Dragon Hunter

Chapter 29: First of Many

Cooper frowned as, instead of the next transit hub appearing before them after stepping through, he found himself standing on the edge of what appeared to be a plain of some sort. As he peered into the distance to try to make out some sort of detail, Kaisea appeared beside him.

"Ah, yes," she said, pulling out her map. "The first of the long transitions."

"I thought it would be like a long tunnel or something," Cooper said, looking over at her. "How is it even possible that such a place exists?" He looked back out over the plain.

"Is it like another world?"

"Not exactly," Kaisea replied while not looking up from her map. "More like a bridge, or a platform that the sorcerers that created the passage through the ether allowed to coalesce so there was something to walk on, and pull off to the side and rest on, for those bridges that would take longer than a day to traverse on foot."

The map was then quickly folded back up and returned to her thigh pocket.

"This is Ahkenet, the Shadowed Expanse."

"Nope, that doesn't sound foreboding at all!" Cooper growled with a grimace. "Is this place empty?"

Kaisea smoothly drew her sword.

"No," she then replied before stepping onto what appeared to be a well-worn highway stretching away from the portal and into the distance over the plain.

Cooper quickly checked his crystal fifty then followed her. Hopefully whatever lived in this place would be visible from a distance so he could get off a shot at it. If not, then the fifty was useless and he'd have to fall back to using the sword to defend himself. As they walked, he took the opportunity to take a better look at the place they were now in, a place Kaisea called 'Ahkenet, the Shadowed Expanse'!

It stretched in every direction, a rolling plain with the occasional stand of unidentifiable trees, waist high grass and nothing in the distance. All awash in a strange purplish light that seemed to come everywhere even though no visible star hung in the sky. Speaking of the sky, it was a wash of shifting motion pushed through space by rivers of pulsing yet muted purple light.

"The ether," Kaisea said when she looked over at an oddly quiet Cooper and found him looking skyward. "Constantly in motion, keeping the universes from running into each other."

"No shit," Cooper replied, finally pulling his eyes off the rivers of muted light to look over at the thoughtful dark elf woman. "It looks like the ether touches this place directly."

Kaisea looked skyward

"That would be ... accurate," she said after a slight, measuring pause.

"So, if anything exists here, either the noriquien brought it in, or it passes into this place from the ether?"

"Also accurate," Kaisea said with a frown as her eyes narrowed in their examination of the ether's hypnotic chaos.

"And these sorcerers, the ones that grew the links to begin with, didn't anticipate that and erect some sort of fence to keep out creatures from the ether?"

Kaisea dropped her eyes from the chaos and looked over at him, her expression even more thoughtful.

"No, they did not," she replied after some consideration.

"Okay. How about cataloging the creatures that dropped in from the ether. Did they do that?"

"The sorcerers? No. Merchants and travelers, the ones that actually make their way along these expanses, however, yes." She paused to flip her pack around and draw out a fairly substantial book. A quick glance at its title, etched in gold lettering on its red leather face and she tossed it over to the curious human.