Burnished-copper dust devils spiraled upward, thin tendrils of writhing chaos reaching to the heavens, barely discernable against the sand storm that raged beyond the ruins and well into the deadlands.

  Dry, sun-bleached bones speckled the arid dunes. Heat radiated from them, warping the air just above.

  A familiar scent that lingered just beyond recollection drifted on a hot autumn breeze, carrying summer’s farewell kiss through the ruins that lay beneath more than a foot of desert sand. The wind caressed Asher’s light brown hair, lifting it from his forehead, throwing back the hood of his charcoal gray cloak.

  He breathed deeply, trying to pin down the smell. It sparked the dark recesses of his memory, reigniting thoughts of his other life. Memories that had lay dormant for years. Mechanical sounds, nothing more than phantom echoes in the vaults of his mind. Engines roaring to life. Hood latches clicking open. The power of several hundred horses thrumming below his foot as he depressed a pedal.

  Oil. Or, rather, almost oil. The scent awakened the memory of oil, a resource that the Kingdom of Thane didn’t utilize in abundance, aside from soaking torch linens and boiling in cauldrons for the defense of fortifications.

  Asher shifted, taking another step towards the ruin. Broken fragments of structures jutted out of the sands, the bones of some long dead civilization that scratched at the edges of his memory in the same way the smell had. The area was foreign to this world, Asher's home for the last five years, but it was not foreign to Asher.

  Asher stumbled as a wave of dizziness washed over him. His stomach twisted into a cold not of nausea. He turned to the side and was sick, his body ejecting the meager rations he had subsisted on the last few days. He smiled as he straightened, ignoring the pulsing headache that was forming at the back of his mind.

  Eddies of gritty sand swirled around the half-buried, mostly deteriorated buildings. The storm approached. Asher raised his hood, wrapped a crimson scarf around his face and neck, and slid a pair of round goggles over his eyes. Wind tugged at his leathers but found to purchase.

  The storm roared in his ears, a cacophony of wind and grit slamming against crumbling cement structures with exposed bones of rebar extending beyond their deteriorated edges. Asher leaned into the wind and walked ahead, ignoring the screams of his horse, who turned and ran. He hadn’t bothered tethering it. It had served its purpose and would likely be consumed in the maelstrom.

  The ever-present specters of his past dug their icy fingers into his mind. He strode through the tempest, and for a moment lost himself in a storm of remembrance.

  He had come to this world in a storm, an antithesis of the current one. Biting, face-numbing frigid winds. Icy blasts of snow, sticking to his eye lashes and freezing, weighing them down and blurring his vision.

  The external cold had been nothing compared the empty, icy worm burrowing into his emotions, hallowing him from the inside. The clinical smell of the hospital had clung to his nose, almost as if it were trapped by the cold.

  Nurses and orderlies had warned, pleaded, shouted at him to stay, to wait out the storm. A Nor’easter for the history books, the weather channel reporter had been saying as he stood in the lobby, holding his little girl. Nessa. Vanessa. Baby girl.

  Her sickness had struck like heat lightning. Her temperature had spiked as the illness raged through her small body. No time was enough, but five years was a cruel joke.

  He had rushed her to the hospital, hours before the storm. Hospitals. Another corrupt branch of a festering society. Ultimately useless. Her breaths had come in gasps as they sat in the waiting room. The nurse told him it would only be a few minutes. He held her, screaming, as she fell still.

  A whirlwind of activity followed. Medical staff rushed into the lobby. She was placed on a gurney and they initiated CPR, attempted to defibrillate her. Too late. All too late. Three men in medical garb held him back as others tried to revive her. He screamed. Fifteen minutes had passed between him rushing into the hospital and Nessa’s passing. Precious time, wasted on bureaucratical bullshit.

  During it all, the storm hit, shaking the glass and matching Asher’s screams with arctic wails. She was so small, laying in the bed. He held her for several minutes, numb, before hospital staff pulled him away. They needed the room for others. They would be in contact about next steps. They.

  It began with a gentle flame, and with the burning in his heart came a return of feelings, of sensations. They led him to the lobby, where he passed an old woman complaining of indigestion. The nurse told her they had a room available and she would be seen. The gentle flame roared in his chest, a white-hot fury that seared all but one thought. They.

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  He hated them all. They held him back, or tried to. Asher was a strong man. Though he had studied as a biological ecologist, studying the way that life forms interacted and survived through that interaction, he had paid for his education with a sports scholarship. His rage burned through the tethers of self-constraint and he shoved the men away, knocking one out cold with a blow to the chin. A nurse had hurried into the lobby, a needle in hand. Others called for him to calm. They called for him to stop, not to leave the protective security of the hospital.

  He ignored them, running for the doors. The woman who had checked them in initially stood at the doors leading out, having just flicked a switch that locked their automatic opening function. He gripped each door, trying to pull them apart. Blinded as he was by the anger, the sense of loss, the affirmation of his long-held beliefs that society was a corruption, he didn’t notice the bolt that had been flipped down, keeping the doors together. He strained against the doors. They didn’t budge.

  The receptionist screamed as he lifted her. Her screams were cut short when she crashed through the glass door, becoming muffled moans. A shard of glass had caught some part of her body and crimson spread in the snow around her like bloody wings.

  Asher felt a hand on his shoulder, a pinch as a needle sank into his back. He lurched forward, past the bleeding angel and into the hoary blasts of arctic air.

  The rage burned as he ran. He felt a stinging discomfort and reached around, pulling the needle from his back. It was still full of some light amber liquid, though it was difficult to see with the flurries and ice accumulating around his face. He threw it aside, and the fury went with it.

  What remained was hollow. A familiar numbness, now cauterized to his soul. It was gradually replaced with a cold feeling, a sense of icy disassociation. They could have helped. They could have saved Nessa. His baby girl.

  His movements slowed as time progressed within the icy storm. He was so tired. He had wandered far from the hospital, down a winding road. The snow was up to his waist. He stopped, looking up at the tumultuous flecks of white twisting and spiraling in the air above.

  He sat down, fresh snow crunching under him and embracing him. The icy embrace changed, warmed. A rational side of his mind whispered that the warmth was not real. It was danger. Death. He didn’t care, pushing the idea away and finding comfort in the illusion of warmth that washed over him.

  It had been like blinking. He lay back in the snow, then he was sitting on a bench in a bustling medieval city. A bustling medieval society. He had looked around, confused.

  The next few days had been a blur. System notifications. Class selection. Realization. This world was worse than the one he had come from. Yes, humans were bad. Societies were corrupt, built upon greed and avarice. But this land, of beast men and magic, was worse. Everyone hated him, or looked down on him, or looked away. He was invisible at best, an unwanted pest at worst.

  His frozen heart chilled further, encasing Nessa’s memory in a layer of rime. For years, he struggled to survive. To eek out some semblance of an existence. In time, he met others of a similar mind. Whispered rumors reached his ears, and he had set off.

  There was something about this world. The fabric, which separated worlds and realities, seemed to be more receptive here. Thinner? He wasn’t sure, but off-worlders were common here, whether it be through death, portals, or some other means. It wasn’t just people that passed over.

  He threw up again. It was carried away in a fine mist by the roaring windstorm. The pain in his head had ramped up tenfold. He struggled to think through the pain as he approached a structure further in the ruins. It was a squat dome of solid steel. Asher placed his hand on the thick, circular locking mechanism in front of the door and struggled to twist it open as sand blasted the area.

  At first, nothing happened. His upper body bulged in a surge of strength. It still wouldn’t open. He took a different route, removing a black leather glove from one hand and placing his hand on the door to the side of the locking mechanism.

  Asher activated a special skill for his class, and absorbed a section of the door. Metal travelled from the door, up his hand and over his arm. It felt cool against the invasive heat of the storm.

  A small hole had formed in the door where he absorbed the material. He punched a fist of steel through the hole, widening it and breaking the lock bar with a resounding crack. He swung the door open.

  A trap door sat in the middle of a small room. He stepped inside and would have vomited a third time, had anything been left in his stomach. A familiar symbol was emblazoned in black on a bright yellow field, the sign stamped into the surface of the trap door.

  Three curved blades radiated from a central circle. He smiled as he approached the door. The text below the symbol was an affirmation.

  WARNING! NUCLEAR RADIATION!

  Yellow hazmat suits hung from the interior of the dome. At least half a dozen. He ignored them, approaching the trap door. He lifted it. A ladder descended into shadows far below. His skin emitted a gentle green glow as he activated bioluminescence, absorbed from fireflies, to provide illumination. His magic warped the glow, surrounding him in a halo of green light.

  Asher didn’t think of Nessa as he swung around and began descending the ladder into the darkness below. He thought of a cancerous society. Of they.