Prologue
Jason
There are three ways to leave Earth: A portal, a contract, or a body bag. The portals are heavily guarded by the guild and run on ancient technology no one understands. Contracts require making deals with ancient and fickle supernatural beings that bend reality to their will. The body bag is the safest option.
-Traveler Guild teacher
I look over at the woman standing in the window shrieking, “Don’t come any closer! I will jump!”
The woman is Amy, the last call of the day. She is twenty-two years old and was in the process of jumping out of said window when my partner, Jim, and I arrived with three police officers. A brief talk with her roommate, Lucy, who had called for emergency services, revealed that Amy had moved out of her parent’s house five weeks ago.
She got an apartment, a job, and a roommate, but she lost her job earlier that morning. When Lucy first called, she reported being worried about Amy. From the time she called for help to when Jim and I arrived with an ambulance, the situation in the apartment had escalated, and now we are standing in a bedroom, Amy in her underwear with one foot on the floor and the other on the lip of the fifth-floor apartment window.
“You don’t want to jump. You have so much yet to live for,” Jim calls out.
“No. Don’t come closer. I’ll do it, I promise!” Amy screams, flailing her arms as though to push everyone back despite no one being within ten feet of her.
Behind us one of the police officers has a taser trained on Amy, ready to incapacitate her. I stand back with the roommate, trying to calm her down as the traumatic scene plays out.
“Does she have any medications?” I ask, trying to mask my rising panic. I hope my demeanor will be a beacon of calm to Lucy in the chaos that has taken over her home. I want to convey the impression that I’m a battle-hardened EMT, this is a normal Friday, and my patient is about to get the help she needs. If Lucy hears I am calm, then she can trust us, and that may prevent her from making the situation worse. Too many times, I have seen family or friends decide that first responders are not acting fast enough and make the situation worse.
Lucy’s hand, with glossy pink nails, shakes as she pulls the fraying hair out of her face. “Yeah, um, in her dresser drawer. I saw she had a bunch of prescriptions in the top drawer when I helped her move in.”
I map the landscape of her room to find the drawer: over the hills of dirty clothes, beyond the marking of spilled makeup, past the drapery of pinned-up motivational phrases to find an old wooden dresser with flaking white paint. All the wooden drawers hang precariously open, threatening to dump their contents and add to the chaos. I look at the treacherous route I would need to take, the police between me and the drawer, and my partner trying to keep from tripping as he stands in the middle of the mess to convince our patient to stay inside the window. I’ll get the list of drugs later.
I turn back to Lucy, noting her arms crossing over her chest protectively and her back hunching over to make herself smaller, her eyes constantly scanning the room but refusing to meet anyone else’s. “Do you have a number for a family member or anyone she is close to?”
“Um, yeah, I have her brother’s.” She uncrosses her arms and pulls her phone from her back pocket. As she flips the phone in front of her face, the device lights up, illuminating in stark detail the tension in her jaw, her furrowed eyebrows, and her tousled hair. I hear the tapping of her nails on the screen as she flits through her phone. Once she finds his contact with a final staccato of taps, she turns the phone to me. In the soft light of the room, the phone screen’s bright background cuts through the gloom to show me a number and a name: Frankie, flanked with two purple hearts. I grab the phone to get a better look at the illuminated screen.
I look up to see Lucy biting her nail while she watches the scene unfold. “Do you mind if I call him?”
“Yeah, sure, go ahead.” Her reply is too quick. The response is automatic, unwilling to refuse any ask from me when Amy’s life is on the line. Lucy chews her lip and opens her mouth but says nothing. Instead, she walks farther down the hallway to lean against the wall. She stares at the ground, putting her arms behind her back.
I press the call icon on the screen and hear the ringing of the phone cut through the beckoning calls of the police officers and high-pitched rebuttals from Amy. The ring cuts off, and a male voice comes over the line. “Listen, Lucy, I told you for the last time, it was a one-time thing. If my sister found out, she’d go apoplectic—”
Lucy flinches, cowering as she hears Frankie’s voice, and she turns away from me.
I cut him off. “Sir, this is Jason Kelley with EMS. Your sister is threatening to harm herself. Do you think you could help us talk her down?”
“What’d you say?”
“Your sister is Amy, correct?”
“Y-yeah…I don’t understand.”
“Do you think you can talk to her for us?”
“Yeah, um, of course. I can be right there. I just need to find my keys. I put them down in the kitchen just a moment ago…”
I can hear him going into shock over the phone. The numbing of thoughts and feelings as the body tries to protect itself. His confident tone is gone and instead is replaced with a frantic energy in his voice. The shock instills a need to act, but he is unsure of how to channel it. Thoughts of him driving recklessly to get to his sister and ending up in a car crash flash through my head.
“No need for that. I’ll put you on speakerphone so you can talk to her now.”
“Oh, yeah, good idea.” All the strength and vehemence from the beginning of the call have bled from his voice, to be replaced by the hollow tone of someone overwhelmed and no longer making decisions.
I cut through the chaotic polychoral antiphony between the police and our patient. “Hey! I got the brother on the phone. He wants to talk to his sister.”
In the wake of silence following my statement, Amy, still hanging halfway out the window, straightens, trying to find any sign of her brother. I see her lean ever so slightly forward, invisibly drawn to the device in my hand, before she asks in a weak voice full of vulnerability, “Frankie?”
“Yeah, Amy, I’m here. What’s going on?” In the silence, her brother’s faint voice echoes across the room.
“It’s just…so much, you know.” She sniffles, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She steps down from the window to get close to his voice, to hear him better, but she keeps one arm on the open window to anchor her in place.
“I know, I know. Why don’t you step away from the window so we can talk,” I say while taking slow methodical steps, as much to keep from tripping over the high heels littered at my feet as to not spook the frail, distraught, crying girl. I had seen the mess of the room from the doorway, but as I step into the room, the sharp chemical smell of nail polish and the overly sweet scent of floral perfume assaults my nose.
One police officer grabs my shoulder with a firm grip and keeps me out of his line of sight. I call out to Amy, “These nice policemen aren’t going to let me near the window, and it has to be hard to hear from over there.”
I flick the phone away and lower the volume a few bars so Amy will need to come closer to hear Frankie.
“No, no, you can’t trick me,” she mutters, grabbing both sides of her head and shaking. She hunches down, curling up into a ball; an ingrained physical defensive mechanism firing in response to psychological pain.
“Hey, I’m going to stay right here. Frankie is right here with me,” I say, stretching out my arm to offer her the voice of her brother through the phone speaker.
I had studied for months to be an EMT, to help people. I learned about how the body works, I learned medications, and I learned techniques to sustain life. After that, I spent years honing those skills by working to help heal those at death’s door. It is baffling that all my knowledge and all my training is utterly useless against the tyranny of self-harm. Right now, it was not medical knowledge that would help her, it was her brother’s faint voice through the gritty speaker on the scratched-up phone in my hand. I’m glad he is around, but moments like this make me feel like a glorified taxi driver.
I try again to convince her to come closer. “Just a few steps, so you can hear him better. You have been crying a lot, and your voice is kind of hoarse.”
She looks at me through squinted eyes. Her face starts to turn red, and her lips part to show teeth in the beginning of a snarl. My shameless plan is laid bare in front of her, but the emotional safety of her brother is too much to risk, too appealing a balm to her aching psyche. She sees the cop holding me back, my arm stretched out to her, and she nods to herself.
“O-OK.” Her voice shakes from the strain of crying and yelling. She takes a few steps, and as soon as she’s out of the way of the window, the cop closest to her fires his taser. I hear the pop and the faint thudding as current travels through her frail body. Her body goes rigid before falling into a mess of clothes. I hold back a grunt, thinking of all the sharp things she could have landed on when she lost the ability to catch her fall.
“Got her!” the cop yells excitedly with a wide grin on his face, like he has just won a prize at the fair. While the excitement is discordant with the tense situation, he has won a prize. He won the life of a young, troubled woman. Tonight, we will go to bed assured that we have done good instead of the consolation prize of staring up at the ceiling in the dark wondering if we could have done something different.
“What’s going on?” Frankie screams over the phone. “Hey! Don’t hurt her. She’s never hurt anyone before.”
I take the call off speakerphone. His sister will not be able to talk for a little bit. “Hey, good news. Your sister stepped away from the window. The cops tased her, but she’ll be just fine.”
“They did what?!” His voice hits another octave, cracking as he screams over the phone.
“Look, man, it went into her bone. We’re going to have to stabilize the electrodes until we get to the hospital,” Jim says only a few feet away from me, examining her wounds.
“The girl is all skin and bones. Where else did you expect the taser to go?” the cop asks indignantly.
I take a few steps away, hoping the brother didn’t hear my partner. I don’t blame the cop; he’s doing his job and saved a life, but sometimes the job can dull the empathy. It’s necessary to form a few callouses to be able to face the darker side of the job, but some thoughts do not need to be spoken aloud in front of people who were eager to put their life in danger by driving to their sister’s apartment.
“Look, the important thing is your sister is safe, and we can get her some help.”
“I am coming over right now!” His voice almost cracks with shrill panic.
“Hey, don’t come over. First thing, call your family and let them know what’s going on. Second, don’t drive right now. I know it’s tempting, but if you can call a ride or get someone else to drive you, do that. If you drive while you’re upset you will cause a wreck, and I can promise you that is the last thing your sister, you, or I want.”
He grumbles for a little bit before agreeing and hanging up.
“All done?” Jim asks.
“Yep,” I say, and now we resume our jobs as medical taxi drivers.
“Good, because now we need to haul the stretcher up five floors and then get her back down those five floors.”
I groan as my mind foretells an imminent future full of backbreaking work, struggle, and not a little cursing. I had seen no elevators on the way up, but I had hoped we could walk her down. Seeing her now, I knew this was going to be a pain in more ways than one.
A few hours later, I run my hands over the leather steering wheel cover of my 2016 Honda Civic as I look over the lines of stopped cars on the highway. Each year the state adds another lane, and I am still at a dead stop every week. I impatiently tap the steering wheel; I am in a rush to go home to catch my fiancée before she leaves for the weekend, and I still need to do a few hours of work from my accounting job before calling it a day.
“Come on, come on. Why is no one moving?” I ask myself. The cars are moving, but at a snail’s pace, and only in fits and starts. To give greater fuel to my anxiety, my car is old, beat up, and well past its prime. The asphalt has grown hot enough to cook an egg, and I’m worried the heat might be too much for the car. It could break down any moment, or worse, lose the little air conditioning it has blowing futilely from the vents.
Moving forward at the speed of a power walker, I make my way up to the flashing lights of the cop cars blocking three traffic lanes. For a moment, tension grows in my chest. Was this the brother who had decided to drive despite my warnings? Was I about to see them pulling a young man out of a ball of wreckage? I turn down the music and look over to see a bare-chested man screaming at half a dozen cops.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone. Do not make me go through you,” the crazy man says while taking an overly choreographed martial arts stance. He dashes forward, hitting a car with his hand, and stops dead. Whatever he had expected to happen when he hit the car, I doubt it was to get tased in the butt by three different cops.
I scoff at the scene. Somebody spent too much time in their basement and not enough time touching grass. I look in my review mirror.
“Well, he’s touching plenty of grass now,” I say to myself while chuckling darkly. I know it’s a bad joke, but joking is a coping mechanism, and if I’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s how cathartic a little laughter can be in a bad situation. In the back of my head, I can feel the look my fiancée would have given me if she were in the car. The one that says I need to be more empathetic even as she fights the smile tugging at the edge of her lips.
On the open road, I put on speed. As I think about my impending marriage, I reflect on my life. I went to a technical college, worked a couple of jobs so I could buy my first house, and tried to enjoy the moments between shifts. I work at a boring desk job processing paper request forms from nine to five and work on the weekends as an EMT. My technical degree was in accounting, but after college, I felt the financial squeeze. I worked a few temporary jobs while I tried to find a way to get ahead.
I started my path to being an EMT when I heard my coworkers talking about how much money is in the healthcare system. I spent a few nights taking a class and soon realized whoever made the money in healthcare was not working as an EMT. I make less money doing EMT work than my day job while doing more dangerous work. Despite making less, I’m happy with my choice of being an EMT; it’s rewarding knowing I’m helping people and has a nice bonus of paying slightly more than most entry-level jobs.
Working two jobs to make a living has not been easy. But one day I met Maria. Her parents moved over from Brazil when she was in middle school. She was cute, with her silky black hair, bright green eyes, and a curvy figure that I could not look away from. Just short enough to fit under my chin when I hold her close on cold nights. She was a nurse at a children’s hospital and had dreams of going back to school to be a doctor.
We met through my EMT job on the weekends. I asked her out to dinner after her shift, and the rest is history. I was instantly head over heels, and in no time flat she moved in with me.
Her parents grew up working hard jobs to get by, and I was glad I could share some of my life that I had built with her. She moved into my house after a few weeks of dating at my insistence. I wanted to help her pursue her dreams and never charged her rent, but she bought the groceries for us and cooked meals when she was home. I was able to cover most of the expenses so she could save up to go back to college. When we started dating three years ago, my parents were thrilled to see me in a relationship with someone and accepted her with open arms, but no one was more excited than my little sister Krista.
Krista is the baby of the family. She is an annoying little snot, but her bright mood and caring demeanor always make my sister a joy to have around. My sister was a sophomore at university when Maria and I started dating, but by the time we’d been together for a year, they had grown close. I was her only sibling left, and she looked up to my girlfriend as an older sister.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
I love my girlfriend and would never change her, but if there was one thing that bothered me in our relationship, it was her friends. She had a few high school friends she still would spend time with, going out to meet at a bar or restaurant every other month. She invited me to join them, but I was always an outsider in their friend group, always missing some inside joke. Her friend group consisted of two other guys and two girls.
The guys were total dicks, and the girls were always annoyingly giggly. Eric and Alex would always be a little too friendly, and every once in a while they would low-key hit on Maria. I would bring it up after the fact, and she would wave it off. It didn’t help when one of her girlfriends, Sandy, made an offhand comment about how Eric and Maria had dated for a few years in high school. It pissed me off thinking about the two of them being together, but Maria waved it off, saying I was overthinking it and I was always there with her when she hung out with her friends so I shouldn’t be upset.
Fast forward a few years and I fell more in love. She was still a nurse but had just gotten accepted to a master’s program for nursing. I loved our life and knew I wanted to take the next step, so I popped the question. We went out to a restaurant for a date with just the two of us. It was the first restaurant we went to together, a hole-in-the-wall pizza place. The place was mostly empty, but all I could see was her. I got down on my knee to propose. She cried and said yes. It was the perfect night.
At first, we were going to get married at the courthouse the next week. We decided a big wedding was not important to us, and she was fine with just a small ceremony. But once we got talking, despite not wanting a big wedding, we decided to plan a small celebration with a few friends and immediate family members, since family was important to both of us. We pushed the wedding back a few weeks to tell our family and organized a few events with friends.
For her bachelorette party, Maria and her friends are going to a cabin a few miles from town this weekend. She’s still saving up for graduate school, so I pulled some strings with a family friend to let her use their cabin for a couple of nights. I had planned to have my best friend fly into town this weekend too for a low-key bachelor party. We were going to grab a couple of hotel rooms in the mountains, do some hiking, and tour some of the local breweries as we caught up. Unfortunately, a big work deadline came up, and I have to stay and work. I talked to my best friend, and we decided to push the trip back a few days. Even with that change of plans, I’m still counting the days until we get married, and today is only one more week before we spend the rest of our lives together.
I pull up to the house, seeing Maria’s car in the driveway. I grab my briefcase, unlock the door, and announce, “Honey, I’m home!”
“In the back!” I hear her say.
I sit my briefcase on the counter and move to the bedroom to see an open suitcase with clothes everywhere. I look down in surprise at the mounds of clothes and ask, “You know it’s only a weekend, right?”
She gives me a playful push before wrapping her arms around me. I hold her close and kiss her head.
“It is only a weekend, right?” I ask, injecting the question with fake concern.
A mischievous light enters her eyes as she looks up at me. “I don’t know…”
I grip her tightly, kissing her neck as she giggles and squirms in my grip. “Stop, stop…” she says between gasping laughs. I relent my affectionate attack before tossing her on the bed.
She looks up at me with a cheeky grin. “I am never going to finish with you here.”
I shrug. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
She rolls her eyes. “Go! I need to finish packing before your sister gets here.”
I relent and leave before getting into any more trouble. For the next hour, I sit around going through paper forms, zoning out I focus on following the numbers across the page. I remember when I first started my career as an accountant, imagining myself as a detective of the corporate world, finding secrets between the numbers on report sheets. Now I realize I’m more of a statistical maid, ironing the number to have a clean crisp P&L while feather dusting the tax records, so they aren’t too dusty when I need to pull them out for tax season. My accountant job has become monotonous, though I get more than enough excitement from my EMT job. I still enjoy the job, but it is far from the complex mystery I once thought it would be.
I hear a knock at the door and open it to the happy squealing of Krista. My sister, the chauffer for the night, is here to grab Maria before taking her away to the fun weekend in a cabin with her girlfriends. After a quick hello, she goes back to the bedroom to help Maria finish packing. A few minutes later, the girls are chatting excitedly with bags in both hands. I shake my head as I see all the bags.
They’re only going away for two days! I hear the door close, and I smile. I start to head back to the kitchen to grab some food when I hear the door open again. I turn around to find Maria peeking through the doorway. She smiles at me before blowing me a kiss. Before I can tell her I love her, she ducks out and closes the door. I wait until I hear the car driving off before I grab a beer and sit down at my dining room table to continue digging into the reports.
I lose track of time as I get into the monotony of paperwork, but my phone vibrating catches my attention. I look over to see a text from my sister. I smile thinking about the fun they must be having, and then my stomach sinks when I read the text. Two guys just walked in. Maria says she didn’t invite them, but it’s ok since they are friends from high school. I know exactly who those “friends” are. My stomach burns as I think about those dicks at my fiancée’s party.
In my mind, I go back and forth about whether I should do something or let it go. It doesn’t sit well with me, but I trust her. I keep telling myself I trust her, like a mantra in my head to ward off the thoughts of infidelity. She’s never given me a reason not to trust her, I think to reassure myself. I sit there, just staring at my phone, internally wrestling, wavering back and forth on how to act. My phone rings, breaking me from my decision paralysis, and I snatch it up. I unlock the screen to reveal a follow-up text from my sister. It’s a picture of Eric with his arm over Maria. Anger boils in my stomach, and without hesitation, I grab my keys and run out the door. My veins feel like they are filled with ice as I drive the hour across town.
Scenes play through my head of what she will say and what I will say back. Will she be angry, sad, or upset? Should I have trusted her and stayed home? She’s only hanging out with friends at her bachelorette party. Sure, they are dicks, but they’re her friends, and I don’t want to be the guy who tries to control who she can be friends with. I summon the image of her and Eric burned in my memory, and all my doubts evaporate like water on a hot engine. I tighten my hands on the steering wheel. No, this is what I need to do, I think, trying to will strength into limbs that feel like they have grown feeble. I’m not sure what I’ll do, but I know that I need to face this head-on.
I pull up the cabin barely hearing the crunch of the gravel under my wheels over the deep bass of the music from the cabin. Outside of the house in the pulsing lights pouring out of an open window is a bench covered in crumpled plastic cups. Opening the door, I find the inside is in a far worse state. Glass bottles of different shades of amber litter every surface and while I can’t see the floor, the crunch under my shoes forewarns me of a far worse situation.
I scan the room to find Eric and Maria huddling close, like conspirators whispering dark plans. The pair sit at a table just out of the way of the rest of Maria’s friends, who are sitting on the couch watching reality TV. My fiancée and her friend sip on drinks while a flushed Maria giggles and tucks her hair behind her ear. My sister sits alone in a corner, hunched, her hands tucked under her legs. Maria jumps up as she sees me in the cabin. I catch Eric looking over at Krista, then hissing, “She’s a snitch.”
I’m about to run over and smack him when Maria marches in front of me. She pushes me back as she drunkenly mumbles, “What are you doing here?”
I look down at Maria, who is scowling at me over her red plastic cup hugged to her chest. I sweep my hands around the room and say, “I should be asking you. What is going on?”
Her lips purse in that familiar way, the look I get when I do something I should not have. I remember a dozen times she has done that exact face. When I accidentally threw away her grandmother’s plates, when I forgot to fold the laundry, so she was late for work, or when I forgot our anniversary. The face summons a sympathetic response of guilt, trained over years. So used to the action, on reflex I question myself. A little part of me wonders if I’m in the wrong, but the cold shock starts wearing off, and I feel a justified anger growing in my chest.
She points to the door, motioning me to go even as she yells at me, “It’s my bachelorette party, my final fling before we’re married. I wanted my friends to be here with me!”
Unwilling to back down, I show her the picture on my phone. “Yeah, but why is Eric hanging all over you then?”
She takes a step back and breaks eye contact. It screams to me that she’s guilty, that I’m betrayed, that I’m an idiot. Almost mumbling into her drink, she says, “You know he’s my friend, and he wants to make sure I have no regrets about settling down. Relax, this is my last night, and then I’m all yours.”
Despite it all, I think I need to hear it. I need to hear her say it. I confront her. “What does that mean? You going to cheat on me?”
She scoffs, rolling her eyes as she says in a tone that is almost sarcastic, making it sound like I’m being ridiculous, “Well, no, it’s not cheating. Even if I did sleep with him, it wouldn’t matter because it’s my bachelorette party. Everyone knows it doesn’t count if you do it on your bachelorette party.”
I throw up my hands. “That doesn’t mean it’s OK to sleep with other men. It’s still cheating.”
She waves it away and says, “It doesn’t even mean anything. I love you.”
I look around the room, trying to find a sign that I’m crazy or this is some kind of messed-up dream. I turn back to her and demand, “If it doesn’t mean anything, then why were you going to do it?”
A hole in my gut forms as my mind races at the implications. Is this the first time? Has she done this before?
Eric walks over and puts his arm around her. “Look, dude, you’re only digging your hole deeper. You should just leave and let her have her last night as a free woman.”
“Screw this. Either leave with me or stay and I call off the wedding,” I growl, barely containing my anger.
“Look, just head home, and we can talk about this in the morning,” Maria says while waving it off as though I am drunk and illogical.
The words catch me off guard, but the view of him still hanging off her is too much. I turn to Krista and motion for us to leave. I see her wipe away a tear, and she walks over to me and whispers, “Sorry.” None of this is her fault, but I have no words for her yet. Maria and I are over, but I still need to finish things definitively before I can have a conversation with Krista later.
As Krista heads out the door, Eric holds up his hand and calls out to her, “Hey, don’t leave yet; the party is just getting started.”
He moves to grab her, but I block his way. Eric’s grin turns into a grimace of indignation, and I feel my heart rate spike at the confrontation. I want to act on it and hit him, but I clench my fists and control my anger. Hitting him would feel so good, but I try to keep things calm since I want my sister out of this situation more than I want to wipe the smirk off his face.
I continue to watch him in case he runs after her. He looks at me and pokes me in the chest. “Look, just get out of here, man. You’re just fucking everything up.”
I see the car lights flash in the background as my sister starts to drive away, and then the world swirls as the ground surges toward me. My jaw stings before fire races across my face where I was punched. I feel hot liquid soaking my shirt. Internally, I scoff at how bad the night is going. It started with me getting married, and now I’m on the floor covered in alcohol in the cabin my fiancée was going to cheat on me in. I try to get up, but my side collapses as I put weight on it.
“Eric! You didn’t have to do that,” Maria screams indignantly.
“Please. He deserves it for ruining our night,” he says nonchalantly.
“Eric, just go away. I had it under control. Now I have to deal with this instead of enjoying my bachelorette party. You always do this!” she yells back.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Eric shrug as he says, “Don’t get your panties in a wad. This was such a fun night until he showed up.”
The more they yell, the more it sounds like I’m hearing them through a tunnel that keeps growing farther away. I’m confused, and I feel my thoughts turning sluggish. It was only one punch; did he really hit me that hard? I feel heat spreading across my chest, so I look down and see my shirt covered in red. I feel a flicker of panic as I see a tear in my shirt where a glass shard from a broken liquor bottle is impaled in my side.
The room was trashed when I walked in, but I wasn’t thinking about it when I confronted them. All my mind could think about was that picture on my phone and how fast our relationship was over. I feel cold set into my core as the blood slowly drains out of my body. I muster my energy one last time to struggle. For a moment, my limbs begin to push me off the ground, but then I flop back down, spent. The last thing I see is Maria and Eric arguing with each other as my vision fades to black.
Hortus
Hortus is a planet on the lower end of the magical spectrum. Planetary wards function as a barrier to limit the ability of other ethereals to interact with their secluded oasis. No known portals are available, but the native ethereals, commonly referenced as the Greek gods in literature, have been known to take other races to the planet on occasion. Case studies show a history of violence and war that is suspected to be entertainment, but this cannot be confirmed. While it is not fully understood why the “Greek gods” were ever on Earth, they certainly hold no special love for humanity.
-Opening line to Traveler’s Guild report on the planet Hortus
Zeus looks down from his chiseled marble throne in his temple on the outskirts of the human kingdom to see his demi-ethereal son Hercules. Zeus, in his giant form, towers over the room, fifteen feet high while sitting. He wears a silky white toga and strokes the thick brown beard that goes down to his mid-chest. Hercules, the muscled six-foot-tall blond man in front of Zeus, is not the same man from Earth mythology. The real Hercules had died centuries ago, but his myth had inspired Zeus’s recent tryst, an unlanded noble women whose family had fallen on hard times, to name him so he would be just as strong and great as his deceased half-brother. Zeus, however, is the same man from mythology—if he can even be called a man. Ethereals, considered the gods of the intergalactic community, rule the planets of the cosmos and hold power over reality itself.
Physically superior and with the ability to bend the natural laws with ease, they rule many of the planets capable of carrying life, and a few that are not. Zeus and his clan had originally been on Earth years ago, but the wars, low cultivation level, and cataclysms led to strife that forced them to leave. They had cultivated this planet as a refuge for years while still on Earth, so when it was time to leave, they had an exit strategy. While at first, they used the planet as a sanctuary away from the mortals, over the next few centuries, the gods began to populate their realm with sapient races. It is not known if it was boredom, altruism, or some darker urge that led to them pulling races from all over the universe to populate the planet. Hercules was one of a few of the half ethereals that dominated the fledgling empires on Hortus.
“Father, I kneel before you in supplication. The elven kingdoms are in full retreat, and much of what was taken by their treachery has been retaken. Please, tell me your will,” Hercules says reverently in his deep, grizzled tone. The man in question is strength incarnate, his muscles bulging with both physical and magical power. His armor is simple in design, a leather cuirass with a steel helmet and steel pauldrons on each shoulder. The seemingly innocuous armor is a ruse; the magically enhanced leather and steel are able to take blows that would crumble fortresses.
Zeus smiles down. It is not a kind smile or a gentle smile. This is the tough, fatherly smile a stoic general might give a recruit who had performed admirably. “You have made me proud. The elves have a high view of themselves, but they will think twice before attacking your people again. I know they still strike at your flanks even as you take city after city. They are beaten, and the human empire needs to consolidate what has been retaken. For now, you should bask in the glory you have earned and enjoy your spoils of war.”
A flash of light, and a tall, slender woman in a flowing white toga and golden crown appears beside Zeus. Her face is one of unworldly perfection, not a single hair out of place or a single line on her skin. She holds herself tall with a royal poise and dignity that not even Zeus on his thrown possesses. Where Zeus is a symbol of strength, she is one of leadership, decisions, and political machinations. It shows not only in her posture but in the way she touches his shoulder and in the terse tone that scolds Zeus as she greets him, “Husband.”
That tone conveys both her position of power and her disgust with the half-ethereal Hercules. Zeus turns and smiles at his wife. At first glance, the smile and light in his eyes would seem kind, but there is a little too much tightness and bloodlust in the man’s countenance. The bloodlust would surprise no one, since it was her empire that Hercules had just invaded. “Ah, wife, it is good to see you. You may go, Hercules, and know I am pleased.”
Hera’s eyes bore into the half-ethereal as she scowls at her stepson leaving the temple. Zeus breaks her from her thoughts. “What brings you here, Hera?”
She turns to her husband and greets him with a sickly-sweet smile. “There is a reincarnator who has just arrived.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Oh? This sounds interesting. We have not had one in this world yet. Who summoned them?”
She shrugs nonchalantly as though it does not bother her, as though a true monster has not landed in their midst. “The reincarnator has not received a blessing from anyone on the pantheon.”
Zeus strokes his beard. “Interesting, but they are of little value. Without a blessing or some backing, they will not make it far. If there is another wave, we will need to move before things spiral out of control.”
He looks over, eyeing his wife with fond suspicion. “Tell me what really brings you here.”
“I cannot see my loving husband and his brat?” she says, smiling back but unable to stop from spitting out the last word.
Zeus tsks. “Jealousy does not look good on you, wife.”
Hera shrugs while walking away, swaying her hips. “Who would I be jealous of? I am the most powerful woman on this planet.”
“Do not be long. I am calling a meeting. It would not do to have the most powerful woman absent,” he says in a playfully mocking tone.
Hera’s face turns to one of hatred and disgust as she turns from his sight. In a flash, she stands in an open room with a marble floor, marble pillars, and a spherical roof. Light shines into the twelfth floor of the temple, bouncing off the polished surfaces. Before her is a kneeling elf in resplendent robes. The elf’s face is pointed submissively to the ground, but in her right hand is a resplendent staff, a symbol of her position as head priestess.
“Great Hera, you honor all elves with your presence,” she says in a tone full of reverence and praise.
Hera smiles, satisfied, at the elf kneeling in obeisance. She thinks to herself how all should serve her as diligently as the Elven Empire. Her plans to educate and uplift the other mortals would have to wait, at least until Hercules was dealt with.
“Tell me how things progress. How do you plan to deal with Hercules?” Hera inquires imperiously. She knew the empire would not solve the problem. They will need her to intervene on their behalf, but a little struggle will help them grow. She wants competent subordinates, not thoughtless seat warmers.
“Forgive us, great empress. We have tried all kinds of weapons. We resort now to less direct means. We have strangled his supply lines so he can go no further. Even so, he feasts on the granaries of the castles he has sacked as his own men go hungry.”
Hera frowns at the harrowing report. “So, you bring only excuses?” she says, injecting only a modicum of her displeasure.
“No, great lady, we have many plans, but none bear fruit yet,” the woman says, shivering in fear.
The sight alleviates Hera’s mood after seeing Zeus praise Hercules. “Tell me about these seeds you have planted.”
“We have sent many behind our enemy’s lines. Even as he sits in stolen homes, his own land becomes more perilous. Hunters and assassins strike fear into the humans, and we have conducted dark summonings to unleash beasts upon the lands of the humans.”
A thought tickles at the back of her mind. “Where were these summonings?”
“Mistress?” the elf asks, confused.
“Where did you conduct the summonings?” she says in clipped words.
“They are in, ah, hidden in secret; I do not know…but I can find out,” the priestess stammers.
A pit starts to form in Hera’s stomach. When she had observed the reincarnator breaking through the mana spheres, she saw he would not land anywhere within the empire, so she had dismissed him. If the reincarnator had been summoned closer to home, she could have him well in hand. Reincarnators were always a toss-up, but she would make a useful tool of whatever fell in her lap.
“Do so and send others to investigate. Whatever was summoned should be brought before me with haste.”
“Of course, great mistress!” the elf says, kneeling as low as she can in obeisance. If only the other gods were so easy to deal with. She had been far too lax as queen of the gods, a momentary bout of sympathy for the mortals; a weakness she would need to correct. Her carefully cultivated garden was full of infuriating insects and grating weeds, and she knew just the horticulturist to see. With a flash of light she disappeared from the hall, off to exercise the power of her domain of power and rule the Olympians as a proper god empress should.
