The Song of Immaru - Earth’s Door (Second Edition Beta)

Final Second Edition to be released Summer 2026. Below excerpt subject to change prior to then.

Chapter 1

Tarin sprang from his bed with a scream. The haunting melody still swirled between his ears, even as the vision of the four necks within four nooses started to fade. Usually, he managed at least a few nights’ gap between these awful dreams. But now they were plaguing him with far more regularity.

He got up and stumbled past a trash bin full of empty amber bottles into his trailer’s tiny bathroom. His heart beat fast as he splashed water on his face and looked at his pale complexion in the dusty mirror. He rubbed his temples and groaned. “What’s the time?”

Four three-dimensional holographic digits appeared near the top of the glass. Already ten in the morning? Howard would be angry if he were late again, and he couldn’t afford to get fired. He grabbed a comb and started working some tangles out of his sandy brown hair. After dressing, he hurried into the kitchen, stuffed a stale piece of bread in his mouth, and grabbed his coat. Still chewing, he headed out into the chilly November air for the twenty-minute walk—or today, ten-minute jog—to Howard’s ranch.

The familiar smell of hay and horses filled his nose as he slid open the big square door leading into the long aisle of twenty stalls. The stable was a cozy ten degrees warmer than outside due to the combined body heat of the animals. They whinnied in excitement as he dumped food into their feed bins and filled their water buckets. Something about the animals, despite their stench, made him feel calmer, and the dreams more distant.

An hour later, he was leading the final horse from the stable and toward a fenced enclosure set upon the gently rolling hills of western South Dakota. As he opened the gate, the horse whinnied and lurched its head back. “Shhh, girl,” Tarin said, “what’s wrong?”

The horse's wild eyes stared into the sky. As Tarin held tightly to the lead line to steady the animal, he gazed upward and looked for what had started the horse. He winced. The texture of the rope against his fingers brought him back to his dream—to the nooses.

To the poor family about to be killed.

He tried to push the image away. But the music was playing. That haunting, terrible music. Each note pulled him deeper into the imagery from the dream—the cobbled brick road, the surrounding wood and brick houses, the platform where a man with a mustache wearing a medieval-style jacket and breeches stood by a lever.

The surrounding pastures fell away as the vision consumed Tarin’s mind. The man with the mustache was ranting about something. He was always ranting about something, speaking to a crowd of hundreds of peasants gathered before him. Tarin didn’t understand the words. They were in an unfamiliar language.

The man held a glass phial as he spoke. It was the size of a pear, wider at the bottom than at the top, and glistened with a mix of red and white light. Behind him were four hooded figures with ropes around their necks. One was a man, thin, tall, wearing leather pants accompanied by a shirt and blue vest. Next to him was a woman with one hand folded over the other, resting on a long blue skirt. Two children completed the lineup, a boy and a girl. Both were trembling. Tarin wished he could rush up to the platform and somehow save that family. But the music kept him frozen in place.

A group of soldiers in leather outerwear and feathered caps surrounded him, murmuring as they knocked bows and readied swords. As Tarin looked down at his short, gangly arms and legs, he could tell he was only eleven, maybe twelve years old. Why was he among this group of soldiers? And why was he at the front of the battalion, as if he were their leader?

The soldiers yelled and gestured toward the gallows, and though he could not understand their words, he knew they wanted him to lead a charge to save the captives. A cool glass object in his hand drew his attention. He looked down. The object was concealed by a strange and growing patch of mist slowly spreading toward his feet.

The music grew louder. Fear gripped him. He couldn’t lead these soldiers. He was just a child. He began to run—away from the platform, away from the soldiers, down the road of that strange medieval town and toward the freedom the music promised.

The mist grew thicker. The soldiers were yelling at him, and as their speech passed through the thickening mist, the words transformed into those he could now understand. “Coward! Deserter!” The clang of a lever pierced through their accusations, followed by a mix of cheers and crying.

A horse whinnied and Tarin jolted. Panting and sweaty despite the cold, he was back in the pasture. Gray clouds passed overhead while the grass waved beneath a steady breeze. It had been a long time since his dreams had manifested as a vision during waking hours. He leaned against the horse and worked to steady his breathing. He focused on the animal’s warmth. It pulled him back into the moment, away from that dream—away from the guilt of abandoning that family.

Tarin had tried counseling once, around ten years earlier, after he’d fled Ohio to stay with his best friend Allen in South Dakota. The therapists had said the dreams were just a manifestation of some trauma he must have experienced as a child, something he’d repressed. They also thought that’s why he didn’t remember anything from before he was twelve. But if that was true, why did he still remember the trauma that had happened just before he left Ohio in his late teens? That was all still vivid, and it had occurred after the first manifestation of his dreams.

As a cold wind swept across his face, a familiar guilt gripped him. He should not have left his hometown when he did. He should have tried to find his mother after she’d left. But he just had to get out of there, away from the chaos, away from the pain…away from his father.

A humming, like that of a transformer, buzzed in the distance. The horse lurched and pulled away, starting a frantic gallop across the field. Tarin searched for the source of the sound. There were no power lines nearby, and the fence was wooden, not electric. Nothing should be making a noise like that.

Something black and oblong darted behind a cloud. Tarin squinted. Had it been a bird? If so, it was bigger than any bird he’d seen before. The buzzing stopped, and a creeping feeling moved along his skin. The horse joined a group of others, all staring at a distant hill. He followed their gaze and squinted his eyes. A man stood beyond the fence line about two hundred yards away. A cattleman’s hat hung low over his hidden face. The flash of a cigarette lit the brim just before he turned and disappeared over the other side of the hill.

Tarin scanned the area for the man or anything else unusual. Although there was nothing, he struggled to shake off that creeping feeling. With an added vigor, he continued his chores and convinced himself none of this was worth reporting to Howard since the strange man had been beyond the property line. He wrapped things up by late afternoon and hurried back to his trailer. There, he took a quick shower, ate a bowl of cereal, and left for town to get some beers.

The sun was setting as he approached Old Cotton’s bar, a modest brick building standing alongside the dimly lit main street of the South Dakotan town of Philip. Barely a thousand people lived there, mostly farmers and ranchers, about a quarter of them Native American.

Philip was an occasional stop for travelers from nearby Interstate 90 heading to Rapid City or Badlands National Park, both less than an hour away. The town had once welcomed guests and their money, but due to the growing unrest caused by the war, many were now troublemakers seeking a place to squat away from the bigger cities. This had been keeping Sheriff Liz and her deputy, Jason, busy.

Tarin pushed open the door and entered the bar. Behind the counter stood Albert, the dark-haired, burly Lakota man who’d been both running Old Cotton’s and bartending for years. There were also a few regulars smoking at a circular table in the corner. Old Bill, the eldest of the three men at the table, tipped his hat at Tarin.

Tarin offered Bill a nod and ordered a drink. He took it to his usual table near the window by the door. It offered a good place to eavesdrop on local gossip and see who was coming and going. No one ever disturbed him there, despite its more central location, unless Allen or Allen’s roommates, Josh and Rob, two Lakota brothers, happened to stop by. But it was game night. They’d be back at Allen’s house on the other side of town, deep into a Legendarium of Beasts game by now. As Tarin started to drink away the memories of his dreams, of Ohio, and of the stranger beyond the fence line, he idly listened to the conversation of Bill and the others.

“Seeing a lot more bad news about the war,” a grizzled brown-bearded fellow in his late forties said. It was Charles, a friend of Howard’s, who did local construction. “I heard the Alliance is actually threatening to use nukes if the Peacekeepers don’t back off.” He took a long swig of his drink. “Can you believe it? Nukes! It’s the Twenty-Eighties for crying out loud! I thought we were past all that!”

“I’m not worried,” another man, Fred, said. He was a spindly trucker ten years Charles’s junior, with a sunken face but energetic eyes. He often traveled all the way to Denver and even to Chicago for his deliveries. Tarin and his friends enjoyed eavesdropping on his sometimes eccentric stories from out of state.

“I just finished my bomb shelter.” Fred continued. He blew out a plume of smoke. “Also got three months of food stocked away. But don’t come running to me if bombs start falling. It’ll be every man for himself!”

“What if they start falling while you’re on the road?” Charles asked.

“I got connections. I’ll know before anything happens.”

“Connections?”

“Military friends out in Ellsworth Air Force base plugged into all the going-ons with the Lattice. If things start going code red, I’ll know, and I’ll stick around here.”

“Well, even if you’re right,” Charles said, “you think three months of food is enough? You’re crazy! If the war spreads out of Europe and the Alliance starts slinging nukes this way, it’s going to take years before there’s uncontaminated food.”

“I’ll be fine,” Fred said.

Charles took a swig of beer, burped, then turned to Bill. “So, you said you had something to tell us. What was it?”

Bill lifted a cigar to his lips and blew out a plume of smoke. “I saw another one last night.”

“Please don’t tell me it was another one of your flying saucers,” Charles said.

“I know you don’t believe,” Bill said, “but I’m telling you, they’re real!” Smoke drifted from the end of his cigar. He lifted it higher. “Last one looked like a flying brown tube, a lot like this.”

Tarin recalled what he’d seen back at the ranch, what had darted behind the cloud. It had also looked a bit like a flying cigar. He listened closer.

“Did it pull you up inside of it?” Charles said. “I know you’ve been dying to get probed.”

Fred chuckled.

“I know you both think this is all a big joke,” Bill said. “But you’re wrong. And what about that sickness going around? The seizures? You’ve heard of those, right?” He swirled his bourbon within its glass and eyed them with anticipation.

Charles took a slow sip of beer. “I guess I might have heard something about those.”

“Me too,” Fred said. “They’re really stressing out the wife. Got any theories?”

“Not yet,” Bill said. “But I’m formulatin’ some.” Bill stood up and gulped down the rest of his bourbon. “I think all this stuff’s connected. And it’s only going to keep getting crazier because of the war.”

The war wasn’t something Tarin cared to think about, but it was impossible to ignore. Everyone was talking about it and wondering what might happen next. So far, it had remained isolated to a small region of northeast Europe, where the Alliance had broken away from the Peacekeeper nations. These represented most of the globe and were governed by the Trinity Lattice, a well-established AI governing apparatus. Tarin hoped the war would remain small and isolated. He had enough problems to worry about and didn’t need to add a war to the list.

Bill bantered with the others for a few more minutes, closed his tab, and headed toward the door. He paused at Tarin’s table. “You keep an eye to the sky, too. I know you’re not sold on all this stuff, but talk to your buddies. Rob’s coming around, Josh too. Listen to ‘em!”

Tarin briefly considered telling Bill about the thing he saw at the ranch. But he wasn’t in the mood to risk it turning into a longer conversation about conspiracies and who knew what else. “Thanks for the advice,” he said. “I’ll think about it.”

“Good! And if you ever see anything, let me know.” He swung open the door and nearly bumped into a woman in blue scrubs.

“Sorry, Samantha!” Bill said. “Didn’t see you there.” He held open the door for her and moved out of the way.

“Thanks, Bill,” she said, composing herself as she walked inside. Bill offered a goodbye and disappeared into the night.

Samantha was in her late forties, with a slim build and dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. Tarin knew her only from limited small talk at the grocery store, where Josh and Rob worked, or if he saw her at Old Cotton’s. She worked as a nurse at the small hospital just a short walk away. She offered Tarin a polite smile before taking a seat across from Albert at the bar.

“Haven’t seen you here in a while,” Albert said. “What’ll it be?”

“Something strong.” Her voice was tired. “Abigail passed last night.”

“Abigail?”

“One of my hospice patients. She was barely into her thirties. I feel so bad.”

“It wasn’t that seizure disease going around, was it?” Charles asked from the corner.

“Charles, you know I can’t talk details about my patients.”

“She ain’t gonna care.”

“C’mon,” Albert said, sending Charles a frown, “show some courtesy. The lady’s patient just died.”

“Sorry, sorry. I’m just a bit worked up right now with everything going on.”

“It’s fine,” Samantha said. “I get it.”

Albert handed Samantha a tall glass of dark ale. She took a sip.

“So about that disease going around,” Charles said, “you got anything you can tell us about it?”

Samantha set her glass down. “Well, it doesn’t seem to be a virus. The experts are telling us it’s probably an environmental thing.”

“I bet it’s the Alliance poisoning us or something,” Fred muttered.

Charles gulped down the last of his beer and stood up. “Might be that, or might be the Lattice doing some weird population control thing. Who knows. But I gotta go. Big job tomorrow out in Rapid City. Hopefully I’ll see you all again, assuming no UFO, nuke, or weird sickness gets me first.” He hurried out the door, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke behind him.

Albert leaned over the counter and looked at Samantha. “Sorry again to hear about Abigail. Did she have any family around these parts?”

“No,” Samantha said. She took another sip of beer. “She was Amish. Lived in Wisconsin most of her life. Eventually moved to Pittsburgh for school. Guess it was part of a Rumspringa.”

“Isn’t that when Amish kids run wild until they decide if they want to stay Amish or not?” Albert asked.

“Yeah. But I don’t think she did anything too wild. She mostly wanted to see the world, then find a nice guy and settle down.” She smiled. “She was a fan of those silly romance books—you know, with stupid stories about city girls falling in love with country guys and living happily ever after. Nice kid, but so naive.”

“Not a bad thing to have a dream, I suppose,” Albert said.

“Yeah, but the dream didn’t come true for her, just like most folks.” She took a full sip of beer and then set her glass down. “I wish things could have gone different for her. But at least she didn’t end up in a bad divorce like I did. The only positive I can see in passing so young is you’re less likely to see your dreams die first.”

Abigail’s story made Tarin think back to a time he once had a similar desire, maybe settle down with someone and lead a simple life with some kids. He’d hoped the normalcy of a routine might be the catalyst to finally drive away those awful dreams. His mind drifted to a girl he once knew as a teen—Chelsy. She’d been as close to him as Allen was to him now. He’d hoped his friendship with her might eventually blossom into something deeper. But she’d just become another sad relic of what he’d left behind in Ohio.

“Sorry if I brought you down, hun,” Samantha said.

The image of Chelsy snapped away. Samantha was looking at him.

“Tarin, right?”

He nodded, hoping Samantha wouldn’t notice his blush.

She gulped down the rest of her drink and sighed. “I see you every time I come here. Hope you’re not overdoing it.”

Fred chuckled. “Tarin? Never.”

She continued to look at Tarin, smeared mascara hiding under her eyes. Tarin felt bad for her, losing her patient. Sounded like they’d become friends. It was lonely living in small town South Dakota, so every friend you had was precious. He couldn’t imagine how he’d feel if he lost Allen, Josh, or Rob. They were all he had left.

“You don’t have to sit over there all by yourself if you don’t want to,” Samantha said. “You can join me and Albert if you’d like.”

“Thanks, but I’m good,” Tarin said, though he appreciated the offer. He just wasn’t in the mood to chat. He rarely was.

“Well, the invitations open if you change your mind,” Samantha said, then returned to her conversation with Albert.

Tarin’s mind turned back to memories of Ohio, and to Chelsey. He wondered what had become of her. Had she gotten married? Had kids? Maybe she’d moved away somewhere, done what Samantha said Abigail had done, gone to explore the world looking for adventure.

An hour passed. Tarin had a couple more beers, and Samantha had one more. “Well,” she said, “I need to get some rest before my next shift. I’ll see you guys later.” She grabbed her purse and walked over to Tarin’s table. “Hey, Hun, I just wanted to let you know, just cause me and Abigail didn’t find our dreams, doesn’t mean you can’t find yours. Keep up hope.” She gestured toward the five glasses on Tarin’s table. “And try not to drink your life away.” With that, she walked out the door.

Tarin considered her words. Hope? He glanced down at his beer. The only hope he had was to keep his mind free of everything torturing him day after day. He lifted the final glass of beer, took a deep swig, and allowed the alcohol to slide down his throat until the glass emptied.

“You going to want any more, or should I close out your tab?” Albert said.

“I’m done,” Tarin said.

Albert tapped on a computer screen embedded in the counter. Tarin reached for his wallet.

 “You don’t want me to pull from your Lattice account?” Albert asked as he stopped tapping.

“I’m over quota for alcohol.”

“The Lattice is going to put me out of business for The Greater Good,” Albert groaned. “I guess you can pay under the table with cash—again.”

Tarin took out some money and set it on the table. The bar door swung open just as he was about to get up and leave. A tall man stood in its frame. He was dressed unusually, wearing a dark brown tunic and medieval-style black pants beneath a leather belt. Dirty boots covered his feet, and a hood partially shrouded his long, dark hair and bearded face.

“Is this Old Cotton’s?” he said in a deep, strong voice.

“Yeah, this is Old Cotton’s,” Albert said. He looked the stranger up and down. “But it ain’t Halloween, in case you didn’t know.”

Fred chuckled beneath his cloud of smoke, but Tarin’s chest tightened. That outfit . . . it reminded him of what those men in the battalion wore in his—

“My apologies for the garb,” the stranger said as he approached the bar. “It is a complicated story that I will spare you for the moment. I am looking for someone by the name of Tarin. Do you know him?”