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*****

GAHRYE – Human World

Gahrye let their bags drop to the ground on the soft grass next to the dirt area where he'd landed. He had made it.

Thank the Creator, he'd made it.

His knee stung where it had been cut, and his heart pounded. But he was here.

Where was here?

Raising slowly to his full height, scanning the surrounds, he attempted to file through the overwhelming mix of scents and sights, but struggled.

Directly around him was beautiful, natural land—grass, trees, bushes, flowers. But everything was oddly placed. As if the Creator had suddenly become obsessed with straight lines, and symmetry. It set his teeth on edge. And the scents…

The flowers were faint, dry in their blooms, though the colors were beautiful. The trees looked tortured—cut or molded somehow into shapes that trees never made on their own. And the leaves here were so small, and all slanted downwards, as if they wilted, yet they seemed perfectly healthy, green and plush.

To his eye, the portal gateway appeared to be a pile of boulders and dirt. But he could smell the flow of a different air—pungent, rotting—wafting from it. He knew if he stepped back inside…

Gahrye shuddered. How would he ever do that again? He shoved the thought away, turning, with shaking hands to try to find his bearings.

There was a large tree behind the portal gateway—nothing like the Great Trees, but he'd been warned that the wilds of the human world were far smaller and less impressive than Anima's. The tree was beautiful and seemed natural. Yet it hid things from his view. Stepping slowly to the left, still scanning for intruders, or danger, unwilling to stray out of sight of the portal in case Elia came through, he peered around bushes and trees until between the tops of trees around him, it appeared the earth fell away and behind the nature he recognized… just hundreds of feet away, large, impossible structures rose made from stone that was not stone.

His jaw dropped. Elia had told him that the humans built their caves—massive structures, larger than the Great Trees. But he'd thought she exaggerated.

It seemed she had understated.

These buildings appeared to be mountains.

Odd, straight, tall pillars in the sky. And yet if his nose didn't deceive him, nature still peppered the landscape between them.

The scents! Gahrye's nose wanted to close. The scents were so strong, so medicinal, they made his head ache. And there were so many—so overwhelming—that he almost didn't trust that he was awake and sensing correctly.

How did anyone concentrate in this world with that stench?

How had Elia grown here—how had she survived? Gahrye already felt as if the air were suffocating him. Removing everything good and right from the world… he shook his head to clear it.

Elia.

He had to make sure it was safe for her to come through. That there were no enemies nearby. Doing his best to filter through the stink of this world and look only for the smell of things alive, he circled the portal gateway.

It looked so… bland. Several boulders stacked as if the Creator—in the oddly precise way of this world—had thrown them there on purpose, then patted dirt between them to keep them in place. And he soon saw that the area where he stood had been completely encircled in a brick and stone-that-was-not-stone fence, taller than his height.

He yearned to touch this strange material, scent it, understand it, but he couldn't lose focus.

Returning to the gateway where he'd started, he knelt on the grass between the boulders and a large bush with multi-petaled flowers to wait.

Elia would come through soon.

She had to come through soon.

He needed to focus on her. Not on what the voices had said. They were liars.

He told himself that over and over again as the heat of the day began to rise, and the scents of this Creatorforsaken land rose with it.

*****

Either time moved differently in this world, or something was wrong.

By the movement of the sun he had sat there for at least two hours—yet there was no sign of Elia. Gahrye's stomach growled and he winced. There was a waterskin at his belt, but he was loathe to drink from it until necessary. He didn't know how long it would be until she came, and even then they'd still have to locate the guardians. He took a sip to wet his mouth, but left the rest.

The problem with having all this time in the quiet, was that the images, the words, the promises of the voices kept creeping back into his thoughts.

The memory of the female they'd shown him had not faded with the passing of time. As if it were burned into his head. He knew the precise color of her hair. Her scent. The taste of her skin.

He shuddered, half with pleasure, half in fear.

"It wasn't real,

" he muttered to himself.

"Oh, we have reason to believe it may well have been,

" a male voice said quietly, from some distance away.

Gahrye's heart pounded and he leaped to his feet.

"Please! Please don't be alarmed! I believe you're probably looking for me. Or, at least, have heard of me.

"

Gahrye flared his nostrils—why couldn't he scent the man? He whipped his head left and right, poised on the balls of his feet.

"I'm here,

" said the voice—slightly high for a male, and soft even in its timbre. There was a movement between two lines of bushes that ran on either side of what seemed to be a path worn by feet over years—a depression in the grassy land. He'd intended to explore it once Elia came through.

Then, a rather short, somewhat fat, older man stepped out from behind a bush, twenty or thirty feet down the path. The top of his head was shiny, just a few strands of hair pulled over his scalp from the sides. He wore discs of glass in a frame that sat over his nose and hooked behind his ears. They made his eyes look too large for his face.

His jowls were loose, and his skin pale. But he had a jovial smile.

"I will not harm you. I know who… what you are. I'm… I'm a Guardian. You can call me Shaw.

"