Chapter 2: Chapter 2: A New Frontier

“Fuuuuuck,” groaned Alice as consciousness battered her back to painful awareness. Icy pain stabbed at her head, and she was careful to not move too quickly. ‘Hangover protocols’, she’d always jokingly called them. Normally it involved ginger ale first thing in the morning. And sunglasses. Her head was swimming too much to recall just what, exactly, was causing the hangover, though Alice could dimly recall leaving for a weekend get-away. 

She never took alcohol on those trips. 

Alice’s eyes snapped open, blinking rapidly before settling for a bleary, pain-fueled squint. A long groan left her lips as she turned her head, taking in the surrounding environment.

And Alice blinked, unsure. 

She was conscious right? Not dreaming? 

Absolutely massive trees surrounded her. Like, redwood-scale large trees. 

Twisted, gnarled roots pierced the ground haphazardly, forming a veritable maze of dark wood and broken-up soil. The trucks didn’t ascend heavenward immediately, preferring a meandering path towards the light above. Presumably above—the tree canopy was blocking out all but the smallest pinpricks of sunlight. Alice was at least thankful for the lack of direct, brutal light to torture her head any further. 

It still begged the question; where the hell had she ended up? 

The twisted giants around her didn’t resemble any of the trees normally found near Anchorage in the slightest. She wanted to get a closer look. 

Alice tried standing up but was overbalanced by something on her back. Whatever she was laying on also seemed uncommonly difficult to get up off of. Grumbling, Alice grabbed at her shoulders and felt the backpack straps laying across them. Unbuckling the entire assembly, she shucked it off her back and tried to get up again. She was able to make it upright, but her legs weren’t quite cooperating and so Alice fell back atop her backpack. 

The failed attempt gave her a good look at what she was stuck in, and Alice was surprised to see stone underneath her. It had felt comfortable to lay atop, which really wasn’t normally the case.  Her pain-addled mind came to the conclusion that the stone had wanted her to rest easy. Somehow. She wasn’t going to question it yet. Her head still hurt too much to think hard about the nature of stones. Or their intrinsic character. Were stones normally helpful? Alice decided not to go any further down that rabbit-hole. The pain was getting more manageable, though. 

Alice rolled to the side, up and out of a depression in the rock. She shuffled to her knees and then, finally, upright. Her legs shook like a newborn deer, pins and needles racing along their length. 

Alice let out a long sigh, brushing small amounts of dirt from her clothes. She started taking stock of the situation, starting with herself. 

Her head still hurt, of course, but Alice tentatively ruled out any sort of head wounds. The pain was more migraine-like than concussion-like, and she didn’t have any bumps or tender spots. Her hair had slipped from its bun at some point and the dark locks had gotten a bit snarled, but that was the worst of it. She shuffled from one foot to the other, sensation coming back to her legs fairly quickly. Nothing felt wrong with her hands or arms, she could breath without difficulty, heart was still pumping along, joints still had full range of motion, though the return of sensation in her legs proved them to be oddly sore. Had she been running? 

Next, Alice checked her equipment, finding the common items she brought while camping. Holstered pistol on one side of her belt, hatchet on the other. Bear spray in a pocket. Rope looped across her body, odd because it’d normally be in the backpack. Durable jeans, leather hiking boots laced halfway up her calves, windbreaker with a fleece underneath, tank-top and bra. Everything seemed in order, so far as what she carried on her person was concerned. 

Next, Alice wanted to check on the stuff in her backpack.

 

“Huh,” she remarked while looking down at it, still laying where it’d been unclipped. No wonder she’d had difficulties getting up—there was a perfect impression of her body in the rock, almost like it had formed around her. The backpack got wedged pretty solidly in a deeper depression, perfectly surrounding it so that she lay flat in the body-shaped indentation formed by the stone.

It was weird, like the rock had turned liquid for a second before re-solidifying around her. 

Alice tried tugging her backpack out of the rock. It held fast. She ended up having to remove the tent separately in order to make enough space for both to come out. It had been packed up poorly, like she’d been in a hurry putting it away. Alice tried remembering what might have caused that and only got the vague feeling of distress and a resurgence in her headache. 

She decided to put off trying to remember what had happened for the moment, electing to focus on packing up the tent properly. Please, no more headache. It ebbed away again.

Inside the backpack, Alice found everything she’d expected. Food, some emergency water, her sleeping bag; which seemed to have just been shoved into the backpack. She rolled it up properly and set it aside. Three books, some first-aid supplies, tampons, extra socks and underwear, a pot and pan for cooking, fire-starting materials, multitool, and a flashlight. With extra batteries. Toilet paper as well. It beat wiping with leaves. Don't ask what happened to the discards.   

All her supplies were present and in good condition. Alice was able to remember eating dinner and finishing one of her books, but everything after going to bed was a blur, and trying to recall specifics sent ice-picks through her brain. She got the hint. Remembering bad.

She certainly recalled being in Alaska though, not wherever…this was. 

Alice sighed, knowing that dwelling on the hows and whys were less important than figuring out the whats. Like, what are the things to be wary of? What should she do next? 

She needed to figure out her next moves. 

“Alright, need a game plan. Game plan…” Alice mumbled, looking down at her freshly packed supplies. She didn’t have a single idea for any sort of game plan. 

Nothing was coming to mind. The situation was so far outside her experience of normal that it was throwing her for a loop. 

“Fuck then, nothing for it,” Alice remarked, stooping down to grab her pack. She swung it onto her back, fastened the buckles, and adroitly turned around. Then she was rendered speechless.

“...Oh,” slipped out. 

Somehow, Alice had missed the familiar stream of water happily burbling away behind her. It was glowing softly, and seemed extremely conspicuous. 

…Maybe she had hit her head after all. It was the only excuse for missing something so blindingly obvious. It was glowing. 

And except for the gentle blue glow emanating from the stream, it was clearly the same stream she’d passed at least a dozen times while camping in Chugach. Same J shaped bends and everything. Just, glowing. 

Alice could not understate how weird that was. There wasn’t anything she could see causing the glow. No rocks or fishes or radioactive algae, the water was just…giving off a steady, unwavering light.

She resolved to not drink any glowing water unless absolutely necessary. 

 

Recognizing the stream had served to fuel an important realization, though. 

Alice was still in Alaska. Thankfully. Probably. The campsite she favored likely would have been visible if it weren’t for the sudden inclusion of really big trees. Knowledge of her general location helped, and Alice felt a lot less lost. She could start figuring out what to do. 

Her truck was a few hours away by foot. Maybe more, with all the trees now in the way. There’d be a lot of crawling over roots taller than herself, just based on what she could see in the immediate area. The trees were also unusually close together for being so large. Normally an ecosystem wouldn’t be capable of supporting such a dense root-system. 

Then again, trees the size of apartment buildings didn’t normally spring up overnight. 

Something strange was going on, and Alice would rather be far away from it. 

Checking again that she had everything, Alice carefully scrambled off the rock and onto uncharacteristically dark and cold soil—another oddity. Normally there were a good number of rocks strewn throughout the Alaskan dirt, and it was paler in color. Not so anymore. Now it was fine and very developed, the sort of soil you might buy from a gardening center. It was damp, and her feet left deep imprints on the ground as Alice walked, following the stream for the moment. 

It wouldn’t bring her all the way back to her truck, but hopefully other landmarks still stood and could help. Like the mountains. If Alice could see them through the trees. There were also some boulders she’d always thought looked like a big train, and a particular lone spruce which had been struck by lightning a few years prior. Alice hoped they were still standing, and hadn’t been overtaken by whatever strangeness had so drastically changed the landscape of Chugach. 

 

Unfortunately, bigger issues cropped up before making it to any of those landmarks.

The stream veered off to the left. 

This was a Problem.

 

It hadn’t done that before. It should have remained fairly straight for about ten more minutes before flowing to the right, hugging the valley. This realization also clued Alice in on another thing she’d somehow missed. 

The water was flowing in the wrong direction. Towards her rather than away from her.  

Which…how?! Why!? 

Was it suddenly flowing uphill, somehow? Or had the gradient geography changed enough to affect which way the water was moving? 

Suddenly feeling a tad pissed off about the whole situation and tired of being in the dark about what was going on, Alice decided to continue following the river, regardless of the direction it veered off in or the way it flowed. She wanted to see where, exactly, it was flowing from. 

I can just follow the stream back to my starting point after figuring this shit out, reasoned Alice. It was a good plan. The best one she could come up with under the circumstances. Probably. It beat blindly taking off in the vague direction of her truck, stumbling around trying to find landmarks which shouldn’t have moved. 

The stream shouldn’t have moved. It shouldn’t have changed so drastically. Alice didn’t trust the new landscape to not throw any more curveballs her way. She eyed the trees suspiciously. They seemed…mischievous. 

Or maybe Alice had simply lost her mind sometime in the past day. 

…It would explain a lot, to be honest. She was feeling awfully scatterbrained. Like something had shaken loose. 

 

She shook the thought away and continued walking alongside the luminescent stream.

Hints of the Alaskan wilderness she’d known peeked out from beneath the soil and giant trees every now and then. Boulders which had been strangled by the aforementioned giant trees, whose roots wrapped around the stones without a care for them being in the way. Some of the grasses and moss most commonly seen in the area peeked out from shaded spots, hardy specimens of shrubbery and smaller bushes growing out of the rich, fine soil. 

Alice paused for a moment when she encountered giant paw tracks pressed into the ground. Evidence of roaming bears. It was nice knowing she wasn’t the only being still walking through the wilderness, but could’ve done without the knowledge that the car-sized wild animals were still around.

Thankfully, the tracks were going away from the stream. Alice wondered how the wildlife was dealing with such a changed environment. Were they freaking out like she was? Everything she saw only left her more wary towards this new, strange version of Alaska. 

The stream continued onwards and upwards, at least clarifying to Alice that it wasn’t actually flowing uphill. It was just coming from a different direction. Still strange, but not physics defying.

 

The ground turned rockier and more mountainous as the elevation increased, dark soil giving way to broken boulders and underlying stone. She’d found one of the mountains bracketing the valley she’d camped in, evidently. The stream got louder, flowing much quicker with the force of gravity behind it. She swore one of the rocks laying beside the stream must have been carved. Nature didn’t typically have ninety degree edges and straight lines. Alice was quickly getting used to not knowing what the hell was going on, though, and walked away from the odd sign of civilization. She continued following the glowing water further up.  

It culminated in a thunderous waterfall falling from somewhere higher in the mountains. Alice decided not to go any further. Disappointing, but she wasn’t about to climb up there just to satisfy curiosity and so Alice turned back around.

It was an interesting view. 

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The tree canopy was still higher up than she was, blotting out the sky above, and the thick, chaotic trunks prevented her from seeing any truly distant sights. But the way the glowing river cut through the trees, tumbled over rapids and roared through the forest…the waterfall behind her throwing out sparks of blue water like little fairies coming to earth…

It was beautiful. 

Strange, but beautiful. 

 

Alice still wanted to get out of the wilderness though, and so began the trek back down the mountain-side. It was always harder going down slopes than up them, especially with all her supplies on her back. All you had to do to go up was press forward. Balance, stability, and careful moderation of speed was required when going back down. 

Her calves were burning by the halfway point, just as that odd, obviously cut stone came back into view from behind a tree. It was as good a place as any to take a break. She was hungry. She wanted a sandwich. 

Her backpack hit the ground with a small thump. Alice stretched, arcing her spine to try and work out some of the kinks acquired by lugging around all her supplies. One of her joints popped and she let out a long, relief filled sigh. 

Sitting atop the cut stone, Alice dragged the backpack over to her lap. 

Her fingers had nearly popped open the buckles when the sound of snuffling reached her.

 

Alice froze.

 

It wasn’t a bear. 

It might have been worse. 

From between two great trees strode the largest moose Alice had ever seen. 

It wasn’t normal. 

Granted, moose were just terrifying animals to begin with. They were larger than the bears. Meaner, too, sometimes. Especially the bull moose during mating season, when they shed velvet. That happened around September, October. Being afraid of them during that time wasn’t a phobia, it was just simple logic. 

The month should still be July. 

Alice was looking at a bull moose with ribbons of bloody velvet dangling from its antlers. Crystalline veins crawled through the exposed bone, glowing an angry and painful looking red. Froth was dripping from the moose’s mouth. Scythe-like bones were growing from its legs, dripping blood. She couldn’t tell if it was from the moose or some unlucky, smaller animal. 

Alice could technically qualify as a smaller, unlucky animal. 

Careful to not draw any attention, she moved slowly, pulling out her bear spray. Hesitation stayed her hand above the pistol holster. Bullets might just piss the moose off. Sucking in a quiet breath, Alice drew it anyway. She supposed aiming for the eyes worked well enough with both bear spray and guns. 

Nothing moved. Except the moose. It had no respect for dramatic pauses. 

More snuffling noises echoed over the burbling stream, the moose trundling along. It seemed to be stepping fairly gingerly, and favoring a back leg. There wasn’t a visible reason for it. Its eyes were bloodshot and passed over Alice’s crouched form without recognition. One of its denuded antlers thumped against a tree trunk. Almost reflexively, the moose tossed its head to scratch more velvet off the antler. It tore a chunk of wood from the tree without any resistance, sending wood chips flying and a scoop of bark and gnarled wood soaring behind the moose. 

The moose didn’t pause, continuing on behind the tree and out of Alice’s sight. 

Another crunk drifted her way a few minutes later, and Alice knew the moose had made its mark on another tree.

She waited longer still, hardly daring to breathe. Moving might just send her spiraling into a panic attack. So she didn’t. 

Apparently the strangeness wasn’t limited to the change in environment. The wildlife had also been affected. Alice didn’t want to think about what could have happened to the bears. She really didn’t. 

She looked at her backpack, bear spray in one hand, pistol in the other, and decided lunch could wait. Alice needed to leave, right then and there.

She put away her meager defenses and hopped off the cut stone. Her legs were shaking a little. Walking off the nerves helped, and the shaking soon became the burn of a good workout. The stream was a good guide, providing light and direction. Alice didn’t drink from it, though. For all she knew, the water had been what changed the moose. She made a much quicker pace alongside it this time, eager to try and find those wayward landmarks pointing back to her truck. 

It seemed like there was more grass on the way back. The shrubbery might have been taller as well. Hopefully not. There was enough to worry about without accounting for accelerated plant growth. Her hatchet wasn’t exactly made for hacking through thickets of plant-life. 

And then Alice came across the lake. 

There wasn’t a lake there before. 

There hadn’t been any sign of a lake before. 

Just, suddenly, the trees opened up and a massive lake of glowing blue water greeted her. 

There were structures on the other side of the lake. Buildings. There were also really large trees growing through and around them. There shouldn’t have been anything like this in Chugach. And yet there was. It hadn’t been there two hours ago. There wasn’t any way for it to have gotten there.  

Fuck. 

Alice was really lost, wasn’t she?

 

She stared at the lake for a while. It probably didn’t realize how thoroughly it had cocked up her plans. Her goal of playing ‘find the landmark’ and driving off into the sunset in her truck, knocked off course. She wanted to scream at it. It had been a long day so far. 

Her backpack hit the ground. She dug lunch from its depths. Alice ate a sandwich while contemplating how screwed she was. A distant crunk underscored that train of thought. 

She put the sandwich wrapper in her backpack and dragged out a compass. The needle spun wildly, which was just typical. Her phone had no signal—which was expected in the wilderness—but stated it was just about noon. Her watch verified that time. She donned the backpack again and looked up at the sky. In Alaska, the sun never quite set during summer. It made figuring out east and west a bit more difficult. But north and south were dead easy. At noon, the sun would be biased towards the south. Midnight, it came from the north. Alice wanted to go west. The sun was to her left. She was on the lake’s eastern shore, then. So she’d need to skirt the lake and go straight off from the buildings across the way. 

That should put her on a path towards Anchorage. 

And if any familiar landmarks presented themselves along the way, Alice might be able to find her truck. It’d made the way back much shorter, even if driving between all the giant trees proved tedious.

…Plus, the mysterious structures really roused her curiosity. They might hold an answer to what was going on, why everything had changed so suddenly. And she’d been unable to see the source of the glowing water, what with it being up in the mountains. Alice needed a win, no matter how small. 

She started walking. 

And quickly realized the lake was larger than she’d thought. And that the buildings were both bigger and further away than they’d first appeared. It took about half an hour to make it to the south shore. The lake wasn’t a perfect circle and it took even longer to make it to the first structure. 

Its purpose was entirely obscured by the tree subsuming the walls and squeezing out the windows. A steeply angled roof was just barely visible up in the tree canopies, carried upward by the trunk growing at the center of the building. She couldn’t make out what the roof was made of. 

The walls themselves were stone, and no carvings were visible from the outside. It was just dull, pitted stone. Nothing truly remarkable about it, excepting the placement and the giant tree growing through it. Alice moved on.

A lot of the structures had been pretty ravaged by nature. Most of them weren’t really standing any more. Walls had been knocked over, roots tearing through stone and displacing vital structural supports. She looked into a mostly intact building. Everything in it had fallen to age instead, the wood in a table rotting unevenly. It had fallen on its side, a corner broken off. Alice decided to come back to that specific building if nothing else seemed promising. She’d seen larger structures from across the lake. One in particular. 

Things got larger as she went. It was like walking through the ruins of a small, old fashioned town. Something you might be able to see in Europe. Minus all the massive trees, of course. There were a couple of other oddities. The whole place looked as if everyone had simply gotten up and left, leaving the buildings to decay where they stood. She’d not seen any bodies to suggest that anybody had stayed. Thankfully. Alice didn’t know how she’d handle seeing dead people on top of all the other creepiness happening.

She found a cobblestone road, which suggested infrastructure spanning beyond a single town. Were there larger, similar ruins in the Alaskan wilderness now? Hidden among massive trees in pop-up forests? 

Alice trundled from building to building, slowly making her way to the grand prize. 

Finally, she turned a corner and there it was. A tall, stepped pyramid structure. It towered above the other buildings, and took up a lot more ground. It felt older than the town, too. Like the Parthenon rising above modern Athens. A relic from an older era. Unlike the Parthenon, this structure was mostly intact. The steps themselves were missing some corners, and the large stairs leading up the pyramid were worn down by the years, but it probably wouldn’t fall apart underneath her. 

The same couldn’t be said for other buildings in the town. Alice was hoping some sort of answer would find her inside the pyramid. Afterwards, she’d make her way east. It’d be simple as coming down the stairs and continuing straight into the forest. Easy. 

She started climbing up the ancient structure. The stair steps were several times larger than normal. Alice couldn’t be bothered to figure out why. It did necessitate practically crawling from step to step though, and quickly chased away any dignity she’d had. 

There were carvings cut into the stone railings on either side of the stairs, but the inscriptions had been too worn away to clearly make out whatever they depicted. Similarly, stylized statues waited at the top, as if guarding the structure. The basic shape spoke of birds, but one was missing a beak and the other its wings. 

The area at the top was open to the air. A stone table rested at the center. 

Alice sighed. She wasn’t any sort of archaeologist. She didn’t know what any of it meant. Not for sure. There wasn’t any sort of clear message waiting at the top. No clue pointing towards what was going on.

She’d need to head east, next. But she could also take a small break atop the old pyramid. Alice set her pack down and leaned against the table. She stared out over the lake, its glow much less noticeable in direct sunlight.

She looked up. Clouds chased each other over the horizon. The tops of giant trees stretched endlessly before her. Mountaintops broke up the green canopies, capped by snow. Birds flew through the new Alaskan wilderness. It all looked so unfamiliar and frightening.

The sky, though...

The sky seemed so open. 

 

‘Rejoice, Mortal! For I have chosen you as my vessel on this Earth!’

 

Alice shrieked and fell off the table. Her headache came back with a vengeance.  

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