The thing about dying alone in the wilderness is that nobody hears you scream. So Michelle had to make peace with that fact approximately thirty seconds ago, right before the ground opened up beneath her feet and swallowed her whole.
One moment, she'd been standing on solid granite, watching storm clouds roll across the skies with the kind of satisfied solitude that came from three days of solo hiking.
Three blissful days without a single committee meeting, without her thesis advisor's passive-aggressive emails, without anyone interrupting her thoughts.
Out in mountain forest was the only thing judging her was a particularly judgmental looking marmot, and honestly, she could live with that.
But then suddenly weather changed and the next moment, reality space cracked open like a broken egg. Purple lightning split the sky. The air tasted like burning and regret. And the universe in what Michelle could only describe as cosmically poor timing decided her peaceful existence was over.
She didn't even have time to drop her hiking poles.
It was like a rift (because what else could you call a glowing purple tear in the fabric of space-time that pulled with the inexorable force of a cosmic vacuum cleaner) that swallowed her whole. Wind screamed in her ears. Her stomach relocated to somewhere near her throat and filed for permanent residence.
And colours that definitely weren't in the visible spectrum burned her retinas, which seemed like overkill, frankly.
The sensation of falling stretched into eternity. Her body tumbled through a kaleidoscope of impossible dimensions while her mind gibbered uselessly about physics and her physical body dynamics violations and how she was going to die without a reason. A tragedy, really.
Thud!
Michelle hit the ground with enough force to knock every thought, revolutionary or otherwise clean out of her head.
For one blank, merciful moment, there was nothing but pain and the taste of copper and dirt in her mouth. Then her engineer's brain kicked back in with its usual detached efficiency: Probable concussion. Definitely bruised ribs. Possibly broken nose. Get up. Move, Michelle.
She groaned and rolled onto her side, spitting mouthful of blood and what she really hoped wasn't a tooth fragment. Her hiking pack had cushioned some of the fall, but her left knee was staging a very bloody protest about the whole experience.
Michelle blinked, trying to focus her vision. Then blinked again, hoping the scenery would improve but it didn't.
An alien forest loomed around her trees wider than California redwoods with bark that shimmered like oil slicks under a gas station light. And on ground was what looked like bioluminescent fungi cast in shades of blue and violet. The canopy was so thick she couldn't tell if it was day or night, or if this godforsaken place even had a proper day-night cycle. Wherever she was, it definitely wasn't Colorado anymore or Earth…
"Aghh...Okay, don't move" she said aloud, because hearing her own voice made the insanity slightly more manageable. "Okay. I fell through a wormhole. Or a dimensional rift. And got hit my head really hard and currently bleeding out in a ravine while hallucinating. Any of those options would be..." She paused, taking in the glowing purple fungus. "...extremely inconvenient."
Rrrrgh!!! A roar split the air.
It wasn't a bear roar or a mountain lion's scream. It was the kind of sound that made every primal instinct in her body slam the panic button labeled PREDATOR, RUN, HIDE, DIE QUIETLY AND DON'T MAKE IT WORSE.
Michelle's head snapped toward the noise. Through the bioluminescent gloom, something massive moved between the trees with too many legs and eyes that glowed red like hot coals in a forge. It was roughly the size of a city bus, with mandibles that looked like they could bite through steel.
"Oh, shit," Michelle breathed. "Shit, shit, shit."
Even in crisis mode, couldn't help but catalog observations: Hexa-pedal(six-legged) locomotion. Exoskeleton suggests arthropod evolution. Those mandibles indicate a carnivorous diet.
Conclusion: I'm about to become a protein source.
The creature charged.
Michelle's body moved before her conscious mind caught up, pure adrenaline overriding the screaming pain in her knee. She scrambled behind the nearest tree, pressing herself flat against the oil-slick bark. Her hiking pole clattered from nerveless fingers, probably alerting everything in a five-meter radius to her location. Her breath came in sharp, too-loud gasps but she couldn't calm her nerves…was she having Panick attack now!! No please!
Brilliant survival strategy, Michelle. Why not just ring a dinner bell?
She clamped her hand over her mouth, pressing her fingers tight against her lips.
The monster crashed past her hiding spot, claws tearing furrows in the earth that looked deep enough to bury a coffin. It paused and then sniffed the air with a sound like a broken air conditioning unit. Its massive head-oh good lord, it had three-heads, she hadn't noticed the other two swivelled back toward her position with horrible, deliberate intelligence.
It knows exactly where I am.
Michelle's free hand closed around a fallen branch. It was utterly useless against beast of that size, about as effective as fighting a tank with a pool noodle, but humans were tool-users, damn it.
The creature took one step toward her tree. Then another.
Michelle gripped her pathetic branch and thought about her whole life and about how the last snack she'd eaten was a protein bar that tasted like cardboard and broken dreams.
What a horrible way to die.
The creature roared and before it could lunged to uproot the tree she was hiding behind, something black and massive slammed into it from above with the force of a meteorite.
Michelle fell the impact around and her stick-weapon forgotten, her mind blue-screening as it tried to process what she was seeing.
A dragon.
There was a fucking dragon. Black as midnight with red highlights that shimmered like dying embers, scales that looked like they could deflect bullets, wings that could probably create their own weather system. It had locked onto the three-headed nightmare-beast with single-minded lethal purpose. And it was winning.
The dragon moved with terrifying, beautiful grace and with all coiled power and calculated violence. Claws that could probably open a car like a can of tuna raked across the creature's chitinous hide. A tail like a spiked battering ram cracked through exoskeleton like it was made of graham crackers. When the dragon reared back and opened its jaws, black fire poured out, not red or orange but black, like flames made of pure shadow and concentrated bad decisions.
The three-headed monstrosity had no chance of survival as it screamed and roared before it collapsed into burnt ash.
With the beasts dying embers there was a moment of absolute silence. Then the dragon turned toward Michelle.
Its eyes were shimmering lava. Bright and molten with slit pupils that tracked her with unnerving intelligence. Steam rose from its nostrils. Ash drifted around it like black snow falling from skies.
Michelle, still sitting on her ass in the alien dirt, clutching her useless stick, looked up at the creature that had just saved her life and possibly planned to eat her for next.
Her engineering brain, that wonderful, terrible organ, supplied one final observation: Well. This is officially the most ruined Tuesday ever.
She was probably going to die anyway. Might as well commit to the bit.
"Thank you for not letting me die to the nightmare arthropod," Michelle said politely to the dragon. "I really appreciate it. Do you... do you eat humans? Just asking. For science-conscience."
The dragon tilted its massive head. And then impossibly and horrifyingly it began to shimmer.
The scales rippled like black-water. Then suddenly its massive form began contracted, folded in on itself in ways that made her eyes hurt. Light bent wrong around it. And then, standing where the dragon had been, now stood a man- having a male human form…
A very tall, very naked man with black hair, golden eyes, and what appeared to be zero concerns about the whole "suddenly human" situation.
He looked at Michelle. Michelle looked at him. Both blinked and then she raised one finger. "I got a question?."
"You," the man said, his voice like gravel and smoke, "should not be in the Feral Lands."
"The what lands?"
"Feral Lands. This is..." He gestured around at the nightmare forest with its glowing fungus and lurking death. "This is the worst place in all the realms to visit. What are doing here? Most beast-kin or entities who fall through rifts at least have the courtesy to land in civilised territory."
"Well, excuse me for not having better dimensional travel etiquette," Michelle snapped, her fear metabolising into irritation because that was apparently how she coped now. "I didn't exactly have a guidebook. There wasn't a 'Welcome to the Feral Lands' pamphlet waiting for me."
The corner of his mouth twitched. It might have been a smile. It might have been a prelude to eating her.
"You are injured," he observed. "And loud. And you smell like..." He sniffed. "Fear and something else…" Like strange magic.
"That's just my deodorant. It's 'Mountain Fresh.' Well, Earth mountain fresh, not..." She waved at the nightmare landscape. "...whatever this is."
He definitely smiled that time. "Do you have a death wish, human, speaking to a dragon with such disrespect."
"No, but try to understand," Michelle said, leveraging herself upright with a wince, "I fell through a purple hell-portal, nearly got eaten by something that looked like it failed out of Nightmare Design School, and now I'm talking to a naked dragon-man in a place called the Feral Lands—which, by the way, sounds like a rejected Disney attraction. My give-a-damn is broken. So unless you're planning to eat me, maybe you could point me toward the exit?"
The dragon-man stared at her for a long moment.
Then he threw back his head and laughed—a deep, rolling sound that echoed through the forest and probably alerted every monster in a ten-mile radius.
"Oh," he said, gold eyes gleaming with what might have been amusement or hunger or both, "you are going to be interesting, little human."
Michelle, standing in an alien forest with a knee that might be fractured, facing a naked shapeshifter who'd just committed casual murder via black fire, made what was possibly the worst decision of her life.
"My name is Michelle," she said. "And I'm going to need you to put on some pants."