“AAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHH!” Dave couldn’t help it, he screamed like a little girl, watching in disbelief as the Island of Hong Kong suddenly dwindled below his dangling fake Cons like he was hitting the minus zoom on Google maps. Smaller, smaller, smaller by the second.

  Then they were as high as a plane, and still going up. Fast. Into the upper atmosphere. Dave watched in shocked disbelief as the sky got dark and then bent away, curving over the earth which fell below them. Upward they went, into the edge of space.

  He screamed until he couldn’t scream anymore, then stared upward in stunned silence as he flew through vacuum while still being able to breathe. All he could think about was the fact that he’d been seeing some really freaky shit in the sky lately, and he REALLY didn’t want to go up and meet it.

  They seemed to be accelerating every heartbeat. Everything went so dark that he thought he’d gone blind. He tried to scream again, but nothing came out. Then there were flashes of light, colors, then suddenly he started to see with his Special Vision. Layers. Wheels. Enormous creatures the size of galaxies… LOOKING at him. Space was NOT what Dave wanted to deal with right now.

  He shut his eyes. “NoNonononononooooooooo!!” Even to his own ears he sounded like a girl. He covered his face with his arms right as he whizzed past the face of a Being which was as big as a moon. It had black holes for eyes. Somehow he could still see it even through his arms, even though it seemed to be a billion light years away. It was still looking at him! Oh God… He was glad he’d just used the bathroom.

  The moon. The big, creepy, glyph-covered moon. He could see it above them. No… below them! Holy shit… they’d flipped around and there was goddamned Rune, the evil huge alien moon, right below them! They were headed straight for it! Earth was getting smaller and smaller overhead, until it was the size the moon was supposed to be.

  He wondered why his lungs weren’t being sucked out. Maybe they were still carrying a tiny packet of atmosphere with him, and any moment it would be pulled away and he would experience a horrible death. Pleasant thoughts…

  He looked up… down… the moon was huge, now it was as big as Earth below his shoes, a silvery-white-gray covered in massive trenches and weird earthworks like lines and circles and interconnected geometric petroglyphs. The light parts of the moon were bright stark white, the shadows were ink black. He couldn’t see where they were headed because it was in a shadow.

  He and Indigo hurtled down toward the weird scarred and pocked surface of the moon at super-sonic speeds, aiming directly for the dark part of a crater. He held the skateboard in front of him as if it would deflect the impact.

  They hit. There was darkness… but Dave only felt vertigo, not impact. He stumbled sideways, feeling the world tipping. Or he was tipping. He seemed to have soft-landed on solid ground somehow, without damage.

  He stumbled right into a stone wall he didn’t even see, hitting face-first, and went down. The next thing he knew he was laying on his back, staring up at the night sky which was so vivid that he couldn’t look away from it for a long moment. He’d never seen stars so beautiful in his life. And Earth… Earth hung there, serene, silent, a beautiful blue disk in the sky. It was the size of old Luna.

  He was alive… and he was breathing. How, he had no idea. The air was ice cold and so dry it burned. What had Miradon said about breathing vacuum? Something about how you could breathe on an airless planet if you went to the spiritual realm? Had the vacuum-suck-through-space-tube pulled them into another dimension?

  As his eyes adjusted to the inky blackness of the lunar shadow he could see Indigo duck and hide behind a short, tumbled half-wall of stone. The angel wasn’t half-transparent anymore, but totally solid-looking, another clue that maybe Dave was no longer in the ‘real’ world.

  Had he died? Was this death?

  He saw the lights in the sky. They weren’t stars. They were moving in patterns, and there were ribbons of color and ripples. A lot of stuff was flying around in space. Lights, orbs, balls, things that looked like bright stars but weren’t. There were also shells of light around Earth, multiple layers of them, and a slender glowing string that connected the Earth to the Moon. Like energy. Like the Aurora Borealis.

  He dare not look beyond the Earth into space… he knew he couldn’t handle the giant bald guys with stars for eyes, and whatever else he might see there. He shut his eyes and just breathed, again wondering how he was doing it.

  “Dave!” Indigo hissed, sounding stressed. “For God’s sake get behind cover! They’ll see you!”

  Dave slowly sat up, but he didn’t get much farther than that. He looked around him at an ancient gray stone ruin. It looked almost Greek, but also alien, and had long ago tumbled to half its height. Moon dust made dunes and slopes against the broken walls, blown by no wind that Dave could imagine. There were three standing stones in the middle, once capped by arches.

  “Get down you idiot!” the blue angel hissed to him angrily. When Dave didn’t respond, Indigo reached over and grabbed Dave’s leg, physically dragging him behind the wall with a burst of enormous strength. He was definitely totally physical now.

  Dave didn’t protest. He just heard some kind of buzzing in his skull and couldn’t think.

  Indigo seemed to be fixated on something, staring across the crater intently. Dave glanced in that direction, mostly for lack of anything better to do. His brain still had not re-booted and he felt dazed.

  He saw the blazing white of the lunar landscape, and in the distance a very big stone building that looked a lot like a very creepy Greek temple crossed with something from a Brutalist architectural magazine. He could see a ray of darkness stretching out of space down to the top of that temple, a black thread even darker than the utter blackness of space behind it.

  He managed to mumble, “Nobody ever told me dying was this screwed up. I thought it was all about a tunnel and light, not getting sucked out of the earth at warp speed and splattered into the moon. Nobody said anything about that.”

  “You aren’t dead. At least not yet. But you will be if you keep screwing around!”

  Dave looked at the creepy, crumbled Greek temple on the alien moon and frowned. “This doesn’t look like Heaven.”

  “Look! Right there! I can see figures going into that temple.”

  Dave squinted. He thought he could see something moving too, although it was hard to see over the glare of the pure white ground.

  Indigo narrowed his pupil-less blue eyes, watching the big temple for a moment. “Okay. They went inside. I think this is where they will stay put for a while. You stay here: if anyone comes toward this gate, hide in the shadow, okay? There’s no light in the moon’s shadows at all, you’ll be totally hidden. Dave? Are you listening to me?”

  Dave knew he was in shock, his mind spinning in a daze. He was on Rune. That evil, alien moon he’d stared at every single night since his parents had been killed by the Enshi. Then the daze of his brain began to fade, and it all came back to him… his life in flashes, his schooling. His studies. Ancient studies, language, myths abounding in every single civilization on earth about aliens and star-brothers and gods coming down from the sky. All those legends, those bizarre tales recorded in ancient stone in distant countries and dead civilizations were coming back to bite Dave in the ass.

  They were right. It was all real. It wasn’t myth, it was eye-witness accounts. The ancient humans had seen stuff. He started to seriously wonder about Gilgamesh and everything he’d ever read. Gods and monsters.

  What would Jim Cragley say if he could see this now?

  Indigo patted him on the back. “Stay in the shadow. I’m going to make my phone call. Don’t move.”

  Dave’s arm shot out of its own volition to grab Indigo’s wrist in a vice-tight grip. “Blue,” he said very slowly, and very, very calmly, “I don’t want to be alone on the creepy alien moon right now.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Indigo peeled Dave’s death-grip off of his wrist. He was a lot stronger than the human. “Let me go, if you want me to make my phone call and bring the good guys to rescue us, okay? You’ll be fine. Just stay put.”

  Dave sent him a really intense look. “I don’t want to be alone in front of the evil temple of demon gods surrounded by hard vacuum, Blue.”

  Indigo put his fingers onto his temples and massaged them, looking very stressed for a moment. “Okay. Fine. Come with me then. Just keep right behind me and don’t trip or something.” Ducking low, the angel ran up the edge of the crater toward the summit which was behind the small ruin.

  Dave silently followed, staying right on Indigo’s heels. Almost close enough to trip them both.

  “Back off, man! I’m serious!” Indigo growled.

  Dave ignored him and stayed right on Indigo’s shadow. He had to admit he was ice-cold scared. He’d never been scared like this in his life.

  The climb was more exhausting than it looked. Their feet sank into the soft moon-dust almost up to the ankle, and sometimes up to the knee. They would gain a hundred feet only to slide down two hundred.

  Indigo took them at an angle, trying to reach a pebbly area which looked firmer. The navy blue angel could also run flat-out on the dust without getting tired, which Dave could not match. He was soon left behind.

  Dave took the time to wonder why gravity was semi-normal and they weren’t bounding around like astronauts. Rune was bigger than their Luna sure, but it wasn’t big enough to have this much gravity. Maybe they weren’t really on the moon? Where else could they be?

  Dave watched his legs run, kicking up moon dust as fine as flour. Kicking moon rocks. He started to laugh. He felt like he was on drugs or something. This was so surreal! Yah when this shit became funny, he was definitely in shock.

  Indigo reached the top and waited for him but remaining low, in the shadow of a ripple in the crater wall. The shadows were pitch black and would provide excellent cover; it was doubtful anything could see them if the sunlight wasn’t hitting them.

  Dave joined him, wondering whether it shouldn’t be like negative a hundred degrees in the shade… it merely felt cold, but not deadly. Nothing was making any sense.

  “This will do. We’re far enough away they won’t see us, and I have a clear shot to Earth from here. Sit tight.” The blue angel squatted down and began to rock gently back and forth, humming, his eyes shut. He went into what seemed to be a trance.

  Dave waited. Whether he wanted to or not, he couldn’t stop his eyes from lifting into that amazing sky and tracing the incomprehensible structures that he saw there. The inside of the universe… the circuit board behind Reality. He was seeing the seams, the cracks, the welds that made up everything he knew. It looked like a massive spiderweb made of light. Rivers of plasma stretched fine as hair between galaxies, filling the sky with light. It was indescribable.

  The mechanical nature of it was so clear from space, so obvious. It was like a vast clock, an endless machine. He began to see relations between the stars, the structures, both visible and invisible. A network of light that connected one sun to another, all the way across the galaxy. Tunnels between the suns.

  He looked at Earth, noticing at last that it was shrouded by a black pall he’d not noticed before. The surface seemed to be dirty, to squirm. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. He saw what looked like slinkies looping all over the Earth, dark and vile tunnels connecting one part of the planet to another. He saw lines of light, like cracks, like the Earth was about to burst apart and explode. He saw geysers of strange green light shooting out of the planet and flattening against the lower translucent shields. He scowled, wondering what it all meant.

  He glanced at the angel. Indigo was still in a trance. Dave sighed. “I think we’re a little distant from all the other guardian angels, Blue. Unless there’s a nice good-guy Astronaut in the next crater…”

  “Sssssh,” Indigo hissed, “let me concentrate! Or do you not want help to arrive? Shut up!” He went back to humming and rocking.

  Right. Dave sighed and turned his back on Indigo, crossing his arms and looking down into the crater. He felt oddly euphoric, and careless. He’d probably snapped and was having a mental breakdown.

  Okay. Facts. They needed help. They were on Rune. An empty, eerily silent, totally desolate moon which was technically off-limits to civilians and Top Secret. With some sort of crypt temple full of bad guys. And his girlfriend was being held by evil monsters like big ugly winged black shadow-men with horns that were working with Chinese mafia no less.

  Dave barked out a totally unamused and involuntary laugh.

  He looked up at Earth and shouted. “Does this count as lost? Hello? I’m Loooost!” Dave began wandering, leaving Indigo to mutter and rock to his heart’s content. “I said I’m LOOOOOST!”

  He kept that up for a few minutes, but when nothing happened he sighed again. Maybe he wasn’t lost enough. After all he knew exactly where he was. Not which crater exactly of course, but… oh screw the guy in the leisure suit. What other help could he possibly reach?

  Dave looked up. He saw what looked like enormous red glowing crabs. Schools of light that swam like fish. What might have been equations or some language that nobody knew, scrawled in plasma across the drifting reaches of space. Nothing out there looked helpful.

  The Earth itself felt vaguely good, but it was also dirty and seemed to be captured in barbed wire. He thought he could almost hear it screaming, a constant distant wailing sound like flutes or discordant wind.

  He turned a full circle, eying space, and saw a glint of red. Mars. The feeling he got from that distant star almost made him sick; the planet was shrouded in a black so dark that it made his mind hurt. The finger of blackness that was going down to the Temple on the other side of the crater was definitely coming from Mars. “Holy shit on a Popsicle stick, batman,” he whispered, retched a little, and looked away. Not Mars.

  The sun. Yes. The sun was a good thing; it had a few shadows of its own but it wasn’t wholly filthy like Earth. He could see a massive halo surrounding it, and almost made out a man-like shape inside it with pinpricks of white light for eyes.

  The angel of the sun, right? Or did he have dragon wings? In fact, looking more closely, Dave was pretty sure the sun-dude was half dragon and had a big snarling mouth full of teeth. Freaky.

  He eyed the sun doubtfully, wondering how far away the sun-dude was. But hell, he’d seen God, and God was far away too. Maybe sun guy could hear him? God could hear people, right? That was what prayer was?

  Without bothering to double-think his instincts, Dave cupped his hands around his mouth and began to bellow, “HEY! HEEEEEY! SUN GUY! YOU! YOU IN THE SUN!” He jumped around, waving wildly, as if that would help. “HEEEEEY! DRAGON SUN GUY! HEY! OVEEERR HEEEEEREEEE!”

  Indigo didn’t seem to hear him, muttering some nonsense that sounded like ‘bim badda bim’ or something. He was deep in a trance. All the better; he wouldn’t try to stop Dave.

  The human kept jumping and screaming like a maniac, waving both arms. “SUUUUUN GUUUYYY!”

  Slowly, the dragon sun man moved. He turned his great head and squinted, as if trying to see something very far away. The light around Dave seemed to get even brighter. “He sees me! Ohmygod, success!” He jumped even higher and screamed until his voice cracked. “HELP! WE NEED HELP!”

  The huge draco-man slowly stretched its wings and raised one hand. It seemed to stand up, which looked from where Dave stood like a momentous effort that Draco probably hadn’t attempted in millennia.

  He kept squinting, obviously trying to get a clear look at Dave. Sun flares spread around him like wings, a beautiful slow dance of fire.

  Assuming the big sun dude thing could hear him, since it was looking at him, Dave hurried to explain. “My friends got captured by evil demon bad guys, and they’re being held in this creepy old temple thing, right behind me in this crater! Can you help me? Can you, like, come over here and squish the bad guys in the temple?”

  The big draco-dude seemed interested. It struck Dave that nobody had probably spoken to him for… God alone knew how long. Maybe ever. Maybe he was lonely and bored?

  The actual physical sun in the chest of the dragon-man seemed to be flaring, sending out arcs of fire. It was getting excited. Then, the big dragon-man smiled. It was terrifying. He slowly raised both arms, pointing toward the moon, and roared. Enormous amounts of sun-flares shot out of the sun, making it writhe.

  “Wow!” Dave couldn’t help himself; he was impressed.

  Then the sun-guy stooped over, squinting again at the moon like an old man trying to read a small bottle label. He pointed, as if sighting down a long barrel of a rifle, taking very careful aim at a very, very tiny target a very long ways away. He wiggled his fingers, shifted his stance, squinted again, and pointed his pinkie at the moon. A tiny, itty-bitty little strudel of sun-plasma squirted out of the end of his finger and headed straight for Dave’s crater like a laser beam.

  At first the beam looked tiny, like a glowing hair, but as it got closer…

  “OHGOD,” Dave gasped, just then realizing what a bad idea this might have been. Dave turned and sprinted toward Indigo, tackling the blue guy into the dust. “DOWN!”

  Indigo snapped out of his trance blearily. “Wha… what the hell, Dave, I was just explaining our situation!!” He started to get mad, and threw the human off of him. Then he looked up. “Oh my God. Dave! What did you DO?”

  Dave put the skateboard over his head as if he could hide under it. “What the hell do you think I did, I asked for help!”

  Indigo grabbed the human and ran for their lives. They couldn’t help it; both of them screamed, sure that the massive bolt of sun-plasma would take them, the crater, and everything else out in one shot.

  Dave couldn’t stop himself from looking up. He watched the light fill up the sky like a comet the size of everything, another sun born above them. Unendurable heat withered the surface of the moon, making the dust sizzle. The missile had to be the size of the Empire State Building… no… bigger.

  Indigo grabbed the skateboard and flung himself onto it belly-first, Dave landing on his back, and they flew for their lives. “GO BABY GO!” Dave shrieked.

  Then it hit.

  BOOOOOOOOOOM.

  The moon shook. No, it rang like it was hollow. A shockwave threw them into the air together on the skateboard and they slowly, strangely slowly, fell through layers of white dust that turned the airless atmosphere into milk. There was thunder. There was peals of thunder. Deafening noise. Explosions. Secondary explosions.

  Dave couldn’t breathe; the dust was so thick it coated him like a flour dumpling. Then he fell, and didn’t remember the impact. His last thought was white-hot terror that he’d blown up Charis.