1 The First of the Hounds

A haze had crept over Garrick's mind, and he stared at the book open before him, his eyes scanning the pages without seeing the words before him. A gentle breeze blew through the open library window and gusted through his short brown locks. The resulting tickling sensation as his hair moved over his forehead and ears snapped him back from the depth of his thoughts, thrusting him back into reality.

Garrick frowned down at the book he held. He recognized the words upon the page from his repeated readings of this same text over the years, but he knew they hadn't faced the same slow scrutiny he had give the pages before them. He flipped back a page and sought the last words he remembered that had faced his methodical mental dissection before his thoughts had thus claimed him. While his eyes scanned the page, his fingers sought the lowball of whiskey on the table beside him.

His hand was the first to be successful, and he drank while his eyes continued their diligent search. However, before he could find his place and continue his work, Garrick felt a pressure in his mind and heard a buzzing sound from deep within his ears.

Someone was trying to contact him.

Setting aside his book and now-empty glass upon the side table, Garrick held out one hand, palm up and fingers curved as though he were balancing the blade of an invisible sword in the empty space of his palm. As the buzzing in his ears crescendoed, he imagined the cool caress of metal machinery filling his palm and the satisfying weight that accompanied it. He imagined the black case engraved with the image of a unicorn, the symbol of the Nascent, upon its back and a front that was speckled with an array of dials and buttons. And as he focused thus on this device, a handheld computer – his Chimera – appeared in his hand, summoned from the depths of his mind and grounded in reality by the power of his will.

The screen of the Chimera flashed a message confirming that someone was trying to reach him, so with the thumb of the hand holding the device, he pushed the button that would accept the communication.

The image of his sister Thistle appeared before him as though projected into the library via hologram. However, Garrick knew that no one else could see his sister but him, as the Chimera inserted her image directly into his eye.

What he could see of the wall behind her was lined with training swords and racks of polished armor, and although this projection of Thistle was cropped at her chest, it was enough to show that she wore her leather baldric over one shoulder, which no doubt meant that her dark sword Umbre was hanging at her waist.

Garrick straightened in his seat. "Is something wrong?" he asked. The words didn't pass through his lips but instead were only uttered in his mind. His focus upon this message, however, made them as concrete as the Chimera in his hand.

Thistle shook her head. "I'm fine," she said. "Are you free to spar? I'm looking for new opponents for Bernard. It's no good if he only fights against me, and I fear his progress is stagnating." Her words vibrated in Garrick's ears even though Thistle's lips hadn't moved.

Garrick let out a relieved sigh and leaned back in his chair. "I could help in an hour. I have a theory I'm pursuing and don't want to lose my momentum."

Thistle pursed her lips. "A theory on what?" Her words were stiff.

Garrick's mind started to race for some lie, but he worried that she would pick up on his surface thoughts through their mental link. The truth was easier, even if he already had a pretty good idea as to how she'd react to it. "On how to find Conrad and bring him home."

Thistle's eyes narrowed into a glare, and her lip twitched. "This still?" Her words were as sharp as any blade. "We're better off without that miserable dolt bumbling around the palace, drunkenly hitting on servants!"

"I'm just worried because we haven't been able to reach him since the war, and-"

Thistle cut him off. "And it's been a blissful ninety eight years," she finished for him. "If only Blaine and Cerulie would think to crawl into the same hole Conrad did. I'm tired of seeing traitors wandering free in my home."

Garrick couldn't help but wonder why Thistle was bringing in more of their siblings into her rant. The only connection that he could see was that she viewed Conrad as a traitor as well, but that went against everything Garrick knew about Conrad. "Neither Blaine nor Cerulie have been by for long since the war," he said in an attempt to calm her.

"But they always drop in unannounced, forcing us to scrambled together preparations after it's already too late." Her expression had twisted into a scowl. "You're wasting your time, Garrick, just as you're wasting mine right now. Just admit Conrad's dead. You'll feel better thinking like that. I know I do."

"Thistle-"

But it was too late. She had vanished from his sight.

Garrick sighed and turned his attention from the Chimera in his hand. With its existence no longer sustained by his concentration, the computer vanished once more.

Thistle was wrong. He knew that much. If Conrad were dead, then a corpse should have turned up eventually. Conrad had to be alive. It was just a matter of finding him.

However, poring over the books that recounted each of their stories during the war was getting him nowhere. Besides, Conrad had been alive to tell the scribe everything after the war's end. How could he have gotten himself killed after their troubles were over? More likely, he was held captive by some force that was keeping him from contacting his family. And if that were true, who knew what horrors he had suffered over the years?

Garrick forced these thoughts away before they could worry their way into his gut. Fretting about Conrad's safety wouldn't magically bring him home. He had to go out and look for him.

While there had been countless attempts to seek Conrad with a Chimera, all of them had failed.

However, Garrick knew he couldn't stay here and do nothing with these worries screaming in his head. He stood and willed his Chimera to return to his palm and pressed the button necessary for the machine to construct a tunnel for him to travel through.

A message appeared upon the screen. "What is your desire?" A cursor blinked below these words as it awaited Garrick's input.

His hand hesitated over the keys. He already knew that just putting in his brother's name wasn't enough, so he'd have to take a different approach if he wanted results. A thought came to his mind, and his fingers danced deftly over the keys to spell out his message.

"The merest trace of Conrad," he read back to himself once he'd finished his typing. It was something different, at least. Finding it suitable for now, Garrick opened another menu within the Chimera and scrolled through the list of names and locations that popped up.

The Chimera was good at finding anything its owner wanted, but just like how a bloodhound follows a scent, the computer needed something to follow through the old worlds to better find its source. Thankfully, Garrick had just the thing for his Chimera to catch Conrad's metaphorical scent. By selecting Conrad's name from the list, Garrick's Chimera accessed the long string of numbers, letters, and equations that made up the fingerprint of his missing brother's Chimera. And then, with another press of a button, the tunnel opened up before him, splitting the library apart like light refracted through a prism. Before him, the white light of the library split into a rainbow of worlds as far as his eye could see, leading him away from his home in the Nascent and deep into the old worlds.

He strode forward, his feet leaving the comfortable firmness of the castle's stone floor to arrive onto bare, hard-packed earth, which then changed to soft, warm sand not more than five paces further. As the texture of the ground changed beneath his feet, so did the rest of his surroundings. The sounds of seabirds crying as they hunted along the waves changed to the mingling twitters of countless song birds as the sand he strode across became soft, young grass.

Garrick didn't have time to savor all of these changing sensations, however. His strides were long and quick, cutting his time in each world as short as possible.

At one point, his tunnel lead him through what seemed to be some noble's house, and as his feet thunked over the wooden flooring, he heard a surprised gasp from someone unseen to him, and he wondered how many ghost stories would be created from his brief intrusion upon this world.

From somewhere behind him, a dog growled, and not wanting a scuffle with a guard dog slowing down his search, Garrick picked up the pace to leave the lord's home behind and enter the next world, an open field where he saw wild horses grazing.

He let out a sigh as he traded the even flooring for the roughness of packed dirt. He was safe.

The nearest horses let out startled whinnies and bolted from Garrick's sudden intrusion upon their world, and he watched them as they galloped toward there the tunnel formed a border, where they vanished from his sight as his view of their world was obscured by the upcoming world of jagged cliffs that cut through a snowflake obsidian sky.

However, under the sounds of hoof beats and grasses that rustled against his knees with every step, the ominous lupine snarls remained and seemed even closer than before. The obvious explanation was that he had interrupted a pack of wolves as they'd hunted, scaring off their intended prey with his sudden appearance. After all, it was impossible for the guard dog in the last world to have followed him without a Chimera of its own, and no ordinary animal would have a Chimera.

Since there was a good chance the interrupted wolves might make him their new target, Garrick sought a button with his thumb, and pressing it, his spear materialized in his free hand, constructed from pixels as the Chimera brought the weapon to existence. The coolness of the wood in his palm calmed him. If he were attacked, he knew he could make short work of even the largest pack of wolves.

He was close to the next world, but Garrick glanced over his shoulder just in case any stray predators had moved close enough to strike. But what was behind him was no wolf, no guard dog, and definitely not anything natural. Instead, the monster that followed behind him was an impossibility that made his blood run cold.

What seemed to be a massive, lanky, hairless dog was charging after him through his tunnel, bounding on all fours effortlessly through the same worlds that Garrick had just traversed himself mere moments before. It closed the distance between the two of them with a pace that was disturbing in both its speed and its gait. The latter of these originated from its body, which was all wrong.

Instead of the barrel chest and paw-tipped limbs expected of a dog, this creature had the body of a man. But even when compared to a human, the body was amiss in all sorts of unnerving ways. Its arms were gangly and thin, proportioned much longer than a human's to better support its animalistic, four-footed run, and there seemed to be far too many joints. The body itself was gaunt, with skin stretched over its muscles like saran wrap.

Garrick had been frozen in startled terror, but he snapped out of his fear and confusion to act. He rested his spear against his shoulder in order to hold his Chimera with both hands, and when he found the button he needed, he jammed it hard with both thumbs.

The sliver of world Garrick stood in expanded, driving away all of the other worlds he had traveled through in his search for Conrad as the tunnel collapsed around him, trapping the beast a few worlds back.

Garrick let out a long sigh. Other than the wild horses nearby that snorted and paced about him at a cautious distance, he was now alone.

It had been such an easy solution, Garrick almost laughed as he found himself freed from his pursuer. Whatever had just happened must have been some sort of fluke. It was gone now. He was safe.

It seemed that something or someone didn't want Conrad to be found and had sent that beast after him. Who knew if there were more? Just in case, he kept his spear out as he repeated the same steps he had gone through back in the library, typing in his desire and selecting his brother's name from the list offered to him

But before he could press the final button, he heard another snarl and the horses surrounding him bolted with frantic whinnies. Garrick looked up and saw a dog-headed man seemingly identical to the one that had charged him in his tunnel sprinting toward him on all fours, lips pulled back to reveal curved fangs.

Garrick dismissed his Chimera and raised his spear as he shifted his weight to his back foot. His pulse thudded in his ears as his mind raced. How?

Only two explanations came to him, and he didn't like either of them. It could be that this was the same creature that had chased him through his tunnel, and it had clawed its way between worlds to find him again. That, or it was a different one that someone had injected directly into this world to specifically target him.

Either way, it seemed that someone was trying to prevent Garrick's efforts, and that the only way to continue his search for Conrad was to kill this creature.

As the distance between them closed, the monster rose up to run on its back legs. Its tongue flopped from its open mouth as it lashed out toward Garrick with hands tipped with wicked claws.

A spin of his spear deflected the incoming blow and opened the beast up to a counter attack. Garrick thrust the head of his weapon toward the creature's torso and made easy contact. However, the the weapon's edge merely skidded across his opponent's skin with hardly a nick, and dread filled Garrick. His spear had been magically honed so that it could slice through steel like butter, but this creature's very flesh managed to repel all but the mildest of cuts.

With a snarl, his foe lunged forward, claws raking the air and aiming for Garrick's throat. Another spin of his spear deflected the blow, and Garrick darted backward in an attempt to keep distance between himself and this monster. But the dog-faced creature pressed the attack, the slashes of its claws swift and unrelenting.

The horses around them were growing restless, pawing at the dry earth with their hooves and tossing their heads, ears pressed flat. A stampede was imminent. Garrick could only hope that they chose to aim their rush away from him.

Garrick continued to dance away from his attacker, thwacking at the claws that threatened his eyes and throat.

As he continued to fight defensively, he glanced down at the gash that he had made earlier. It was thin, like a papercut, and red dripped from it in raw lines. But that cut was now the chink in this beast's armor. With its flesh already damaged thus, he should, in theory, cause even more grievous wounds than he'd managed with his initial strike. It would be risky with how wildly his opponent was attacking, but...

The bipedal dog snarled and sliced at Garrick again with its claws, but instead of blocking, Garrick ducked. The sharpened digits sliced past him, and he felt those long fingers brush against his ear as one claw caught at his jawline. He felt the sharp bite of pain followed by a warm wetness that trickled down the side of his neck. Ignoring both these sensations for now, Garrick thrust his spear upward, connecting with the beast's man-like torso. The tip of his blade found the opening it had made earlier and penetrated deep within the flesh of the foe, its progress halted only by the similarly tough hide that coated the creature's back.

There came a yelp like a dog that's had its tail stepped on, and the dog-like monster whimpered in pain. Yet in spite of the hole left in its gut, it still raised its clawed hands menacingly, stretching its fingers out as it attempted to reach its prey, even if it meant pushing the spear deeper into its body.

Garrick yanked his weapon free, lurching the monster closer. But before it could strike him, he flipped his weapon around and bashed the butt of it into the beast's solar plexus.

The monster stumbled to the ground but still clawed at the earth, attempting to drag itself closer in its desperation to end Garrick's existence. However, the Nascentian kept his distance, standing just out of reach of any further attack as he looked down at it, analyzing it for weak points as he tried to come up with a way to kill it for good.

It was then that the horses seemed to have enough of spectating, and the herd charged. Garrick looked up and raised his spear as adrenaline thundered through his veins. Falling beneath so many hooves could mean death, even for someone as hardy as himself, so he widened his stance to brace for impact and took a deep breath as the wall of horses enveloped him, sending trembles through the earth as they beat upon it with their hooves.

Using his spear, Garrick parted the charging animals, sending them to his left and right with nudges and the occasional nick on their chests and shoulders to encourage their changes in direction. The one that was charging up the center toward him wouldn't be quite so easy, however. As it neared, Garrick repositioned his spear and then swung the weapon like a club. With a startled whinny, the smacked horse reared into the air, hooves threateningly close. Garrick raised his spear again, ready to stab this one through the heart even if it meant losing the very tool that was keeping him alive. However, he let out a relieved sigh as the horse lowered to all fours again and joined its fellows in the streams of wild bodies that passed harmlessly on either side of Garrick.

The stampede thinned and the rumbling of hooves faded, and Garrick lowered his spear with a sigh of relief. His hands still shaking from the fading adrenaline, he looked down at where his attacker lay.

All that remained was a mound of flesh that had been trampled into the dirt. Its bones were shattered so that what was left was twisted and crushed into an unrecognizable lump of meat. But finally, it was unmoving.

Garrick took one last moment to stare down at the beast before summoning his Chimera to his free hand. This was all wrong. A being such as this shouldn't exist, shouldn't have these powers.

And the timing... it had attacked him while seeking Conrad.

Fear filled Garrick. This was proof that he had been right, that his brother was truly in danger. He kept his spear out as he reopened the tunnel, and with his Chimera in one hand and weapon ready in the other, Garrick raced through the old worlds, his eyes and ears ever vigilant for anything else that might dare try to stop him.