“Can you not just stop for two minutes? You’ve had your head buried in that book since we lit the fire. Jeez, you too — get off your damn phone, man,” Bahador said, stoking the fire with a dead twig.

  This was supposed to be a break. Some time to unwind. A few beers under the stars without the distractions of work or home life. But since pitching the tents and Bahador getting the fire going, Tyler had been glued to his notebook, working away. Matt had been trying to get a signal on his phone, and Craig — well, he’d just disappeared.

  “Give it a rest yourself, just trying to get a signal. I had a bar earlier.”

  “What, a signal so you can play Wizards and Gnomes? You’re addicted to that game, man.”

  “It’s Wizards and Witches Online, actually, and I’m not addicted. I was just going to check on my auctions, maybe check the patch notes. Do you know they’re introducing a new warlord class? It’s—”

  “Ha! See, addicted. What do you think, Tyler?”

  Tyler lifted his head from his notebook, snapped out of his focus by hearing his own name. “What? I was just—”

  “Come on, you two. We only have tonight left. The tents are all up, the fire is going, and the beer is chilled. Can we not just leave everything else until tomorrow?”

  Matt pocketed his phone, chewing the inside of his lip, while Tyler was back to reading his notes, switching off halfway through Bahador’s sentence.

  Bahador reached inside the cooler next to him, picked out a tin, and was just about to launch it in the direction of Tyler when Craig came through the trees, a goofy grin on his face and a few twigs sticking out of his messed-up hair.

  “Here, give this to that workaholic over there, will ya,” Bahador said, passing the can to Craig. “Might pull him away for a while.”

  Bahador flung another can to Matt, handed an extra to Craig, and pulled one out for himself before closing the cooler and using it as a footstool. With everyone no longer distracted, they all opened their drinks at the same time, took a long sip, smiled at one another, and laughed, each sighing in turn.

  This was a regular monthly outing for the four of them — a few beers under the stars with some nice food. It always started out this way, but once the beers began to flow, work and games were left to one side, and they started to enjoy each other’s company.

  “So, another date, eh, Craig?” Matt said, a sly smile forming on his mouth.

  “You been on the dating sites again? Come on, fill us in on all the details,” Bahador said, sitting up.

  Craig turned to Matt and gave him a look that, in some cultures, meant I’m going to bloody kill you for this, and said, “Oh, not much to say really. Went for a coffee, chatted, but… well, you know. Nothing quite there.”

  Matt spluttered his drink from his mouth, some coming from his nose as he tried to get the next few words out. “Not much there? I think you’re selling this story short. Go on, tell them about the birds.”

  Craig just sighed. “I met up with a lass called Sally. We’d chatted for a while, she seemed nice, so I asked her for a coffee, and we met at Costa. Everything was going fine until she mentioned the storm last week. You know the one — flooded the lab. Well, she said she saw a flock of birds flying in the thunderstorm, and when they got close to the black clouds and lightning, they formed this V-shape. Then she went on to explain that birds do this because the bird at the front of the V will get struck by lightning. It then travels down all the other birds and dissipates the lightning across all of them, so they don’t get fried.”

  Matt didn’t get the response he wanted. There was just silence as everyone took the story in. If a tumble weed had been present it would have blown by.

  Bahador spoke first. “So, this Sally — what does she do?”

  “She’s a technician over in the Edmunds buildings.”

  “Not for much longer,” Matt laughed.

  All eyes looked over at Craig.

  “Okay, so there have been a few complaints about her work and she’s up for review.”

  “Complaints?”

  “Yeah. Others have complained she keeps using the staff dishwasher to clean out the test tubes and petri dishes after they’ve been used.”

  “Did you ask why she did this? I mean, I bet there’s some nasty chemicals there.”

  “I did; I did. She just said, ‘What do they expect me to do, wash them by hand?’”

  Matt started laughing. “Well yeah, that’s what you get paid for. Tell them about the jewellery — go on, go on!”

  “I’d much rather know how Cathy is doing. Seen her lately?” Craig said, trying to steer the conversation towards something Matt would not like to chat about.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Oh, well—”

  “Shh. Do you hear that?” Tyler said, standing up in a crouch with his finger to his lips. “I think there’s something in the trees.”

  Matt tried to jump up from his camping chair but failed and tipped backwards his drink falling all over him. All eyes turned to him, a little chuckle coming from Bahador at the sceptical.

  Tyler helped Matt up to his feet, where Matt saw a fifth person standing off to the side, who was simply massive—and old, very old. He pointed, and everyone else turned to see.

  A man closer to seven feet than six, thin, maybe in his late eighties, stood before them. His clothes were layered around him, white and reflecting the firelight in dull reflections. He had no boots or shoes on and looked like he had been in a bit of a scuffle, with small cuts to his face, hands, and feet.

  He stood there without speaking, slowly looking at each member of the camping trip, the noise of the small fire roaring in the stillness. It was Tyler who spoke first.

  “Hi, are you OK? Can we help?”

  The stranger stood still for a while, changing his focus to Tyler. It was another minute before he responded.

  “Interesting indeed.” The words formed unnaturally in his mouth, as if he was trying to wrap his tongue around each syllable. Everyone looked at one another, wondering where this strange giant of a man had come from.

  Matt, now a little soberer and reclaiming his chair, spoke next—more so to disguise the clean-up of evidence from his fall moments earlier.

  “Yeah, we’re pretty interesting alright. So, what brings you along this way? Where you been?”

  “I was… outside,” he said slowly. “Then I was… inside. I followed a—” His gaze flicked upward, through the canopy, as if he could see past it. “What is this place?”

  Bahador gave the group a wide grin and stood up. “Here, take a seat,” he said as he tried to guide the man to his chair, but it was more like a child trying to move their parents than him actually helping.

  Once the man was sat down, Bahador turned to the rest and said in a whisper, “I think we need to get some help. He might have been attacked or something.” The rest of the party nodded along like kids at a pantomime.

  “No, thank you. I am not in need of any help. If I can just sit and talk for a while, that would be great.”

  Matt, Tyler, and Bahador then copied what Craig had been doing all this time and just froze, looking at the man, wondering what the hell was going on.

  “I am just travelling through, but I find it very strange. The aether is extremely low here, and it seems like you do not interact with it at all. I myself am finding it hard. Oh, I see, I see. You do not have the required organs.”

  This confused the group even more, but Tyler, always wanting to find the solution to a problem, engaged in conversation—much to everyone else’s confusion.

  “Aether?”

  “Indeed, it is. what makes the universe run, the very energy of everything. But here it is very limited. I wonder if there was none at all until your metal vessel broke out.”

  “Metal vessel? Broke out where?”

  “Not too far beyond the planetary bodies of this system. There were some markings on the side. Let me think—words, new and all that—yes, that was it. Voyager. It pierced the Verge and made a tunnel I was able to pass through.”

  Matt got his phone out and started holding it up against the night sky, trying to get a signal.

  “So that would make the Verge here, right?”

  The old man nodded his agreement.

  “Come on, Tyler. Don’t do that. You can see this man needs some help,” Bahador said.

  “Thank you again for the concern, but I am quite alright. Just getting my bearings is all. The aether seems to be getting thicker; I can feel it increasing.”

  “See, Tyler, I think we might need some medical help. You can hear what he is saying.”

  “Ah, I see your concern now. It would be like you explaining sight to a blind person—they would think you were mad.”

  Bahador turned around to look at the old man, confused. Then he looked at Tyler, his eyes bulging, trying to convey meaning through them.

  “He is right, Bahador. Just think about it. If a person is born blind, what do they see?”

  “Really?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “They see black. Just blackness all the time!”

  “No, you are wrong,” the old man laughed.

  “That’s right, you’re wrong. You wouldn’t see blackness—you would see nothing.”

  “Either I’ve lost the plot, or you planned some elaborate joke here. Teaming up with a stranger out of the woods, saying people see nothing—seriously?” Bahador said, now getting annoyed.

  “I haven’t planned anything. I am just agreeing with this gentleman. Here, I’ll show you. Say you are born blind—no eyes at all—then you would see nothing. Better yet, imagine you have an eye on your elbow. Now try and look out of that eye. What do you see? Not from the eyes in your head, but the imaginary eye on your elbow. Move your arm about, change view—what do you see?”

  Bahador did this slowly at first, then slightly more animated, as the anger in his face relaxed and realisation fell on him. He could indeed see nothing.

  “Now imagine if there were an aether, but you lacked the organ to interact with it. What would you feel?”

  “I see. I see what you are getting at but come on. He just appeared out of the woods. He looks like he’s been in some sort of altercation, and he starts talking about the aether.”

  “Oh, I am sorry. Let me introduce myself. I am E’lamn. And yes, I was in a little bit of a scuffle, you could say. I was tracking some prey, but I underestimated it and things didn’t go quite how I had hoped. But it all turned out fine in the end.”

  “You don’t look like you’re kitted out for hunting,” Craig said a little too loud.

  All eyes turned to him in astonishment, as if he had just turned up from nowhere. He returned the blank stares and just shrugged. “Well, he doesn’t. Just look at him.”

  They all again turned to look at the old man, but he was gone—as if he had never been there at all.

  “Where did he go?”

  “E’lamn?”

  “Elam?”

  “Old weird bloke?”

  They all spent the next few minutes shouting and looking around their campsite for the visitor, but he was nowhere to be seen. After about ten minutes, they gathered back at the dying campfire, all looking a little confused and very tired.

  “Well, I still can’t get a signal, so there ain’t much point trying to get in touch with someone now. I say we call it a night and just let the park ranger know in the morning that there is some weird old man hunter in the woods.”

  Tyler sighed. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. But I’m going to have to agree with Matt.”

  “You mean agreeing with Matt, not the situation.”

  “Of course. I mean E’lamn was at least interesting”

  Tyler, Bahador, and Craig all started chuckling to themselves as they headed off to their tents, leaving a wounded-looking Matt standing there, staring at his phone, still with no signal.