What do you say as you watch your friend get sucked into a hole in the sky?
Nothing, apparently. I didn't even have time to think. My stomach dropped, my feet left the ground, and then I was gone too.
Blue. That was the first thing. Blue everywhere. The sky looked like it had cracked open and I was sliding through a broken glass sea made of clouds. For half a second it was almost peaceful... then the screaming started. My friend's screaming. Which meant the good news was we were all in the hole together. The bad news? We were in a hole, flying at insane speed, surrounded by pieces of the world: earth, uprooted trees, a car flipping end-over-end, an entire corner of someone's house. I tried to twist away from a spinning trash bin, but a thick tree branch clipped my ribs and knocked me off balance. I spun, helpless, into the stream of debris. My friends were flung in different directions. Colors exploded around us, flashing neon, pulsing like lightning, but I didn't get to admire any of it. Everything went black.
Pitch black.
When I woke up, I was moving. No, someone was moving, and I was tossed over their shoulder, bouncing with each step. Something jabbed me in the stomach rhythmically.
A shoulder.
Fresh air hit me first. Crisp, clean, earthy. My eyes cracked open and saw green. Real, vibrant green, tall trees, thick grass, a forest untouched by anything I recognized.
Then pain. A sharp, splitting pierce through my skull. I clutched my head and groaned.
The person carrying me reacted immediately. "That's going to be there for a while Killian. Looks like something nasty hit you."
The voice. Deep. Steady. Familiar.
Deandre.
Where are we? What happened?
"Weird thing is, I don't know," he said. "All I remember is waking up in this forest with you lying right next to me."
Where's Silas?
"Somewhere nearby. He had to have landed close, just like us. I'm looking for him now."
So, we walked. And walked.
Rain started to fall, light at first, then heavy. Once we got past the fear of yelling in a strange forest, we started calling his name.
Then, faintly, somebody yelled back.
Silas.
It wasn't a normal cry. It was a help me right now scream.
We ran.
We reached a ledge and froze. Silas was below us, back to a rock, swinging desperately at what looked like skeletons.
"Are those... skeletons?" I whispered.
But they weren't fragile Halloween props. Some had rusted armor. Some moved disturbingly fast. And all of them wanted Silas dead. His black and white hair was soaked with rain, hanging across his terrified eyes as he screamed up at us for help.
We didn't hesitate.
We jumped.
Two skeletons shattered under our impact, their bones snapping apart like brittle sticks. But armored ones stepped over the remains unfazed.
"This whole situation is fucked," Dre muttered.
No arguments from me.
Dre tore through them like a bulldozer while Silas and I worked together, knocking armored ones off balance, shattering skulls with rocks or anything we could grab. But more came, so many more, and the rain made everything heavy, slow, exhausting.
They forced us back to the cliff wall. Then something even worse happened. They crawled over each other. Bones disassembling, reattaching, locking together until a massive skeletal giant stood over us, its ribcage a cage of jagged white, its eyes empty, its fists huge enough to crush all three of us at once.
"We're so fucked!" Dre shouted.
Even Silas looked pale.
I stared up into the thing's shadow, and for the first time, I genuinely thought of home. My brother. My mom. That I'd never see them again. Tears blurred my vision as that enormous fist came crashing down.
I held up my arms and screamed
BOOM.
Light. Heat. A crack of thunder exploded out from me. The giant's fist disintegrated into shards of bone. Sparks danced in the rain.
Dre and Silas didn't say anything at first. They just stared at my hands.
They glowed.
Blue.
Electricity arced between my fingers. I panicked, shaking my hands, trying to stop it—but the lightning clung to me like it was alive. Run! I yelled. Go!
They sprinted.
I turned and ran too, and suddenly I wasn't beside them. I wasn't behind them.
I was on the other side of the forest.
"How the hell did you.....?" Silas shouted from far behind.
I had no answer. Skeletons reassembled behind them. More emerged between the trees.
So, I stopped running. And I decided to fight.
It felt like I was a living bolt of lightning. A blue streak tearing through the forest. Skeletons exploded into splinters as I passed. The storm crackled with every strike. Dre and Silas watched, drenched and shocked, as over a hundred fifty skeletons collapsed into piles of useless bone.
Wherever this place was...
It was nowhere ordinary.
And I wasn't an ordinary kid anymore.