At first, I felt a growing pressure under my skin. My magic pulsed and tried to seep out of my pores. It was humming. Nothing around me seemed amiss. The owl hooted. The dark silhouettes of bare trees were still. Shadows moved lackadaisically under the swing from the glow of the porch light.
Yet something felt wrong. The pressure increased and the air pressed back on my skin, making it hard to expand my lungs and breathe. My magic responded with equal force pressing back outwards, protecting my bodily integrity.
Suddenly, a resounding crack boomed through the air, ringing in my ears, and temporarily making me deaf. A blinding flash of light followed along and, as my hearing recovered, the distant sound of agonized screaming.
I found myself on my feet, the mostly full second bottle of wine glugging a red stain across the porch. My heart pounded in my ears as I scanned the yard and trees for some explanation.
My eyes lit upon a group of people standing in the overgrown grass next to the driveway. They hadn’t been there a moment ago. A loud buzzing filled the air and made my skin crawl.
Two men stood in front. They had wings extending from their backs. Six other people stood next to them. Shouting off to the side of the group caught my attention. Five winged men knelt with their hands cuffed together in metal. My gaze pinged to each person as I stared with my mouth open.
The two people standing in front of the group appeared to be gasping from exertion. I tripped down off the stairs to the porch and stopped twenty feet away. The men at the front caught sight of me.
“Kiamara?” one asked.
I swallowed and tried to blink away my wooziness from the wine.
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I flared my wings, realizing as I did that they had opened out of my back of their own volition. My magic roared to life under my skin. I struggled to prevent it from rushing into the air around me.
Other magic wrapped around me and wrenched me forward to stand directly in front of the two men.
“Wha-?” One of them placed his hand over my mouth to prevent me from further vocalization.
I thrashed in surprise but the two held my arms as they debated something intensely with each other in a foreign language. The one shouted over the other, clearly losing his patience and gesturing angrily at the handcuffed people with his free hand. The other evidently capitulated.
I yelled at myself in my mind to kick them and free myself or use my magic to throw them off me but couldn’t move out of my shock.
The buzzing grew louder. I felt a growing gathering of power. I tried to reach to it and understand what was happening, but I didn’t know how to interact with it. The men yelled at me, clearly commanding me to desist. I was unable to offer even token resistance. The magic began to swirl around us, closing my vision to a circle including the fourteen of us.
Two of the handcuffed people on the ground began screaming and crying. The others were silent.
One by one they groaned and fell over, disintegrating to dust. My mouth fell open. As each died, the magic swirling around us expanded exponentially. The six people beside us shouted something and made a complicated obeisance to the two men holding me. Then they too fell over and disintegrated to dust. The buzzing heightened and then abruptly stopped. The swirling magic increased in power by orders of magnitude.
My magic burst out of my skin, pouring out of me toward the two men despite my efforts to control it. I tried to pull it back, but my attempt had no effect on the tide.
The power swirling around us was heady and terrifying. It was so vast I could barely perceive the extent of it. My mind swept along with the storm, completely out of my control.
I could feel the men directing the magic into a shape. The conglomerated power snapped outward an incomprehensible distance and then pulled space-time into a fold. Little by little it resolved into a glowing sphere. The vague outline of a field appeared in the center.
The men marched me toward the sphere. My feet followed the movement of my body before I could form the thought to resist. It felt as though the thing was dragging me toward it, pulling on something deep inside me. We stepped over the threshold and reality ripped.
Our physical presence on Earth detached and time spun. My magic exploded in all directions as I screamed.
After a period of time that felt like two seconds and a thousand years, I became aware that the two men were struggling to control the shape of the magic. It flickered and fought their commands.
We moved forward as if through molasses, one heavy and searingly painful footstep at a time. The connection to Earth behind us severed. The end of the tunnel the men had created whipped amok. Darkness reigned. I lost all feeling in my body but for an incessant tugging forward.
I instinctually clung to the solid feeling of our destination in front of us and pushed toward it. I felt with each tiny movement I moved unimaginable eons and distance. My sense of the cohesiveness of the whole of myself began to waver. I pushed harder toward the destination, growing terrified of being lost in pieces in time and space.
The men by my side released any magical control they had over me. I sobbed once, then reached forward with my magic. I focused exclusively on moving toward the destination. As the tunnel in which we moved crumbled behind us, I felt the men try to climb over me. Despite being blind, deaf, and numb, I shoved them off me using the ghosts of my arms and a flail of my magic.
One of their minds reached out to mine and attempted to take my magic and my life to fortify the tunnel. I screamed again, although it made no sound in the endless black, and fought back, stabbing at him with my magic though I had no idea what I was doing.
I felt him fall shrieking out of the side of the tunnel and then my awareness of him was gone. The other man pushed forward, and I followed. He slowed and I passed him. The crumbling of the tunnel behind us caught up to him and I felt his screaming in my mind as he fell backwards out of it into the unknown.
I pushed toward the end as hard as I could as the tugging forward intensified. I held my hands out, propping up the tunnel with magic, and leaned forward, grasping for the reality I could feel ahead of me. The void pressed in on me. I couldn’t quite reach the bright exit, my fingers too slow, the fabric of the darkness too thick to tear through.
The tugging rose into an incomprehensible power that caught my mind, yanking me forward, ripping through the membrane between me and the reality ahead of me.
Then I was tumbling downward while the void of space tried to suck pieces of me away into nothingness. My hands grabbed grass. I wrenched myself into reality with the last of my magic. A great snap shocked my body and echoed in my mind. The sound of thunder and a blinding flash reverberated and then everything went black.