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This story was written as an introduction to my Skylands tabletop RPG setting. The world of Talvali (containing the thaylene, the Twin Ruins, this particular interpretation of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and other landmarks unique to this story's context), and the characters of Trey and Misha are owned by myself. It is just a snippet, showing how people from our world came to become a part of the Skylands.

Skylands: Hypoxia and Edema

©2013 Sylvan Scott

"Hypoxia," Misha thought, sounded like the name of a mystical fantasy land: a realm of ice and trolls and grizzled barbarians. It sounded mysterious and magical. "Edema," on the other hand, made her think of those little peapods at the Japanese noodle house on Broadway and Prince: salty and oh-so-good with dark soy sauce. Innocuous words, neither commonplace, they didn't seem fear-worthy. And although both were very serious medical conditions, likely plaguing Trey at this very moment, she couldn't help but be amazed at how much the streets of Saint Paul now looked like the fantasy landscape she once associated with "hypoxia". Amidst thin flurries of icy snow, towering blue-skinned creatures and small, green monsters waged battle against each other. Some even employed giant, steam-powered machines: stomping like anime robots through the streets to round up fleeing Saint Paul natives. A fantasy of chaos gripped the city like a snapshot out of some legendary, mythological war.

It was thrillingly, horrifyingly beautiful.

"Hang in there; just a few more steps." It was probably a lie. But while Misha didn't like not having all the answers she absolutely hated not being able to offer reassurances to a friend in need. She'd spent her life finding out the reasons behind things. As such, she always had a plan.

She had to offer answers. She had to figure things out. She had to know. But in truth, she had no idea how long it would take to get to the hospital, given Trey's condition. Fifteen minutes had passed with Misha doing little but walking and repeating herself. Trey didn't respond, except to wheeze.

"Come on, Trey: the emergency room's just down the block."

Downtown was lost.

While the storm clouds' fury had mostly broken, a wall of white and grey--reaching from sky to ground like a wall--blurred everything beyond Interstate 94. It was like standing in the eye of a hurricane. And although the storm-dark clouds had been growing thinner over the previous six hours, she knew the tumult was anything but over.

Temperatures had plummeted from a balmy, early June high to a frigid, mid-January low. Damage from the previous three days' of rain was compounded by layers of ice. Streets and sidewalks were caked and cracking from the sudden chill. Icicles covered both branches and the shattered car windows they'd fallen through. Flashing lights from a construction barricade looked faint and slow beneath a layer of frost. The tremors that had shaken the region during the last twelve hours hadn't helped, either. And, now, in the wake of Mother Nature's wrath, they had to stumble along, looking for help, trying not to die in what remained of their home. The air had become hard to breathe; unnaturally thin and cold. And to make it all worse, just after the mercury dropped, the monsters had appeared. Many looted buildings but others chased down the city's terrified inhabitants. A few even seemed to have a rivalry with each other and took the opportunity to fight.

At least the rain had stopped just about the time the freeze began. If it hadn't, they'd be buried in drifts up to their hips rather than just fighting a light dusting of only an inch or two.

Bethesda's emergency room was still a quarter mile away. Misha continued to promise Trey that it was "just down the block". She tried to keep her footing as she made her way along the slippery streets. She cursed the painfully thin air. It was nearly impossible to catch her breath. Climate-wise, the city now reminded her of the backpacking trip she'd taken to the Himalayas during college. Oxygen deprivation, cold, exposure: each, on its own, was a killer. Combined, she was amazed the streets weren't filled with corpses.

Minnesotans were used to harsh winters but this was absurd ... especially in June.

The state capital was pandamonium. Coming up Rice Street, she'd been forced to avoid more open avenues rather than risk life and limb. It wasn't merely overrun by the brutes with axes and giant swords. All manner of strange creatures were around. Some looked like werewolves: right out of a horror movie. A few looked like human-shaped lions, snarling and savage. A couple resembled multi-tailed foxes, walking on their hind legs. It was like a fantasy clearing-house, including invaders who were human, but wielding weapons normally reserved for a Renaissance Festival.

Worst of all were the dragons.

The invaders had pierced the storm-wall in flying galleons and wooden, seventeenth- and sixteenth-century sailing ships. The titanic, leather-winged dragons had simply flown through the storm and the clouds. They soared above it all, seeming to take no sides, but strafing the city and its inhabitants with blasts of destructive light from their city block-wide maws.

She'd seen what happened when their glowing breath bathed a building or a person or a city block. She shuddered at the memory. If one passed overhead again, Misha had no idea what she would do. Instead, she kept telling herself that they were almost there.

They pushed on, block after block, until the brick building with its red cross symbol became clear.

Misha vaulted over the icy, paint-chipped railing running between Park street's sidewalk and Bethesda's parking ramp. She nearly skated up to the entrance.The door was frozen shut. The wind had sprayed a sheet of ice onto the outside entrance. Frustrated, she chipped at it with her belt buckle. She prayed Trey could keep himself conscious while she worked. She'd worn herself out getting him this far.

A shadow fell over her. She looked up, surprised. Trey smiled, weakly, and held his own belt buckle in his hands.

"Damn it: just stay put," she said.

"Can't," he wheezed. "Gotta ... keep moving..." He began to chip at the ice.

She stopped him from exerting himself and leaned him against the icy brick wall. Turning, she ran along the low, street-facing wall of the parking garage until she found a spot low enough to give her entry. She climbed over the wall and into the lot. Not stopping, lungs burning, Misha ran around to come at the door from the inside. She kicked at it several times. Finally, the sheet of ice keeping it closed, broke. The door flung open.

She helped Trey over the threshold, out of the wind. He was barely conscious. How long that would last, Misha didn't know. All that mattered was getting him oxygen.

A shadow, darker than the night of the stormy skies, passed overhead. She glanced up, despite the fear that screamed for her to look away.

The base of the creature's neck, long and serpentine, was still passing. It had a hide that was covered with brilliant colors; patches of hue that resembled iridescent dark-green scales tinged in reds and blues. While overall the dragon looked dark grey beneath the low clouds, this one was big enough and low enough that the colors making up its hide were clearly visible.

The wind whipped into a frenzy with its passage. It was faster than any race car and the rumble from its passage was joined by a crackling that sounded like a thousand tiny icicles being ground into snow in its wake. Its head, blocks away as its torso passed, didn't make a sound. It neither growled nor roared. A creature of that size, with eyes the size of buildings, would have no need of proclaiming its superiority. Mere presence, alone, accomplished that.

Blocks and blocks of body swept past. The sheer acreage of the beast was simultaneously terrifying and awe-inspiring. At least, in the shelter of the parking garage, the wind of its passage was blocked.

The heater in the garage stairwell had kicked on but she didn't feel safe. Cracks ran through the brick walls. The tremors which had come during the height of the torrential rains had inflicted terrible damage on the non-Earthquake proofed, midwestern buildings. All around town, she'd seen half-collapsed stores and homes. Sinkholes had opened up into the aquifer-pocked landscape of urban Minnesota. She'd seen the injured and heard the dying.

Bethesda would be busy.

The hospital stretched over two blocks but she'd come in the westernmost side. The parking ramp had two doors at ground level: an entrance that led to the Emergency wing and another marked "Authorized Access Only". She could hear the shouts and demands for help from inside both. She envisioned the threadbare staff working to triage as many people as they could.

A minivan was crashed up against the Emergency entrance: ice caking its broken windows. The "Authorized" door, by contrast, hung half off its hinges. Its fractured frame pressed down, forcing the door into a partially open position.

She made for the damaged door, dragging Trey with her.

Misha pulled him from the ramp's sheltered stairwell into the ground floor of the parking ramp.

The low lights were tinged with an emergency red. It had to indicate backup power. Behind them, back on the street, a brilliant, electric-blue pulse erupted in an explosive flare. She heard the rumble and boom in the distance that was far too powerful and far too strange to be lightning. She didn't think it was one of the dragons, either, but it could have been. If so, they had even less time that she'd hoped.

Dozens of the mile-long monsters in the sky had been strafing the city streets. But rather than storybook fire, what they breathed was a sizzling blue light--brighter than the sun--that enveloped everything it touched and left nothing unchanged.

She didn't know how it worked--didn't care--but had seen the results. In the wake of the dragon's breath, things changed. In a flash, everything one of the storm dragons breathed upon was transformed into something else. Stone, wood, plants, animals, cars, people ... all were changed in the blocks-wide columns of breath the dragons vomited into the streets.

Twisting and snapping into new and surreal forms, inanimate objects altered and people became ... not-so-people.

Some became like monsters, a few even became like the giant blue-skinned creatures and little, green invaders. Even their possessions were transformed. In the wake of the dragons' breath, every changed thing looked more primitive; more fundamental. It was most obvious in the buildings. It wasn't like architecture itself changed but the _materials_from which homes and buildings had been constructed became simpler and cruder. A few, unable to withstand their own weight afterwards, had even started to collapse. Since the storm wall had contracted in around downtown, perhaps that was what had happened to the Saint Paul skyline: maybe the buildings weren't visible because they'd fallen into the streets.

There was no way to know.

The hospital, thankfully, had not yet been hit. She had to pray that whatever forces these were that were knocking them back to the Stone Age, would hold off just long enough for her to get help for Trey.

She moved past cars and between vans and trucks, caked in frost. Her lungs burned but she was able to pull Trey to the "Authorized" entrance. The bent door was only a minor challenge. Warm air wafted through the semi-warped door frame and the fragmented glass of its window. With both hands, she wrenched it open.

Inside was an empty corridor. The main admittance desk was somewhere ahead, around several twisting and turning corridors. Abruptly, she knew she wouldn't have to go that far.

In the hall was an abandoned oxygen canister next to a wheelchair.

Grateful for their first stroke of luck since this whole catastrophe began, she dragged Trey the last few feet. Pushing his body into the chair, she quickly placed the mask over his face and turned the knob to start the oxygen. She didn't know how to adjust the flow, but hoped it wasn't too little or too much.

Aware of how hard her heart was beating, she collapsed into a heap on the floor next to her friend.

Long minutes blurred into one another as time seemed to slow down. Her eyes grew heavy as adrenaline slowed. She wanted to fight it but an even larger part of her wanted to just rest. She didn't think that what she'd been seeing had been some massive hallucination--she was too practical for that--but, at the same time, a non-zero portion of her mind hoped she would pass out and awake to find out it had all been in her mind.

Another distant boom shook the building and the emergency lights flickered, alternating with the overhead fluorescents. This wing of the hospital, between the main lobby and the parking ramp, was mostly empty. Dust fell from the drop-ceiling. She reached up and took Trey's hand.

Misha smiled. "Hey," she said. To her ears, her speech sounded slurred. Was that a symptom of edema? Of hypoxia? Of some other disorder she should be scared-to-death of? "You okay?"

Trey opened his eyes. He managed a thin smile. "Never better," he said. His usual urban accent was heavy with exhaustion. "This shit is th' bomb."

Despite her circumstances, Misha laughed. It was a tired sound. "That's pure O-2," she said. "It's the best drug on the market."

"Good t' know; I'll inform my dealer."

She didn't try to stand but she took his hand and closed her eyes for a moment.

"Misha? What's going on?"

Her natural inclination to know the answers, bristled at the question. Shaking her head, she forced a shrug. "Armageddon? Ragnarok? Who knows?"

"Please tell me you're not going all religious on me."

She smiled. "Nope: still an atheist; you'll have to believe for both of us."

Another boom shook the building and, this time, the fluorescents went out and stayed out. Despite pain in her legs, lungs, arms, and head, Misha stood. Trey struggled to rise but acquiesced after she put a hand on his chest, nudging him back.

"Is that ... one of those things?"

She didn't know what he meant by "things". There were too many strange beasts to choose from. He probably meant the dragons. Misha listened and guessed the rumbles were nearby buildings--or wings of this building--collapsing in the wake of dragonbreath transformation. Some of the rumbles sounded like implosions. Suddenly, she felt a lot less safe, indoors.

"Yeah," she said. "I think that's--"

Another boom rocked the building, sounding like a train crashing through a row of concrete walls.

Misha acted swiftly as the air flared with a bright blue light.

Blinded, she grabbed Trey and hauled him out of his seat.

"Stay with me!"

By touch, alone, she dragged him towards the nearest, interior door. She hadn't grown up in an earthquake zone so she didn't know if it was an urban legend or not, but she hoped getting into a doorframe was the safest place to be.

The brilliant brightness of light started to fade into spots but with the slowly returning patches of vision came pain. Every muscle that wasn't already on fire, started to burn.

Mishae screamed.

Anyone would have.

It felt like she was being torn apart. Every muscle, every bone, every cell of her body felt like it was twisting and being pulled in a different direction. Her mind clouded, going in a dozen different directions. Memories, long-discarded, flickered before her mind's eye. Classes she'd taken in college, knowledge she'd acquired in elementary school and ignored for years, came flooding to the surface. The chaos in her skull matched that of her body. She felt as if she were being sifted and re-woven by the hands of some unseen, giant sculptor.

Every experience she'd ever had, everything she'd ever learned or thought, spun through her conscious mind; everything that made her life was brought forth, sorted, sifted, and evaluated before flickering back into the darkness of her mind like a candle in a night wind.

Her body burned, too.

Vision still blurred by the burst of blue-white light, she blinked and tried to pull Trey to safety. The shaking continued.

Her vision returned as flickering lights came on. Red candles had replaced the emergency lighting and the walls looked like they were made of plaster-painted granite blocks. She saw that Trey didn't look so good. His oxygen mask had been wrenched free and blood flowed from one nostril. He looked like death warmed over. But while she watched, as her mind and flesh crawled and burned, he seemed to grow larger. As she blinked back tears of pain, Misha realized the rest of the hospital was getting bigger along with him. Her perspective was shifting and it took her a moment to correlate everything with the fact that she was shrinking.

Confusion, colored by both her physical pain and the pure chaos of her thoughts and memories, kept her from panicking any more than she already was. While she'd never thought there could be an upper threshold to fear, she seemed to have found it. She had nothing more to give. Whatever was happening to her was as inevitable as death and taxes. That didn't make it any easier to accept--no easier to convince her spinning mind that this was real or even possible--but it did make it easier to bear. In that moment, in the ten-or-so seconds since the blast of light shook the building, she'd become less scared.

If all this were inevitable, then the fear she felt at facing it was lessened.

The world spun inwards; like a maelstrom pulling her down, pulling her in. Her body drew in upon itself. Her clothing alternately clung tighter and felt loose as her body molded itself into a new configuration. Her skin grew itchy as fur began to sprout all over her body. Her legs shifted as her heels rose and the balls of her feet grew flatter and broader. She felt a twinge of pain from the base of her spine as a long tail grew over the top of her pants. Her clothing changed with her but didn't always keep up.

The hospital, she, and Trey had been caught in one of the dragon's strafing runs.

A block of stone came crashing through the drop-ceiling tiles and shattered on the floor. It exploded in a puff of granite dust, splintering the now-wooden tile floor. The sterile linoleum had changed along with everything else. What had once been a while pattern was now a highly-polished, bleached wood in a thin veneer over a brick underfloor.

Trey's changes progressed as swiftly as hers. But where Misha was getting smaller and sprouting fur, he was getting larger.

She found it hard to focus. She knew they had both been human but it was getting harder to envision details.

The thin and fine fur growing on her body was a rich, lustrous brown; the fur growing on his was as black as pitch.

His hair changed from the tight, African-American afro he normally wore into long, waving cascades of black down to his shoulders. It grew taller in the middle and shorter on the sides, as if he were developing a mohawk without the benefit of any stylist or barber. His face pushed forward, nose broadening and blackening on a thick, heavy muzzle. His unfocused eyes glistened as they became a bright, brilliant blue. His teeth thickened, becoming flatter and more equine.

Horse-like.

She watched him grow bigger as she shrank to a height she'd not been since childhood. Trey was becoming a horse.

But that wasn't right.

Her changing mind told her that; calling him a "horse" would be in insult.

Why she knew this was another mystery. It emerged from the same part of her mind that knew all the insults her friend had been exposed to in her presence. Misha could feel it: old ideas were replaced with new. An understanding of what was racist ... of what was a sapient mortal and what was merely an animal with similar appearance, took the place of old, now-alien ideas. Her formerly human mind changed to match her body.

She fell on her rear and gritted her teeth. Long, slender whiskers grew from her own, narrow muzzle. She felt her ears grow, become rounded, and migrate up the sides of her skull to a higher position on her head. One flicked, independent of the other, as sounds intensified. The smells coming through her nose down the length of her muzzle also grew. She could smell the hospital's antiseptics in the air, smell the odor of horse and cat and dog and fox and mustelid and thousand other scents she'd never noticed, before. She had to be shorter than three feet tall, now ... maybe as tiny as two feet.

Some words translated in her brain as she felt her understanding of language shift. Knowledge of chemistry became knowledge of an apothecary's arts ... knowledge of how her mobile phone vanished into the ether, replaced with understanding of the care of other items: a dagger, a shield ... things that were as everyday in a primitive setting as instantaneous communication had been, before.

In high school, she'd learned Spanish but the words she'd learned were shifting into some other tongue. What was "Spanish"? Was that even a real world? She spoke the Trade tongue: High Trade, to be specific. And she'd learned two languages in school ... both Thay and ancient Draconic. But hadn't she learned Latin?

What was "Latin"?

The word fled her mind and all she remembered was what she now knew.

In minutes, her mind and body completed their reconfiguration.

Order slowly reasserted itself into the chaos.

She breathed slowly, catching her breath, as the pain vanished.

Misha looked up, seeing the confusion and pain echoed in Trey's black, horse-like face. He still wore the same clothes but now sported a long, flowing tail to match the mane that started from the top of his head between his ears and flowed to the small of his back.

Pupils dilated, Trey took a deep, shuddering breath. He screamed in a whinny of pain as a pair of black, feathered wings burst from his back, spanning some twelve feet to either side. Then, his last change complete, he pitched forward onto hands and knees and stared at Misha.

For long moments, neither spoke.

"What ... what happened?" he managed at last. "Why are you a mouse?"

Misha didn't know how to answer him. He'd been too out of it to see the dragons changing everything they breathed on, outside. He'd not seen much of anything; he'd been too busy trying to breathe. At least, for what it was worth, he no longer seemed to be suffering from oxygen deprivation or the cold.

Another granite block crashed through the ceiling tiles and nearly hit Trey by his right hoof. He jumped back, his former sneakers now metal shoes nailed into his feet. They'd been transformed as completely as the rest of him. The nylon of his winter coat, now that she looked at it, seemed to be some sort of dyed hide, lined with wool. She shook her head, reason taking charge at last.

"Doesn't matter; we gotta get outta here before the hospital collapses!"

Her voice sounded different, but she didn't care.

Leading the way, Misha ran towards the door to the carriage lot. Her long tail swished and she realized, catching a glimpse of herself in a large pane of glass--half-cracked and lying on the floor--that his assessment of her was right. She now looked like a mouse. But it was as much an insult, a racial slur, as if she had called him "horse".

Trey was her friend; she knew it hadn't been intentional so she shoved it to the back of her mind and tried to push the giant door open. It was buckling with the weight of transformed brick and stone above it. It was a colossal portal, three-to-four times her height. It wouldn't budge.

"Let me."

Trey put his shoulders into it and, after three tries, managed to force it open.

They stumbled through and into the cold air, once again. It didn't bother her as much as it once had. Now, her warm fur protected her from the worst of it. The icy, thin air only stung her nostrils but she was strangely acclimated.

Carriages in the lot looked half-destroyed: as if a combustible pocket deep within them had burst, making each explode. A few flickering flames lingered on the debris as sections of concrete crumbled in patches. The lot looked secure, but Misha's heightened senses told her not to trust it.

"Let's get outside."

"Yeah," Trey agreed, "before this whole place comes down on us."

With that, and seemingly without thinking, he reached down and picked her up. He was about a foot taller than he'd once been (it was hard to tell from her current height) but he was leaner, now, too. With a single beat of his wings, he launched himself forward. He half-leapt and half-flew through the wreckage and out into the icy, transformed streets of Saint Paul.

Landing, he nearly slipped on the slick sidewalk, but managed to keep his balance.

He put Misha down. Both turned to look at the parking structure and the attached hospital.

It was a half-collapsed mess. Where once there had been materials both flexible and light-weight now it was glass and brick and granite and assorted other stones. All the lights were out save for flickering oil lamps and candles. It was as if the intent of the place had been preserved while the physical structure had been translated into something else ... something more primitive. It was the same building, sagging under its weight, as if it had been built three hundred years before but to the same height and number of rooms.

The black pegasus (Pegasai? Pegasuses? It was something else Misha didn't know but both seemed right) turned to look down at her. His eyes grew wide and alarmed. Even not being fully accustomed to seeing human expressions on an equine muzzle, Misha saw fear in his expression. He was looking past her.

Chaos was not letting them get a break.

Misha heard the booming of metal-clad steps behind her. They accompanied the shattering of ice and fragmentation of sidewalk stone. Something was charging them: something big.

She dove forward, not able to guess which of the strange monstrosities it could be, and prayed Trey would follow suit. She slid across the cold, unyielding ice and spun out of control between Trey's black hooves. She partially managed to roll on one side but only after impacting a snow bank. Behind her, she saw one of the giant, dark blue creatures barrel into Trey.

Her friend flapped his wings but couldn't get any lift. The fang-toothed troll (she struggled to find the word and that one seemed as good as any) struck her companion and sent them both prone.

But the massive, double-headed axe the creature bore fell from its grip as its elbow struck the twisted remains of a now-iron railing. The monster slipped and fell forward onto its blade. Misha bit back on a shriek, winced, and looked away. The meaty "thuck" of blade piercing leather armor and flesh, beneath, was mercifully brief. When she glanced back, she saw Trey getting up from where he'd landed in the street. He half-extended his black wings to keep his balance.

Next to him, the monster lay motionless.

Trey, with some hesitation, knelt to pull the axe out from beneath their attacker's prone form. It took several tugs but eventually came free, coated in red. He gulped and looked as ill as Misha felt.

In the distance, high in the sky, a giant dragon soared. It cut the air in broad swaths as if searching for more victims.

"Shit," Trey swore.

Misha nodded, hesitantly. "Yeah." Her world had spun about like a roulette wheel and landed on an imaginary number. She looked up at Trey's towering form, some four times her height. He seemed both new and familiar at the same time. She knew he hadn't always been this way but had trouble remembering what he'd looked like as a human. "It's ... unbelievable."

He swallowed, hard, and looked down at her. "What now?" he asked.

She looked back up into the clearing skies as the snow became less prevalent, and simply shook her head. Ships were flying in, full of strange, alien crews. Two moons were visible in the sky: one small and blue and the other, large and white.

"I wish I knew," she said.

Trey followed her gaze and simply stared. She looked back at him and gritted her teeth. No matter how strange things were, no matter what had happened, they had survived. And where there was life, there was hope ... a chance. She looked at Trey with his newly-appropriated battle axe and smiled. Given how quickly he had taken control of his situation, she realized he was just as ready as she was. The storm had caught them off-guard but whatever was coming after it, was something they could deal with.

What they didn't know, they would figure out.

The End