CHAPTER ONE
WHERE AM I?

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Aliss Kade was the type of person who really valued her sleep. She'd spent many years unable to rest easily over the shouting from outside her bedroom door or the more distant, but still loud, noises from neighbours' apartments that didn't want to bother being quiet even though it was the middle of the night. Or maybe it was just nightmares that kept her awake. Or just not wanting to have to face the next day.

Whatever the reason may have been, Aliss didn't live in the environment that had caused it anymore. She lived with the person who had seen her struggling, seen her sadness and loneliness and gotten her out. The person who had saved her. She got to sleep through the night now and after many sleepless nights, expecting something that would never come, she had gotten to a place where she could sleep through the night now. Where she wasn't afraid of what the next day might have in store for her.

Unfortunately, she was the only one in her home of two that valued sleep.

Ivan Voland was the one person that Aliss trusted her life to. He had been the one that had saved her from the home that was slowly draining the life out of her, that had given her a place where she could feel safe, a person she could feel safe with. She loved him more than she could ever put into words and the three years that they had been together were easily better than the sixteen years of her life before.

Despite her own lack of understanding in it, one of the things that Aliss loved the most about Ivan was his love of astronomy and everything that had to do with space. There were many nights when he would sit out on the back porch with his telescope and a thermos full of hot tea. It wasn't unusual for him to come into their room in the middle of the night and wake Aliss, telling her that she had to see something that he'd just found.

That was how Aliss found herself out of bed and sitting in the passenger seat of Ivan's truck with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

Well, that was part of how.

There was a meteor shower that night that Ivan hadn't known about. As soon as it had started, he had rushed to get Aliss so that she could watch it with him. Through her sleep-heavy mind, she could see that it was really beautiful to watch.

Even more unexpected was when one came closer to them. Close enough that they could actually see the fire as it crashed down on the other side of the hill that was a ways from their house. Ivan had insisted that they go find it, maybe take a piece of the meteor for themselves. Aliss had been... hesitant to say the least. But she couldn't deny the way that Ivan's face had lit up.

That was how she found herself sitting in the passenger seat of Ivan's truck with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

Glancing at the clock, Aliss sighed and looked back out the window as Ivan drove them towards where he thought the meteor had crashed. She would never say anything to Ivan but she really didn't believe that they'd find it. She was sure that their search through the night would be as useless as trying to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

"Sorry, love, I should have made you some tea before we left," Ivan told her, glancing over at her as she rubbed her tired eyes.

"No, it's alright. I don't have to be awake to provide moral support."

Ivan laughed and reached over to squeeze her hand before he moved his hand back to the steering wheel as they turned the final corner and he pulled them off to the side of the road.

He met her on the other side of the car after they'd parked and took her hand, leading her into the dark trees of the park towards where he thought the meteor would be. Ivan started talking all about meteors as they walked, and Aliss half-listened, her brain still not fully awake.

When they came around a particularly thick grouping of trees, Ivan cheered and Aliss' jaw dropped as they saw a crater in front of them with a lightly smoking hunk of rock in the center of it.

"Careful!" Aliss said as Ivan immediately dropped her hand to jump down into the crater to have a better look.

"It's fine, don't worry," he promised her. "I'm being safe, promise."

"You jumped down there way too quick for me to believe that."

He laughed at her again and started walking around the meteor, looking at it with wide, excited eyes. This really was part of a dream come true for him.

"Come on, Al, come down," he said, extending a hand to her.

"Absolutely not."

"What? Why?"

"That thing's from space and it's still smoking. I am perfectly content up here."

"I promise that it's safe."

Aliss sighed and decided that she was too tired to argue. She took the hand he had offered out to her and started to slowly make her way down into the center of the crater. Halfway down, her foot slipped and she was sure that she was going to fall and hurt herself, but Ivan was quicker and he managed to catch her easily in his arms.

He smiled down at her, clearly very proud of himself. She placed a hand on his cheek and kissed him in thanks before he set her on her feet once more and stepped back. When he was sure that she was steady, he kissed the top of her head and then turned back to his meteor.

Not completely understanding her boyfriend's excitement at what was just a hunk of rock, Aliss still started walking around it in the opposite direction of Ivan. It was from space, after all, she was sure that she could find something interesting about it.

A deep humming noise suddenly reached her ears that seemed to be coming from the meteor itself. A glance at Ivan told her that he didn't hear anything and she looked back at the rock, spotting what seemed to be a cleft in the rock. She placed a hand on it so that she could try and see into the cleft.

The stone screamed.

She stepped back abruptly, tripping on the dirt and falling backwards till she landed heavily on the ground and stared at the meteor in shock, eyes wide.

Though she tried to think of a way to describe the horrible scream, words fell short. Even if someone never expected to hear stone scream, if they had to imagine what it might sound like, that was exactly what Aliss would have expected.

The scream started back up again, louder this time. Aliss shook her head to try and clear it but the noise went on. She stumbled to her feet, wanting nothing more than to get away from the stupid meteor. The sound was all around her, making her teeth ache and her head spin. Her vision began to blur.

Aliss had been in a car accident once in her life when she was three years old. It was one of her first memories. She could remember the gentle rocking of the car, the comforting weightlessness as she drifted off to sleep. Then the shock of her stomach suddenly dropping and the sickening sensation of falling at high speed. That abrupt transition was the only way she could describe what she was currently feeling and even that fell far, far short.

She could say that her field of vision contracted to a single dark spot, then disappeared entirely, leaving not darkness but a bright void. She could say that she felt as though she was spinning or even being pulled inside out. Each of these things was true and yet none of them could describe the sense of complete disruption, of being slammed against something very hard that wasn't there.

Nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing whatsoever appeared to happen and yet she experienced a feeling of complete and total terror so great that she could hardly remember anything at all. It was the heart of chaos. No power could overcome it.

She didn't know how to describe what state she was in as all this happened. It wasn't quite unconsciousness, but she certainly wasn't awake. Though she was aware of the changing sensations, she was aware of nothing else. When she finally did become aware of something else, the first thing that she felt was a soft bed beneath her and she thought for sure that somehow, she had just passed out at the crater site and Ivan had brought her home to bed.

Aliss sat up, rubbing at her eyes and then taking a deep breath as she ran her hands through her hair.

"What happened?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

Every muscle in her body froze. That was not Ivan's voice.

She finally started taking in the room around her. The bed below her had brown sheets, there was a bay window in front of her with the curtains all drawn. An unfamiliar desk against one wall, pieces of art that she'd never seen before up on one of the walls to her left between two strange-looking doors.

Turning towards her right where the unfamiliar voice had come from, Aliss saw a man with a beard that only looked vaguely familiar sitting next to the bed. A scream escaped her as she scrambled over the bed to get as far away as possible.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Aliss, what—"

"Who are you and where am I?"

"If you just take a—"

"How the hell did I get here? What happened to the meteor?"

"The meteor?"

"Yeah, the meteor! We were at the crash site and— Oh, my god! What the hell did you do to Ivan? Did you kidnap us both?"

"Ivan?"

Aliss took a deep breath, feeling herself getting close to either hyperventilating or giving herself a panic attack. The bearded man sighed as a look of realization came over his face.

"Blast it, we were making such good progress," he said.

He started walking around the bed to come closer to her and she matched his every step with one that took her further away from the stranger. When he realized that, he stopped, setting something that he'd been holding down on the bed and held both his hands up as if to show her that she was no threat.

"You're safe, Aliss, I promise. We're back at the temple, the meteor is gone."

"Gone? How could it be gone? We were just there. And what temple? Why would you take me to a temple?"

The man sighed again. He picked something up from the end of the bed and held it out to her. She could tell that it was some kind of tablet, but it had some fancy case on it that looked to be heavier than the tablet itself.

"What is this? I don't need your fancy iPad! I need you to tell me what's going on, here!"

"That's what I'm trying to do," he explained in a gentle tone. "It has your life on it, Aliss, the healers thought it would help to jog some memories."

"Why would I need something to jog my memories? Why did you say healers? Just tell me what the hell is going on!"

"You were in an accident. We were on Cas Leoch and there was a meteor shower coming right for the village we were protecting. You saved everyone, but you used all your strength, and the last meteor crashed right next to you. I brought you back here and the healers said you'd lost your memories."

Aliss scoffed. "That makes no sense. That makes absolutely no sense."

"That's the truth, I promise you."

"No, no way. This is some kind of sick joke. Ivan put you up to this, didn't he? You're some... coworker or classmate of his, right? I fell and hit my head after I touched the meteor and he wanted to play one of those 'you've been in a coma for five years' jokes on me."

"Aliss, what are you—"

"You can just fess up now. This isn't funny."

"No, I rather think it's not. Perhaps you need to go back to the healers."

"I'm not going anywhere with some stranger."

"I am not a stranger, I promise you, Aliss—"

He stepped forward again, reaching out like he was going to touch her arm or grab her or something. Panic shot through her and she scrambled away from him, jumping up onto the bed and then over it, heading for the door that was now in front of her.

Instead of finding some regular hallway, it only looked like more of what was inside. People dressed in the same strange robes that the bearded man was wearing walked by, giving her a strange look. Though even more panic was starting to build in her, she didn't give herself more than a few seconds to stay there, sure that the man was going to come after her.

She picked a direction at random and started running down the hallway, not acknowledging the strange looks she continued to receive or how her mind started to wonder if perhaps she was in a real place as it continued to go on and on past what seemed logical for something constructed for a joke.

Eventually, a large door came into view and she made a beeline for it, pushing it open and stumbling out into fresh air. To her continually growing panic, instead of finding herself on a street, she had only come out onto a balcony.

And then she looked up.

Her heart dropped as she looked at the view beyond the balcony. A city that stretched as far as the eye could see, both out and downwards. Strange flying cars zipping around buildings. Fluorescent and colourful signs advertising products in a language she didn't recognize. Flickering holograms of people in strange clothes.

The door opened behind her again and a moment later the bearded man stepped in front of her, blocking her view of the strange world. As he took in her expression, his own dropped into one of deep concern.

"Aliss?"

"It's real. It's all real..." she managed. "It's not a joke or..."

Her eyes rolled back and her knees gave out as she fainted, the world going dark.

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an. first chapter, folks, how are we feeling? I, for one, am super excited! I hope you guys liked the chapter!