It felt like a stupid dream!
That kind that people experience on there first time falling for someone so hard.
just mixed with the madness of a new lover!
But it was real though!
He woke up. The first thing Mazen felt was cold.
Not the kind of chill Cairo nights sometimes carried, but a deep, hollow cold that settled in his bones, like the air itself was thin and wrong.
He groaned, his head pounding with a thick, sluggish ache. The ground beneath him wasn't concrete or dirt — it felt slick and gritty, like damp stone dusted with ash.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
And nothing made sense.
The sky above him was colored in deep reds and purples, streaked with veins of black cloud that twisted like moving ink in water. A massive, pale moon—three times the size of the one he knew—hung low on the horizon, scarred with jagged, dark craters.
The air shimmered, carrying a scent like burned wood and wet earth.
Mazen pushed himself up onto one elbow, wincing as his muscles screamed. His chest heaved as the panic set in.
Where… where am I?
He scrambled to his feet, boots crunching on the strange stone beneath him. All around stretched a dead, alien wilderness. He even saw The land rolled in jagged hills and cracked plains, dotted with pale, leafless trees whose blackened branches clawed at the sky. Rivers of faintly glowing silver light snaked through the valley below, and somewhere far off, a distant howl split the silence.
It wasn't a dog.
It wasn't anything human.
Mazen Felt true fear for the first time in this world.
He didn't even know it was a new world, not the earth he used to be on.
The wind here felt alive — it hissed and whispered past his ears, carrying words he couldn't understand but felt in his body.
A sudden pulse of nausea swept over him. He staggered, bracing himself against a jagged rock.
His heart pounded.
This wasn't a dream.
This wasn't Earth.
And Shina—
His mind started to remember what happened earlier with the portal.
"Shina!" he called out, voice cracking.
He assumed that she might have been pulled after him
But he found no answer.
The only response was the dry rustle of weird wind around the place.
"Shina!"
Mazen's voice cracked through the dead, open air.
It barely carried. The sound seemed to hit a wall a few meters out and dissolve into nothing, swallowed by the oppressive silence of the place.
He turned in a slow, frantic circle.
"Shina!" he shouted again, louder this time, voice hoarse.
Nothing.
No footfalls.
Not even an echo.
No sign of her presence!
Just that terrible, endless stretch of strange land and a thick, suffocating air pressing down on him like a weight.
He went thinking deeply. He could still see her in his mind — that split-second before the tear pulled him under, her eyes wide, her hand hanging to something resisting the ultimate pull force of the gate, the look on her face…
He gritted his teeth.
No. She had to be here. Somewhere.
Mazen started moving, stumbling over uneven stone and brittle tufts of strange, colorless grass. He half-jogged toward a rise in the ground, nearly slipping on loose gravel.
At the crest of the hill, he looked down.
Nothing but wasteland.
He was terrified after seeing the bones of a corpse hanging on a leafless skeletal tree.
Twisting rock pillars and distant, unearthly rivers of light. Far away, jagged mountain shapes loomed, black against a bleeding sky.
He cupped his hands around his mouth.
"Shina!"
Again — only silence.
Panic prickled at his skin.
What if she didn't make it?
What if the portal didn't pull her here?
what if it did already and she is wandering around feeling just like me?
What if it tore her apart?
He squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to take a breath. It came sharp and cold.
No answers. No clues. Just empty, unfamiliar land, and the relentless feeling of fear from the unknown.
Something close.
The landscape stretched endlessly in every direction — cracked, dark stone and patches of sickly, grayish grass. Gnarled trees, black and leafless, rose from the earth like skeletal fingers.
Mazen moved carefully, his steps crunching on loose gravel. The ground beneath his feet was strange — soft in places where it should've been firm and vice versa, almost like something was shifting just below the surface.
A pale mist clung to the ground in certain hollows. When it drifted past his legs, it left a faint, terrible cold burn on his skin.
The wind carried no scent of earth or rain. It smelled of ash, of smoke, something sharp he couldn't place — like really old blood in a forgotten room.
And the world… it moved his heart in fear.
Not visibly. But Mazen could feel it. A subtle pulse beneath the stone, a rhythm just beneath the edge of sound. Like the land itself was breathing.
There was something wrong with this land.
Everything was wrong with this exile-like place.
He crouched beside a jagged rock, pressing his palm against it.
It was warm.
Too warm.
Finally, something feels fine in this madness.
He jerked his hand back.
A low, distant rumble rolled through the ground beneath him. Not thunder—not the growl of a beast—something deeper. Older.
Mazen shuddered and straightened.
And then a sensation crept through him. An itch between his shoulder blades. A flicker at the edge of his senses.
As if the shadows in the crevices of the rocks weren't just shadows.
As if the night air whispered in a tongue too ancient for his ears to understand.
And… something inside him answered.
A subtle, instinctive awareness. A pulse beneath his skin. Not power—not yet, but a flicker. A tether to this place. As if the land itself recognized him.
It felt nice but weird and scary at the same time.
He clenched his fists, forcing the sensation away.
I have to find her.
He glanced once more to the horizon — toward a crooked ridge where strange rock formations twisted into sharp spires.
And something moved between them.
A flicker of pale yellow eyes in the dark.
Mazen's breath caught.
The pale yellow eyes blinked once in the darkness between the spires.
Then again.
Closer.
Mazen's pulse hammered in his ears.
He stepped back instinctively, his foot crunching on loose stones. The sound was loud — too loud in the unnatural stillness.
A low growl drifted from the shadows.
Not the growl of a dog, or a jackal.
This was wet and thick, like gravel grinding in a throat made for killing.
A shape slunk into view.
It was canine in form — long, sinewy limbs, matted fur the color of burned wood, and a mouth too wide for its skull. Its back was lined with jagged spines, and its eyes glowed an unnatural, jaundiced yellow.
Saliva hung from its open maw like strands of thick rope.
Mazen's life became in the first true danger in all his life.
Moving.
He turned and ran.
The creature snarled — a guttural, broken sound — and bounded after him, its movements disturbingly silent across the jagged stone.
Mazen dodged between crooked boulders, heart racing. The ground blurred beneath his feet, his lungs burning more with the cold air as he ran for more time.
A flash of movement to his right.
Another one.
Two.
Three.
There's more.
The creature lunged. Mazen felt claws rake past his side, shredding the edge of his jacket. He threw himself forward, rolling across sharp, gritty earth, and scrambled behind a slab of cracked stone.
His mind screamed for something to fight back. Anything.
The wolf-beast rounded the rock, teeth bared.
And something inside him cracked.
A flicker.
A cold pulse that wasn't fear.
something struck the wolf suddenly
a thing like dark spear.
Black luminous threads rose up through his whole body like a living thing, sharpening his senses, making the world slow for a split second.
The shadows thickened around the base of the stone. They moved — not by wind or light — but by something else.
And in that moment, the wolf lashed out.
A ripple of darkness, thin as smoke, flickered from the ground, slamming into the creature's side.
The beast yelped, knocked off balance.
Mazen staggered back, panting, his vision swimming.
"What… what was that…"
The wolf-creature regained its footing, now cautious, circling.
And then — a figure emerged from the mist behind it.
Tall. Masked. Cloaked in weathered gray.
A sword gleamed in one hand.
The man moved like a storm.
One clean stroke.
The wolf-beast's head dropped to the earth, its body slumping beside it.
The stranger lowered his blade, the mist curling around him.
"Stay down, boy," the man growled, his voice low, rough, and unreadable. "You're not dead yet."
The man stood over the creature's corpse, his sword dripping black ichor that hissed where it touched the ground.
That black ichor was the beast's blood.
Mazen was completely speechless with all of this crazy reality.
he pressed a trembling hand to the rock beside him, trying to slow his breathing, his chest still tight with adrenaline.
The stranger turned, eyes hidden behind a simple, blackened mask marked with twin slashes of crimson paint. His cloak, tattered and ash-gray, hung around him like a storm cloud.
For a long moment, neither spoke.
The only sound was the faint hiss of the dead creature's blood seeping into the stone.
Finally, the man sheathed his sword.
"You're either stupid," he growled, voice low and rough as gravel, "or new here."
Mazen swallowed hard.
"I… I don't know where here is."
The man's head tilted slightly, as if weighing the honesty in those words.
"Of course not," he muttered. "Didn't think you would."
He crouched beside the dead beast, running gloved fingers through its fur, pulling free a long, needle-thin fang. He tucked it into a leather pouch at his belt.
"This place is called Lumadion near the southern kingdom," the man said without looking up. "And you, boy, just walked into a graveyard."
Mazen's stomach twisted. The name meant nothing to him, but the weight behind the words did.
He forced himself to stand.
"I'm looking for someone. A girl."
The stranger's eyes behind the mask met his. There was a flicker there — a recognition, or perhaps a warning.
"Then you'd better move fast," the man replied. "The blood in this land isn't patient. And neither are the ones who hunt in it."
He turned away, already moving into the mist.
"Wait," Mazen called after him, voice catching.
The stranger paused.
"What do I call you?"
A long silence.
Then:
"Shadow, Shadow of the North."
And he vanished into the darkness between the spires.
Leaving Mazen alone, the dead beast at his feet, and a landscape of endless blood-colored sky.
To Be Continued...