Chapter 458: Chapter 458- All Harem United

Her feet left the bridge railing.

For three seconds she hung in the red-stained air above the river, her dark hair floating upward, her tear-streaked face tilted toward the sky she hadn’t been looking at, her hands open and empty at her sides.

Then the sky took her.

Three time zones east, in a concrete apartment with a broken radiator and a wall calendar still showing last month, a woman named Fatima was watching the news on a tablet propped against a water bottle.

She was built in the way that made furniture feel inadequate — wide hips, heavy chest, the kind of body that drew eyes in the street and made her spend considerable energy ignoring the fact that it drew eyes in the street. She was wearing a large sleep shirt and nothing else, sitting cross-legged on her mattress, watching the BBC feed with her dark hair loose around her shoulders.

The news anchor was saying nine million.

Fatima was watching the footage of the Shinjuku woman’s phone hitting the pavement.

She watched it three times.

Then the red sky outside her own window caught her peripheral vision and she turned her head and looked at it directly for the first time.

It looked back.

’Oh,’ she thought, with the particular clarity of someone who understood, on a cellular level, that something enormous had just identified them specifically.

She looked down at herself — the sleep shirt, the bare thighs, the unremarkable domesticity of the scene — and had one complete, fully-formed thought:

’I wasn’t even dressed.’

Then the warmth found her sternum and pulled.

[ AL JAZEERA — LIVE BROADCAST ]

"— we need to update the numbers, we are now receiving confirmed figures from our correspondents across fourteen regions — the current estimate has been revised significantly upward — we are being told—"

The anchor paused.

Touched his earpiece.

Looked at the camera with the expression of someone whose professionalism was doing considerable heavy lifting.

"We are being told that as of this hour, the confirmed number of individuals reported missing — vanished — globally, stands at fifteen million."

The studio was quiet.

"Fifteen million people," he said again. "In the span of approximately three hours."

Behind him, the red sky feed played on the monitor wall.

Every country. Every timezone.

The same color.

The same pulse.

The same pull.

Upward.

Gone.

----

The island had no name on any map.

That was intentional.

It sat at the precise geographic and metaphysical center of something that cartographers didn’t have instruments for — not the center of any ocean, not the center of any continental shelf, but the center of the seam between worlds, the thin place where the membrane between this reality and the next had been rubbed down to translucence by the repeated passage of things that had no business moving between them.

The farmhouse stood at the island’s highest point.

It was large in the way that things built without budget constraints and without neighbors tended to be large — sprawling, multi-winged, stone at the foundation and dark timber above, with a roof that caught the red sky’s light and held it like a pan holds water. The windows were wide. The doors were heavy. The garden below the upper terrace had been planted by someone who understood that beauty served a function.

Raven stood on the upper terrace with his hands in the pockets of a dark bathrobe and looked at the sky.

The red had reached the island’s horizon approximately twenty minutes ago. It moved differently out here than it did over the cities — slower, more deliberate, spreading from the east like a tide that had decided to come in from above rather than below. It pressed against the upper atmosphere with the patience of something that knew it would get there eventually and saw no reason to hurry.

He watched it.

"Eight hours," he said, to no one visible. "Give or take."

The wind off the water was warm. Wrong for this latitude, wrong for this time of year, right for what was happening above it.

He looked at the red and let his mind run the arithmetic he’d been running since before any news anchor in any country had started reporting numbers.

Fifteen million.

He’d been one of them, the first time.

He remembered it with the particular clarity that only humiliating experiences retained — the sensation of being pulled out of his world without ceremony, the labyrinth’s entrance materializing around him before he’d had time to form a complete thought about what was happening. The cold stone. The smell of it. The sound of fifteen million confused, frightened people resolving themselves from sky-pulled chaos into something the labyrinth could sort.

The sorting had been brutal.

That was the word for it, the clean, accurate word. The labyrinth sorted. It applied pressure until what remained was hierarchy — the strong, the clever, the vicious, the adaptable, arranged in the configuration that the other world required them in. Subordinates under heroes. Heroes under kings. Kings under something he hadn’t been given a name for yet.

He’d been sorted under Gareth.

Gareth, who had the pure bloodline, who had been transmitted directly to the throne hall while Raven and fourteen million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine others ran labyrinths and killed each other and learned very fast what kind of people they actually were when the scaffolding of civilization was removed.

That was where he’d found Nyra.

That was how the system had found him.

That was how this had started.

He turned his face slightly away from the red sky and looked at the memory the way he looked at all memories — from a slight distance, with the detachment of someone who had decided that what had already happened was data rather than damage.

’And now.’

Now the clouds would reach the island in eight hours.

Now fifteen million new people were moving through the pull, some of them landing in labyrinths, some of them landing directly in the other world, all of them sorted by the same system that had sorted him.

Now he had a hall of transmigration waiting for him — a direct line under the king, no labyrinth, no sorting, the privilege of someone who had already been processed and had come back with considerable additional information.

He could go now.

He could step into the purple and arrive in the king’s hall within the hour.

He looked at the red sky.

"You’ll have to wait, Astasia," he said.

The name sat in the warm air over the terrace, private, directed at something far away and fully capable of receiving it.

He wasn’t in a hurry.

He had eight hours.

He had, more relevantly, things to do with eight hours that the king’s hall could not offer him.

He looked down.

Below the terrace, in the wide flagstone courtyard that separated the farmhouse’s main entrance from the garden’s edge, approximately a dozen women stood in varying states of confusion.

They were bound — wrists behind their backs with soft cloth ties, nothing punishing, just sufficient — and blindfolded with strips of dark fabric. The blindfolds were neat. Someone had been tidy about this.

They stood in no particular formation. They’d been placed roughly in the courtyard’s center and had since redistributed themselves the way confused blindfolded people do — some standing very still, some turning slow circles, some tilting their heads toward sounds and voices.

All of them talking.

The voices overlapped, wove through each other, interrupted and contradicted:

"— hello? Hello, is anyone — where am I, the last thing I remember is my apartment—"

"— my hands are tied, why are my hands tied, I need someone to explain—"

"— Raven. I’m looking for Raven. Has anyone here — does anyone know who—"

"— What? Darling?*

"— Husband? Is he the one who brought me—?"

"— Aahn~ Is he going to fuck me."

"— Y-you disgusting perverted woman... M-my pregnant belly feels to uncomfortable, I need him to be gentle with ropes atleast!"

"— Don’t call Master that... he likes rough and need many women too—"

"— Umh... Yeah—"

"— Master—"

"— yes, Master, exactly—"

"— Why there are so many women here—"

"— my hands are tied with magic, I can’t break the bindings—"

"— I know but what if ge just wants to play kinky game—"

"— My Pussy Hurts so much without his cock—"

"—Are there bitches too here?"

"Ummngh... Yeah, I am his bitch... Master~!!"

While looking down at his women—Hana, Min-jung, Yuna, Priya, Avriana, Celia, Nara, Meera, Elena, Preet, Sophia, Gia, Jennifer, Veronica, Müller, Kira, Marga—all of them in one place creating melodious voices of protest.

’Sigh... How can I just come out of nowhere? You see... I have women to fuck.’