Quest for the Thing from the Sky

Part Three

"The crown is from me," cackled a voice from behind them, and Raymond whirled to see. "Not the sky."

A wagon was careening through the air toward them, drawn by six rams that galloped through the dense gray clouds. The sky was looking like rain after all, and neither hunter had brought an umbrella.

The stranger had a wide-brimmed, floppy hat on, though, so he would be fine. He had a bushy red beard, and curly brown hair bursting from his scalp. His eyes were electric, twin green thunderbolts Raymond saw blaze from afar, which contrasted boldly with the red and gray rooster wings sewn onto his hat. He wore a golden sword at his side without a sheath, tucked into his belt beside reed pipes and some kind of mini tortoise-shell guitar. He held the reins in one hand and a staff in the other, which despite the distance Raymond could see was carved with many figures.

"I did not, however, make the star fall from the heavens. That power has never been one of mine."

"Who--" Julian started to ask, but the stranger cackled again and interrupted.

"No names--that ruins all the fun. The crown is a gift, and don't ask me why yet. It's the stone that I came for, but you two seem like you might like a bit of an adventure."

"Not really," Julian began, but then the goat-drawn wagon hit the earth and kept rolling. Now its wheels started to turn, but only for a moment, until the man with the reins pulled them taught, and the six rams stilled.

"Everyone wants an adventure--don't lie to yourselves. Here, I'll make you a promise. If you do this, I'll promise you both a bottle of golden fire. Humans like that; don't they?"

Raymond looked at Julian, then back at the man. "I have no idea what that is."

The man in the wagon snorted and hopped out. 

Raymond saw the man had goat legs then, but the stranger from the sky didn't give him much time to consider it.

"I have a task that the two of you might quite like to do, but you're both still so stuck in your own molds. You need broken out of that--the desert should give you some perspective."

He waved his hands, and the sky above lit with blue light. The clouds roiled, and then the goat-legged stranger roamed nearer to the site of where the stone had fallen.

"We got here first," Julian said, and stepped in the way. "Take the crown; we don't want it. The meteor is ours."

Raymond nodded. The hot stone was red-black, and if it was high quality, it still would be the same color when it cooled. The pitted rock was as big as one of the wagon-pulling rams, and heat came off it in waves. It would be worth at least thirty thousand to a collector--maybe fifty.

"You can have the cart when you go," the man said, as a silent blue thunderbolt erupted out of the clouds, and struck Raymond where he stood.

He fell sideways, but rather than hitting the ground, he flew, and by the screams beside him, Julian was with him. When he turned, he saw gold amid all the blue light, and he knew the crown was with them too.

They landed in burning sand, at the end of morning becoming afternoon. Raymond landed on his feet, but he careened forward after a great deal of toppling and collapsed into the burning grains before him.

"Where--" Julian started to ask, but Raymond interrupted him with a scream, until the other man seized him by the shoulders and helped draw him up off of the hot desert floor. If every grain of sand here was a soldier, the army would be the largest that the world had ever seen, and every one of them was on fire.

"Thanks," he said at last, standing again, in boots that the heat couldn't break through. He had bought these online for almost two hundred dollars; they were thick, black, heavy things, with laces that he had to tie twice if he wanted them to stay. When he'd worked as a cook to pay his way through college, he'd worn them as something non-slip for walking through kitchens, and when he'd evolved to being able to focus on school full-time, as a graduate student, Raymond bought himself a new pair. He never fell, not in winter freezes, spring thaws, or the very worst summer storms. He bought a new pair at every solstice, and each set lasted him six months.

"Where the hell are we?" Julian demanded again. "Who was that old man?"

"He was insane," Raymond pronounced, and looked around again. All he saw in the sky were far-off birds that he couldn't even recognize. One of the really high-up ones looked like a golden eagle, but that couldn't be right. Turtlebrook Hills didn't have birds like that.

It also didn't have any deserts, though. Maybe Raymond was in denial.

The bird made him look for Constantine, but he didn't see his falcon, nor Alpha.

"He told us he was sending us to a desert," Julian mused. "Maybe we're in Egypt."

"How do we get out?" Raymond asked, and then looked down, hoping for a trapdoor. When all he saw was sand, he pinched himself, but this was no dream. "Where's my bird, and your wolf?"

The hunter seemed to notice at the same time. A pain passed over his face as he passed his gaze around, but then he settled on something.

"We start with that," Julian said, pointing at the goat-drawn wagon that Raymond hadn't seen before. Six rams were standing there proud, awaiting orders from new owners. "Haven't you ever played a video game?"

The other man seemed excited--not at all upset about being sucked out of the real world and into whatever the hell this place was.

"There's a video game about this?"

"Not about it, no, but--look, we've been given a mysterious object." Here he held up the crown, where it gleamed even brighter. "We've been given a means of transportation and been told to explore. In every game I ever played, that was a good sign. Being allowed to explore means people put time into the game to really make it worth playing."

"But this isn't a game," Raymond cried, and his voice echoed well beyond him. Without a city around him, he'd never known how truly loud his voice could be. Now he heard it hit the horizon before disappearing where his eyes couldn't follow. "This was supposed to be a hunting trip--my first hunting trip. I'm not ready for this, for any of this."

"And you think I am?" Julian was calm, and quiet. "You think I know exactly what to do?"

"You're the survivor man! You can hunt, and you play video games. It seems like you know--"

Julian clapped his hands and interrupted. "I just do the things that I think I should. There's no door back to where we were--let me know if you find one. All I know is that some old man came down like Santa Claus from the sky, but with rams instead of reindeer, and gave us a shiny crown. Now I'm in the desert with Santa's sleigh just sitting here, waiting for someone to use it, and I'm going to, because all this heat is making me thirst, and I would hate to die."

"All that's very logical," Raymond spat back, "but right now I don't want to be. I want to find Santa and punch him in his liver-spotted face."

"Because that would make him want to send us home."

Raymond just gave Julian the evil eye then, and said nothing more. The other man ignored him, and started toward the wagon.

They had almost reached it when Julian leapt backward, sinking into a low crouch, and pointed toward a near dune.

"Is that--"

It wasn't hard to follow his finger. At first Raymond didn't recognize the little moving blur, but then he did, at the same time he remembered that the desert was full of more dangers than the heat and sand.

A lean, shaggy-haired lion was loping to the left--majestic and unbowed, the beast ran without fear for any creature alive, until it turned and saw them.

They were a feast waiting to be taken, and Raymond almost wet himself. The beast was only a hundred feet away, at the top of a golden hoard of sand, but that distance was closing fast. One pounce down the hill took away twenty feet, so soon it was only eighty, then sixty--

Julian remembered himself, though. He raised his rifle to his eye, and put a finger to the trigger.