Something was fundamentally wrong.

A sunny afternoon, with warm beams of light that bathed the woods in dappled yellow. The air was calm. There were the usual smells of a lazy day; warm soil and the hints of food cooking in another yard somewhere. The lake shimmered at the center of the neighborhood, and someone had brought a small raft out into the dark water on the far side to sunbathe on.

But Winterwing found himself disoriented, as if everything in the house—no, the house itself—had been picked up and set back down three feet to the left of where it should have been. Every intuition he had about the space, where things should have been, screamed wrongness at him, but he could not find actual fault upon inspection. It was all fine, it was all not fine.

It was in this state of confusion that he found himself in his parent’s entryway, in the light reflecting in glimmers from the lake, through the back windows. The little found objects of shared lifetimes gleamed around him. Glass figurines, clay ornaments, paper books that smelled of dust, wall hangings that were threadbare but carefully preserved in glass display.

He could not have guessed at the significance of most of the collection. These were the things his parents, and his mother in particular, found important. Most of it meant nothing to him, beyond the vague notion that he should have been impressed with the curation. The piece that caught his attention now was a replica of a star-chart that was suspended on the wall opposite the entryway stairs.

The old ones had believed in the power of the stars, had thought the sky an ocean traveled by heroes and beasts. The constellations made mythical creatures, an oral history that was ravaged, then salvaged, then put to fragments on paper. The creatures of the sky danced in the reflections of the afternoon light; horrific beasts with too many limbs and teeth large enough to eat the stars themselves.

The light from the windows was interrupted, accompanied by a creak of weight on wood.

For a moment, all he could see was the silhouette shape of his mother, silent and unmoving, the light of the lake dancing behind her. As his eyes adjusted and her face resolved, he could see an inexplicable anguish, some great conflict within her, and she stared at him as if she had come across something far more grizzly than a person standing in a foyer.

She looked younger, he thought. Another piece that didn’t fit, she stood perfectly in the wrong place, just as everything else around her did.

“What happened to you?” she asked. Was that her voice? It had been so long, he couldn’t remember. No, that wasn’t right, he had seen her the previous week. He should have been able to remember.

Winterwing could only return the stare for a moment.

What happened to him? He remembered staring at blurry ceiling tiles, listening to lot of people shouting over him. No, no, that was wrong, that was a long time ago. There was falling in the dark, yes, that was a long time ago, too, but also right now. The red vines. Fire. Cold. Forest? A moon? No, the moon, yes, no. A library.

There was that old instinct, the one he wasn’t supposed to have, where something internally tried to reach for a deep well of thought and memory. Nothing was there, and instead it was an empty space. No, not empty, that implied a space for an absence. It should have been there. Easy as flexing an arm. As easy as remembering to breathe.

Oh, shit, when did he last breathe?

His mother couldn’t explain it, but there was a stranger there before her, that she recognized but did not altogether consider familiar. A skin that resembled her son stretched over him. She was intimidated in a way he had never seen from her before. She was terrified and didn’t understand why. She could only intuit it. She would never have the words.

The house and the trees and the light and everything else was fine, just fine.

It was him. He was the impostor. He was what was so terribly wrong.

Distant points of red light appeared, like fires on a horizon, or maybe a thousand starred, bleeding eyes. The air turned steadily warm, then unpleasantly hot.

Winterwing came to realize that he was lying on his side, on a hard floor. He thought, at first, that it was his own floor. Maybe he had only been away from reality for a few short seconds, and drifting through slight cosmic terror had just been the result of his head striking the ground.

But, when he opened his eyes, he didn’t see the pastel colors of apartment walls, or the green glow of city lights filtering through the smartglass window. Nor could he find any of the reminders, the bits of clutter that marked a space as home. Instead, he was in a room of nearly equivalent size, bathed in shades of harsh, bright, nearly arterial red. The floor was the same color as the rest, metallic, and strangely warm against his cheek.

His head was a mass of dull ache, full of unconnected fibers and few complete thoughts. He struggled to come to an explanation, and couldn’t. He could not move, couldn’t even touch his face to see if the splatter of black bile had been imagined or was still there. A paralysis clung to his muscles and held him in terrifying stillness.

His hands were clenched into tight fists around something, maybe cloth. It was ripped from his grasp, and the sound of it came to him, distorted, as if underwater, or through a gale. He lay on that floor, unable to move his own limbs and trying to, drowning in the frustrating fuzz of half-waking, but everything came to sharp clarity when his brain told him someone was screaming his name.

He had grasped at Emily in that last moment before being subsumed in a floor that had become something else. Had, it seemed, managed to hold her all through the gray ocean where one forgot to breathe.

Something had just snatched her away from that grip.

He was able to see the movement out of the corner of his vision. He reached toward it, involuntarily jerky in motion, still sluggish, his limbs refusing to cooperate.

He tried his best to respond, but got as far as “Emil-” when a large, taloned foot smashed down on the bones of his outstretched hand.

“Spare me,” came a deep voice from far above him, irritated. He was effectively pinned in place, still on the floor, muscles unwilling to wrench free. He tried to look up, over his shoulder. He could not be sure, but it did seem as though the weight standing on him belonged to someone quite tall.

Winterwing tried to wriggle free with what strength he could find, and was just a little insulted when the person standing on him didn’t even bother to notice.

Instead, he heard an impatient “Well?” from above, that disregarded him entirely.

“This one is promising,” came the response, ancient and dry as deadwood found in a desert.

Winterwing twisted a bit in place, trying to catch a bit of context from anything, and could gather none that made any sense to him. The room remained a bright bloody red, the air and floor strange with uncomfortable warmth. There was a stinging smell that brought up memories of boyhood mistakes–the aftermath of fire–and something more subtle under it, that may have been rot.

The brightest point in the room remained Emily’s white feathers, upright but not exactly standing, toes barely touching the ground, arms outstretched at a strange rigid angle from her body.

She was alive enough to continue shouting, and gag when something cut her off.

Beyond her was a gnarled and bent creature, that was somehow wavering, an unsolid form. A face that resembled nothing so much as a dry, leathery skull. It gave off the aura of something truly ancient, held together by worn thread and arthritic joints, leaning heavily on an old staff. Tattered robes of blue and purple.

The gnarled body swirled, took a step closer to look at Emily’s face, and she could not move away, but might have flinched at the movement. She had given up on screaming, or perhaps had been prevented from doing so, and instead her body undulated with the telltales of wracking silent sobs.

“Healthy,” the creature concluded, standing as straight as it could. He turned his attention to the floor, just beneath where her toes dangled, thoughtful.

The weight finally lifted from Winterwing’s hand, his captor momentarily forgetting he even existed. “You’re sure this time?”

Winterwing cradled the crushed hand and tried his best to remain quiet.

“Arkimus kept very poor records of his experiments. This is the best of the candidates I’ve seen. I can start immediately.”

“You have spent a lot of time today, telling me about how it’s someone else’s fault you can’t produce results.” There was that shifting of weight from one taloned foot to the other, an apparent universal sign of impatience, and a lash of what, distressingly, appeared to be a tail. “You need to have some good news sort me soon, or—”

It was at this moment that Winterwing’s new, impossibly tall friend, deigned to finally peer down at him, and there was a brief moment of eye contact, which resulted in stunned silence from both parties.

Towering above Winterwing appeared to be the largest damned lizard alive. Having never actually seen a Saurian, it would take his sluggish brain a moment to find the right word. It was wrapped in polished armor, offset sit some bright ruby gems, and draped in a royal purple. The armor came to points, mirroring the large, bony crest on his head. If there was any doubt as to whether or not he had teeth was answered as his yellowed eyes narrow and the rest of the face turned to a snarl.

Winterwing was lifted to his feet by his collar with incredible speed, and then thrown back to the floor, between the two conversing parties, landing in the same useless heap he had started in. He was on his back now, squinting into the painfully bright light.

“Explain yourself!” his new friend demanded.

The second, ancient face came into view, cautious, frowning, perhaps a little flustered. “That is not my doing.”

“No?” was the shouted response. “You didn’t just bring that here, right in front of me, in the middle of my ship?”

The ancient one had no answer for this. “I parted the Weave for one, just one,” it protested.

“And yet, you couldn’t even manage that.”

“This is what happens when you rush me,” the ancient one answered, defiant. “I did not bring this here. I should investigate what did, that is evident. When I am done with the other.” And then, perhaps forestalling further argument, repeated, “When I am done.”

There was a tense moment of silence, and the light above was starting to blur in his vision, but Winterwing thought perhaps the last thing he would live to see was the taller of the two parties eviscerating the other.

Instead, there was a frustrated sound of a deep grumble, and a single syllable that may have been a name, might have been a command.

“With the rest.”

The dark was crawling back into his periphery, and the red pinpricks danced in the night beyond it.

“Separate, from the rest,” the taller corrected.

The light retreated entirely, but he had enough awareness left to realize he was being moved, maybe simply dragged. He knew he should put up some sort of resistance, but had absolutely nothing within him to draw from. Even if he literally could not move, could not keep his damned eyes open, there was a little unease, pooling in the bottom of his stomach, that told him he should have tried a little harder, and done a bit more than half-remember two syllables of her name before giving up.