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The Elemental Portals

Book I – Terra

Chapter I – The Other Side

Jimmy Douglas was feeling very mellow on his eighteenth birthday. This was partially thanks to the presence of his childhood friend, Anne Steward, and partially due to the legal weed she had ‘borrowed’ from her mother’s stash.

“Honestly, why is it,” he asked after inhaling particularly deeply and holding it for a few seconds, “that we can’t drink beer or smoke weed here in Ontario until we’re nineteen but in Quebec, only an hour’s drive away, they drink when they’re eighteen, yet …” he paused for effect and almost forgot what he was talking about. “Yet, they can’t buy marijuana there until they are twenty-one?”

In his current state of mind he thought that it was a deeply philosophical question. Anne must have thought so also because she had to take two hits of the pre-rolled joint before she answered.

“Literally, it’s the oil companies, Bro. They control everything. We drive to Quebec to drink when we turn eighteen and they come down here to buy weed when they’re nineteen and that takes gas, gas made from oil. Like, it’s why the drinking age in New York state was changed to twenty-one, so they would have to drive up here to Canada to drink.” She took one more toke before passing the roach back to Jimmy. “Or to toke up. You agree?”

“Hundo P.”

Anne curled up laughing. “Look at you, talkin’ like the cool kids.”

“Yeah, yeah. You not so thicc you can throw shade at me Bae.”

She lifted her head and looked at him seriously. “Am I you Bae now, Jimmy?”

Jimmy found the idea funny, but then again he was finding every idea funny now that the second joint was almost done. It was the first time he had smoked the good stuff and it was a different kind of high from the occasional six-pack of beer his dad let him share.

He and Anne had known each other since Kindergarten and they had grow up going to school together in Kingston, Ontario, the capital of Canada for three short years before the young Queen Victoria decided to move the colony’s seat of government to the remote village of Ottawa; the good citizens of Kingston still lamented the snub. He had never thought of her as more than a friend despite how well they get along together.

Anne was well aware of that fact, to her regret. When they were kids she had been the bigger of the two and often had to step in to protect Jimmy against the bullies. But when the puberty fairy struck she had expanded outward while he had shot up like a weed. Now at eighteen, her birthday having passed just a week before, she was considered thick, as opposed to thicc, and plain.

Her body was a series of blocks: a square block of a head framed by black bangs and long hair that refused to be anything but straight, a blocky body and blocky legs and arms. On her first day of Highschool the Girls track Coach had taken one look at her and said, “Shot Put.” Competing in that in the summers and in weightlifting in winter had made her strong, but her muscles were covered in a sheath of soft tissue that refused to go away.

She had enchanting hazel eyes and a brilliant smile, but her broad, blocky nose drew all the attention on her face. Except when Jimmy looked at her. When he looked at her she was sure that he saw only the good parts; not like when she looked at herself in the mirror. She loved him, she was sure of it, but she did not dare tell him.

Jimmy had grown tall first and added muscle later. Unlike most Canadian boys of his age he did not play hockey in the winter or soccer in summer, instead his father, Arthur Douglas, had enrolled him in martial arts and arcane weaponry classes. Jimmy was the only guy she knew who could spar with a claymore or a sabre and use a longbow and a crossbow with equal skill.

Most of the other kids thought that they were dorks, except the ones that thought she was gay because of her looks and the way she dressed to hide her blockyness. Even she had to admit that she came off a little butch.

But Jimmy was not a totally lost cause. The martial training and the sparing with heavy weapons had put a layer of sleek muscle on his lanky frame this last year, and his features had sharpened as he grew. He had developed a long, slim, pointed nose and high-set, slightly pointed ears, like a young Bradley Cooper, and the girls at school were starting to notice. His boyish good looks combined with bright red hair, which the Douglas’s were famous for, and piercing grey eyes had turned more than one female head in the school hallways lately, and a couple of male ones too.

All this passed through her head in the moment it took for him to answer her.

“My Bae? Jeese, Annie, you’re better than that, you’re Fam.”

Anne smiled, sadly, but she did let it show in her eyes.

“Hey, Annie, whatcha get me for my birthday? A sexy picture?”

Anne had developed a talent for drawing and had amused herself and Jimmy by making caricatures of their teachers and fellow students these last few years. She drew them as animals, upright, clothed and intelligent animals, but ones whose features and stereotypical habits mirrored their subjects. The history teacher from tenth grade was a nearsighted and forgetful anteater. The boys PhysEd coach was an overweight loin that preyed on small herbivores. The Librarian was a fuzzy black spider, as benefited her malicious and manipulative ways.

Jimmy liked her pictures, especially the ones that showed the French teacher as a busty vixen wearing clothes that could hardly contain her, or the ones depicting the cool girls as sexy little lambs enticing wolves in football and hockey gear by exposing their cute little sheared bottoms. He had given her a set of very expensive coloured pencils and markers for her birthday in hopes that she would do a nice sexy illustration for him on his.

To his disappointment instead of a vixen in lingerie or a schoolgirl lamb being ravished she reached under the table and produced a box with a logo that resembled a DNA helix wearing a turban. The box was labelled “Gene Genie – Your Heritage is Our Command!”.

“What the … I mean, gee, thanks but …”

“It’s a DNA test, dummy.”

“A DNA test?”

“Yeah, like those ones that are linked to the ancestry sites. You’re always talking about how you’d like to know more about where you came from …” her voice dropped to almost a whisper, “… on your mother’s side.”

It was true. Jimmy knew a lot about the Douglas side of his family. They went back to the fur trading days in Canada and beyond, to ancient Scotland, but he knew nothing about his mother or her family. His father hardly talked about her, only to say that they had separated after agreeing that Jimmy should be brought up in Canada by his father. From that he surmised that his mother was a foreigner, from a land where the quality of life and opportunities were well below that of Canada, but that was a pretty broad field. The family Import/Export business took his father all around the world, and Jimmy suspected that he might have a female friend or two in far lands. He never saw him with local women, that was for sure.

The prospect of finding a link to some exotic but improvised country appealed to him.

“How does it work?”

“You spit in the tube here, seal it and send it in.”

“It’s that simple?”

“Well, you have to fill in the paperwork, background on your family and your contact information and such, but essentially, yes. They promise to send you the results in a couple of weeks.”

“Have you done it?”

“My dad did. He was trying to prove that our family was related to the royal line of Steward, but it said that he was mostly Croatian. I think his mother’s maiden name being Horvat had something to do with that.”

Jimmy did not say anything more. He worked up a good amount of saliva and spit it into the narrow tube.

“A little more.” Anne commented after checking the line of the tube that indicated enough spit for testing.

Jimmy swirled his tongue around and spit again. “Enough?”

“More than enough.” Anne sealed the tube and passed a sheath of papers over to Jimmy. Fill those out while I get the return envelope ready.”

Jimmy bent over the coffee table, his 420-befuddled brain concentrating on the questionnaire, never stopping to ask himself why they needed so much personal information. Meanwhile, Anne snuck glances at his strong arms and asked herself why she did not deserve to have them wrapped around her.

* * * * * * *

Later that night, after Anne had left and the weed was wearing off, Jimmy began to feel a little horny. It was not unusual; he had similar experiences going back to when he was thirteen. Back in those days he had unconsciously started humping his mattress and had been shocked when, as a result, a fair amount of white, creamy discharge had soiled his pyjamas. Later, on overhearing snatches of conversation in the locker room and through the inadequate lessons in health class, he had determined that he was not suffering from cancer or any sort of infectious disease but from puberty. It was few more years before he made the connection between puberty and procreation, but he mastered masturbation in the meantime.

Jimmy liked girls, there was no denying that. But the girls at school, even the ones that lately made it clear they would suck his dick in the smoking area or spread their legs for him under the bleachers did not turn him on, not completely. He was not interested in them as girls, at least not as human girls. He had seen a few magazines and he knew what the anatomy looked like, and he liked it, but the surest way to make his pecker hard was to imagine a fluffy tail and a pair of furry, perky ears on the girls that were spreading themselves for the camera. He had expressed as much, as delicately as he could, to Anne in hopes that she would draw him the kind of thing that really got him off. But she never did.

She came close, but in the end her drawings were PG13 at best, and is cock cried out for triple-X material.

His search for sexual fulfilment led him to a number of websites that were considered ‘furry’. Jimmy did not think of himself as furry; he had no desire to dress in a fur suit or hug every other furry person he saw, but he was definitely attracted to the art on those sites; a well-rendered vixen or tigress with large breasts and a sassy little cunt all pink and open was enough to drive him up the wall. And by up the wall he did mean the height of the spooge that splashed on the latex paint above the headboard of his bed, leaving a few suspicious crusty stains before he learned to catch it in a tissue and dispose of it in the toilet.

After logging into one of his favourite furry sites Jimmy placed his laptop computer on a stand beside his bed. He got undressed but because his father was away on a business trip he did not bother to put on his loose pyjama bottoms, the ones he could hide an erection inside in case of parental interruption. Then he lay back against a pile of pillows and began scrolling through the new images posted by the artists he watched.

There was one off his favourite characters, Leggy Lamb, drawn wearing a loose sweater and blowing a wolf. A few rows farther down and he saw that someone had posted a new page of a comic that featured Polynesian otters, but they were all fully clothed this time, so he skipped over it. New the bottom of the page he found what he wanted, a busty vixen done in great detail and with brilliant colours. She was posed squatting on a huge sex toy. She had the tip in her ass and was exposing her open, wet twat, which she was fingering with one paw while raising a breast to her lips with the other. And as bonus, it was animated.

Jimmy was already growing hard as he started the animation and rubbed a little hand lotion into his palms; this could be a two-hand job. As he watched the vixen rose and fell on the rubber cock, squeezing it into her butt hole as she rubbed her clit and licked one of her nipples. The artist had also animated the eyes opening and closing and the tail swaying back and forth seductively behind her. The audio consisted of some convincing moaning with the a few gasps timed to match full insertion. Secure in the empty house Jimmy turned the volume up.

With a little imagination Jimmy could picture the vixen riding him as he lay back against the pillows. The image made his cock swell and with a few strokes it was fully erect. He paused for a moment, contemplating the rod of throbbing flesh in his fist and wondering if it would get any larger in the next few years. Doctors said that your brain did not stop developing until you were twenty-one so why not your prick, he wondered?

He might not have a career as a porn star but his cock was a little more than one and a half fists long between his belly and the knob that appeared out from the foreskin when ever it was fully erect, and a little thicker than average. He was dying to try it out on something other than his hand ... or those old furry mitts that his dad used to use to polish the car after waxing it ... until they mysteriously disappeared ... into the space behind Jimmy’s dresser.

Anne had teased him about who they would eventually lose his virginity to and had jokingly even suggested that they could lose it to each other. At least he thought she was joking. But thinking of her was distracting him from the deed at hand, as it were.

He looked back at the screen. He was running his fist up and down the full length of cock in time with the animation. His left hand was between his legs, playing with his balls as he pretended that it was her paw doing it.

He briefly interrupted his play to touch a button on the screen that made the animation speed up. His fist kept pace as her ass swelled with each insertion and her moans intensified. He touched the screen again and her tail began whipping back and forth and her eyes rolled back in her head as she rose and fell even faster.

Jimmy was very close to cumming. He clutched a tissue in his left hand and grit his teeth to hold it off a little bit longer. There was one more button on the screen he wanted to push, the one labeled ‘Cum’.

He touched it with the tip of a finger and got his hand back in position to catch the flying sponge before the animation could loop into the final sequence. On the screen the vixen’s mouth hung open and her first two digits disappeared into her cunt. A moment later Gobs of animated translucent fluid exploded out from around her embedded digits and she yipped in delight. She continued to cum as his balls swelled and clenched and his hand flew on his rock-hard shaft. He felt it coming, and he tightened his grip as he positioned the tissue. He felt the final release and then ...

“Hey, Jimmy boy! I got back early, have you had supper ye- .... Yike! Jesus, Jimmy, I’m sorry!

“Dad! Get the hell out! Don’t you know to knock first?”

Jimmy tried to cover himself up with the blankets he had tossed aside but only succeeded in knocking over the stand with his laptop. His father, demonstrating the cat-like reflexes he had developed during years of martial training leaned in and snatched up just before it hit the floor. He held it out to Jimmy, whose hands were occupied trying to hide his dying erection.

“Get out, Dad!”

“Sorry. Yes ... I’ll just … go.” Arthur Douglas left the room, still holding the open laptop he had saved.

That was the least of Jimmy’s worries. His balls felt like they had blown a valve at the sudden interruption. At least I didn’t cum all over my Dad, he thought.

It was the first time he had been caught, and he wondered what the protocol was on an occasion such as this. Most of the guys in school had been though this either with their father or mother but he had not been part of the conversations when they regaled their friends with the tales, so he was not sure whether he should discuss it with his old man or just act like nothing had happened. He wondered if it had happened to his father when Arthur had been his age and he supposed that it had. He decided that the best thing would be to go out there and let his father take the lead.

Jimmy got fully dressed again and headed out to the kitchen, where his dad usually conducted any ‘life talks’, as he called them. He half expected to find his dad busy cooking, as that was what he did when he was upset or embarrassed, and was a little taken back to find his father sitting at the kitchen table with his arms crossed and frowning as he studied the laptop open before him. Jimmy suddenly remembered what he had on the screen just before his dad walked in on him and his face turned red.

Seeing his son enter the room Arthur fixed his eyes on the boy and turned the laptop around to face Jimmy. Sure enough, the vixen was still humping the sex toy, although silently as his dad had turned the sound off.

“Dad, I can explain ...”

“No need, James. You’re an adult now and you have the right to seek pleasure as you see fit. I had hoped tough, that ... well, certain things might skip a generation.”

Jimmy had no idea what his father meant by that, focussing only on the use of his proper name, which his father only used when he was deadly serious.

Before he could think of a reply his father closed the laptop and stood up. “Are you still determined to get some work experience before applying to any universities?”

The sudden change of subject caught Jimmy off guard. “Uh, sure. I haven’t sent out any applications yet, at least. I really have no idea what I want to do.”

“Aright then.” His father reached out and closed the laptop. “We’ll speak no more of this for now. At the end of the school year you’ll come and work with me.”

“Well, yeah. That was the plan.” Earlier in the year they had talked about Jimmy’s future, in the kitchen of course, and decided that he would work at the warehouse as an intern in the various departments of the family business for a year and hopefully find something he was interested in.

“Change of plans. You’re not going to work for the company, you’re going to work directly with me. You’ll accompany me on my trips and learn about our business.”

Jimmy was intrigued. The company employed a dozen or so locals. A shipping manager, some warehouse labourers, an accountant and a sales team, but they all worked out of the warehouse office.

Kingston was conveniently located on the national rail line and country’s busiest east-west highway with a port that accessed the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway. It was close to a busy border crossing into the United States and within driving distance of several major airports, so having the warehouse here made sense, but all the importing was handled personally by his father.

The source of their goods was a family secret passed down from father to son, or uncle to nephew if the head of the clan was childless, since the days of the original James Douglas.

The goods that they brought in were high-end, organic products like fine cotton and woollen clothing and linen tablecloths and draperies. They also had a line of peasant art, hand-carved and painted and with no two pieces alike. Trade in rare spices and fine jewels rounded out the picture. These were all sold in specialty shops that catered to those who did not mind paying premium prices for quality goods.

In return his father brought in hand tools like axes with hardened steel blades, hand saws and hammers and files. They were simple and always had wooden handles, “because they can replace them locally.” His father explained. But the metal parts, be it an anvil, a jackknife or a Japanese trimming saw, were always the highest grade of steel.

“I thought that there was a glut on the steel market.” Jimmy had asked after learning about the competition in that market in Economics class. “And who buys overpriced stuff like this when you can get something workable for half the price at any hardware store chain?”

“Good quality steel is in sort supply in some parts, as is the ability to make fine things like these tools, or even a decent arrowhead for that matter.” His father had answered. “And you get what you pay for. Cheap goods don’t last a lifetime.”

His father refused to elaborate at that time, and Jimmy was left speculating that they were secretly dealing with the Amish.

What Jimmy did know was that the family business had originated, and continued to exist, in another branch of the Douglas clan back in Scotland. They had started off dealing in scrap metal, iron and tin mostly back then. And while tin was rare these days his father also exported old cast iron and aluminum, because “you don’t need a blast furnace to melt it down”. This apparent lack of technology in their customers reinforced Jimmy’s Amish theory.

His namesake, James Douglas, had emigrated to Canada to become a fur trader because he was only a distant cousin to the main Douglas line and could never hope to rise high in the clan business. He hoped that by sending fine pelts back to the family for resale that he might one day be a small part of it though.

He did not succeed at first. Strangely enough, despite the demand for then in Europe, the family back in Scotland did not want the pelts. This forced James to sell them wherever he could, often invoking the wrath of the French or British authorities, depending on whose territory he was dealing illegally on. A bit of a rogue, he was playing fast and loose in the lawless colonial days, but not making much of a profit.

He turned to soldiering during the French and Indian wars that predated the American Revolution, forming a company of his fellow Scots and a contingent of Indigenous people from the Six Nations. He led them against the French outposts along the Ottawa river, defeating them and their Algonquin allies. For this, the British had granted him a parcel of land in what was later to become Renfrew county, named after their clan homelands of Renfrewshire, west of Glasgow. That marked a change in James Douglas’s fortunes, and he was finally able to establish a branch of the family business in the New World.

The company had managed to keep under the radar by staying small. They did not trade in volume, and never had according to his father, but they lived comfortably and there would be no need to take out a student loan if and when he went to university. They paid the warehouse staff well above average wages, the price of keeping their trade secrets secret, his father claimed. Jimmy wondered if it were not the price of looking the other way when goods that clearly did not originate in Canada appeared with no proof of origin, especially the gemstones. His father claimed that he acquired them from independent indigenous miners in the north and due to a history of generous Douglas philanthropy the local university’s Geology Department was happy to grade and certify that they were, at least, not from conflict areas.

Three weeks later, after all the final exams were done and noting important was left to do, His father pulled Jimmy out of school and instructed him to pack a bag for somewhere warmer than Southern Ontario in early June.

“Best use a large backpack.” He said. “We’ll have to walk the last bit with whatever we can carry. And don’t bother with your laptop, there’s no internet where we’re going.”

Jimmy wondered where they were going as they headed north toward Ottawa. The airport there did not have as many direct flights to warm places as Montreal or Toronto’s airports did. His confusion was further compounded when instead of turning east to ward the airport his father continued to drive north along the Ottawa river, but he did not question his father because the elder Douglas was acting uncharacteristically quiet and serious that day.

He studied his father in the reflection of the windshield. They were the same height and of similar build but now in his late forties his features, which were once as sharp as Jimmy’s, were beginning to broaden. He had the same blazing red hair, with a few streaks of silver at the temples, but unlike Jimmy his eyes were dark brown, as were those of all the ancestors Jimmy had ever seen in portraits or photographs. He supposed that he inherited his grey ones from his mother’s side of the family.

His interest peaked when they entered Renfrew County, where the first James Douglas had established his trade with the local Algonquin tribe after defeating them and their French allies. The family had a cottage on a lake in the middle of the county and a small storage facility where the goods from their indigenous partners were stored for a short while before being transferred to the main warehouse. They were both on property that the family had owned since the late seventeen-hundreds.

As they neared the property his father began speaking without taking his eyes off the road.

“After the British ceded all the lands in this area to James Douglas, he was expected to clear it of Indians and French. But instead he chose to work with the natives and the established settlers, allowing the former to keep their hunting and fishing grounds and confirming ownership of the land being farmed no matter whether the occupants were French, British, Scotch or Irish, but he got a flack for letting the Irish stay. He never took the title of ‘Laird’ either, as some others did, recognizing that the leadership of the clan remained in Scotland, nor did he charge more tax than the minimum required by the British to pad his own coffers. It was said that he was fair to all as if they were his kith and kin.”

“Because of that he was liked and trusted by both the colonists and the natives and respected by the clan. He was allowed to trade on the clan’s behalf in small goods like hatchets, arrow heads and knives made from a crude form of steel the Europeans had back then. In turn he sent back articles of native clothing decorated with porcupine quills and other artwork for the upper-class Brits, who were becoming enamoured with a romanticised version of the ‘Indians’ around that time.”

“The Algonquin leaders, believing that he must be a chieftain of some sort, and feeling that they owed a debt to their conqueror for the justice he showed, brought him to the piece of land where our cottage now sits. They explained to him that the land was special, and that it contained secret opportunities for wealth, but only for those who could be trusted not to squander or exploit them. It was a kind of wealth from goods that they did not deal in but knew that Europeans valued. They felt that he showed the right qualities to be guardian of that land so they showed him all of its secrets, the same ones that I’m going to show you today.”

James was intrigued. He knew from Geography classes that the area was once rife with mining operations, including gold mines, but most of them were inactive now. In addition, the town of Bancroft, just an hour or so south-east of here, was known as the gemstone capital of Canada. Could the Algonquin have shown his ancestor a treasure trove of gold or gemstones in some crevice that only European tools could dig out? It would explain a lot if it was true.

Jimmy was familiar with the cottage, which was situated on the edge of a small lake and included a dock and a boathouse. The building was not that old, having been built by his grandfather in the eighties after the original cabin burnt down. They drove right past it though, continuing up the hard-packed dirt road to the small warehouse.

The warehouse was even newer than the cottage. It was made of cinderblock and surrounded by a security fence. Sensors on the fence and around the building ensured that no one could approach undetected. A guard company from the nearest town would dispatch a patrol if the fence were climbed or the gate were forced, and the solid steel doors on the warehouse were rated for a two-hour delay against everything except high explosives.

His father had a fob that deactivated the outer alarms and opened the vehicle gate. He drove in and closed it again before parking in front of the vehicle entry door on the end of the rectangular building.

“We have to get inside with a key and a code to open the big doors.” His father explained. “That way no one can steal the code from this fob to gain entry.”

After using his thumbprint, a complicated key that he claimed cost almost a thousand dollars to make and an eight-digit code they were inside. Jimmy, who had never been inside before, looked around while his father opened the vehicle door and brought the car inside.

The building was large enough for a couple of large panel trucks like the ones the company owned but neither were there at the moment. There was a small forklift and several pallets of scrap metal in the room, which did not run the entire length of the building, just about halfway. There was another solid cinderblock wall separating the other half, and it was pierced only by a double door just big enough for the forklift to get through. All-in-all it was a bit disappointing.

“Come.” His father led him to that door and went through a repeat of the process at the main door to open it.

“Seems like a pretty elaborate system for a few piles of scrap iron and aluminum cans.”

“There is something much more valuable yet.” His father said as he swung open the door, setting off an automatic lighting system that illuminated the contents of the next room before Jimmy’s eyes could adjust to the dark.

“Wow.” Jimmy said with a voice that dripped sarcasm. “It’s a cabin.”

It was a cabin, one made from thick oak logs that had been roughly squared off and sealed with clay. There were a hundred like it on the back roads of the Ottawa valley, remnants from the pioneer days. Most had been abandoned or had collapsed but a few had been converted into modern living spaces. The only thing remarkable about this one was that it was very well preserved; thanks to being inside another building, Jimmy supposed.

He expected a surly remark in return, but his father just chuckled as he removed the modern padlock and chain that secured the old wooden door.

“Wait until you see what’s inside.”

The interior of the cabin was lit, but not by artificial light. Jimmy could swear that it was sunlight pouring out of the door, and it was accompanied by the sweet scent of summer flowers, which had yet to bloom this far north.

“Step inside.”

Jimmy did, stopping dead in his tracks in the middle of the doorway with his mouth hanging open in surprise.

In the center of the bare cabin there was a hole, a hole that stood up on its edge several centimeters above the floor. Through the hole Jimmy could see a sunlight meadow surrounded by a high stone wall.

“Wha- … the hell … it’s … impossible.” He turned his head to see his father’s grinning face right behind him. “Isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not impossible. In fact, there used to be hundreds of these scattered around the earth. You just don’t hear about them, not from believable sources anyways, because the people who know about them keep them secret.”

“But … what the hell is it?”

“It’s a portal to another world.”

Jimmy had to take a few moments to let that sink in. While he was dumbstruck his father nudged him inside the cabin and secured the door from the inside with the same chain and padlock. By the time he was done Jimmy was finally able to speak.

“Another world? Not another part of our world?”

“No, an entirely different world.”

“Another world in our galaxy?”

“I’m not quite sure. I’m not an expert at these things. It could be in our galaxy, or another galaxy in our universe, or in another dimension for all I know. This one is an elemental portal, a permanent opening created by an elemental force, a meteor strike in this case. They still exist in many wild places on the earth, but there are not nearly as many as there once was. They can be destroyed, closed or hidden in various ways, other than the obvious one of erecting a building around it. There is one still on the clan lands in Scotland, caused by an earthquake thousands of years before any humans lived there.”

James gazed through the portal to the green field beyond. “What are these other worlds like? Are there humans on them?”

“On a few of them, yes. But others are populated by creatures you’ve only heard of in legends and faction – Elves, Dwarves, Ogres and Dragons.”

“Sounds like the Lord of the Rings cast.”

“I have no doubt that Tolkien went through a portal and visited one of the worlds like that. It was probably a temporary one created by the massive artillery barrages while he was serving in the trenches of the First World War. Portals can warp time as well as space, and he might have spent years on the other side, collecting tales and visiting strange realms, while only a few days passed here on earth.”

“These are the source of stories and legend.” His father continued. “There are worlds where magic still works but technology as we know it does not. Worlds where animals talk and lions battle witches and others where animals walk upright and wear clothes, sometimes. I think that most of the ancient beliefs and myths are just the oral history of encounters with the inhabitants of these worlds. There was certainly a lot more interaction between our world and theirs before the monotheistic religions took hold and labelled them as demons.”

“But our people still cross over?”

“Yes. The world on the other side is the different from ours, but they don’t fear humans. For one thing, our science does not work there so we had no advantage. Chemistry, physics and biology as we know them are totally different on the other side of this portal. Gunpowder and its modern equivalents don’t work, steel can’t be forged, even if they had the ingredients, and unlike species can, uh, interbreed. I not a geologist but this planet must have developed completely differently from earth because they have very little in the way of metals, but lots of crystals.”

“Is this where the gems come from?”

“Yes, that and the artisan goods. Since refined metal and manufactured goods are precious here that’s what we bring to trade for them.”

Jimmy had an exciting thought. “Do they have magic here?”

His father laughed. “No, not here, but on other worlds they do. Like our science magic does not work on the other side of this portal … however …” Jimmy’s father reached into a bag hung on a nail to one side of the portal. “Within a few metres of the portal, a space about the size of this cabin, anything goes.”

He drew out a stainless-steel revolver. “Sometimes you have to defend your ownership.” He put the gun back in the bag and pulled out a scroll tied with a red ribbon. “In the past one of our ancestors brought a magician through a different portal on the other side and had him put a protective spell on our portal.”

Using a quill and ink that he also produced from the bag his father wrote the name ‘James Arthur Douglas’ at the bottom of a long list of other Douglas’s and then had Jimmy add his thumbprint after his name. While doing so Jimmy noted that all of the old names had been crossed out, leaving jut him, his father and a fellow named Paul Collieman on the list. More interesting was a name added to the list after his father, but which was already crossed out, that of one Rory Douglas. He asked who it was.

His father looked away as he answered. “Just a distant relative.”

“Why was he removed from the list?”

The questioning seemed to fluster his father. “Listen, Jimmy. These worlds are the source of great treasures and the playground of adventurers, but they were also the bane of the vain and greedy. Not everyone is worthy of this knowledge.”

“But without the spell anyone could just walk through?”

“Generally, yes, but if you have an artifact linked to the portal you can still get through whether your name is on the scroll or not.”

“An artifact?”

His father held out his right fist. On the third finger he wore a plain band of dark metal. “As I mentioned, this portal was caused by a meteor strike. Portals formed that way often have meteorites near them. James Douglas found one at the base of this portal and on the advice of the clan leader in Scotland had several rings forged from it. Over the years one was lost and others were destroyed so there is only this one left, otherwise I would give you one too. But since I can’t you must only go to the other side when I am with you so that I can bring you back if the scroll is somehow destroyed.”

“It looks pretty safe in a bare cabin inside a cinderblock building in the middle of nowhere.”

“Don’t take this lightly, Jimmy. This is dangerous knowledge and not everyone that knows about these places has good intentions. From now on you must view any inquiry into our family business with suspicion. Now let’s go, there is someone I want to introduce you to on the other side.”

Suspecting that it might be the Paul Collieman listed on the scroll Jimmy followed his father through the opening.

Passing through felt strange, like the kind of full-body shudder you get when you go from a warm room to a cold one, but it was not painful or unpleasant. One he was a couple of steps away from the portal he turned back and saw the interior of the cabin with the chain and lock on the door.

He also noticed that they were standing in a large barn whose large doors had been thrown open, providing a view of the meadow that they had seen though the portal.

“I visited a few days ago and asked my business partner on this side, Paul, to come unlock and open the doors so you could get the full impact of the portal.” His father confessed. “The inside of a couple of barn doors is not nearly as impressive.”

Jimmy had to agree. Looking back he could see the portal but not the bag holding the gun and the spell, as it was off to one side of the portal over there.

Once out in the open he could appreciate the size of the sturdiness of the barn. His father closed the doors and set a steel bar across them. This he secured it with a lock similar to the one on the chain on the Earth side of the Portal.

“This bar and lock are made from a Tungsten-Chromium alloy that can only be cut with a high-speed diamond saw.” His father told him. “And while they have plenty of diamonds here on Terra they lack the technology to make a durable diamond saw. Anyone trying to get in would have to hack through thick oak planks but they would be heard from the village, which does quite nicely from our business, and they would be stopped long before they could make a hole big enough to crawl through. Then there’s the spell, of course.”

“Of course.” Jimmy replied dryly. “Did you call this place Terra?”

“Yes. It has other names that mean the same as ‘land’ in their language, but they took Terra from the early human explorers to use when dealing with us.”

Having locked the barn his father turned his back to it and began waling toward a wooden gate in the stone wall that surrounded it.

“They have a common language on this world, called Terran, although most worlds are like Earth with numerous languages. Some folk that have studied the portals and the worlds they connect suspect that its because there was no intelligent life on this world originally, that the inhabitants all came here through other portals, like we did, and populated the planet. In this region they used to speak some Algonquin, as they traded with that tribe before the white men came, but now they speak English as well as Terran.”

“Does that happen a lot, populating worlds, I mean?”

“Often enough. Anytime a people talk of escaping across a rainbow bridge or through a hole in the heavens to find a promised land you can assume that they’re talking about migration through a portal of some sort. You’ll find human settlements here, but not all of them originated on earth. And while you don’t find dragons or griffins or jackalopes on every world you see a lot of common species, like lions, tigers, foxes, wolves, sheep and canines. Some people believe that there is a home world where every species now occupying the know worlds originated, and others adhere to the theory that the forms are somehow universal despite evolving separately.”

“What do you believe, Dad?”

“I believe that this is a beautiful place.” His father replied as he unlocked the iron padlock and chain from the simple but sturdy wooden gate. “It’s quiet and peaceful what with no machines or artificially amplified noises. Listen.”

Jimmy paused, and he could hear birdsong and insects chirping. Then, from a distance, came the sound of metal on metal.

“That would be the Blacksmith, Gael Tholkes. Iron heated over a charcoal fire is about as advanced as industry gets around here.”

“They don’t have coal?”

“No. this planet did not develop fossil fuels. People have tried bringing some in, but they wouldn’t burn properly, and the more refined they were the less they worked. The laws of chemistry are different here, as I mentioned. But other than gemstones galore they do have the softest wool, the smoothest cotton and the finest linen that you have ever seen.”

“I suppose as a fur trader James Douglas traded in those also?”

“Furs? No, never. James became a soldier because the clan would not buy furs off him and he could not make a profit selling them to the licensed traders. You should never mention our family’s history in the fur trade here.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll see.”

From the other side of the gate Jimmy could see that the compound with the barn was situated on the top of a hill that overlooked what seemed to be a medieval village. There was a road leading down to the village, which had a few dozen buildings, including an open-sided covered area where the sounds of metal striking metal were combing from. The village had a small river running through it and on the edge of town there was a mill whose wheel was slowly turning in the current. The village was surrounded by cultivated land. Each parcel of a few acres was punctuated by a small thatched cottage, most of which had curls of smoke drifting lazily up from their chimneys.

He did not see any of the citizens out in the fields though, and a glance up at the sun explained why. It was noon, the hottest part of the day, and most of the farmers would be having lunch and resting in the shade until it cooled off a bit before going back to their fields.

Jimmy followed his father down the road that led to the village. It formed a “T” junction with the main thoroughfare at the base of the hill. There was another cottage at the intersection, larger than most, with its own vegetable garden in back and lines of laundry on the near side. The lines were occupied by sheets and table linens and a few nondescript items of clothing; trousers and shirts, skirts and blouses and the like.

To Jimmy’s surprise they stopped in front of the cottage, but when he thought of it, where better for Dad’s partner to live than right by the portal?

His father called out to the cottage. “Aurora! Aurora come out. You have a special guest.”

Jimmy had only a moment to wonder who Aurora was before a feminine voice responded from behind the lines of laundry. “I’ll be right there, Arthur dear.”

Arthur dear? Jimmy had always suspected that his father had a female friend in foreign parts and wasn’t entirely surprised.

Jimmy turned in the direction of the laundry. The sheets made an effective barrier, especially with the sun straight overhead, casting no shadows, but he could detect movement behind them. A moment later the overlap between two sheets parted. A figure emerged from behind them and for the second time in recent memory Jimmy found himself frozen in place with his jaw hanging open

Standing framed by the clean white sheets was a vixen, a vixen that stood on its hind legs that was almost as tall as Jimmy ... and it was naked.

The vixen seemed to be as stunned as Jimmy because it just stood there staring at him with its mouth half-open like him. The moment might have only lasted a second or stretched out as long as half a minute but it was long enough for him to take everything in.

Her head looked just like a fox from earth, with the exception of her piercing grey eyes. Her muzzle was long and thin, her ears upright and pointed, and the fur of her ruff was thick and full. From knees to neck, however, her physique was more like a human woman, with shapely round thighs, a navel depression over a patch of thicker fur that concealed her genitalia and two large, firm breasts high on her chest. He could see the tips of her nipples poking out from the sparse fur there.

Her lower legs were more like a regular fox and they ended in paws that were in proportion to her size. Her arms were slim and their muscles human-like but each finger on her hands ended with a small, sharp, dark claw.

Her fur was a brilliant red with a white patch that ran from the bottom of her mouth to the inside of her thighs. Her lower legs and forearms were dark brown, as were the small triangular markings on her snout. Her tail, which was almost as large as her torso, had a white tip and it was frozen in a raised position behind her.

Jimmy eyes flicked back and forth between her exposed breasts and her soft, round thighs. He felt a familiar stirring at his crotch and then a steady pressure on the front of his cargo shorts. he tried to adjust them to hide the mood he suddenly found himself in.

The movement broke the spell she was under and she glanced down to see what his hands were doing. Her eyes went wide when she saw the obvious bulge in his shorts and her tail swung up between her legs to conceal her groin. She used her hands to hold it in front of her breasts, inadvertently striking a shy but sexy pose, like the ones Annie would draw for him.

“Arthur! What are you doing bringing him here unannounced? I’m naked!”

“So? You’re always naked.” Arthur’s voice had taken on that confused male tone that said, ‘I know I’ve screwed up, but I’m not sure why yet’.

“Not around family!” And with that she ran to the front door of the cottage and disappeared inside.

Jimmy turned slowly to face his father; whose face was red as his hair with embarrassment.

“Dad, who was that?”

Before his father spoke Jimmy’s rapidly disappearing erection told him what he already suspected. It had been the eyes, he concluded.

Arthur Douglas looked down where his fingers were nervously turning the ring on his right hand.

“Aurora,” he said in a small voice, “is your mother.”

Paul Collieman © Collifan

Gael Tholkes © MarcusXLight