The Home of Fang Ch. 1

         “Your true home awaits you, destined one. Zhaltiic bei don eixxtor.”
         The exact same echoing voice whispered the exact same curious phrase every time. Jess dreamed as he dozed in the overstuffed chair on his neighbor’s back porch. He always fell asleep after helping the old man with his yard work, and he always had the strangest dreams there. And without fail, that phrase was always the last thing he heard before waking up. He opened his eyes to see the old man sitting in the matching chair, reading one of his books, again. Ultimately the entire experience was highly repetitive.
         Without looking up from his page, the old man spoke in a deep voice that sounded much too strong for someone over eighty years old.
         “Thank you, again, for the help, Jess. Did you rest well?”
         The young man sat up and rubbed his eyes with both hands, simultaneously wishing away the fog of sleep.
         “You’re welcome, Mr. Drake. Yeah, I did, same as always.”
         The old man nodded. “Good to hear. I have something rather different for your payment this time.”
         Jess gave him a curious look. He’d become so accustomed to everything being the same each week when he came over to help, it was somewhat a shock when Mr. Drake offered something other than a book for payment. Granted, he would have helped his old neighbor without any payment, anyway; but the old man insisted on remuneration. That was the word he used for it, “remuneration”. He was always using words that were far bigger than necessary for normal conversation. When asked for the reason, he said that language was quickly becoming a lost art, and he wanted to do his part to preserve what “diminutive” amount he could. Since Jess was only twenty two, himself, Mr. Drake was several times his senior. So, Jess found it best not to argue about either the observation on the ‘art’ of language, or about the undying insistence on payment.
         “What do you mean, different payment? How different?”
         The old man set his book down on a side table next to his chair, and picked up an old looking cylindrical piece of metal. The item looked to be around five inches long, and about as big around as a broom handle.
         The younger man eyed it inquisitively before slowly leaning over and reaching for it. The aged hand of the kindly old man pulled back slightly, and he held up the index finger of his opposite hand. His normally jovial expression was instantly wiped away. He adopted an alarmingly stern countenance. Never since moving to this neighborhood had he been seen looking so serious.
         “Listen to me carefully, young one. This is exceedingly old, and has a plethora of secrets behind it. You have to promise me you will keep hold of it.” His voice was stronger and more stern than Jess had ever heard it.
         The young man blinked for a moment, then nodded. “Sure thing, Mr. Drake.”
         “Promise me, boy!”
         Jess met the hard stare of his elderly neighbor. The elder’s eyes were dead set on their subject. The ‘boy’ felt like they were searing into his mind, forcing the point home that this item was important. He found it impossible to look away, and even more impossible to be anything but serious.
         “I promise to keep it safe.” came the low, quiet reply.
         “Excellent!” Mr. Drake broke his trace-like gaze and immediately resumed his usual playful mannerisms as he thrust the item into his helper’s hand. “Well there you are, then. I believe it would behoove you to be on your way. You have a job to get to, after all.”
         His mind barely registered the old man’s suggestion. He could still clearly see, and feel, those eyes boring into his subconscious. Unsettling would have been the lightest word he would have used to describe the feeling it gave him.
         He nodded robotically and walked off the porch, headed for the gate in the fence so he could get to his own yard.
         “God speed, boy. See you soon.”
         “Yeah, uh, goodbye, Mr. Drake. Next week, then.” He was far too preoccupied with the memory of that expression.
         The old man’s next comment brought him back to the present. “Mind your promise. Keep an eye on it.”
         The younger man shook off the eerie feeling he’d been dwelling on and nodded to his elderly neighbor. “Yes sir. I’ll keep it safe.”
         He looked at the strange item as he walked. He couldn’t, immediately, tell what sort of metal it was, but that was of little concern to him. He was far more interested in the complex series of marking engraved into it. It had foreign words, strange pictures, and what seemed to be just unusual patterns all over the outer surface. There didn’t seem to be even so much as a quarter inch of it that wasn’t marked in one way or another. As he reached the archway in the old man’s fence that framed the gate, one mark, in particular, caught his eye. It was a set of words. He tried to pronounce them.
         “Zhaltiic bei don eixxtor.”
         Those words were the exact same ones he heard at the end of his strange dreams every week before waking up. It took the briefest of instants for his mind to register what had just come out of his mouth. That was good, because the briefest of instants was all he had before his life was permanently changed.
         He wanted to look back and question the old man. He wanted answers for how that phrase, which was always a part of the strangest dreams, was now written on this odd little trinket he’d been given as payment. He wanted answers why he always had those dreams on the old man’s back porch. He wanted answers to all the questions which were beginning to come up about the item he’d been given. But he didn’t have the opportunity for any of it. Because the moment he walked through that archway and spoke those words, the world he knew vanished. Or rather, he, himself, vanished from that world. The oddest of holes shot open in the ground beneath his feet, and the confused young man had no time to react before being taken in.
         Jess fell through what, for all accounts, was an endless tunnel of light. Of course falling wasn’t exactly what he would have called it, but he couldn’t argue the fact that he had, definitely, fallen upon his first entrance, but after that it would have been debatable, because falling implies direction. Here, there was no such thing. Still, there was no better way to describe the initial tumbling and now continued progression through the curious passageway. The blue, white and black walls rippled and undulated ahead of him. When he looked back, those same walls seemed to shatter into glitter as he passed. That, alone, quickly made him realize he wasn’t going to be able to get back to his home the same way he’d come. He couldn’t explain to himself how he was able to tell the particles of black were there, instead of it being empty space. Still, it was obvious. Everything about it was strange. Truthfully, if it hadn’t been for the fact that he was all too aware of the movement of his own body, he would have suspected the tunnel was, actually, passing on all sides of him, instead of the other way around.
         It was frightening at the beginning. To be honest, he nearly panicked when it started. However, the old man had generally made it a point to give him life advice whenever the opportunity arose. One of his favorite topics was reacting to an unexpected situation. Apparently, a few of the lectures had sunk in. He was able to will away his initial reaction and calm his mind down, which is how he even thought to look behind him as he “fell”.
         He ran several different scenarios through his head before realizing that he’d been “falling” for quite some time. That frightening moment in the old man’s yard was some time ago now. He tried checking his watch to see just how much time was passing, but found it covered in a thin white layer of something that resembled frost. When he tried to wipe it off, however, it had much the same effect as sliding your finger through thin wet sand. The material parted upon contact, but immediately refilled the gap when his finger was out of the way. This made it impossible to determine exactly how long it had been.
         Of course, by now, he’d already run through a hundred possibilities of what he could expect for his future. The books with which the old man usually paid him were heavy in the fiction department. This only added to the complexity of some of the scenarios running through his mind.
         It was the simple questions that started them. “How did this thing appear? Where will I end up? What if there’s no end?”
         Those few basic questions led to other, more complex questions. Those, in turn, led to still other, even more complex questions. Soon he’d felt that he was successfully prepared (mentally, at least) for everything from a strange phenomenon that put him right back in the same spot in the old man’s yard from where he’d started, with no one else the wiser, to a trip across the universe into the middle of some trans-galactic battle. He ultimately just wondered if he would be able to survive whatever it was that was coming next.
         His questions would soon be answered, at least in part. Before he had more than an instant to see it coming, what could only be described as a crystalline hillside leapt up at him from the end of the tunnel of light. He hit the ground, which seemed to be made of primarily sapphire and opal, with a fair amount of obsidian scattered in. He didn’t notice at the time, but not a single one of the precious gems moved even the slightest bit as he rolled down the hill after impact. What he did notice, was that every single one of them was just as hard and painful to roll over as he would have guessed without the firsthand experience as proof. Every inch he bounced and rolled down the hill made it feel as if his flesh was being pummeled in a rock tumbler. His head hit hard on one of the stones, and his mind instantly went fuzzy. Shortly further down the hill, he hit his head on another one, and he lost all awareness of what happened after that.
         Three unknown individuals, their bodies draped in crimson robes with white sashes around their necks, were standing on an adjacent hill. Each of them watched in silence as the young man plummeted down the hill. They saw his head strike both stones, and waited as he rolled and skidded to a stop in the narrow valley between the two hills. The largest of the three, who was the only one of the trio to have his hood draped over his head, turned to the companion on his right.
         “Get him.” He spoke in a manner of one accustomed to giving commands, and expecting them to be immediately obeyed.
The man on his right did not disappoint. He nodded silently, touched something on his left arm and vanished.
         The third member of the group, a woman, spoke quietly. “Are you certain?”
         The hooded one nodded. “Absolutely. I have learned not to question His prophecies. They never fail. This is the one we were sent to retrieve.”