The Return

THE RETURN: I

By Sean M. Campbell

ABBY ADAMS PUBLISHING

The Return

By Sean M. Campbell

Edited and Published by Abby Adams.net

Copyright © 2013 Sean M. Campbell

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without written permission of the publisher or author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

Disclaimer: As with any fictional story, this is for entertainment only. Please direct any complaints regarding character words or actions to the fictional character portraying the offense.

Standard non-reproduction language

WARNING: This book contains adult language and depictions of adult sexual acts, which may not be suitable for teenagers below the age of 16; or for anyone who does not wish to read stories containing written descriptions of explicit, erotic sexual behavior. It does not contain any explicit sexual or nude images. It does contain serious, humorous, and interesting stories of contemporary literature, and fictional tales of both romance and adventure; and is intended for adult readers.

Chapter One

I guess you could say I was born when I was twenty years old. That sounds odd, but in a way it is very true. The first thing I can remember is waking up in a hospital. No one knew who I was.

I was informed by the doctors that I was suffering from amnesia. In other words, I couldn’t remember anything. Apparently, I had been found in the water off the coast of Maine by a fishing boat. The fishermen told everyone I had fallen out of the sky into the water. No one believed them.

The doctors did what tests they knew how to do back then, but they said there was nothing they could do for me. The only thing they found on my person was a necklace, with a copper pendant on it. The pendant had two names engraved into it; Morgana Wynnifred Oakbloom and Rhys David Cain. They assumed I was Rhys, since I did not look like a Morgana.

I seemed to be better educated than the average person, and none of my education had left with my memories. That was eighty years ago.

At one hundred years old, I am still a fairly active person, if private. My son owns a ranch in Texas, and I had gone down to his place to go kill some feral hogs. I loved to hunt and I had agreed to go readily. That is how I came to be walking through the woods on that day.

I was walking, tracking a hog that I had wounded, and trying to follow the blood trail. I had my big hunting rifle on my arm and a pair of Ruger Super Blackhawk Hunter edition pistols on my hips. My backpack had a few boxes of ammo for each and a lot of my survival gear. I also had my big survival knife tucked into a sheath in the middle of my back. The knife was one of my favorite possessions. It was a hand forged Damascus steel blade with a hollow handle.

I had been tracking the hog for about an hour, when the radio on my pack squawked. My son asked for my location. I told him. I was about five miles north of camp along the creek. He told me I might want to head back because a bad storm was on the way in. I told him I would head back in a little while because I was tracking a wounded hog and needed to finish it off at least.

After another hour, the wind and the first drops of rain started hitting me. Still no hog, so I turned to head back to camp. As I turned, reaching for my radio, I stopped moving in a state of mild shock. Standing twenty feet behind me was a beautiful woman. She was about five feet eleven inches tall, and had midnight black hair all the way down to her waist. Somehow, she was extremely familiar to me! The pointed ears, peeking through her hair on the sides about an inch, were very noticeable. Her skin was pale and her eyes were light green. The most striking thing was how narrow her features were. I would almost say she looked like an elf.

The woman looked at me and spoke in a very musical sounding voice “Rhys, it is time to come home; we need you.”

The lightning bolt struck me dead in the top of the head as I screamed out, “Morgana!”, and the world went black.

I felt stiff and sore. Heaven was supposed to be an end to all pain. Maybe I went the other way. As I opened my eyes and blinked a few times, it was just as dark with them opened as it was with them closed. I was sitting up with my legs folded in front of me Indian style. Reaching back, I pulled the flashlight off my backpack and thumbed it to life.

I was sitting in a stone walled room. There seemed to be several pieces of stone furniture sitting around the edge and a fire pit directly in front of me. There was no wood in the pit, and I suddenly realized how cold it was in the room. My breath could be seen reflecting in the beam of the flashlight.

I got up to see if there was any wood in the room, but as I stood the fire pit suddenly burst into flame -- no wood, just flames dancing over the pit. Heat came off the fire almost immediately. That was when I remembered the radio.

I reached back and pulled the microphone around, and pressed the talk button on the side. I called out to my son to report my condition but got no answer, not even static. Pulling my backpack off, and setting it in front of me, I pulled the radio off. The power light was still on but there was no sound coming out. Even after turning the squelch all the way down and flipping through the channels, there was no chatter or static on any of them.

I thumbed the radio off to conserve the batteries, and got up to walk around the room. As I walked along, torches flared to life along the walls of the room. When I stepped in front of a mirror, I crouched and spun, drawing one of the pistols on my hip. Someone had been in the mirror, but there was no one there. Standing up I turned back to the mirror. There was a young man looking at me.

He had jet black hair and a small goatee on his chin. His eyes were a deep brown that women would call dreamy. His face was ruggedly handsome, but had a hint of a thin scar, which ran from just below his eye to his lip.

I immediately recognized him. He had last been seen eighty years ago -- the very first time I could remember looking in a mirror. I had shaved off the beard that day and had never grown it back.

As I continued to walk around and look, I came across a doorway that was completely blocked by rubble. A cold wind could be felt leaking through it. Towards the back of the room I found another doorway, but this one was dark. As I touched the door frame to look in, the torches in this small room flared up. Inside there was a large black horse and a white wolf. The horse was dressed in armored barding with packs on his rump, and an odd looking saddle the likes of which I had never seen. It stood at least six and a half feet high at the shoulders and was wider than a large man across its chest. The wolf was large; maybe two hundred pounds and all white, with sparkling blue eyes.

A heard a female voice, I turned to look for the speaker and the wolf trotted past me to walk over to the fire and sit in front of it. Then the horse walked by me and stood by the fire as well.

I shook my head and continued around the room. A third doorway was there that was also dark. I reached up and touched the door frame, and the torches inside flared to life. Inside was a dummy with a set of light armor and weapons. The weapons were a pair of short swords on the hips, a pair of long swords on the back and a bow across the chest, with a quiver of arrows on the back between the swords. There was also a buckler type shield on the left arm and a cloak draped across the back. The armor looked like it was lacquered black. The bow was made out a strange black and white striped wood. The swords all had black lacquered handles.

, the female voice said.

Again I turned to look for the speaker and so no one except the horse and the wolf. The wolf was staring at me. “Did you just speak to me?”

The voice was in my head not my ears.

I stepped backwards into the little room as the wolf spoke in my mind. As I entered there was an odd tingling sensation and I stepped forward again in reaction. As I looked back in the room the clothing I had worn was now on the dummy, and the armor was on me, weapons and all. I looked down -- the guns were on my hips with the short swords laced under them.

I looked at the wolf. “Where am I, who are you and what is going on here?”

Using her own magic, the dark haired woman named Morgana suddenly appeared from nowhere. Shockingly, I could see right through her to the wolf on the other side.

“Likka,” she said, facing the wolf, “Rhys cannot remember anything from before. Something went wrong with his crossover, but it is for the best. If he does not know his own past, his enemies will not know it is him. I brought him back because he had no magic where he was hiding. He could not bring himself back, and I just now found him. We urgently need him here. The Mage Kings are trying to crush all hope from the people, and he is the only one who can stop them.”

She then turned to face me. “Rhys, my love,” she said, “I cannot stay long, as this drains me to project myself to you. You must travel east from here, to the town of Quinn. There you will find answers. Talk to the one the town’s people call Father.” With that she faded from view as if she had never been there.

 “Who was that?”

the wolf said in my head.

“You’re my familiar, right?”

“Why?”

I walked over and knelt in front of the wolf, I thought in my head.

The horse snorted in agreement and the wolf laughed in my head…

I had spent the better part of an hour looking at the rocks in the doorway out, from as many angles as I could, trying to figure out if I could even work one of them loose. I somehow got the feeling the wolf was laughing at me behind my back. I had finally gotten annoyed with her enough to turn and say something. As I put my hand on the door frame to stand up, the rocks just disappeared. I turned to see the wolf rolling on the floor with her tongue lolling out.

The wolf looked up at the horse, , as she continued her wolfish laughter. The horse just shook its head.

I put my backpack on and picked up the rifle. I slid the rifle into the spear quiver in front of the saddle on the horse and led it out into the cold morning air. I mounted the horse and pulled out my survival knife. I unscrewed the base of the knife to look at the little compass inside. “The road heads east so we will follow it.”

We made it down out of the mountains by nightfall into a small glade. As I stopped to look at the area as a possible campsite, the wolf wandered out of the woods carrying two rabbits in its jaws. I busied myself looking through the packs on the horse and found a small tent and some blankets. There were even two pillows. I set the tent up and set a ring of stones to start a fire. I used my knife to shave some dry wood to make kindling and then opened the handle to pull out a match. Nine left I thought to myself need to get some more at the store when we get to town. Soon I had a cheery fire going and set about cleaning and skinning one of the rabbits.

Likka replied.

“Reaper, do I need to tie you up or do you stick around on your own?”

The horse shook like he was trying to get water off.

“I didn’t mean to insult you. I am just trying to get to know you again.”

I unpacked and unsaddled the horse while the rabbit cooked over the fire. He then wandered over a bit to eat some of the grasses and flowers in the glade.