1. RAINBOW DOORS

“What is this place?” I breathed quietly to myself as I surveyed the dim forest. The trees ringed the clearing in a perfect circle and my view of the dusk sky was unhindered by tree limbs. The clouds were red and pink and golden light shot through them like arrows onto the ground. The rays of light struck an enormous prism which, like a ghost, hovered silently behind me, spinning slowly.

Moments before I had been sitting on a bench before a gem exactly like it. I had been in a crowded mall, resting my feet and resenting those around me for their joy and their carefree lives, despite my best efforts. Though I despise what I have become, I cannot change how I feel. I know that Sylvia would despise what I have become, as well…

I stood to leave and my shirt caught upon the bench. I tried to jerk it free but was unsuccessful. With another hard tug, it came tearing loose and I stumbled backward. Like the mouth of a hungry beast, a slanting rainbow had opened up behind me. I had always been taught that you could not touch a rainbow. I had been told always that it was only light and water. Who ever said that was completely wrong.

I hit that rainbow and it was a swift, strange sensation. It was like falling through some sort of thin membrane. It resisted my weight, but not much. Sticky surfaces lightly dragged across my skin as I passed through it. And then, just like that, I was flat on my back in front of it. In front of it—but not truly. It was not the same as the prism from the mall, but it was identical, save for some alien chart that had been carved beneath it in a circular slab of black stone.

I stood and looked around at the forest clearing, uttering to myself as I did, “What is this place?”

There was beauty here in abundance…but there were feelings that were underlying. Feelings of hatred, injustice, danger…and, unmistakably, an unfathomable, terrible, fate lying, dormant, in the land.

I turned back to the prism. It was producing rainbows, though only one at a time. These rainbows shot out at angles that were defiant of scientific fact and theory. I squinted at the spectacle, and then looked up towards the sun. A number of theories as to what had happened bounced through my mind, often accompanied by the notion of psychosis. I disregarded the idea of having gone insane with difficulty—after all, there was nothing in my family history to suggest a sudden, dramatic break from sanity. All my relations were entirely sane; the sort of people so dull they made throwing ones self into on-coming traffic a preferable alternative to having to bear a conversation with them for more than fifteen minutes at any given time.

So, with the difficulty associated with great disbelief, I forced myself to assume that all I saw before me was real, as was the existence I held leading up to it. The prism was the link between the two, it was apparent, as it had been in both realities. The rainbows provided a further link between the two locations. I surmised, then, that perhaps the rainbows served as some sort of door between worlds. They served as a gate between the world I knew and—at the very least—this forested clearing, which I guessed was a place far and foreign by the general feeling of it and the slight strangeness of the plants. The plants, mind you, were not bizarre… Just off.

Cautiously, I took a step towards the hovering anomaly. The prism turned, but made not the slightest sound. I reached up a hand and then, carefully, stuck it into one of the rainbows. With the same sticky sensation as before, my hand was devoured by the rainbows. There was no pain, however, but on the other side of the rainbow I could feel a chill wind. Curious, I let the rest of my body follow the hand through the rainbow, leaving my other hand still on the side of the rainbow I was leaving, to keep it open.

The other side of the rainbow this time was rocky and unpleasant. I was up on a high cliff which over looked a barren and uneven scape. Cold gusts of wind blew up the sides of the mountains, rustling the loose pebbles at my feet. I was about to go back through the rainbow when a rumbling from the depths of the chasm paralyzed me.

A giant set of fierce claws gripped the lip of the cliff and its owner, a huge creature—part dragon, part slug, it seemed—began to climb towards me. The beast had not eyes with which to see, but the monster’s other senses, I could tell, more than compensated. Its skin was thin but obviously impenetrably hard. The beast’s pale green body was ringed with blue veins. Its colossal mouth opened into a wide, tooth rimmed abyss and all I could do was stare, fear tearing my insides to shreds.

‘What kind of an end is this? Falling without even a fight?’ Something inside of me said. I wanted to fight but…I couldn’t…I was too scared.

The cliff began to crack and crumble as the hideous fiend climbed toward me. Trembling, I stared forward into the chasm-like mouth before me. I could feel the cold sweat on my body as I looked past the sharp, yellowing teeth, into a darkness from which the smell of carrion drifted up. I was shaking terribly now, fear coursing through my body like blood. In my ears I could hear only the pounding of my own heart, and in my head I could hear my own voice telling me to run, and another voice telling me to defend myself. Neither could force my body to respond.

The creature advanced slowly, tearing chunks of cliff away with every movement of its enormous limbs. The repugnant smell of death was rampant about the air, and everything began to blur. I was getting dizzy, giving myself up to flash backs of the life I’d lived.

A city in the mountains…A girl with big green eyes…A man that smelled of alcohol whom I refused to call father…One night, saturated with blood…

The cliff fissured and I lost my footing. I fell hard, landing on my back. The only sound I could hear was the beating of my heart and my panicked breathing. The ground continued to give way beneath me and I started to slide with unprecedented rapid ness towards the gaping hole that was the monster’s mouth. The beat opened wide to me and I screamed in fear of the fate presented me—but I could not hear my own scream.

A hand reached through the rainbows and grabbed my hand with strength. My arm jerked painfully, but I was saved. The other party jerked slightly with the strain of my full weight, then seemed to adjust to it quickly. The monster ascending the cliff seemed to notice that I no longer was falling into its grasp, and so made a lunge towards me. Just in time the stranger beyond the rainbows pulled me back through. With a mighty lurch, I was pulled back into the clearing and the rainbow behind me disappeared, to be replaced by another rainbow on the opposite side of the crystal.

Rubbing my throbbing shoulder, I gazed up at my rescuer. He was a strong looking man with rough features. His hair was dark green and his eyes were navy blue. A quiver of arrows was hung upon his back, as was a heavy ash wood bow. He was well tanned and very muscular with a broad sword in one of his hands. He reached to his waist where his scabbard hung and sheathed it silently. There, just under the belt which held his scabbard on, his body became that of a dark blue horse. I blinked at the oddity.

A centaur, right before me. It was fact, undebateable and solid. After all that had happened in the short five minutes since I had been pulled from the mall, I had no reason to try and believe otherwise. Still, it was odd for me and hard to swallow. How does one go about accepting the presence of something they’ve been told could not exist? How can a young man—college educated, no less—simply disregard all scientific evidence against magic and fanciful creatures? But there before me was a centaur, breathing and alive, studying me with sentient eyes.

“You are from the Unworld, yes?” he asked me.

“Unworld...? I don’t…”

He pointed to the prism and asked, “Which door did you come out of? Could you show me on the map?”

“Map?”

He bit his lower lip and kneeled on his equine knees beside the prism. He pointed to a chart, etched neatly in some black stone, beneath it. The chart was filled with a dizzying amount of shapes which I could make no sense of. He pointed to a string of them and asked, “Your door was here?”

“Um…yeah,” I said unsurely. It looked to be about the place the rainbow had been, but I wasn’t sure.

He stood. “Come with me,” he said.

“Come with you where?”

“To the castle.”

“Castle?”

“King Sythe wishes to see you,” he said and motioned for me to come to him. “Get up on my back, we’ll go.”

“Who’s King—“

“Get up on my back, we’ll go,” he said sternly. I looked at the sword the bow and the arrows and then, nervously and clumsily, mounted his equine back. I held, awkwardly, onto his belt. He turned around to look at me—a movement which made his upper and lower body seem completely disconnected—and said, “You’ll hold on tighter. I’m going fast.”

I took a tighter grip on his belt and he suddenly lurched into a gallop. He galloped easily between the thick trees, dodging this way and that. He jumped logs and rocks without ever looking down. I held tightly to him and prayed I would not loose my grip and fall beneath his powerful hooves. It was a bizarre thing, to see the centaur run. His lower body was swift and graceful, as of a normal horse. But his humanoid upper body was awkward. Every time his hooves touched down on the hard ground beneath us, his arms—held out slightly, bent at the elbows—bounced clumsily. His hair whipped with the movement, becoming wild and ratty.

We arrived, shortly, at a well groomed path. He galloped faster along this clear trail. In less than half an hour’s time, a time spent in complete silence, save for the pounding off his hooves, we were outside of a giant wall, guarded by more centaurs.

The centaurs beside the wall, all armed with long spears and bows, looked up as we approached. The gates of the wall opened after a few of the guards called to each other in a strange, hard, choppy language. They saluted as we passed them to enter the gate. Beyond the wall there was a small city. Simple buildings and round huts separated by narrow roads where centaur children played and centaur women cooked over fires were all around us.

The smell of horse sweat and cooking meats and the sounds of conversation were every where. It was a pleasant town, but there was some sadness about it as well. The muscular centaur galloped through the narrow streets and children looked up at him and waved, shouting in that same hard language words that sounded like a greeting.

The buildings ended abruptly, giving way to a stretch of lush, green grass. Beyond the stretch of greener a castle, grand and shimmering, stood proudly with red and purple flags flying atop its towers. A wide moat, murky turquoise, surrounded the castle. The drawbridge, cased in gold, was let down and, at the castle entrance, two more centaur guards, with halberds in hand, stood watching us approach. They saluted as we passed into the castle.

The centaur stopped and knelt so I could dismount. I did and then stood unsurely in the cold stone hallway. He motioned for me to follow him and, without a word, I did. He led me through the spacious halls of the castle at a brisk pace, but it was slow enough that I might observe the building. There were tapestries upon the walls which depicted centaurs fighting in wars against strange, humanoid beasts with bat wings and wolf tails. There were large paintings of similar scenes, as well. The interior walls were of dark blue stone and many pieces of medieval weaponry were held to them. I examined the gleaming axes, shimmering lances and glinting blades as I passed them.

Finally we came up a flight of stairs to an arching door way. The centaur led me through it, into a sizeable room with a lush red carpet. Paintings and mirrors and bladed weapons of all sorts adorned the walls of this huge room and in the middle stood a single centaur. A grand, full-length mirror stood in one corner of the room. I glanced at my reflection in it briefly. My skin was pale, both from genes and a lack of proper exposure to sunlight. My dark hair and dark eyes made me look even paler. I was thin, the sort of person that had obviously been beaten up as a boy because no one had ever taught him to defend himself. My loose, blue, button-up shirt was dirty and slightly torn in a corner. My loose-fitting jeans also were dirty. How ever, for the most part I looked as I normally did, though a bit shaken and unsteady.

The centaur that I had rode knelt down before the other and muttered something.

“Thank you, Archer,” the centaur said and came towards us. “You may stand.”

The centaur beside me rose to his feet, but kept his head bowed.

The second centaur dropped his voice and said, “Kaer liht myrkkiah?” The one I had rode—Archer had the second one called him?—nodded.

“Brilliant. Thank you, Archer, that’ll be all. Close the door on your way out,” the centaur said. He turned to me as Archer bowed deeply and left the room. “Greetings, Unworld Human. You’ll forgive my English, won’t you? There’s not much call for its use I’m afraid.”

He paused to adjust his heavy, purple robe. Then he continued, “My name is King Sythe of Zylx. I’ve been waiting for you, Unworld Human.”

“You’ve been waiting…for me?” I asked, still quite taken aback by the surreal-ness of it all.

King Sythe was thin, but muscular. His hair was a bright, fiery orange. A golden crown sat atop his head, just above his sharp ears. His face was very royal looking, with handsome features. The centaur smiled in a friendly way, but there was something in his eyes, some hateful thing, that made me slightly uneasy.

“Yes, I’ve got a favor to ask. But first, I would ask your name,” Sythe said.

“My name is Pike Desoto,” I said and then added lamely, “Pleased to meet you.”

“Fantastic,” Sythe said. He tested my name, “Pike…Piiiiiiiiiiiike…Pike…it’s an interesting name. Pike…piiiiiiiiike. Pike.”

“That’s my name,” I said uncomfortably.

“Well, Pike, I’ve got a favor to ask, as I mentioned before. Forgive me for getting straight to business,” Sythe said. “There was something stolen from me that’s very important. I need you to recover it for me.”

“Why me? I’m not much, really,” I said. “I’m not special…I’m not strong…”

“It’s complicated,” the king said. “It would involve much explaining but…well, if you must know… There is a demon that resides in the frozen east by the name of Faustus. He’s a terrible fiend who sold his soul for immortality. Before he sold his soul, however, he was a man from the Unworld—“

“Unworld?”

“Yes, the Unworld is the name for the realm from which you came,” Sythe explained. “We name it as such because it does not name itself and it is so strange and different… It’s very rare that the Junction of Realms opens up the door to it. You just came through that door, Pike. That rare door brought you to us, hence why you’re so important.

“Faustus murdered my father, the King Scimitar. He killed my father and then stole the Royal Scepter. Without that scepter I cannot be officially named the King of Zylx, not by Centaurian law. I cannot command the military or put laws into effect… I’ve tried to keep this quiet, but… It’s bound to get out and then the entire kingdom will collapse into bitter anarchy. So, Pike Desoto, will you help this prince?”

“But, why me?” I asked. “If you know where Faustus is living, why not just send some soldiers? I mean, even if you can’t send them officially, they would go, wouldn’t they?”

“I tried sending a group of my men, but Faustus has many guards of his own… At his command there are most terrible, unnatural abominations. You must understand, to fight a demon it is not easy," Sythe sighed. “He told the men, however, that he would be willing to speak to an Unworld Human. That’s why I need you Pike. Do you except my quest?”

“I… I do,” I said with hesitation.

I will regret that decision always.