Fallen University: Year Two

Chapter One

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.

…or, you know, a remote mountain range between Russia and Mongolia.

Hannah scrunched close to me as we sat on my bed, staring out of the window at the dark landscape beyond. It was definitely not Mönkh Saridag.

We’d been here all night, keeping a strange, silent vigil. We had talked a little, but not much. Enough for her to know that Owen was responsible for transporting us here. And that he was dead. Nothing else seemed important right now; at least not until we knew whether or not we could ever get back home.

“We aren’t sure this is the underworld though,” Hannah said after a long, bleak silence. There was a hopeful, almost desperate lilt to her voice. “Maybe the school just fell through a collapsed cave or something. We’re probably still on earth, right?”

I didn’t want to point out that a collapse like that would have felt like the worst earthquake ever, or that this transportation had been completely seamless. The tone of her voice suggested she already knew those things but just wasn’t ready to face them yet.

“I guess we’ll find out soon,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and even. “If a sun even rises out there.”

My window had shown me nothing but pitch black throughout most of the night. Now, in what seemed to be the early hours of dawn, an eye-shaped swath of black in the distance was turning gray. Hannah blinked and rubbed her eyes, craning her head forward slightly. I did the same. We’d been up all night; it was entirely possible we were both hallucinating.

But we weren’t. As the light outside got brighter, it also got way more red. Super red. Not like the old sci-fi interpretations of Mars—more like the angry, dull burn of a dying star. Shadows began to take shape in the deep darkness outside, and I could finally interpret what I was looking at. We were in a cave, or something similar. Shit, maybe whatever spell Owen had used to transport us here had gutted a mountain. There were certainly plenty of those to choose from, at least, on earth. I had to imagine the underworld was the same.

The red light streaming through the eye-shaped hole in the distance illuminated the landscape inside the cave. It truly was a cave, but it was so massive it almost didn’t feel like one. It was so wide and tall that I couldn’t even make out all the walls, except for the one with the hole in it. And the terrain around us was… well…

“Oh, God,” Hannah whispered.

“Yeah, I don’t think he can hear you from all the way down here,” I muttered, not taking my gaze off the sight outside.

Massive slags of black slate rose like jagged teeth across the blood-red horizon. Bubbling black bogs spread across the land in front of us.

“I saw an image of an aneurysm once,” I said quietly. “Back in college. A big black splat with snaking arms. It looked like death. It looked just like those.”

She shuddered beside me, reaching out with a trembling hand to point into the distance. “Are those trees?”

They looked more like bones, leafless and gnarled. Great white fingers pierced the ground, reaching up for the sky as if they wanted to claw the blood from the clotted clouds.

“I hope so,” I said. “If they’re not, I don’t want to know what they are.”

She was silent for a long moment, but I could practically hear her thinking, her brain whirring as she tried to figure out how to fix this. I hadn’t known Hannah long, but we’d gotten to know each other very well, very fast because of the intense circumstances of our meeting. Being turned into demons together will do that to people.