The Fae realm used to be the realm closest to ours, you could call it our magical shadow. Although I started learning magic a little before the end of the world, I never had a chance to visit it before the end. But from what I learned talking to Erick and other wizards, while being the closest to us, the Fae realm wasn’t an exact mirror, and it’s lands were much smaller in size than our world. Due to this, the distance between pathways wasn’t the same on their side as it was on our side.

This allowed for someone to enter in Los Angeles for example, walk for a couple of hours and leave in a pathway that leads to New York. That without counting that the Fae realm was full of magic that allowed one to teleport to some places, and the most powerful Fae, The Queens and the most powerful Wyld Fae like Oberon, Herne and few others could move to anywhere on their territory instantly and bring others with them if they so desire.

This allowed for those with the knowledge of the pathways, the Fae realms and that were in good graces with the Fae to be able to move quickly on our world. Knowledge like these were something wizards could go to war for.

After the big end, when the Fae realm crashed with ours, most of it was destroyed or fused with our own world. But a few parts of it remains like corridors that can still be transversed.

We use them whenever possible to travel when distances are too great, to bypass difficult terrain or dangerous places. It’s still dangerous, and very limited to what it used to be, but much safer than crossing some places on our world.

The reason we had to wait for a right time to open the passage, is that when the Fae realm crashed in to ours, the remains of it became like shrapnell being launched in all directions and then started, lacking a better word, spinning around our realm. Like small moons orbiting our reality. So, if we wanted to use a path way, we had to do it at the right time. If not, it would, at best, fail to open. At worst it could open to an eldritch dimension that would spill even more abominations in to our world.. So kids, no opening the doors outside of permitted hours.

As I stepped on the Fae realm, everyone was waiting for me further on the trail. There was no way they could have been so far away unless they started running as soon as they entered. Well there is no way in our world, but time in the Fae realm never ran exactly at the same rate as ours, sometimes I ran faster, sometimes it ran slower, time there was affected not only due to the magical nature of the realm, but could also be affected by the powers that be on the realm. That was another reason you had to be on the good side of the Fae or have a good deal with them to travel through it, wouldn’t do good to take a shortcut to go from LA to New York in two hours and arrive there a day later because you pissed one of the Queens the last time you were here. Now that there is no more powerful Fae residing on what is left of the realm, you don’t need to worry about someone screwing you up due to mischief, you only have to worry about being screwed up by random changes on the time flow… Yay..

Well, I’m exaggerating a little, all this things I tell you are true and can happen, but in general we (as the Fae enclave) are very good at predicting how time will behave in each corridors, so we can avoid using the most dangerous ones. This one we are travelling is on the mild side, varies between 2 to 3 times faster or slower than time on our world, so it’s a safe bet. But there are corridor where time can slow to a halt, and years could pass while you walk for a day on the corridor.

Anyway, putting the surprise of the time dilation aside, I take a look around while I rejoin my Vanguard, and the scenery is just as I remember. Eery dead trees, check. Shattered moon, check. Starless sky, check. Giant red light emitting rift crossing part of the sky, check. The sound of howling wind being sucked on that rift, check. Ok, things seen normal on this pathway. Once I reach them, we start moving.

I keep watching the surrounding with more attention than usual. The true is, after today problems I feel like lecturing them the rules for traveling on this realm, just to be safe you know, but since one of them is being silent, it would be counterproductive. I guess I’ll just go over them in my head and hope they are doing the same.

Avoid making noises, there are plenty of things still living on the Fae realm, both old residents and new. And stay on the trail

Be vigilant and look out for anything out of the ordinary. And walk on the trail.

If you do spot any creature or being, don’t make eye contact and keep walking unless it starts going after you. Running is preferable than fighting, but whatever you do, don’t leave the trail.

Make sure to keep everyone on ur group in vision range and inside the trail.

And most important of all, STAY ON THE FUCKING TRAIL.

Well, remember that I just said I was exaggerating on the the risks of alternative time flows on the Fae realm? Well, I’m not exaggerating now about the dangers of leaving the marked path. This was always a dangerous place for the unaware, now it’s worse. Although the Fae were miriad, we knew all that lived close to known paths, and had experience on dealing with them. Now, you never know what you might find when traveling the pathways. Most of the time it will be empty, but now there are much darker things that roams this corridors than before. And the trails we use are tried and true, not safe, but much safer than wandering around the corridors or trying to take a shortcut from point A to B.

Despite all my worries, we make good progress and should soon leave the dead forest behind and reach a small plain with a stone circle where the pathway back to Fairy Land is located. As we reach the last of the dead trees Lia and Johnson who are leading, stop moving and make a signal for me.

“I swear I didn’t just threw stones at the cross on one of my past lives, I probably threw the damm cross at the stones to deserve this”. I murmur to my self when I finally see what made them stop.

A small plain stands downhill from us, with grass tall enough to reach a little over a grow man waist, and the trail we are following leading to the stone circle not 400 meters away from us located on the center of the plain. But halfway through there is what seems to be a fault on the ground that cross half the plain, including over our trail. It doesn't seem very large, maybe an entire meter at the largest parts. But, the detail, is that it doesn’t seem like the ground cracked open, like those faults you see that result from earthquakes or on the icebergs, it wasn’t the ground that seemed to have opened up, but reality that was ripped open, and a purple tinted darkness was sipping out of the resulting rift.

I know I wasn’t going to try jump over it if I could avoid it. So we had to go around it. And to do that, we would have to leave the trail.. The rift seemed to cross the trail and keep going for 60 meters, so 120 in total. It wasn’t a big distance, but I still hated it.

“Doesn’t look too big, we could jump over it” And just like that I reconsider my idea of lying for Johnson sake. Unfortunately, I already made a deal with Lis, so no turning back now, even if the kid just crushed my hopes for him.

The silent that follow his comment is enough a tell for him to understand what everyone thinks about his idea. “What, it was just an idea”. He says defensively.

“Erick, do you sense anything from around us?” I ask from our diviner.

He concentrates for a few seconds, his face goes dark and he answer me. “I can’t tell, there is too much magic around for me to pinpoint any specific signature. But I can tell you that the rift isn't Fae, it feels very alien, probably outsiders in its origin.

“I can confirm that thing doesn’t belong here, it’s not magic from my kind.” Lis complements.

Outsider magic is basically, everything that comes from other worlds/dimensions that we can’t identify and feels different from everything we encountered before. Maybe it’s the alieness of it, but for us and the Fae, 99% of the times it feels corrupted and evil.

“Ok, we are surely not jumping over it. Anyone got any rope?”

Johnson and Erick carried some, and it was enough for us to string ourselves together, with a two meter in between each person. We are surely not going to enter the grass to circumvent the rift without everyone being together. Last thing we need is for a stealth bastard to get one of us and drag away.

“Lets do this quickly and quietly. I’ll lead and Erick takes the rear, we will keep a shield ready to cover everyone if we need to, if something attack us, hit it hard and keep moving if possible.

I take a deep breath and can’t help but think “Here be raptors” as we enter. And that brings me the memory of the Jurasick Park 2 movie with the guy yelling, not the tall grass, don’t run in to the tall grass..

Ok, 60 meters to go, and 60 to go back, even considering how much a pain is to move on the grass, shouldn’t take us more than 4 minutes to do it in walking speed.

We leave the trail and enter the grass. As we reach the end of the rift and start moving back to the trail I hear Erick say with a chilling voice “Artharian we gotta move faster”. In my experience, when your diviner tell you to run, you run. So we started moving back faster and I look back and I can see many parts of the grass undulating as something moved through it, gaining on us.

Pyralis quickly realized that we wouldn’t make back to the trail in time, and castes a firewall, between us the and approaching creatures. It burns in a semicircle it’s 10-12 meters long. We hear a shrill howl loaded with frustration as one of the creatures almost run into it.

The fire wall slowed up the ones closest to us, but more seemed to be approaching from other angles.

“Lis, get us fireballs on the grass” and point to places along the trail. “I don’t want them jumping on us once we leg it on the trail”. Lis immediately understand and starts burning the grass close to the trail so they don’t jump on us from cover when we move the last distance to reach the stone circle.

As we reach the trail, I immediately turn around and yell “sciath“ and activate my shield, I immediately feel my magic reserves being drained as my shield catch two giant black dogs with red eyes and foaming mouths that were jumping on Lilian. My shield pushes the two black monstrosities back and they are thrown 3 meters away from us. I noticed that Erick caugth a third creature on his own shield, but being a diviner wasn’t strong enough to push it away like I did.

I drop my shield and Lilian immediately follow with an orb of pure arcane energy the size of a basketball that hits the two dogs that I pushed away, it explodes on contact. The one who took a direct hit from the orb is thrown a dozen meters or so away, and I’m sure I saw limbs flying in a different direction, the other one is blown half that distance or so in to the grass.

Johnson, who had already cut himself free of the rope drew his hammer and is moving to the dog still striking Erick shield, as a well coordinated unit, Erick drops his shield right after the dog hit it and Johnson capitalize on the fact that it’s recovering it’s balance to bash it’s head in to a pulp.

Looking at the dog, it was the long and lean, but full of muscle, It’d say it’s as long as a calf, but shorter on height. There are purple veins on his body and they look a lot like the darkness escaping the rift.

“A Barghest” Lis says. “But something is very wrong with it”. Howling starts all around us, as if trying to scare us once the surprise was lost. “Quickly, to the stone circle.”

We start running for the circle while more barghest quickly approached from our right, and front. We could only see their movement on the grass, and once they reached the burning grass from Lis fireballs, they hesitate a little, but then charge through the fire to get to us.

Four more were closing from our right and behind, thankfully due to Lis burning the tall grass we had 5 to 6 meters of vision, so when the barghest lef the tall grass I immediately summon the power of winter to cast half a dozen pen size icicles on the closest one, it falters on it’s charge and falls, but start getting up right away. Erick casts a small bolt of lightning on the new leading barghest and it falls stunned for a second or so and then starts getting up again. Now the two that were furthest from us catched up with the ones closest to us, and a thin smile stamps my face. Now that is some good kiting and pulling if I can say so. The barghest are basically lined up and Lilian turns around and casts another arcane orb. A little bigger then the last one, the orbs flyes straight in the middle of the trail and reach the approaching pack before they can react. The explosions sends all four of them flying away. Lilian stumbles right after casting the orb, but Johnson steadies her.

The two bhargast that were approaching us from the front gets pretty close as we dealt with the pack chazing us, “gaoth na sioc” I say as I extend my staff, and a cone of freezing wind strikes the two monsters slowing them down and partially blinding them. Johnson speed up to my side and as we pass the partially incapacitated creatures he strike one with his mace and I hit the other with my staff. As I stroke the creature, I activated one of the enchantments I have on my staff. It released stored kinetic energy on the strike. And just as a professional baseball player, I didn’t even stop to see where the ball, well barghast, went and kept running to get to the next base, well stone circle.

More howling came from our right, and now roar that sounded a little like wood cracking from our left, great more friends. “Erick, Lilian and Johnson cover our right and behind, Pyralis cover our left, make sure nothing passes”. I yell as I reach to the pathway point and start working my magic to activate it. Lis could probably do this better and make it look good, but her talents were better suited to hold off what was coming from our left.

It seemed that the forest wasn’t as dead as it looked. What I think are treants or some similar creature were moving from the border of the forest crossing the plains to reach us. With orders given, I got my focus on opening the portal.

That's when I heard it, and I couldn’t keep a maniac smile from my face.

“You -- shall not -- pass!” and then a bright orange flash to my left as the plain is lit on fire.

I look right and Erick is staring at Lis with the biggest WTF look on his face. If we buy it tonight, at least my inner nerd will die happy.

Ok, now you're thinking how can this guy who seemed so serious and works hard to avoid unnecessary dangers and at looked, at first glance at least, responsible act like this when shit hits the fan. Well, cracking jokes (bad ones in general) and sarcasm are my copying mechanism. Whenever the adrenaline hits, my inner child comes out..

Well, back on topic, I finish opening the path way and signal for everyone to go. Erick goes first, followed by Lilian and Johnson, as Lia pass me I see a bhargast rushing me, it looks hurt, probably one of those hit by the explosion of Lilian arcane orb. It won’t reach me before I cross the pathway, so I jump on it.

As I cross I almost bump in to Lilian due to the time dilation effect. “Coming hot” I yell right away and jump to the side. When the bhargast follows me he is met by 5 men in full tactical gear, each pointing an m-16 to it. And it’s gunned down before it can even process where it is.