Aregoria: Book 1 - The Return of the Dragons

Chapter 1

Portals and Wonderings

At eighteen, Rafael had wondered into more worlds than he could count. He kept track of every single one of them. He had books covering every single world in all the known solar systems, but there was only one that he called home.

Aregoria.

The world he was on now was a dark and shadow world of rocks and erupting volcanoes. It wasn't a place he would come to visit again but he wanted to give the world some hope. There was no food on this world and no clean water that he could see. He decided he was going to help them by giving them some things from his own world that he knew would help them.

He carried a water cleaning device, vegetable and fruit seeds in his satchel. He was going to find someone on the world that could be trusted to share the knowledge before he left it and went home.

He walked the stretch of barren land. Scanning the area carefully he found that the ground was covered in large quantities of salt. There was no other excavation or planting done to this land for more than fifty sions. He moved the scanner he carried over the salt rocks and read the data carefully. Sions was the cycle of time that the world experienced. A day had more than 24 hours in it; this world had 26 hours to its days. It meant longer nights and longer days but it worked for them.

The night he knew could become cold and ice would form on the ground. The ice could be collected for clean water but he doubted many would do so since the temperature of the world was almost arctic.

Rafael found no animals and no men or women anywhere on the planet. The more he walked the more desperate he got. He stopped 20 kilometres from his entry point and made a fire with some dried wood he found on the ground. The fire lit quickly and turned blue, the flames that licked the wood purple. He made notes in his small bound leather book his Aunt Prinnie gave him and noted the oxidisation of the planet made flames and fire that he was used to on his home world an different colour. He would go more into the chemical compounds of the fire at a later date but right now he had to focus on finding someone to give his seeds and water device to.

If there were any people living on this world, he was sure that their numbers would be dwindling.

As he warmed his hands against the blue flames he closed his journal with his quill inside. He poked the charcoal pen in his right hand and wet it with his tongue. Opening his journal again he started to write profusely about what he saw and experience on this world. His scarf was tied around his mouth to keep the dust out. He pulled it down just below his chin so that he could take a quick whiff of the air.

Dry, icy and dust. He scrawled.

Nothing would grow here on this planet. Was he to assume that there was no life here and just leave, or should he keep going until he found something.

His Aunt Prinnie told him not to stay away for too long. He had school. It was his last week and he still needed to go through their towns "graduation ceremony". All the ceremony was of his teacher handing him a handwritten diploma that said he had completed a standard education to the highest ability of the educator. But even that was limited. Controlled. Rafael preferred to be learning about the things on other worlds. He wouldn't be able to do it full-time until he graduated and could seemingly spend all his time at home. No one knew he went off world on his own for weeks at a time. When there was no more school, Rafael was away on other worlds for months. He would lie to the teacher and tell him that he had done the readings and wrote his papers. But what he was really doing was meeting otherworldly people and helping them on a cauldron berry farm or even helping a civilisation with their new baby dragons. He had better things to do with his time than to just do what the educator had assigned him to.