody’s seen the bottom. And it’s loded.” By this he meant highly magnetic. “Anything metal, including our blood, gets pulled. And it’s growing stronger. Ahn Avee is evacuating.”
“That’s north of us. They don’t think it’d reach here?” Torion asked. A touch of nervousness caught in his throat.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jouhsta said. “We’re leaving too. The entire region agreed that if another highly fortified region around us was breached or lost, we’d begin retreating. Now that our southern flank is exposed, I’m betting we’re due a visit from powerful neighbors. Never forget the Tower of Adversity is near us.”
Orion and Torion swallowed. People still talking nearby overheard. The surrounding chatter died out. Tamantro grabbed her husband’s arm, and then moved to Rohiah, pulling her daughter in close.
“I imagine the Adversary would’ve attacked us long ago if he cared to invade these lands. Aren’t those world traitors only interested in preventing the world from being fixed? The dark gods said so,” Rohiah said.
“Not necessarily, my little girl,” Tamantro said in an almost apologetic voice. “Rumors.”
“She’s right about that. The Towers were created as the gods’ demolition crew,” Orion said. He folded his arms. “That’s what everyone says.”
“I thought Jouhsta said it was the Adversary. The Demolition Tower is different, isn’t it?” one of the neighbors asked.
Orion felt a vein bulge with annoyance at the idiot. “The ‘Demolition’ and ‘Adversary’ Towers are just titles. Each of the Nine has a formal name—it doesn’t change that they all are employed by the gods to destroy what’s left of the world.”
“We aren’t the gods,” Jhousta said. “Who knows what the Towers are truly for. I just make mention that we’re vulnerable to attack. They tell us the world is ending and set up their pet warlords to ensure our demise.”
“Some of them disagreed, clearly, seeing as they gave us the Three Trees, to try and stop the earth’s destruction,” Tomantro interjected, stroking Rohiah’s hair.
Jhousta shrugged. “It’s obvious we’re caught in the middle. That’s why evacuating is our only hope.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere without a way out of this world,” Johth said.
Jouhsta was holding two fingers to his temple, focusing on the blue light streaming before his eyes. Those eyes glowed electric blue from the reflected light.
“Do we have confirmation of a new one, Jouhsta?” Johth asked while tapping the bigger man on the shoulder.
Jouhsta looked up and removed his fingers and waved Johth’s hand off with an annoyed twitch of his lips. The light from the Flow retreated to his ear lobe and spun like a little vortex. “Johth, I wouldn’t have bothered to tell you Ahn Avee was evacuating if it wasn’t true. I’ve gotten the confirmation.”
“When?”
“Just now,” Jouhsta snapped, balling his arms into fists. “Let me talk for a second!” he waited. No one said anything. The shouts of people in the distance rang out clearly now. “A world gate’s opened.”
“Is it stable?”
“How big is it?”
“How long will it last?”
“Is it dangerous?”
“How long until the big countries find out?”
“Yes but where is it?”
“Yeah, get to the point, Jouhsta, where is it?”
“SHUT UP!” Jouhsta bellowed.
Silence.
He cleared his throat and put his arms on his hips. “There. Let me finish before you bombard me with questions. Now. As I was saying:
“In the Kamto region, new and stable gate’s opened to another world. One we can get through easily in large numbers. The ethers appear favorable to our magic, so it is a world of equal standing to ours. You all know if it was a less developed realm, we’d see no magical energy present. And if it was a higher realm, we’d be unable to bring our magic in without severe interference”—
“In theory,” Orion interrupted.
Jouhsta glared frost out of his eyes at Orion. “Yes. In theory.”
“Great news if it’s in Kamto! That’s right next us,” someone piped up.
“Yes, Johmo is directly east of Kamto,” Jouhsta said. “Ahn Avee is directly north of us. Unfortunately, south, spanning the whole border from Kamto’s western end to our eastern end here in Johmo, is the Prarshavi region.” He paused to let that sink in.
“That’s a very big region,” Torion muttered.
Orion glanced at his father and quietly said, “Dousa, you’ve been all over it, right?”
Torion nodded. “It’s extremely fertile. Even after rains were lost, even when all their animals died from the Shriven Plague twenty years ago, they were still prospering. They have over two hundred million magic wellsprings that bring drinkable water alone. And two million Fountains of Bounty for food.”
Several people exclaimed surprise. Jouhsta even whistled low. The news surprised even him. The information had apparently been kept well hidden. Indeed, it was the only reason Orion could see for the bigger countries having ignored it so long. That, and their continent had the Tower of the Adversary sitting not ten miles from shore on its eastern seaboard.
“There are maybe one-fifty—no—one hundred and sixty million people living in Prarshavi. Compare that with Ahn Avee, which has maybe a million. We have…?” he looked up with a questioning face at Jouhsta.
Jouhsta closed his eyes and held up three fingers. “Seven hundred and thirty-two thousand, approximately. That’s the difference.
“We won’t be turned away at the gate, chances are high. It’d take us no time at all to get through without counting any other factor. But the rush is going to make a flood of humanity coming up behind us from Prarshavi. Easily 80% of our population are on our eastern end, and they have to cross all Johmo in whatever condition it’s in by then. We have to move. Now. Or else we’re going to get overrun.”
Everyone stood silent for a moment, breathless, ready for the sudden break.
“You’ve all prepared for this, or at least we tried to,” Jouhsta said after a cold, tense minute. “I’ve notified everyone I can through the Commons Flow. But we’re noticing interference—low level. It’s likely Borolaris.”
“Why?”
“They’re watching.” Jouhsta held up a hand as people started and began readying to dash away like scattered dust. “It’s one reason I’m notifying people in-person. Spread the word, just in case the Flow gets disrupted. Get your things, leave whatever can’t be used or taken on a quick journey, get to your waypoint—wherever that is—and move.”
Another tremor rocked the ground. That acted like a signal. Everyone took off at a careful gait, trying to keep balance. This time, the earth didn’t stop shaking for over two minutes.
When the tremors stopped the house was cracked at its foundations.
“It looks like we’d have to make a move anyway,” Torion said with a resigned sigh. He looked up at the roof. “Orion, what is that?”
Orion gave a wry grin. “Don’t mind the tree. I asked it to start emptying the attic for us. Thought it could give us a head start in packing.”