Page 112 of Gate of Chaos


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Auryn shook his beautiful head.

“I don’t sense a contraption,” I said, still trying to process being on an alien planet and having succeeded with the Gate while it all still felt like I’d accomplished nothing butsomehowsucceeding in digging yet a deeper hole for all of us. “I sensenope.”

“Like you felt on the ship?” Keon asked.

“It’s different, but I can’t explain how.” My scales tingled painfully as I said it, and the sensation crystalized along the tips of my scales, like a constant painful cold breeze against frozen skin.

Homeworld was something of a terrifying letdown. It wasn’t Earth, but “alien shithole wasteland” was very similar to “Earth shithole wasteland”, and also not entirely dissimilar to “Mars shithole wasteland,” based on pictures from the Mars rovers. And all three were light years better than “Venus shithole dumpster fire,” because Venus was basically Hell in planet form.

My consorts did the same, with Akoni sniffing the air and scratching the stones while Auryn seemed to strain his hearing, and Keon swung his head back and forth to get the full, grim panoramic view.

I turned my attention to the Gate. The leystone was intact and in pretty good condition—there were some superficial cracks and dents, then a few chips in the corners, but the integrity was excellent. The rest of the Gate matrix hadn’t been so lucky. The three layers of stone, which would have been carved from one giant rock, had been shattered. Someone had attempted to rebuild it and plate and bolt and glue the remaining pieces together.

The state of the housing indicated the Gate had been moved. The three Gates had been built in proximity to large cities and housed in protected temples several stories high, with the Gate on the top level. This was not the Gate’s original location, and this was the original Earth Gate. Part of building a Gate was etching the magical equivalent of a timestamp into the internal matrix, and this one’s origin point in the cosmos had been back in the day.

“This is all very neat for the level of crumbling,” Akoni commented.

“Pardon?” Keon inquired.

Akoni used a wing to point at the columns that had crumbled to varying heights. “No debris.”

There wasn’t a single pebble, much less a chunk of rock, in the entire complex, despite how mangled it was. It was dusty and gritty, not freshly swept, but the lack of debris was strange. Maybe there was some kind of rock-devouring wildlife that came through like a little automated vacuum.

The damage to the columns and lower pad seemed the usual combination of earth movement, lightning strikes, and general decay due to age. The stone pad the Gate sat upon was in flawless condition. The nonagons the Gate sat on were flawless, and so perfectly fitted the only evidence it wasn’t a single pad was faint, darker lines where the pieces met.

The eeriness of Homeworld became even more intense.

If I’d had hairs on the back of my neck, they’d be standing up.

Keon had paced the perimeter of the Gate pad. “This is scale-imbued. Like Atlantis. But it was done fast and dirty. There is a scale placed at the corner of each tile, but only one layer of scales.”

“Done well enough this has survived for at least several thousand years,” Akoni commented. “I find the lack of debris when there has been obvious stone damage bewildering.”

“Perhaps it happened initially and was swept clean?” Auryn suggested.

“The damage is of varying ages.” My low-light vision was better in dragon form than human, but the sky was still twilight-dim. It was hard to get a clear look at fine details. “It’s happened over time.”

Akoni clicked his teeth and Keon coughed.

The airwasbreathable, and thicker and richer than even Lemuria, despite the dust. It was chilly, but not cold. The sky wasn’t the same as what we’d seen from the archives, but the sky had usually been cloudy, with bands of storms that followed the edges of the twilight habitable zone.

Many Lemurian plant strains had been bred to not just have optimal O2exchange, but to grow in dim light, poor soils, with limited water. The livestock was similarly hardy. Although none had been proven to survive in intense weather conditions, or colder climates. But there were plenty of topside species of plants and animals that could do just fine in cold, barren climates.

Auryn stepped down off the pad and seemed to glow brighter, his beautiful face gaunt with concern as he strained his senses.

I took in the wasteland.

The vastness of the nothing, the emptiness, the desolation sank fangs into me. I waited for it to pass, but it didn’t.

“Do you sense the black dog, Helena?” Keon asked.

“No,” I said. “I think the black dog is dead.”

Thirty-Three

Since Gates went both ways, once we were back in Lemuria, I shut the Gate down. No point in leaving the screen door open for all the intergalactic bugs to get in.

There wasn’t a lot of chit-chat on the long trip back to West. I tried once to venture that the airwasbreathable on Homeworld, so there was that, and the frosty reception I got would have made the North Pole seem tropical by comparison. Auryn risked mentioning the “contraption” that he felt, and Keon weakly joked that said contraption ran over the black dog. Which sounded a bit too accurate to be at all funny.

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