On first glance, the world we found ourselves in wasn't that strange. After all, the persistent feeling of underlying strangeness was explained swiftly, though somewhat vaguely. The way things never quite fell at the same speed twice, the way friction on the same surface varied with the weather, or the position of the sun, were all symptoms of something larger.

This "something larger" was shown more strongly in this world's overall structure - something that would never have made sense were it not for the bizarre quirks in overall physics, and chemistry.

On second glance, the world seemed broken, more than simply strange. It was an ominous feeling, to approach a place which was more broken than the rest, but manageable. The small pylon in the center of the temporarily inhabited village was one such place.

It was a relatively unimpressive thing, barely higher than myself, and composed almost entirely of white-ish stone, gleaming with an otherworldly sheen. I didn't feel like touching it, but upon overcoming the first feeling of slight disgust, it only became stronger and stronger the closer my fingers came to the pillar's base.

Slight disgust bled into vehemence, then outright hatred for the pillar itself, and then its builders, whoever they might be. Upon realizing that emotion for what it was, something foreign, hatred shifted into fear, and my hand was quickly drawn back. I absentmindedly turned my hand around and looked at, to make sure that touching the pillar hadn’t affected it in any way, then chastised myself for the action. Why would it?.

The pillar's top part, a small, jagged crystal formation that seemed to grow out of the stone itself, rather than having been placed there, pulsed once with the same otherworldly light, and I felt a shiver of the same disgust as before run over me.

On third glance, the world was wrong. Not as it should be, not as anything should be. I felt a general aversion to everything around me, including the air I was forced to breathe. I had a suspicion that even if I were suspended in a vacuum, I would still hate it all the same.

It was lucky, then, that I had things with me that were right - something that was luckier still when I discovered that the native food held the same emotion for me as the pillar, though to a lesser extent. Staring down at the loaf of green-ish bread, I shivered - the color wasn’t a problem, and it looked well-preserved, even though it was made of some sort of otherworldly grain, it wasn’t rotten or visibly inedible in any way I could discern..

I knew the emotion was irrational, that the bread here was just as edible, perhaps more so, than back home, but I could not bring myself to touch it, much less eat it.

If the worst came to be, I supposed, and my food ran out before we reemerged into the sane world, starvation might give me the incentive to try some of the local cuisine. For now, though, it felt as though I was looking at a piece of food that had been lying on the ground for a while, or a fruit with multiple moldy spots, or something equally disgusting.

We'd moved on quickly, my compatriots and me, north along the compass. Myself in the mirror explained to me, sometime during the endless, brain-dead walking through an equally endless grassy plain, why the compass seemingly worked the way it did.

***

"As you can probably see," she lectured, her voice somewhat stilted by the angle of the mirror, "This plain most likely doesn't have any magnetic poles."

"I can see how that would be, I mean, unless there's a molten core somewhere beneath us," I shivered a little at the notion of floating, through unknown means, above an endless sea of molten rock, "I can't see how this place would have anything relating to planetary geology."

"And that's where you'd be right. I can only guess at why this place looks like it does, and most of my guesses aren't pretty." A pause. "Or safe to know."

"Then why does the compass point us in the right direction?"

"An astute question, and not one I'd have expected from someone who experienced a broken transference but a day prior," my Reflection said in a tone I couldn't quite place - she'd used that term before, 'broken transference', but refused to explain what it meant. Not that I needed an explanation; the answer was pretty obvious. "Especially while walking through seemingly endless shrubbery without a Funnel in sight."

A Funnel, which was explained to me as well, was what had brought us from the circle to the little town in no time at all. A ripple in space, that could stretch or contract distance, without affecting time. They were random, but very effective means of travel here.

"A compass, as you're well aware, points toward the largest positive magnetic pole nearby. Usually, that's your planet's north pole, but this plane does not have one. Here, it points toward the largest source of magnetic force - the capital."

"The capital of whom?"

"The natives. We most likely won't meet them, not with what happened to the world, but I suppose you can't be over-prepared enough. This plane, realm or whatever you call it, lies directly underneath your own, on a cosmic level. Just like gravity, Things were pulled here, against their will or not, and have lived here since long before the beginning of your history."

"While Earth hosts - hosted only two fully sapient species, and a few near-sapient ones, this one had more. Many more. They referred to themselves with a common name, one I'm sure you're quite familiar with, if you've picked up on some of the more and less obvious signs you humans have appropriated for legends and stories."

"The inhabitants of this world are collectively referred to as Fey, Fae, or Fay. Under no circumstances are you to call one a Fairy or Faerie. Those words are insults, similar to the racial slurs you humans seem so fond of. It denotes their existence to being contingent on human sentiments, which were ...not well received here.”

“They were a group of species, ranging from simple Lowborn, similar in stature to Humans, though by no means similar, to many more exotic beings. Everything that had no place on the surface, that was forgotten and discarded, landed Here, hence the name. Human religion and mythology had mentions of many of these species, though most are inaccurate, or stereotypes, further fueling the animosity between both realms."

"The capital, Am prìomh-bhaile, or simply Bhaile for short, is the greatest city of Faykind. I've never been there before myself, but I passed through this land before, a long time ago, and I heard stories. Mostly false, of course, but every telling contains the seed of truth at its center. The reason your compass points toward it is because Bhaile contains the Clachan Acarsaid, a circle similar to the one we arrived in, only larger. It holds this realm together, or what's left of it."

I'd long since noticed that Ref possessed a style of talking that reminded me of rambling and lecturing, at the same time. Undoubtedly informative, but still slightly guarded. During some of her lectoral ramblings, she omitted key pieces of information, ones which left me unable to grasp the bigger picture of what she'd said. It was infuriating, but I knew why it was necessary.

Didn't mean I liked it, though.

***

During a discussion about the possibility of bringing a car with us through the circle, it happened.

I didn't feel it coming, didn't feel it happening, but I saw it.

In one second my feet carried me forward exactly one step, the next, my stride seemed to lengthen, my legs twisting in my view into long, spaghetti-like strands of jeans and flesh. There was no pain, no sensation out of the ordinary, only that my leg was many, many miles longer than it should have been, than it had any right to be. It stretched into the distance, further than I could see, could comprehend my leg being.

My foot met the ground, and I leaned forward, and the moment was over. In one stride, I'd moved further than I had the entire rest of the day, no, than I could have possibly moved in a week.

The lonely mountain beside which our temporary village had lain was no longer looming into the sky - it had been reduced to a small speck on the horizon.

With one step, I'd crossed almost the entire continent, and a sheer cut in the terrain was waiting ahead, visible from the slight highland this entire continental chunk seemed to be occupied by.

"Fucking finally! I can't believe that took so long." The voice drifted to me from somewhere below, but I was stunned by the vista below us.

The plateau was flattening off, rolling downward to an unnatural border in the grass some miles still from where we were. When I'd looked enough, and taken in the vibrancy seemingly spilling from the edge, I spoke up, for the first time in what seemed like ages.

"How will we get across?"

"Huh?"

"I assume we'll have to get to one of those," I gesticulated toward one of the larger floating islands in the distance, partially obscured by clouds, but still very visible through the misty heights.

"Ah, yes. Don't worry about that. We just walk along the edge until we find another circle, and then jump our way across."

'Jump our way across'? I did not like the sound of that.

"Does it involve any more world-collapsing-inward?"

"No, this one will only be teleportation. Nothing so crass as transference."

The terminology still tripped me up a little, but I'd connected enough to realize that 'Teleportation' referred to instantaneous travel within a given realm, and 'Transference', referred to travelling between them.

I tried to wonder where the hell she'd gotten all this knowledge, but the words seemed to slip through mental fingers like liquid, quickly dulled and meaningless.

"You alright there, Amy?"

"Oh, sorry. I was just thinking about... about something. I can't remember."

***

Solar cycles were longer here than on Earth, but not overly so. The sun seemed to wander across the sky in a noticeably slower pace than back home, and I found myself growing tired and exhausted, despite it only being 'late noon'. My circadian rhythm was usually rather good, but thrown out of whack by the unusual daylight pattern.

I didn't fancy waking up at night, either, so I continued walking.

It was then that I heard it.

It was a small sound, at first. A deep form of rumbling, perhaps, reminiscent of a very distant thunderstorm. I didn't pay it much mind until the sound intensified, and the deep, sharp tones of ice breaking off a very, very large glacier, became noticeable.

I stopped to turn around, and gaped at what I saw.

There was a point behind us, somewhere deep on the horizon but still horribly close, where the sky was just ...cracked.

I can't find any other way to describe it other than the sky looking like it had splintered open under a titanic ice-pick, visible, spider-thin cracks spreading out from some point in the far distance. The ones nearer to their origin point were obviously larger, being more visible even this far away, and they were spreading outwards, fast.

The inside of these rifts was a black so dark it sucked the light from the sky around it, darkening it rapidly with the spreading fragmentation.

It was a terrible, awe-inspiring sight, and I couldn't rip my eyes from what was happening, the first outlier already reaching the sky above me, cleaving the faint blue in two halves, separated by a darkness so deep, yet so familiar. A darkness I'd seen before, somewhere.

I knew that running would do nothing, and fell to my knees, in awe at the magnitude of destruction happening above my head, eyes glued to the growing splinter in the sky above.

Somewhere in the background I heard someone shouting something, but I did not - could not - care. What use was running, fleeing? This was beyond anything I could ever comprehend. A look of horror crossed my face as I tried to think about ways of how this could be done, only to be washed away when the question was forgotten just as quickly.

It wasn't my companion's wild cries for attention, or the incessant assault of my head by a black bird that finally drove me out of my rapture, it was the ground itself. When the fragmentation of the sky had begun to darken the horizon like a sun in negative, I felt the ground shift beneath my knees, subtly rumbling and slowly shifting gravity in one direction - toward the anomaly.

***

My legs were burning, and it felt more and more as though I was running uphill, or through a thick swamp.

I could hear it behind me, the rumble deep and insistent, a faint note of distant, breaking ice carried with it on the growing wind.

When Ref had spotted the circle, I knew it was too far. At the rate this island, this continent was tipping, it would be like climbing a sheer cliff by the time we reached it.

Still, I didn't want to give up. Something inside me spurned me on, drove me forward, almost seemed to say 'You can do it! Keep running!'

Then, I felt my legs lightening, my entire body grabbed by a familiar sensation, and I saw the small grey shape approach with blinding speed. In the blink of an eye, I stumbled to a halt at the bottom of a small hill, similar to the one our circle of arrival had been on.

The climb up was more grueling than the rest of the way, but at least we had a chance, rather than nothing at all..

I quickly thrust my staff into the soft dirt and held on to it, the wind from below picking up at a frightening pace. One glance outwards, away from the growing destruction, confirmed my fears: The continent wasn't just tipping, it was sinking.

There was a massive storm whipping upward from below the island, as all the air previously present beneath was rapidly displaced by its continued descent, and found the path of least resistance, which seemingly intersected my person.

I stood there, hands on the staff, knuckles almost white in an attempt to keep my feet on the ground, any compatriots stuffed hastily into pockets, and focused.

I felt the lake of tranquil, enhanced by the circle, at the edge of my consciousness, but the wind was too strong, it whipped my hair around my head, lifted my jacket and almost myself.

I reached out for it, quieting my thoughts, but the wind had gained enough force to almost lift me off my feet, shoes scrambling for purchase on the staff itself.

I reached into the lake, my hand sinking in with little resistance, but my clothing was acting as a sail, and the staff gave a single jolt, then caught on an unseen rock in the ground.

I felt something solid, something smooth, but the wind had begun to erode the landscape around us, and the entire cliffside had already disintegrated into chunks of rock and dirt.

I pulled, and felt something give, just as the wind ripped free the chunk of land our circle was standing on, and seperated it from the falling continent.

I felt the circle thrumming with power as the chunk tipped over half-way, causing me to hang on to my staff with one hand, scrambling for more grip, a second hand, anything.

And then, all at once, the circle went still, and I thought it might be the End, before light, energy and power exploded outward, enveloping the circle in a golden sphere, and yanked everything inside away, away, away, into the cloudy sky.