Chapter 1: Chapter 1 – CALL

I was deep under the weight of an ink-black ocean, but I could breathe.

The cool water pressed down on me, but I wasn’t cold. Faint traces of light revealed a blurry waterscape of black stones, smoothed bricks, and broken statues.

I was the only living creature, but the loneliness was comforting. It was like a mute button had been hit, silencing a million screaming background noises, which I had slowly grown used to and stopped noticing before this moment. Now, it was finally quiet.

I moved forward, gliding across the seafloor. I was travelling through a strange mish-mash of ruins. Classical Greek statues, robed and elegant, lay beside brass sculptures of modern politicians. Empty frames rested in the rubble, shredded canvases rippling in the currents.

There was a stronger shaft of light ahead and I swam toward it with vague interest, then stopped.

A creature was caught in the light. It seemed to be made of darkness itself, its body absorbing the light around it with no reflection or colour. It was reptilian, with a long alligator’s jaw, arched neck and long pointed tail, wreathed with spiny fins.

It looked at me with white, blank eyes, impossible to read, but I knew that I was looking at something intelligent, in the way you know things in dreams. It paddled through the water with long limbs, webbed claws catching the current. Swimming toward me.

It is nearly time, said a voice, everywhere and nowhere. I flinched back. Awaken, Second.

I popped awake, lying in my bed at three in the morning with my blankets bunched and knotted around me.

I sat up, heart pounding. That had been the clearest dream yet—I swore I could still feel the dragon’s white eyes staring at me from the shadows. But my room looked the same as it always did: close, dim walls, the small window on the opposite wall, the lights and hum of the city outside. Barely a shadow to hide in.

I clicked on my desk light and reached for my ratty dream journal. It had gotten pretty full since the dreams had started several months ago. I flipped to a new page and hesitated with the pen hovering.

The dream was still clear as day in my mind, shocked into my memory by the strange creature’s eyes. I put down the notebook and the pen. I had a feeling I’d remember this one without writing it down.

I straightened out my blankets, turned the light back off, and tried to go back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

My life was an exhausting rhythm of work, sleep, and more work. It’s the kind of thing you learn to accept, especially living in a place like Toronto. Nothing against my city—it’s really not such a bad place. I like the busyness, the subway and streetcars that get you anywhere, and I love living near the waterfront. But the city’s expensive as hell, and I was beyond lucky that my cousin Eli had found this apartment. Even luckier that he’d thought rooming with his deadbeat cousin from Ottawa wouldn’t be a terrible idea, and that it had worked out for us so far.

I had work that morning. That meant I turned off my six AM alarm with a groan and staggered into the bathroom, feeling like the living dead. I scowled at myself in the mirror—waking up in the middle of the night had given me dark bags under my eyes, or maybe those were just permanent now. Combined with my prickly-short hair, just long enough to stand in odd directions, and the stubble that barely hid the little white scars on my jawline, I looked just a touch too murderous for my liking.

I shaved, showered, got into my work clothes, and made it to the kitchen running late. Eli had left for his job already—poor bastard had to be in by quarter to six—but he had thoughtfully left half a pot of frigid coffee in the coffee maker.

I scowled and poured a cup, tossing it back without bothering to heat it up, then set off into the cold December morning.

It was a work day like any other at the plant, but I couldn’t seem to shake a weird sense of paranoia. I went through the motions, stacking cardboard and cleaning equipment. The whole time, there was a strange prickling on the back of my neck—I felt like I was being watched.

Just as I had this thought, a shadow emerged from the darkness behind a tall stack of wooden skids. I yelped and dropped my broom—only to find it was someone I recognized.

Joel grinned at me, lifting his own broom. “Hey, Camilo! Good to know my stealth skill is improving.”

I glared at him, trying to recover. My heart was still pounding. “Why are you sneaking around in the back like that?”

Joel gave me a flat look. He was about my age, a part-time college student who worked at the factory when he didn’t have classes. He was skinny as a twig and about as threatening. “Uh… sweeping.”

I picked up my broom and resumed my own sweeping.

Joel continued nearby. “Jumpy today, huh?”

“No,” I said shortly. Looking for white eyes in the shadows was not a typical behaviour of mine—that dream must have messed with my head more than I realized.

Joel shrugged. “All right, all right, whatever you say. Hey, you think the power’s going to go down today?”

That caught my interest. “Why would it?”

“You know, the storm.” Joel gave up all pretence of pretending to work and leaned on his broom, giving me the grin of a kid offered a snow day. “It’s finally gonna hit us today, and it’s not gonna be pretty.”

I groaned, remembering seeing a weather report earlier that week. “Man, I completely forgot about that.”

“It’s gonna be a real mess,” Joel continued. “If the power goes down, they’ll have to send us home.”

“Why do you want that?” I asked. “That’s a whole day’s work gone.”

“I could use an afternoon off.”

Despite my objection, I had to agree with him. A supervisor marched by and we quickly ducked our heads back to our work.

By early afternoon we could hear the wind howling outside, and most of the workers stayed inside the building during lunch break as walls of snow and hail beat at the windows. But the power stayed on, so I got through my full eight hours, plus two hours of overtime, and then headed out.

Stupidly, I had not brought a winter coat, figuring the weather had been fine the day before. Equally stupidly, I then elected not to take the bus and instead started off on the half-hour walk back to the apartment, pulling my threadbare sweater around my shoulders. My dumb Canadian pride assured me that I was immune to the cold and that the bus fare wasn’t worth it—the hail had stopped, how bad could it be?

No one else was out walking in the storm. Occasionally, headlights would light up the dense wall of snow and a car would inch past, ice crackling under the tires. Snow had swiftly devoured the sidewalks and streets, falling slowly but heavily. It was weirdly peaceful, and I might have taken the time to enjoy it if I hadn’t been so damn cold.

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I walked with my head ducked, hood pulled down over my eyes to stop the stinging flecks of snow. Soon I’d hit the edge of the highway, then I’d keep going east—

I stopped and looked up, suddenly overcome with the feeling that something wasn’t right. I didn’t know this road. The buildings were old and the streets narrow, some part of the city I’d never seen. The area was empty of human life. Thick snow flurries blocked out visibility like a fog, condensing under streetlights in yellow cones that seemed to stretch ahead forever.

I slowly turned around and started back the other way, wondering where the hell I’d taken a wrong turn. This was not the night I wanted to get lost in some abandoned suburb.

 I kept walking, but the street didn’t start looking familiar, and it didn’t cross anything I knew. The street names, when I got close enough to read the signs, were completely unfamiliar—Gwendolyn Street, Great Oak Avenue. The signs themselves looked like they’d been built about a hundred years ago, made of painted wood, black text on white.

When I looked up, the snow was too thick to see any landmarks, like the CN Tower, that might tell me which way I was facing. I was lost as hell.

Okay, maybe I’d missed a familiar street somehow. I turned around again, this time intending to fully investigate each street I walked past, when an intense sense of dread slid through me.

My eyes saw something, but it took my mind longer to catch up, to turn the shapes and colours into something that made sense.

Far down the street, something was standing under the streetlight. Cat, my brain suggested, seeing that it was an animal with long legs and an upraised tail. The… scale was wrong, though. To look that big the cat would have to have been relatively close to me, but the animal was standing all the way at the end of the street.

My heart started pounding double-time when it moved, unfurling a long neck with a pointed head. Two white eyes blinked slowly. It seemed to be scanning the streets, searching.

It hadn’t seen me. I shoved aside all questions of what the hell I was looking at for now, and started to ever so slowly move back the way I’d come. My instincts were telling me it was real, and very dangerous. Being a city boy, I was prepared for thugs or muggers, but not dangerous wildlife and certainly not giant freakin’ hell snakes.

I backed away into a side street, my whole body shaking, and I let out a breath once it was out of sight. I needed to find my way back to a main road, a place where people could help me.

I started at a brisk walk down the side street. The industrial district where I worked was right off of the highway; there was no way I’d gotten turned around this badly. It couldn’t be far.

But ahead of me were just… old-fashioned streetlights, carved poles and circular lamps, going on and on into the snow ahead. I’d never even seen streetlights like this in Toronto before, not in this area.

And just ahead of me—I suddenly flattened myself against the nearest building, back pressed into the rough brick. Another one of those creatures, dark as the night and standing directly underneath a streetlight. Beside the streetlight; it was taller than it.

How can this be happening?

This creature too turned its head to carefully scan its surroundings. Its white eyes abruptly settled on me.

 I froze. I had no basis for dealing with something like this. Maybe it wasn’t even hostile?

Its mouth opened, not like a snake’s jaw like I would expect, but halfway down its long neck, the whole length lined with sharp, narrow teeth. A shrill cry erupted from it and it bounded towards me.

Hell. No. I was running before I even decided to, full-tilt sprinting down the snowy street. It took all my concentration not to slip on the coarse ice.

The monster made no noise as it ran except the scratching of its claws against the concrete. In four staccato scrapes, it had almost closed the distance between us. I could sense it behind me, ready to strike.

I saw a narrow alleyway coming up to my right and skidded into it, scraping the palm of my hand and nearly falling over. I scrambled back to my feet and darted into a passage just a few metres across.

It couldn’t get in after me.  I hesitated at the far end of the alley, breathing hard. Could it? I didn’t want to wait around and find out.

I turned to keep moving, but as I did the world around me suddenly seemed to darken. A strange shifting feeling, like walking into a heated room from the cold outdoors, went right through my bones. It was like nothing I’d felt before, an almost electric jolt that started in my skull and shot down my legs. And I was suddenly aware.

My senses opened up. I could sense the shape of the alleyway around me, knew each twist and turn it would take before returning me to the street. And behind me—like something full of venom or acid, like a toxic stink—the monster was coming. I could sense it testing the alleyway with its shoulders, then jamming its body into the narrow passage.

The alley took a sharp turn to the right and I dashed around it. I could sense… up ahead, a fork, and then… just as suddenly as they’d come, my new senses were gone. I grasped after them feebly, but the shift was over. I could hear the creature dragging itself after me, keeping pace with my mad dash. In a panic, unable to remember the correct path, I took a right at the fork.

I skidded into another alley and felt my heart stop. It was a dead end. There wasn’t even anything to hide behind, no dumpsters or bags of trash.

I could hear the creature close behind me, sliding through the alleyway and blocking my only escape. I backed against the wall and let out a hoarse scream, half trying to scare the thing away like it was a bear and half just plain terrified.

It appeared, creeping closer. For a moment it stopped and we just looked at each other. Its weird eyes were strangely piercing, two bright flecks of white, intelligent and malicious. It lurched toward me.

“Stand back,” said a voice. I was against the wall and could do little else, but still pressed my back against the bricks.

Something big, though not quite as big as the monster, dropped down in front of me from above.

I had to shield my eyes. It seemed to be made of light—tiny, brightly shining plates made up its form, layered over each other like luminescent feathers. A long neck reared up in front of it, and two sweeping wings folded onto its back.

The hell-snake let out a hiss and pushed forward, hindered by its lack of space. The new arrival went straight for its throat, getting a grip and shoving it back through the alley.

As the hell-snake writhed, the shining dragon reset its grip on the monster’s neck and smashed its head into the wall. The monster’s shadowy body broke apart on impact, turning into a thick ink that splattered the walls of the alleyway.

The dragon turned to me. It reminded me of a gargoyle, almost, if one had been designed like a swan rather than a scowling gremlin. Long hind legs bunched beneath it, with a tail sweeping behind it. It used the back of a sharp-fingered hand to wipe the splatters of ink off its beak in a strangely human gesture.

It sought eye contact with bright yellow eyes, then spread its wings and lifted up and over the nearest building. It was swiftly out of sight.

I stared after it in shock, then slowly began to creep back through the alleyway, stopping when I came to the black sludge coating the ground and walls where the hell-snake died.

The wind was swirling the remains up in eddies, despite it otherwise looking like a slimy liquid. I grimaced and hurried past it, then kept going at the way I’d come. My swift walk turned into a jog and then a sprint. I had no idea what to do except get back to a main street, then try to figure out where to go from there.

This was not how I’d expected my day to go.

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