It was dark, but Lucas could see pinpricks of light through the gaps in the threads of the rough cloth hood that he suddenly found over his head. The ground was hard and cold under him, his arms and legs were restrained, and there were loud and confusing noises echoing throughout a seemingly large space. A hand roughly pulled him to his feet as he spluttered in confusion and pulled him along somewhere.

Was he being abducted? No, Lucas thought to himself, he had already been kidnapped. The last thing he remembered was leaving the bank and then nothing. Had he been drugged? He must have, but if they wanted the money he had been loaned Lucas was screwed. It wasn’t like he had walked out with a briefcase full of money after all, it was deposited into an account of his- one that was not associated with his debit or credit accounts yet. In short, Lucas had the money, but had needed to do a bit more paperwork before it could be spent. Paperwork he had planned to come back the next morning and fill out.

His abductors were speaking, but Lucas could not recognize the language. It sounded vaguely latin, but he could not pick out any latin roots or identify their words in any way. He had to admit, his language skills were very basic. He had neither the money, nor time to study them and he had not seen the need in the first place.

“He- Hello?” Lucas called out as he was pulled along, the loud noises from before seemingly getting louder still and more clear. Was that… Screaming? And metal hitting metal? “Who are you? What do you want with me?”

His captors paused for a moment, and Lucas squinted against the light as the hood was suddenly pulled off his face. When his eyes adjusted, he had to wonder if he was still drugged. He was in a ruined, but still grand and beautiful, cathedral-like building. Standing in front of him was a rather beautiful and striking young girl with fiery red hair and green eyes, dressed like she was a member of old medieval European nobility. Hell, she could not be older than seventeen!

“Wh- what the hell do you want?” Lucas asked again, but the girl ignored him, silently studying his face. He gathered himself and steeled his will- he was not going to lose his shit in front of some kid cosplayer! “Who are you? If this is about the loan, I can’t give you the money even if I wanted to!”

Rather than address him, the girl spoke a short sentence to the man holding Lucas- who was also dressed in medieval looking armor- and the man grabbed Lucas by the head and roughly stabbed something into his ear! Lucas shouted in pain and recoiled, but the man had a firm grip on him even as blood began to fall down on to Lucas’s shoulder. The girl’s face was suddenly right up in front of his. The thing in his ear burned for a second and then turned ice cold.

“Can you understand me now?” She asked, or did she? He heard those words and heard that same Latinesque language from before leaving her lips. Was that thing in his earlobe a translation device? Why the fuck did they have to stab him with it?

“Yes, I understand you- whoever you are,” Lucas said and then asked the most important question. “What do you want with me? And what the hell is that sound?”

He threw in that last question as an afterthought, but as he was once again pulled through the hallway he realised that it was screaming he was hearing. A fight- no, a battle- and men were screaming and dying not far away from him.

“I am Terrasin deVon Almistraus, Lord Hero,” the young woman he now knew as Terrasin had a musical quality to her voice, completely at odds with what Lucas was sure was a slaughter going on past one of these walls. Wait, Lord Hero? “And we need your help, the battle you are hearing is the rearguard who will allow are escape against the demons. They are losses we can ill afford, but necessary.”

Lucas’s head was swimming and he stumbled as a sudden wave of vertigo overtook him. He must have really been drugged, and this whole thing was some kind of chemical trip. In fact, if anything made him believe that, it was Terrasin’s next words.

“It is the duty of my family to welcome you to our world, and as the fourth princess- I wish I could follow that tradition in full.” As they passed a window, something slammed into it. As a geneticist and a biologist, Lucas was familiar with even the strangest of life found on Earth. He was proud of the knowledge he had, which is why he was certain that the winged creature now trying to claw its way in with its four legs and whiplike prehensile tail was nothing that did, or ever had, existed on planet Earth.

“Unfortunately, this is not the time or place to explain,” Terrasin and the guard dragging him ignored the creature- which was now letting loose an unholy screeching noise as its prey got further away- and continued pulling Lucas forward. “I beg your forgiveness, Lord Hero, but we must flee.”

Trip or no trip, Lucas was not about to argue that getting away from that nightmare was a good idea. He tried to move himself, that the guard would not have to drag him, but found he was too unsteady on his feet as another wave of vertigo and nausea overtook him. In the end, it was not under his own power that he made it through the doors at the end of the hall and out into the sunlight.

Lucas blinked at the sudden glare, made all the worse as it glinted off the armor of the men at the doorway. Men whose swords dripped blackish-red blood and bore rents that looked like the work of a beast’s claws. To the side, a more lightly armoured group in chainmail and leather shot arrows into the flying beasts that had tried to get at him earlier.

“The ritual is complete, we have the Lord Hero.” The woman called Terrasin spoke to what Lucas assumed was the man in charge. He was currently too sick and too confused to say anything himself, the entire world seemed to be spinning before him. And was that… Islands..? In the sky?

“Reform the lines!” The knight, for that is all Lucas could imagine this plate armoured man with a shield bearing some kind of crest to be, shouted. Lucas noted that the plate appeared to be silver, and glowing softly, lending more evidence to the hypothesis that he was either drugged or going insane. “Break through the center and open a path to the cities edge! Let nothing stop you, victory for humanity!”

The soldiers roared in response even as Lucas was dragged up the steps of a light carriage. It was a small thing, enough that Lucas would have wondered about it had he not now been able to clear his head enough to view the ruins before him.

It was a majestic city, or at least, a once majestic city. Even with the immediate surroundings slick with blood blackish-red and red- with bodies of monster and man- and the smell of ash and bile in the air, once could see the impressive workmanship that stood the test of time. Still, an armor filled with nothing but a charred and smoking corpse took a lot away from the scene, just as the other bodies did. The smell itself would have been unbearable if Lucas had not been a biologist, and used to both the smell of death, blood, guts, and chemical preservatives.

In the distance, however, despite the damage of age- and what also looked to be pillaging and destruction- were blasted manors and castles, temples and monuments. Some nearly pristine and some clearly defiled even from a distance, though as he got a closer and better look, he found that everything had been torn down and diritied. Only the remarkable quality of the original craftsmanship allowed the city to maintain its beauty from a distance, but when up close one could see the layers of filth and dirt covering everything, as well as the shattered buildings broken beyond any hope of repair or salvage.

The soldiers were using one of those buildings crumbling walls to fight from, and Lucas watched in horror as some kind of monstrous tentacle slipped through one of the holes in the wall and grabbed one of them and tried to pull him towards the gap. His fellow soldiers ran to help him, and the hole was too small for the man to pass through, but the tentacle itself possessed inhuman strength and the guards shouts for help became yelling in pain, then shrieks of agony as he was not so much freed of the tentacle, as freed of the leg it had ripped off him and pulled through the hole to whatever monster waited beyond.

Lucas looked away as the carriage began to move, but there was nowhere free of horror to look. To one side, twisted monsters ripped into a still living mans chest- eating him alive. In another place, a freakish creature appeared to vomit all over a group of guards and closed its jaw with a snap that caused a spark and ignited the fluids, turning them into screaming and flaming torches.

Lucas no longer thought he had been drugged. No, he had died, and this was hell. When the feelings of weakness came upon him again, Lucas leaned into them and passed out.

**Terrasin deVon Almistraus**

“Princess, the Hero has fainted.” Sir Carsin Forus, a Knight of the Almistraus Household- though not a personal knight of Lady Almistraus herself, just a bodyguard assigned by her father to look after her on this mission- had a firm and steady voice even when in the middle of a folding carriage rattling down the ruined streets of Uri as demons swooped around them. “Although it would be a risk, we could reunite with one of the teams holding the road and have a healer attend him.”

A risk would be putting it mildly, Terrasin thought. The city of Uri was a demon-infested pit right now. Even though they usually avoided the place in general, the creatures- and certainly their King- were aware that there might be a chance we would try for something like this.

“We will continue onward,” Terrasin tried to mimic the firmness in her bodyguards tone. “The traditions our family has passed down suggest that the summoning magic weakens the Hero for a time. So long as we keep him safe from injury, he will wake soon enough.”

Besides the hundred guarding the cathedral itself, Terrasin had managed to bring quite a force into Uri. Twenty-five Slipboats worth of soldiers, as well as two horses and a folding carriage, was a stunning thing. Nearly five hundred soldiers had answered her call for volunteers and had gone with her into the SkyRiver Merri and attacked the demons who had, despite their precautions, not truly believed that humanity would risk such a thing.

Now, if they could make it to a Slipboat, they would be almost guaranteed free. It would take the demons time to bring any significant amount of vessels to this side of the city, and their flyers lacked the stronger breeds capable of chasing the humans from the sky.

“Forgive me, my Lady.” Forus’s voice took Terrasin out of her reverie, “but I must confess that he does not look like much of a Hero to me. Someone as weak-looking as this…”

Carsin Forus had, Terrasin knew, never really believed or put stock in the legends of the Heroes. If she was honest, Terrasin had to admit that when she completed the ritual and saw the criminal sacrifice they had brought for this purpose begin to writhe with his skin shifting, she was disappointed that the Hero was rather scrawny looking. Of course, she would never be honest and admit that because part of it was rooted in a childhood fantasy of a glorious Hero coming to sweep her off her feet and she had discarded that fantasy half a decade ago, but that was not the point.

“Neither The Speaker nor The Sorceress had strength of arms, Sir Forus.” She said instead, “The former brought to us an entirely new power to use against Demonkind and the second refined what we had so much that it may as well have been something new altogether. Might is not something that can necessarily be seen with your eyes, nor can it be measured in muscles and steel.”

As the carriage continued to fly along the bloody and broken streets, when Terrasin could see the edge she could not help but start feeling relief. The few Paladins that had come with her held the landing, literally glowing with the fervor of their faith as they chanted prayers and smote down any demon that approached with holy light. Behind them was the Skyriver, a twisting serpent of rushing water that came up from the skies below to barely touch the docks of Uri and then swept up further still before spiraling downwards towards another island, a border territory controlled by the Kingdom of Francea.

From there they would reunite with the camp they had left behind, including a Cardinal and other nobility like herself and make the trek across the contested land until they reached the border fort that guarded the next Skyriver to human territory proper. She would have to meet with the General in charge, and Terrasin had to stop herself from smoothing her dress as a nervous habit thinking about that. A lot of men were dying for her choices, but still, she had succeeded.

Not wanting to talk to the knight nor look out the windows at the fighting and devastation, Terrasin instead examined the Lord Hero himself. The man was incredibly tall, almost two meters in fact, and while she had thought of him as scrawny not long ago, a closer look revealed that to be an illusion caused by his height. The Hero was not muscular, but he certainly was not as thin as she had thought either. Though he wore the criminal’s cloths, which now looked comedic on his much taller frame, his skin and short black hair seemed as well-kept as a nobles.

A Hero. In the flesh. Terrasin had been preparing for this day her whole life, her family had been preparing for a thousand years, and she almost could not believe it even with the man in front of her.

The carriage rocked as something exploded nearby- a demon’s fell magic, no doubt. Terrasin very much hoped that they would not have to run to safety. Even in a situation like this, etiquette and decorum did not bend far enough to allow her to dress in pants and her dress, while quite pretty, was not the best thing to run in. Inwardly, she cursed whomever had made those rules and the people around her who would not let her break them.

But all of these thoughts were just to distract her from her fear. Even she could tell that the lines holding the roads were breaking. Behind the carriage, Twistlings overran the guards and soldiers left behind, ripping them to pieces with claw and fang. Ahead, soldiers had been pushed into the street itself by the horror of Firgue demons and Bent monstrosities.

More than once the carriage driver had to swerve to avoid one that had slipped past the soldiers or avoid the dive of a flying demon. They simply did not have enough men to stop them all, even if every soldier fought to the death.

She looked down at her hands and saw them shaking as they gripped her dress tightly, she could hear her breath quickening and feel her pulse racing. Terrasin deVon Almistraus could distract herself from terror, had fancied herself immune to fear until today. She thought that if she did not acknowledge it and focused elsewhere, she could beat it.

As a man was picked up and carried off into the air, held by the tail of a flying demon, she realised how wrong she was. She had not seen much of the battle going in, nor witnessed the defense as she conducted the ritual, but seeing this now as they ran for their lives…

She was so terrified she could hardly breath.

A groan from the Hero preceded the man stirring, his eyes opening slowly- then immediately going wide as he seemed to witness what was going on outside. His right ear was pierced with a rare and ancient translation stone, which was why Terrasin could understand him when the man suddenly shouted.

“Get down!” His voice was panicked, and he lunged for Terrasin grabbing by the arm and pulling her down before she could even make sense of what was going on. A moment later, a gigantic claw scythed through the carriages roof, passing right where her head was before, and stabbed the Hero through the shoulder to pin him to the seat behind him.

A second later, the appendage was severed from the demon it belonged too by Sir Carsin and the carriage sped onward as the demon’s body was suddenly bathed in holy light and burst into brilliant white flame. They had made it to the Paladins and the Slipboats, and not even an hour into this world the man had convinced Terrasin deVon Almistraus that she had made the right choice and that he was a Hero.