Betwixt and Between
Ixtalan
Between one step and the next, the landscape around them changed.
She paused, a sense of dizzying familiarity washing over her. The Fighting Stones on their hillock brooding over the crossroads before her. The tall shape of the lighthouse rising to the north. The damp air enfolding her, heavy with the smell of salt.
Cracks spiderwebbed through the air, visible only by the glints striking off the edges at certain angles.
She turned around slowly, certain what she would see before she saw it. Shepherd’s End, stretching out eastward in a fold of the land.
Her chest tightened, and she began to run, heedless of her companion’s shouts behind her as she took off away from them, heedless as she plowed through the twisting cracks in the air, nigh-invisible and presenting no physical barrier to her. Her heels, still bare—she had come off a ship, after all—pound in the road, raising puffs of dust that smell exactly as she remembered. In every condition she remembered. A road still damp from rain. Crunching with snow. Herbal from the grass encroaching on the road surface, crushed underfoot. Dry and baked with summer’s warmth. She hardly noticed the flickers in the town before her. One moment the buildings were grass-topped; the next square-doored; buildings change with each shift in perspective, eroding, brightening, canting at angles or gaining new windows.
Images flashed through her mind with each step, a jumbled torrent that brought no sense with it. A red-haired satyr she vaguely recognized, older than her—no, that can’t be right, he’s younger than her—the flare of pain from a broken nose even as a curly-haired girl smiles up at her—the foul scent of death all around as a behemoth rises—an old man with blue skin—the warmth of mingled breath as a halfling leans in—dice rattling across the tavern table—pink and teal fronds veiled by a gush of dark blood ribboning through the water—a minotaur toddler bawling in rage and the answering well of rage and frustration at having to deal with this—her fists pounding bloodied against the inside of a brig—pink and teal feathers rising on a lizard’s crest—a train, fragmenting into the air with a bloom of fire behind it—
She did not stop running until she reached the center of the town where the Hearth was. It stood, as she had always remembered it, with the pavilion roofed in turf—no, that wasn’t right, it was roofed in tile like it had always been—and of course it was raised to keep it out of the rain, after the floods—well, they had been droughts, but the tile flooring kept things cool, until the jelly chicken destroyed it.
Cracks twisted through the air, ethereal and barely visible. She stared at a glinting line and saw the change in tile roof on one side of the line to sod roof on the other, until—
crack
Sylas found her, peeved at her flight and warning that they wouldn’t chase her a second time if she was going to be that stupid. It took them a moment to wind down and ask what, exactly, the fuck had warranted her running like that. She looked at him blankly and said, “I do not know. This is home—Shepherd’s End—but it is … not.” She gestured at the Hearth, an open bonfire burning merrily in a dirt circle, surrounded by squared buildings roofed in slate. “And there were—” She hesitated, raising her eyes. “Lines? In the air? Like shattered glass?”
Try as she might, though, she could not find them.
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