Wayspring wanderer, p.1
Wayspring Wanderer, page 1
CONTENTS
Summary
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1. A Bright Future… Too Bright
2. Two Bottles of Water and a Stick
3. The Magic Above
4. A Freakin’ Desert Druid
5. You Got Moxie, Kid
6. Pedant Alert
7. Two Pettings and a Funeral
8. Splashy Splashy Bad
9. One, Two, Three Useless
10. Rude Awakening
11. Dry-Boned Fool
12. The First Wayspring
13. Tinembrous
14. Trust Part 1
15. Trust Part 2
16. A New Collective
17. Incoming!
18. The Magic Above
19. From Nightmares to Dreamscapes
20. The Impatient Patient
21. We Called it the Culling
22. Two Pieces, You Say?
23. Battle with Graygloves, Chonkdog, and… Orangy?
24. Tatsu the Third Sun
25. The Worst Plan Ever
26. A Man Can Dream
27. Big (But Not Yellow) Bird
28. My Crater
29. More Than the Wind
30. Pangolor Party and Destination in Sight
31. Kang the Clinker
32. Boss-Boss Orders
33. A Change of Plan
34. Know That Water’s Sweet, but Blood is Thicker
35. Look. Look. Look. Look
36. Kidnapping A-foot
37. Trust Part 3
38. The Magic Below
39. “I’m starting to think Gramm has it out for us.”
40. The Sandwyrm
41. Skill Issue
42. Druid’s Awakening
43. Always Faithful
44. Under Pressure
45. Walking to Run
46. The Silent Type
47. A Man of the Land
48. Alas
49. Brothers Gotta Hug!
50. Meaning in Suffering
51. Depth is the Greatest of Heights
52. Air Superiority and a new… friend?
53. The green reed that bends in the wind…
54. Pspspsps
55. Oss
End of Book 1 Stats
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About the Author
SUMMARY
In this world, the only thing more precious than water is trust.
Oskar Dorn is no stranger to nightmares. As a Marine, he lived through more than his fair share, but these new dreams carry a weight no battlefield ever did. The screams of his brother Erik—long believed dead—ring in his mind every night, calling for help.
With reality fraying at the edges, Oskar heeds the call, drawn to a terrifying space between worlds and ultimately to a desolate planet on the brink of collapse: a place where water is lifeblood and the fading remnants of magic cling desperately to it.
To save his brother, Oskar will have to fight—but even with his newfound druidic power, standing against a Crocodilian warlord and a dark shaman puppeteering from the shadows is a deadly gamble.
But this isn't just about his brother anymore.
Oskar was summoned for a reason: a broken man, chosen to heal a broken world.
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1
A BRIGHT FUTURE… TOO BRIGHT
The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs infold…
—William Blake, “Mad Song”
Oskar Dorn clenched the motel bedsheets in his trembling hands as he woke and instead felt hot sand falling between his fingers. For a few seconds, his senses were overwhelmed by heat and the sound of his own heart beating out of his chest. And then the world, the real world, whatever that meant now, returned.
Tears dried quickly on his face, and the screams he’d just woken up from faded back to wherever nightmares went when they’d outlived their purpose. Sweat rolled down his body, and he could feel his skin cooking in the damp sand beneath him. He took a deep breath because he’d held it too long, and still half expected the stale, stuffy yellowed room and the rank smell of wet cigarettes to hit him… but there was only air hot enough to sting his nostrils.
The pain cleared his head, and he pushed himself up on his elbows so that when he finally opened his eyes, he wouldn’t be staring directly into the far-too-bright sky. The constant noise he could now hear over the heartbeat in his ears made more sense when he squinted his eyes open after rubbing away the crust of dried tears.
No buildings, no lobby, no road. My brother’s bike. It’s all gone.
Tall sand dunes rose on either side of him, thankfully blocking the sun and hypothetically at least some of the heat. Sand in every direction and a heavy wind overhead. In fact, the only thing other than sand he could see was the faded, creaky motel bed he’d finally passed out on the night before, and for some reason, seeing it sitting lopsided in the sand almost made him laugh out loud.
An odd, long-abandoned sense of self-preservation snuck in, and he looked around more carefully, but the reflection of the sun on the shimmering sand seemed as bright as the sky.
The burning pain of sitting in the sand finally teamed up with that self-preservation to get him to push himself up to standing, and he awkwardly hopped to the bed a few paces away. The sand, the sky… all the colors seemed off, even through the tiny slit of vision he was forced to look through.
A puff of dust billowed up as he landed on the bed, and Oskar held his breath until it dispersed, feeling around the disheveled covers for his bag. His clothes, his gun, or even better, his prosthetic and liner… anything other than the boxer briefs he’d been wearing when he went to sleep in that God-awful hotel room. Even without self-preservation, he never would have slept there, but the whole damn situation was cursed from the get-go.
He’d driven his brother’s bike all day as the temperature dropped and a massive snowstorm grew. By the time he’d walked into the old motel lobby, which smelled of wet cigarettes and mold, the wind and cold had made riding the Indian Triumph a growing death wish.
Although, I guess that describes the last year of my life pretty well. But no one wants to die by freezing to death in a blizzard.
Pausing in his fruitless search of the bed, he glanced carefully up at the red-and-purple-streaked sky.
Or dehydration and heatstroke in a desert that shouldn’t be here.
It wasn’t lost on him that if he couldn’t think of a way he wanted to die, maybe he didn’t actually want to die at all.
Waking up almost naked in a surprise desert must have woken up my sense of adventure.
But it was hard to get excited about anything when you had dreams every single night. They were persistent, strange dreams. Dreams that didn’t float out of memory the way dreams often did. They started gently, like a faint voice in the wind, but over the course of three months they became screams.
Just like the ones he’d had the night before. Flashes of a creepy clerk whose teeth grew larger and more rotten the longer he smiled… and a freaking bobtailed calico cat… pitter-pattered through his thoughts. Oskar pushed it all away, reminded by the feel of the sun bearing down on his shoulders that he sat on a bed in the middle of a desert reminiscing over things that probably didn’t even happen.
Blinking away the night before, he stopped himself from pointlessly looking around and instead continued his search of the bed, scooting inward and leaning over to pick up the pillows. Something rolled under his arm, and he pulled the dusty seventies-themed comforter back to reveal a long, rough-textured walking stick.
Encouraged by the odd find, he pulled the walking stick free from the mess of covers and realized it was a spear, not a walking stick. The end of the stick had a vague pinecone looking pattern to it, a little thicker than the shaft that led into its point, just a few inches further up.
“Well then…”
His voice was raspy. The sound was out of place, and he was self-conscious about it for reasons he couldn’t identify. The missing prosthetic was a worsening concern in Oskar’s eyes. Even if he had water and clothes to protect him from the sun, he wouldn’t last long in this weird colored desert without the ability to walk.
One does not simply hop into Mordor.
The thought didn’t even make him smile, which was irritating. Dark humor usually did the trick.
Finally lifting the pillow changed things, if not for the better, at least for the “interesting.”
The stained body pillow had been sitting crookedly leaned up against the headboard, and under it was… a box. A beautifully ornate, carved box was dangling off the bed through the gap at the bottom of the headboard. Oskar grabbed at the box, dragging it toward him curiously.
It was a few inches thick, a foot top to bottom, and maybe twice that wide, and someone clearly crafted the box with care. Patterned swirls looked like gusts of wind on the top, with a crisscrossed pattern across the bottom. Th
It only made sense he was supposed to touch it, but he really didn’t want to, and this time the odd feeling was easy to quantify. The metal cat eye was staring at him, following his every movement as he tried to lean out of the way of its piercing gaze.
The creepy thing blinked slowly, which if he’d been wearing his leg, or had any other options, would have been his “aww hell no” point—his signal to get out.
There was no out, though. There was a desert, deadly heat included, and a bed. On it was a one-legged man in his underwear with a spear leaning across his thigh… and this box. For the first time in months, Oskar didn’t have to fight to keep from going numb. He pulled the sheet out from under the comforter, draped it over the top of his head and across his shoulders to block some of the awful sun, and grinned, shaking his head.
He reached out a hand, steadier than it should have been, and touched the cat’s eye lock on the side of the box. It blinked, and Oskar could have sworn he felt a brush of fine hair across the tip of his finger… and then he was blown off the bed onto his back in the sand by an explosion of wind.
“What the crap?!” He said it under his breath, and this time his ears were ringing too much for him to care. Squinting upward, he saw the box was still on the bed.
Now though? The box was open.
2
TWO BOTTLES OF WATER AND A STICK
With a little effort, he made it back to the bed and plopped back down on the edge. The corner he sat on sank a few inches further into the sand, and he ignored it, looking at the contents of the box.
Inside, there was a pair of steampunk looking goggles, which were a plain, matte metal, but trimmed in a darker pewter looking color with dark leather straps. The lenses looked clear, but did not reflect any of the glare he was dealing with from above and the reflection from below. Also inside were two waterskins and, of all things, a leather scroll case with wooden caps on both ends.
Immediately, he pulled out one of the rough leather waterskins and took a grateful swig. The water sent shivers down his body that even helped cool the sting of the burning heat.
He forced himself to drink slowly enough to not waste a single drop. Some of his underlying concerns subsided. Leg or not, the water gave him time. Time to work out where he was and what, if anything, he could do about it.
He put the stopper back in the waterskin, looking back down at the perfect box. The scroll case inside had symbols along the edges that were completely unfamiliar, except for the name Oskar Dorn in elegant writing. Reaching out, he picked it up, and he knew he was holding something that no man had made; it had the feeling of a moment he’d remember for the rest of his life.
Looking down, his breath started coming faster, and he had to fight down the panic building in his chest. He dropped the scroll case back in the box, and his fingers tingled with static.
What the hell is happening to me?
A few long, deep breaths later, he opened his eyes again, but didn’t look at the scroll or the box. Frustrated with squinting to shield his eyes from sand and brightness, he looked down at the goggles in his other, non-tingling hand. He took a quick look at the straps and then finally slid the goggles over his head.
Thankfully, his eyes effortlessly adjusted, allowing him to see clearly with no discomfort whatsoever. He noticed the same strange lettering in a digital overlay at the bottom of his vision, and it flickered faster than he could comprehend until the letters flickered one last time and finally settled into English.
And then things got even weirder.
“What in the…”
_RAT1_Goggles AwaitingSync
It flashed until his eyes had settled on it for a few seconds, then noticeably faded into a subtle dot in the bottom left of the lens. He focused on the dot for a moment, and the notification returned until he looked away again.
This is cool and all, but how does this help me?
The all but useless question of how he got here hadn’t escaped him, but it had taken him until just now before he was convinced it wasn’t a dream; there’d been no screaming after all. He couldn’t have been unconscious long, which tracked with how he felt when he woke up in the burning sand. If he had been out longer, he would be dealing with a lot worse than the lingering stinging he could feel on his back and hamstrings.
Finally able to look around safely, he did so, staring for a moment as the whitish bedsheet rippled off in the distance, caught in the wind as it blew even further away. A lot further than he was willing to hop, at least.
I’m tired.
The words were not enough. Nothing was. He sure felt like he wasn’t.
I can’t even handle my own dreams.
It sounded petulant in his mind and he knew it wasn’t fair; it had been more than just bad dreams. A lot more. It was hours of screaming in his mind every night. Pain, torture, and fear like he’d never felt in real life. Even in the Marine Corps, even in Iraq and Afghanistan, there had always been at least the illusion of control. Those nightmares though? They had put him so close to the edge of the abyss that he wondered if he’d fallen in without realizing it.
The only thing that kept him from giving up on life, after losing nearly everyone he cared about, not to mention his own right foot, was that he could never tell for sure if it was real or not.
Over time, though, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were not just dreams. When it all began, there were strings of days he didn’t sleep. How could one expect to sleep, serenaded by the screams of their dead brother?
Last night might be the first night I fell asleep with no trouble in a year… Trapped in a hotel room with no door, afraid to close my eyes. Till the cat showed up. Whatever she did put me right out, and I slept like a baby, at least for a few hours… and that’s the most sensible thing that happened last night.
The whole thing was surreal, and he still wasn’t sure if it had even happened, despite his current situation. Eventually, though, the nightmares returned.
“Was that a dream, or is this?” He whispered to himself, ignoring the increasingly insistent blinking at the bottom left of his vision. Oskar squeezed and opened his hands, staring intensely at nothing for a few seconds.
Or did I just finally fall in too deep to ever get out?
And Oskar might give up on himself, but giving up on Erik?
Never.
A flashing light returned in the corner of his vision, and he ignored it. He’d avoided looking at the scroll for too long, and thinking of Erik got him out of his head and back on track, somewhat.
Pulling the leather scroll out of the box, he could feel its unnatural weight. It wasn’t that it was heavy, it was just a little heavier than it should have been. More importantly, though, he knew it was the beginning of something he wasn’t sure he even wanted.
But, if Erik is alive, it’s not about what I want.
He really didn’t want to die, he knew that now. He also knew he was done dwelling on it. This was an ultimate new beginning. Oskar might not have a clue what was going on, but it was as clear as this cloudless, odd-colored sky that it was something big.
Shaking his head, he checked his surroundings again—then finally looked down at the scroll thing. The lettering on the outside was now entirely in English, and it didn’t look at all like an overlay. The goggles were somehow translating the lettering.
Oskar Dorn, I have chosen you.
He pulled the goggles from his face and squinted down at the leather case, and sure enough, the strange glyphs were there, illegible.
More information that he had no way of parsing. It went right into the “maybe this will make sense later, we got surviving to do” part of his brain.
“I guess the Chosen One gets two bottles of water and a stick.”
Pulling the goggles back into place, he went to open the scroll and, upon removing the wooden caps at both ends, realized the case was empty. The case itself was thick leather, and he unfurled it. The thing was about five inches wide and eight inches in length. He ran his fingers along the inside, which was a soft furry material except for a small metal disk about the size of a quarter in the top left corner. The bottom left of his goggles lit up with a new notification.
