"The Veil does not bring people by accident. It has never brought anyone by accident. When the compass moves, it moves toward something necessary."
— Nyx — age unknown, possibly lying
The first thing Eli registered, once his brain caught up with his situation, was the sky.
It was wrong in the specific way that you notice when something is wrong but haven't yet identified what. It took him a moment to parse: the blue was too deep, the light too diffuse, and hanging in the northwest, visible in what should have been mid-morning, were two moons. One the colour of ice. One the colour of old bone. Both larger than they had any right to be.
He was standing at the edge of a fjord.
The word "fjord" arrived in his head with a small attached packet of information, the way words always did for Eli: Norse geographical feature, formed by glacial erosion, characterised by steep cliff walls and deep water. The cliffs here were sheer and pine-dark. The water below was the kind of green-grey that meant very deep indeed. A dock extended from the shore to his left, empty, listing slightly to one side. The trees behind him were too symmetrical — not unnaturally so, just tipped slightly past what felt right, like a painting of trees rather than the thing itself.
He looked at the compass in his hand. It was still warm. The crimson needle was pointing toward the water. The gold needle was pointing at him.
He said, to no one in particular: "Okay."
And from directly behind him, a voice said: "Excellent assessment. Thorough. Really captures the situation."
✦ ✦ ✦
He spun. There was nothing behind him except his own shadow on the mud.
His shadow moved.
Not the way shadows move when the light changes — it peeled upward, lifting from the mud with the sound of something that wasn't quite a sound, more of a sensation, like the click of a language you don't speak but almost recognise. And out of it stepped a fox.
Eli had seen foxes. He'd seen them in gardens and on nature documentaries and once, memorably, standing on a wall at midnight looking at him with what he'd described in his journal as "aggressive indifference." He had a reasonable framework for foxes.
This was not covered by that framework.
The fox was ink-black — not dark brown or very dark red the way foxes usually are, but the specific flat black of a shape cut from the world rather than placed into it. It was slightly too large. Not alarmingly so, but enough that you noticed. Its three tails moved independently, each one tipped with a faint glow the colour of deep sea water, and its eyes were amber with vertical slit pupils that caught the light in a way no animal's eyes had any right to.
It sat down. It looked at him with the expression of someone who has waited a very long time for an appointment and is reserving judgement about whether it was worth the wait.
"You came...out of my shadow," Eli said.
"Yes."
"You were a shadow...And then you came out of it."
"I'm glad we've established the timeline."
"Where am I?"
The fox — Eli would learn its name shortly, would learn many things shortly, would spend the next several months learning things at a pace that would have been deeply satisfying if it weren't quite so immediately dangerous — tilted its head precisely one inch to the left.
"Somewhere else entirely," it said. "Specifically, the Asgard Strand. A Norse mythological dimension currently experiencing what I would describe as an extended bad period. More specifically —"
The fjord made a sound.
It was not the sound fjords usually make. Fjords make the sound of wind and water and the particular silence that comes from being very old and very cold. This fjord made the sound of something the size of a building moving under the surface, and the water was no longer still.
"— we're standing on the feeding shore of Jormungandr's smallest offspring," the fox said, in exactly the same tone. "Which, to be clear, is still approximately the size of a subway train...in your own world language."
Eli looked at the water. The water erupted.
✦ ✦ ✦
The serpent was beautiful, in the way that things are beautiful when they are also extremely dangerous and you do not have time to fully appreciate them. It was deep blue-black, the scales catching the pale-morning light like oil on water, and its eyes were white and enormous and fixed with absolute purpose on the compass in Eli's hand. Its head was the size of a small car. Its body continued below the surface for what looked like a considerable distance.
It opened its mouth.
"Running," said the fox, and Eli ran.
He had not thought of himself as a runner. He had, in fact, a letter from his PE teacher suggesting he approach physical exertion "at his own pace," which his mother had interpreted charitably and Eli had interpreted as confirmation of what he'd always suspected: that he was better suited to activities that required thought rather than movement. The serpent, however, was an excellent motivator. He discovered, in the first four seconds of running, that his legs were faster than he'd given them credit for, and in the next three, that they were not faster than the serpent.
The serpent's head hit the shore where he'd been standing. The impact sent a shockwave through the mud that knocked him sideways; he caught himself on a pine root, stumbled, kept going. Behind him: the sound of something enormous and angry recalibrating.
"The compass...!" he gasped, running. "It brought me here! Can it take me back?"
The fox was running alongside him with the liquid ease of something that did not find running physically inconvenient. "Eventually."
"Eventually?"
"It decides when you leave. Not you."
"THAT IS A TERRIBLE DESIGN."
"Well, most things are," the fox said, and banked sharply left. "Up."
The cliff. Eli looked at it with the despair of someone who had never enjoyed climbing in gym class, registered the serpent behind him, and started climbing.
His hands found purchase on pine roots and cold stone. His sneakers slipped twice and held once. His glasses slid to the end of his nose and he couldn't push them up because both hands were needed for not dying, so the world was slightly blurry around the edges, which was somehow worse. The fox flowed up the cliff beside him like water going uphill, which was deeply unfair.
At a narrow crevice in the rock — just wide enough for a twelve-year-old and an abnormally large fox — Eli wedged himself in and stopped breathing.
Below, the serpent pressed its vast head against the base of the cliff. Its pale eye tracked upward, scanning. Its nostrils flared. It hung there, enormous and patient, while Eli's heart attempted to leave his body through his ribcage.
One beat. Two. Five. Ten.
The serpent turned and slid back into the fjord. The water closed over it without a sound.
Eli exhaled so completely that he briefly had no air left at all.
"Is...it gone?" he managed.
"For now." The fox settled beside him in the crevice, tail-tips dimming to their resting glow. "It's not very bright. Compensates with persistence."
"You turned into my scarf."
The fox regarded him. "You grabbed me."
"I didn't know what you were!"
"And now you do."
A pause. The fjord was still again. The two moons were climbing slowly toward noon.
"What are you?" Eli asked.
The fox was quiet for a moment — not a thinking quiet, but the quiet of someone measuring how much truth the current moment can hold.
"They call me Nyx," it said at last. "I'm Veilborn. I evolved here, in the in-between space that connects the mythological dimensions. I've been alive — depending on how you count time in the Veil, which is complicated, by the way — for a very long while. I know this place. I know most places." A pause. "I know what that...compass means."
"What does it mean?"
Nyx looked at him steadily. "That's a longer conversation. One we should probably have somewhere other than a cliff face."
Eli looked at the compass. It was still warm in his palm, still pulsing that slow gold rhythm, like it was breathing. Like it had always been breathing and he'd simply never noticed before.
"You're going to help me?" he said. "Why?"
"Because," Nyx said, and dropped gracefully from the crevice to a ledge below, "I've been waiting for someone to show up with that compass for a veryyyyyyyy long time. And now someone has. Shall we?"
Eli looked down. Looked at the compass. Looked up at the wrong sky with its two strange moons.
He pulled his journal from his hoodie pocket — it was damp at the edges, slightly muddy, but intact — opened it to the first blank page, and wrote, in the careful handwriting he used when he wanted to remember something exactly:
Day 1 —
I'm somewhere else entirely. The compass brought me here. There's a fox named Nyx who claims to have been waiting for someone like me. There was also a sea serpent. I am not dead yet. I do not know if this is an improvement on my previous situation. Current evidence: inconclusive.
Then he closed the journal, pocketed it, and climbed down.
TO BE CONTINUED...