Diminishing portals

“Alright, Anna, good talking to you. See you around.” Leigh said this with a beaming smile on her lips, but as she closed the door behind her it was gone as quick as it had appeared.

She hung her jacket on the sagging coat rack on the wall, finding the right angle at which it would hold on instead of dragging the existing pile of coats down with it. Below this was a bulging mountain of shoes, sandals, high heels and other less common, less often worn footwear. Without a second glance, she contributed to the mound with the pair of trainers she had been wearing, a pair that had seen better days, weeks and years – but then, who has time to break into a new pair of shoes?

She bent down to grab the pair of sturdy carrier bags she had carried in with her, but doubled back before getting a hold of either of them and pressed her face against the door, the smell of lacquered wood deep in her nostrils as she held her eye level with the peephole. She had never had any reasons to distrust Anna, but she had learned to be careful about everyone, no matter how well she thought she knew them; one of the many despairing consequences of this whole ordeal. In this case, though, she felt a bit more justified in checking: she had been carrying way more food than one would expect for someone who supposedly lived alone and feared other might grow suspicious.

Satisfied that nobody was lurking at the door, she lugged the bags along the hallway and into the kitchen, the handles biting into her sweaty hands as the seams lining the bags threatened to burst open at any minute, their weight as they swung around upsetting her balance every couple of steps. With the grace of a drunk elephant, she managed to haul them both onto the kitchen counter, where a bright green apple trundled out of one of the bags and roll over to the foot of the humming fridge, but she ignored it in order to catch her breath after the unrewarding work.

She looked around the room, noticing that a late afternoon sun was streaming in through the windows in the kitchen and adjoining living room, tingeing everything with a soft, peachy colour. The air was still, a few specs of dust stranded in the air, unsure of what direction to take.

But Leigh was not about to let her guard down, not even in such tranquil circumstances.

Once back to her normal blood pressure level, she proceeded to pull down the blinds on every window in both rooms until only a faint gloom was left inside, sliced by the occasional stray orange beam that had managed to squeeze itself through some gap in one of the blinds. By the time she switched on the light in the kitchen, the apple was no longer there, only a few pea-sized chunks strewn around the kitchen tiles.

Eyes narrowed into menacing slits, she looked around the room, but did not see what she was looking for. As a pungent sweet smell tickled her nose, her eyes homed in on the bags on the counter. As she approached them, it became obvious one of them had been rummaged through. Her gaze fell on a small puddle next to the bag. She swabbed it with her index finger and put it into her mouth, her lips smacking loudly as she popped it out.

“Orange juice,” she muttered. “Freshly squeezed.”

As the last words left her lips, a rapid fluttering broke through the silence in the flat, like the wings of a large insect beating frantically. Not an insect, though. No. She knew the sound. Those were fairy wings. She turned her head around in the direction of the noise, here eyes somehow narrower than before.

“Alarick!” she hissed, as loud as she could whisper. “You know you’re not supposed to come out through the portal until I confirm the coast is clear! Especially if Tarnak is with you!”

At the sound of his name, a grey blur shot out from a set of cookbooks on the far wall and crash-landed on Leigh’s chest, pushing out the air from her lungs on impact. She looked down unsurprised at Tarnak, who was busy excitedly rubbing up against her like a dog with a look of elation on his innocent face. You would be forgiven for believing he had not seen her for a month, but it had only been a few hours since she had last left the flat.

“Ew, Tarnak, come on! You’re getting sticky orange all over me!” she chuckled, unable to keep a serious face for any amount of time as long as he continued his playful welcoming.

To most humans, Tarnak looked like the average fairy: around four inches in height, a body quite similar to a human’s – two arms, two legs, one head, thinner in proportion than most humans and skin an overcast grey – and two pairs of translucent wings on his back. Most of his similarities to his fellow kin stopped there, but it was no surprise that most humans – and most other sentient creatures, at that – never got close enough to him to notice. Fairies had a well-earned reputation as vicious creatures when provoked and few people understood what exactly was bound to provoke them, so keeping a safe distance tended to be the best approach.

The first and more obvious difference between Tarnak and most fairies was something you found out after spending five minutes with him: vicious was the last word to cross your mind when thinking of him. Whether it was due to his simple-mindedness or to past interactions with caring people, Leigh did not know, but she was certain he was the most gentle, good-natured creature she had ever known. Hence the outpouring of love and slobbery kisses she was receiving.

The second remarkable difference was his diet. As a general rule, fairies hunted for their food. The tougher and fresher the meat, the better. Not Tarnak. For all intents and purposes, he was a vegetarian, sticking mostly to vegetables and indulging in the occasional piece of fruit when presented with the occasion. Hence the chunks of apple strewn over the floor and the freshly squeezed orange on the counter. The only other fairies known to exhibit similar dieting restrictions were Naka fairies, or Highborn fairies, as most people usually referred to them.

Which leads us to the last difference: unlike most other fairies, the lining of Tarnak’s upper wings was not white, but golden, something only seen on Naka fairies. This lining is so fine it would be hard for anyone other than another fairy to notice unless they got up close, at which point they would be bleeding profusely through the dozens of tiny stab wounds inflicted on them by the fairy’s Naka Guard. Hence the pair of guards that shuffled out from behind kitchen utensils Leigh would have sworn had nothing behind them.

Their blank stares betrayed nothing of their opinion regarding their charge. Naka fairies were cunning, devious creatures, natural leaders to their lesser cohort, but Tarnak was far from any of that. Despite this, she had never met the fairy without his guards, who followed him wherever he went. They continued to survey the room for any threats, barely acknowledging her, and she ignored them as she looked back down at him.

“OK Tarnak, that’s enough. I need to speak to Alarick. There’s more fruit in the bags.” At the sound of the word, he froze in place, his navy blue eyes wide open like a pair of robin’s eggs trying to pop out from his skull, the white pupil in the centre of each one now focused on her own eyes. His pointy ears were pricked, reminding Leigh of the dogs she had grown up with when she uttered the word “walk” within a 50-foot range. She snorted at the look on Tarnak’s face before continuing. “Yes, more fruit. Try not to eat it all, though. I don’t even know how you fit it in that bony body of yours.”

As he zoomed onto one of the bags, Leigh made her way to the opening into the pantry next to the fridge, grabbing a tea towel hanging from the oven door handle as she did to wipe off bits of orange and spittle still clinging to her t-shirt.

Entering the dark room, she stepped onto a tin of some kind before she was able to switch on the light, twisting her ankle painfully enough to merit a grunt. However, before she had the chance to wallow in her pain and frustration, the more practical part of her mind began to wonder why there had been a tin rolling around the floor in the first place.

Looking towards the back of the room, a soft glow emerged from the portal at the back wall. Usually it was covered up by a wall of tinned vegetables, jars of preserves, cartons of milk and other long-lasting products, conveniently reachable from both ends of the opening while protecting the portal from prying eyes. Not now, though. A couple of rows still remained at the bottom, but most of the wall’s contents were now scattered all over the pantry floor, including the cause of her ankle’s swelling.

“Alarick!” she hissed again as she limped her way towards the gateway, avoiding any further encounters with long-lasting foodstuff that did not involve her being seated at a dining table. She though she heard a faint whirring from the other side, but heard no other reply to her calls. “Alarick!” she repeated. “Where in god’s name is that bloody gnome? I swear it, every-”

“Shhhhh!”

Finally, some kind of response. As she reached the opening, she noticed someone sitting on a large chair at a broad wooden desk. Once here eyes adjusted to the proportions of the other room, however, she realised the furniture was not particularly big, but was made to seem so by the small gnome sitting on the chair, his short legs not quite reaching the floor as they hung down from the seat. He was wearing rough-looking garments, and sported an even rougher-looking beard, but the long, bright red cap that sat flaccid on his head seemed brand new. She rolled her eyes at the inconsistent combination. Gnomes. A large headset arched over the cap and covered his ears and most of his cheeks. No, not large, she corrected once again. Human-sized. The combination looked ridiculous and would have made her laugh were it not for the expression of despair on his face as he stared dumbstruck at the brick wall in front of him.

The whirring she had heard earlier came from a large machine sitting on the table, into which the headset was plugged in, and now that her head was poking out through the portal she could also hear a low-key buzz coming out from the headphones. She remained still as Alarick continued to listen, wrinkling her nose at the dank smell in the room, topped by a faint odour that uneasily reminded her of vinegar. She should bring up the gnome’s personal hygiene one of these days. Underground network or not, this was not the kind of thing she had signed up for.

Finally, after several nail-biting minutes, Alarick removed the apparatus from his ears and distractedly hung it on a peg sticking out from between two bricks on the wall. He remained still for half a minute before being jolted back into the present by Leigh’s questioning.

“Well?”

“Huh? Oh, yes, hi Leigh.”

“Hi? Hi?! What on Earth is going on, Alarick? Why do you look like a ghostly version of yourself?”

“There’s…” He swallowed hard. “There’s been an attack. A coordinated attack.”

“What? Where? In one of the other portals?”

“No, not one of them. Seven of them.”

“Seven?! But… how can that be? The time disruptions, they’re too complex to coordinate an attack on two portals, let alone seven! Are you sure?”

“Quite certain, unfortunately. Reports began to rush in about twenty minutes ago, the whole thing was a mess. Most of us watchers are ready for some kind of skirmish or another, but the scale of this was unprecedented.”

“What’s the damage?”

“Three of the gates, two gnome ones and a goblin one, had to be disabled to prevent the attackers from taking control over them.”

Leigh slammed her fist on the flagstones below, ignoring the thump of pain that ran up through her bones. After a couple of seconds she managed to relax her hand once again and look back up at the gnome. “Well, three is quite a hit, but at least we managed to hold onto the other four. They-”

“Have been captured, Leigh. The other four are now in enemy hands, their watchers presumably slaughtered.” His voice cracked as he pronounced the last few words.

Leigh was speechless, tears beginning to fill her eyes as the long-held rage for her own people filled her mind. How could anyone be capable of something like this? And for what? A new dumping ground for their poisonous factories? She wiped away the tears and focused her attention back on Alarick, who had remained silent as he tried to process the deaths of so many comrades and friends.

“So how many portals does that leave us?”

“Two. Counting this one.”

Leigh tried to let out all her frustration with a deep sigh, but, before she could finish, a loud banging from her end of the portal quickly replaced it with fear.

“Alarick. I think they’re here too.”

She turned around before waiting for a reaction and kicked through the tins in the dark as she made her way back into the kitchen. Tarnak’s head was poking out from one of the bags, an expression of curiosity in his face, his cheeks still bulging from the fruit gorging. His guards were on alert, shining blades at the ready.

A muffled voice travelled in through her front door, getting louder as she tiptoed towards it to grab her trainers and a coat. “Miss Cairn, we know you’re in there! This is the police! We have reason to believe you are harbouring terrorists in your flat!”

A softer voice was heard as if from a distance. “I’m telling you, I saw her carrying more food than she could eat in a month.” Anna. She had been right not to trust her.

She slipped on her trainers and grabbed one of the thicker coats, but this caused an imbalance in the delicate ecosystem that had been her coat rack and the nails that had held it onto the wall for so long finally conceded defeat, the ripping of the plaster and snapping of the wooden rack inevitably being heard from the other side of the door.

“Miss Cairn, we heard that! Let us in or we will be obliged to enter by force!”

“Good luck with that”, she muttered to herself. She had made sure the door was thick when the portal had first appeared in her pantry, and was sure it would never cede to a simple shoulder charge from some goon sent by the government. She soon lost her confidence, however, when she heard a deafening boom on the door. It sounded like they had a battering ram.

She raced back into the kitchen and grabbed one of the bags still on the counter. “Come on, Tarnak, out you go. You need to go back through the portal, they’ve finally found us. Bring that bag with you.”

As she stumbled along towards the pantry, the other bag whizzed past her, carried by the fairy. She never ceased to be amazed by the strength fairies had despite their small size. She slid her feet along the pantry floor to avoid stepping on another tin and chucked the bag through the portal. As she ran back to pick up the emergency pack she kept at the other end of the pantry, she heard her front door’s hinges crack and the full weight of a ninety-pound door crashing down onto her hallway echoed around the entire flat.

Without even a last glance at her kitchen, she dived in through the portal. As she rolled over on her back, she looked back in through the portal for one last time, but only saw the shadows of the intruders against the opposite wall of the pantry before Alarick thrust a violet crystal through the gateway, causing it to shut down permanently and leaving them staring at a regular brick wall, no longer different from the other walls in the room.

There was an overwhelming silence as the reality of what had just happened sank in, only interrupted by a soft whining from Tarnak.

“One.” Alarick spoke at last. “That leaves one last portal under our control.”