The Nextworld Invasion and the Death of Magic - 31. Chapter 31 - Loss of Power

Alydrael was asleep, and Illiop was curled up next to her. The rainbow-furred creature was quietly snoring, but above deck, Kilial’s footfalls went stomping from the bow to the stern, and Illiop raised his head. He looked up at the ceiling of the cabin, slid off Alydrael’s bed, and scurried up the stairs.

Kilial was in the middle of tying off one of the Mermonster’s ropes, and she was surprised to turn and see the animal seated on his haunches behind her.

“Hey there, little one,” she said to him. “Is Alydrael still sleeping?”

Illiop tilted his head to one side and let out a squeak.

“If you say so,” Kilial replied with a chuckle. She got back to her task at hand.

The Mermonster was anchored in the calm inlet of a tiny, uninhabited island; however, the Human was no longer onboard.

Dorjin was alone on the spit of land. Everything about Earth seemed weird and wondrous to her. The color of the sun made the appearance of things she was used to seeing, look odd. The sand of the beach, the palm fronds above her head, the water of the ocean, nothing looked right to her. It was all so different from where she grew up in Nextworld.

“I don’t want all the elfs, dwarfs, and orcs to die,” she murmured to herself. She was struggling to remember what she had learned the three races called themselves.

“I just want my people to come home.”

Dorjin had never expected to meet Earthians. The fact that the tentative beginnings of friendships had started to form between her and a few of the people she had been trained her whole life to hate was more than a surprise. She did not want to admit to herself how many from among their three races she had slaughtered. Dorjin was trying not to think about her actions in the recent past, but she could still picture the countless dead, and she was struggling to come to terms with her current situation and her new understanding about Earthians.

“I didn’t realize they were people.” Dorjin was not talking to anyone; she was simply working through her thoughts out loud. “I thought they were monsters.”

She had spent years watching the people of Earth through the barrier, but in reality, they were nothing like she had expected. All her feelings about the Rothians, Noktar, and Urcai had been indoctrinated into her since her childhood. She needed a little time to herself to work through some of these feelings.

Dorjin also wanted a little time alone to secretly try another spell without anyone witnessing it. She wandered around to the far side of the tiny island until the Mermonster was hidden from view behind the palm trees and the slight rise of the land itself.

Dorjin remembered how she had felt killing the crab when she first reached that lonely beach back on the mainland, but she wanted to test a hypothesis that she had been calculating in her mind.

“Just need to find something to use for my spell,” she mumbled, and she tried to force down the emotions that had overwhelmed her last time.

She headed toward the water’s edge to see if she could find some other shellfish, but she spotted movement out of the corner of her eye. A small, fluffy bird was seated on its nest, and it did not seem to mind Dorjin’s presence. Even as she sidled over to it, the thing paid very little attention to her. It was not until Dorjin’s arm shot out like a viper, and she snatched the bird by its neck that it suddenly realized it was in danger, but too late. It flapped its wings and flailed with its clawed feet, but Dorjin had it fast. However, the bird managed to scratch her forearm, drawing blood and causing Dorjin to retaliate. She cried out in pain and instinctively swung the animal by its neck, slamming its body against the trunk of a tree.

The bird was badly injured, but it was not dead, and it let out a horrible screech. Its wings were contorted in the wrong directions, and the pathetic thing convulsed in Dorjin’s grip. The reality of what she had done again, to a second animal, and the sight of the dying bird was more heartbreaking than she could have imagined. Her fingers slackened, and the poor thing yanked itself free of her hand. It lay beside the tree, struggling to breathe, and Dorjin fell to her knees next to it.

“I didn’t mean to…” she mumbled as she began to sob. She dropped her head to her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she blubbered.

When she looked at the bird again through her tears, it had died, and it made Dorjin weep all the harder. Eventually, her sorrow began to subside. She sniffed and rubbed her eyes on her sleeve.

“Dammit,” she grumbled. She knelt over the animal’s corpse, and she was filled with regret.

The bird had been pretty, and Dorjin had not even taken the opportunity to appreciate its appearance; she had simply readied herself to kill it. Now the bird looked hideous, but it had been beautiful mere moments earlier. Its wings were teal and orange with pale patches under each, and its tail feathers were striped in the same three hues.

Dorjin let out a little moan of remorse as she pulled a knife from her bag. She had to squint back more tears that threatened to stream from her eyes. She focused and cut open the bird. Another sob tried to rise in her throat, but she forced it down and stuck her fingers into the dead animal’s body cavity. Dorjin was so used to the cloned organs she picked up from the warehouse aboard the whale-blimp, which were always cold, but the bird’s insides were warm, and the sensation surprised and disgusted Dorjin. She pulled out its innards, and she was surprised again when the action made her dry heave. Dorjin turned away and her stomach lurched, but she did not vomit.

“Ugh, what the hell? What is wrong with me?” She cleared her throat and spat onto the sand. “Gross,” she mumbled, and she began her spell.

Dorjin was clutching the bird’s lungs, kidneys, intestines, liver, and heart in one hand, and a little mechanical ring in the other. She was simply attempting a rudimentary charm that would allow her to bind the organic and inanimate matter to one another, but when she cast it, nothing extraordinary happened. For some reason, this charm was not powerful beyond her control.

Dorjin was flummoxed. Ever since her treasonous abandonment of the recent attack on Earth, the spells she had cast were each far more energetic than they should have been, but the charm she just performed was not. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.

“What the hell’s going on? Why didn’t the magic do something crazy this time? I was half-expecting it all to explode in my hand or something,” she said to herself. “Why did every other spell go haywire?”

She turned and looked out to sea. With the Mermonster on the other side of the island, there was nothing blocking Dorjin’s view of the ocean’s horizon. It was breathtaking. She had once seen the ocean of Nextworld, but it was an uninviting, monster-filled expanse, and very few Humans were willing to venture out into it.

Dorjin was feeling drawn toward the Earth ocean. Its water was sparkling under the sun, and Dorjin wanted to step out into the rolling waves. She wanted to enjoy the coolness in contrast to the warm air. She wanted to play and splash. She wanted to be free of the immense responsibility to conquer Earth, which had been drilled into her and every other Human. Dorjin wanted to have fun. She did not remember the last time she did something just for the fun of it.

The slime from the dead bird’s organs was still all over her hands, and she turned her gaze to its corpse. The organs were no good for anything, which was why there were such vast waste fields in Nextworld, but the rest of the bird’s body could provide sustenance to the sea creatures in the shallows, like crabs. Dorjin still felt sad about killing the crab, and she wanted to show some kindness.

She walked up the beach toward the base of a palm tree, dug a small hole in the dirt, and placed the remains of the bird’s organs from her fusing spell into the hole, knowing they were useless for food. Dorjin covered then, and she was almost reverent as she returned to and picked up the corpse of the bird. She brought it to the water’s edge and laid it down again.

“I need a rock.”

She stepped out into the gentle surf and found a large stone. It was too heavy to lift, but she was able to move it along the bottom to where she wanted it. Dorjin stepped back up onto the sand and picked up the bird again. She brought it into the water, submerged its remains, and placed the stone partially on top of it to hold its body down.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again.

Dorjin stood and looked down at herself. She focused out on the stretching sea, and she started to wade out into it. The cold water felt refreshing and delightful, and she dunked her head under the waves, but the salty taste surprised her.

There was only one ocean in Nextworld, but there were many lakes, some of which were themselves the size of seas. However, the water of Nextworld was fresh, even if many lakes were stagnant and putrid, they all had low salinity.

Dorjin popped up out of the surf, spitting and sputtering. She was not sure she liked the taste of the ocean, but she liked being in the waves. She pulled her shirt up over her head, tossed it onto the beach, and she did the equivalent with her shorts.

So much about the Earth was not what Dorjin had expected, but she did not want to go back to Nextworld. She wished more of her fellow Humans could have the opportunity to meet people of the races of Earth.

A glint of something far out to sea caught her eye for a split second, and it was gone. She watched the waves, and for several minutes, nothing happened. Then it appeared again, above the water for an instant, and it was much closer.

“What is that?” she mused.

When the thing surfaced a third time, Dorjin decided she was as close as she wanted to be to whatever it was, and she started backing out of the water. On the shore again, she realized there was more than one of them, and she gasped as another leaped out of the water. It was a finned creature with a pointed snout.

“Is it a shark?”

Two launched themselves from the surface in unison, and they came down with a glorious splash that made Dorjin smile.

“They’re dolphins,” she said with a little laugh.

She brought her fists to her hips with her arms akimbo. Dorjin was feeling very comfortable in just her bra and panties. She was glad no one was around though; she had only grabbed a few changes of clothes before escaping from Nextworld, and her undergarments did not match.

From the age of sixteen to about a week prior, Dorjin had lived aboard the whale-blimp stationed above Nextworld. During that time, she had two relationships with other soldiers of Kalthrin, a boy when she was seventeen and a girl right after her nineteenth birthday, and Dorjin had enjoyed being naked with both her lovers. She was young and inexperienced, but she had always felt that nudity brought with it a certain kind of freedom, and Dorjin liked it. She was enjoying being mostly naked right now, and she was grateful to have taken a little time to be alone.

She may not have figured out why her spells were being unpredictable, but there were many other quandaries spinning through her mind. She was still coming to terms with her past, her beliefs, and the truths about reality that she had very recently learned. Dorjin had given her feelings a little attention, something she was not accustomed to in Kalthrin, but she had been wrong about many things, and her heart was heavy.

There was still so much that Dorjin did not understand about the peoples of Earth who she had been raised to think of as enemies. Even Earth itself turned out to be so different than she thought.

Dorjin picked up her clothes, and she draped them over a large, sun-bleached chunk of driftwood. She stepped into the shade of a mangrove tree close to the water, and she sat down on the sand. The air was warm, and Dorjin decided she would enjoy the beach until her clothes were dry. Then she would return to the dinghy and row back to the Mermonster. It felt so strange to Dorjin that friendships with a few people from the other races had started to grow in her heart.

Kilial had taken to calling her kid, and it felt affectionate every time the captain said it. Tigath and Othri’s relationship reminded Dorjin of a couple she had known back on Nextworld, and she could not help but instantly feel like she knew them. Nuji had not warmed to her yet, but Dorjin was very interested in getting to know her. Even the rainbowy animal was quickly becoming a new little buddy. However, most of all, Dorjin liked Alydrael, and she liked her a lot.

Dorjin felt herself blush at the thought of the other nineteen year old, and she glanced around in embarrassment as if someone might have seen her, but there was no one else on the beach. She was filled with another feeling that was unfamiliar to her. Her life had been embroiled in the actions of Kalthrin for long enough that she barely remembered being at peace, and here she was; she was at peace. Dorjin took a slow breath of the salty air, and she let out a sigh.

To her horror, the glow of a mystical doorway through reality appeared in front of where she was seated, and it began to open.

Someone from Nextworld has found me! she thought in panic.

Weaponless and wearing only her bra and panties, Dorjin was completely exposed.