It started as a low rumble, like thunder rolling in from a distance. The stained glass windows rattled in their frames. Then the pines outside began to sway in unison, bending sideways like they were bowing to some terrible god.

  The house groaned. Every beam, every nail, every piece of century-old wood voiced its protest as the shockwave swept the Pacific Rim. Picture frames fell. The grandfather clock chimed discordantly.

  I mentally tabulated the distance between Cascade and the Arctic. The explosion of the Arctic island shouldn’t have reached this far this quickly as the pressure/sound wave from such would travel roughly at the speed of sound and would have moved at 49 minutes per 1,000 km. This was something else. Something else had exploded catastrophically much closer to our valley.

  "Jesus Christ!" Jake's voice carried from outside. I heard his van door slam, engine starting before the house even stopped swaying. Gravel sprayed as he tore down the driveway, probably breaking several traffic laws in his escape.

  I couldn't blame him.

  My tablet buzzed frantically on the counter where I'd left it. Notifications flooding in so fast the screen became a blur of text. I grabbed it, hands shaking.

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: HOLY FUCKING SHIT

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: ALIEN INVASION!

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: ACTUAL FUCKING ALIENS

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: POLSA RADAR TRACKING HUNDREDS OF SHIPS IN ORBIT!

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: THEY CARVED UP THE FUCKING MOON!!!

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: BRO ARE YOU ALIVE???

  I sent back a single word “yes” reply, paralyzed into indecision by shock.

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: Glad you’re okay, dude. A fucking crystal worm thing just landed in downtown Warsaw, obliterating all the windows nearby. Bunch of them are coming down from their ships like falling stars!

  I swallowed. The blastwave that hit Cascade must have originated from a Frontenachii lander cleaving the atmosphere nearby.

  More messages poured in from other friends, family and former classmates. The world was collectively losing its shit.

  I turned the TV to the news, my hands twitching as I fumbled with the remote. Every channel showed similar, utterly mad footage of every major city on Earth being invaded.

  CNN: Massive crystalline centipedes, each the size of a subway train, titanic bodies gleaming like frozen blood, plowing through downtowns of Seattle, Washington and Manhattan.

  Fox News: Shot of the moon from a telescope, now sporting a perfect cubic hole. The talking heads were having a collective meltdown, many simply repeating "This can't be real" over and over.

  I went to the ‘live’ news channels on GoTube to see what else was happening across the Earth.

  BBC: Armored Wendigo women, each as tall as Shady, striding into the Parliament building surrounded by what looked like anthropomorphic wolves, birds of prey, velociraptors and other predator species of Earth, all female, all armored and armed with long swords and massive, black, hexagon-textured, gun-like weapons.

  The UK Prime Minister being lifted by his collar like a misbehaving puppy as one of the massive antlered figures demanded, "Where is Princess Aquillianne Quantivia Frontenachii?"

  NHK: Tokyo in panic as one of the red centipedes coiled around Tokyo Tower, not damaging it but... scanning it? Reading it? Its crystalline segments rotated independently, casting beams of red light that made people's shadows dance wrong.

  Behind me, Shady made a small whimpering noise.

  "CIRCLE!" she announced at the TV, then added in the news anchor's panicked voice, "This can't be real! This can't be real! Aliens! Actual aliens!”

  I turned to stare at the Wendigo girl.

  "You absolute antlered idiot," I let out. “What have you done?”

  "You absolute antlered idiot," she repeated back, blinking at me with those enormous silver eyes that held no recognition of what she'd done or why. Just innocent confusion and warm trust that made my chest ache.

  The tablet buzzed again.

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: They're all looking for some princess

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: Aquillianne something

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: They think we killed her

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: we are considering heading to a shelter

  [Daxagon(╯°Д°）╯]: Polish and EU military is mobilizing but what the fuck are tanks gonna do against THAT

  I looked at Aquillianne as she made noises at the news footage of alien ships. "This is a square! BEEP!"

  The weight of the situation crashed down on me. The fate of the entire Earth suddenly depended on me figuring out what to do with a brain-scrambled alien princess.

  FOX news suddenly switched to footage from the White House. One of the Wendigo commanders stood in the Oval Office. The President sat at his desk looking like he'd aged ten years in ten minutes.

  "We have no knowledge of… Aquillianne Quantivia Frontenachii," the President said. "Earth governments have had no contact with such and I personally wasn’t aware that your kind was even real!”

  The Wendigo woman suddenly snapped a black centipede bracelet on his wrist and raised a black gun. “Useless chaff. You see yourself as the leader of this world yet you know nothing of us. Your head is filled with contradictions and desire to be re-elected. You are old, frail and are impudent. You think that your nukes can knock our ships from the sky or disrupt the Corpse Seekers? A lesson then, for you and those below your station.”

  The president’s head detonated as she pressed the trigger. Screams of the people and press present in the White House cabinet.

  “You are next in line, as… Vice President?” The Wendigo turned to the Vice President. The forty year old man nodded vigorously, his face covered in sweat and drops of blood. “Good. You are young and supple and your thoughts are those of cooperation, not atomic devastation. You will do nicely. Order all those below you to cooperate with our search for Princess Aquillianne.”

  Something clicked in my memory then, triggered by the repetition of Aquillianne’s name. More details from that summer day thirteen years ago came flooding back.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The blood pact.

  We were sitting under the ancient oak tree near the cliff, one that leaned out over Darkfall Valley. Shady was looking unusually serious that day.

  "We need to make it official," she said.

  "Make what official?"

  "Us. Friends. No, more than friends." Shady grabbed my hand, her fuzzy fingers warm against mine. "Equals! Would you like that?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “Sure. Sounds fun.”

  She presented some kind of note written in her little notepad with a pink crayon and black marker pen, the letters slightly wobbly. “Read the terms of our agreement.”

  I quickly read over the notepad, not bothering to memorize or take anything seriously that was written there, thinking it was just another silly Princess & Knight game. Something about being her devoted kobold knight administrator, defending her from monsters, feeding her, managing her hoard, etc.

  Then she sliced a sideways number eight into her dark palm pad with her own claw. Her blood welled up, much darker and also lighter than mine, shimmering with inner iridescence and glowing with violet with tiny points of light in it like captured stars.

  "By the ancient Omnid laws," she said solemnly, "I, Aquillianne Quantivia Frontenachii, claim Ashcroft Julian Clifford as my equal, bound by the power of my fractal engine heart, blood and soul... Now you Ashy! Speak exactly as I wrote it, no messing up the Vow please.”

  She flipped to another page of her notebook showing me what to read.

  "By the ancient Omnid laws, I Ashcroft Julian Clifford accept... Aquillianne Quantivia Frontenachii as my equal, bound by the power of her fractal engine heart, by blood and soul,” I read the words, stumbling over the strange name, not understanding the significance of any of it.

  Just a game between friends, I'd thought.

  She suddenly seized my hand and sliced into my palm with a dark claw, making me cry out. Two triangles facing each other. The same symbol, number eight sideways.

  Then, she connected our hands, squeezing tight.

  “In every world,” she declared. “Across eternity.”

  “In every world,” I agreed, my hand stinging and also feeling weirdly tingly. “Across eternity.”

  I blinked, letting out a weary sigh.

  I continued watching the news coverage for the next several hours, as nations bowed to the unstoppable invaders one by one, world leaders in every time zone across the planet pulled from their beds or exhumed from their bunkers by crystal centipedes and forcibly brought to their offices to sign the declaration of surrender to the Frontenachii.

  My brain was boiling, working overtime trying to figure out what the fuck to do about this alien invasion development.

  On MSNBC, a Wendigo commander was interrogating the US Secretary of Defense, her silver eyes narrowed in frustration.

  "Your thoughts speak of a 'Justice League,'" she snarled. "Where is this league? Why can’t we locate them like your leaders? They must know of our Princess!"

  The Secretary, a sixty-year-old man who looked ready to have a heart attack, stammered, "That's... that's a comic book. It’s not real. Just a comic book!"

  "Lies! Your mind shows them very clearly! A man who flies, impervious to damage!" The Wendigo's tail lashed. "This 'Super-man' could have taken our Princess with the aid of ‘Doctor Stranger’ who is capable of opening dimensional gateways!"

  I mentally hiccupped, looking down at my tablet.

  There, on another live cam channel, a different Wendigo held up a smartphone. "This communication device connects to all others, yes? It has intelligence inside that you like conversing with for finding answers? A Large Language Model? Command it to find our Princess!"

  "That's not... Phones and CrawdGPT don't work like that," a terrified female politician tried to explain.

  "Your thoughts say 'global network,' 'connected to everything.' Make it find her!"

  The woman’s hands shook as she tried to explain phones and current AIs, but the Wendigo just grew more confused and angry, demanding things that weren't possible.

  I switched to another tab.

  An indie Gwitch livecast on my tablet channel showed a massive crystalline centipede coiled around a Best Buy in Florida. Its segments rotated as it tried to interrogate the building itself, booming questions in English addressed to 'Best Buy'. Did the centipede think that our buildings were sentient or something?

  Inside, a lynx-woman held up DVD boxes in the air. "These discs contain histories of your world, but they're all different! Which is the true record? This 'Lord of the Rings' or this 'Die Hard'?"

  The teenage employee she was questioning looked ready to pass out. "They're... they're just movies! Entertainment!"

  "Your mind shows them as if they happened! You have fond memories of both! Which is real? Confess!"

  Holy shit.

  The aliens couldn't properly distinguish between what humans had seen in fiction versus reality. Their mind-reading abilities were pulling everything equally: movies, books, games, actual memories. Unlike Shady who spent several summers here in Cascade, watching TV and chatting with me, the invaders couldn't parse the difference.

  Behind me, Shady had discovered she could make the emergency broadcast sound and was doing it repeatedly while pointing at things. "BZZZZT! This is a circle! BZZZZT! BEEP!"

  Another realization hit: they were looking for their Princess's "corpse" because her Astral signature had supposedly terminated. The brain spiders. Whatever Shady had done to herself had completely scrambled her mind to the point where their tech assumed she was dead.

  And then the final pieces fell into place:

  The blood pact. Kobolds. Dragons who owned Kobolds. Hoards.

  A solution. I had an insane, potentially suicidal solution. I grabbed my tablet and tapping on Telegram, I called Dax.

  He answered immediately.

  "Ash! Fuck, dude, are you seeing this whack shit? They just executed three world leaders on live TV! The Polish president barely escaped because he was in the bathroom when they arrived, but they somehow found him later and—"

  "Dax, listen to me very carefully," I interrupted. "I need you to do something that's going to sound completely insane."

  "More insane than big tittied alien deer women with guns who just dropped a chunk of the moon on us?"

  “Yes. Where is the closest crystal centipede to you?”

  “Uhhh… the nearest one is at Pa?ac Prezydencki… Why?”

  "I need you to get a drone. The best one you can find. And I need you to fly it to Pa?ac Prezydencki.”

  "What? Ash, have you lost your fucking mind? The crystal murder worm is wrapped around Poniatowski's monument! It literally just swallowed up the Police car that tried to…"

  "I know. I’m going to talk to them.”

  “Talk to them?!”

  “I know what to tell them. Buy a basic unlocked tablet, shove a generic phone card with ten gigs of data, install Telegram on it, add me and duct tape it to a large drone.”

  “What?! Why?!”

  “You're going to fly the drone while I stay connected on Telegram call to talk to one of the aliens."

  "You want me to fly a drone... to the aliens... who are currently murdering world leaders so you can talk to them via Telegram?!"

  "Yes."

  "Ash, they're killing people! They turned your President's head into modern art!"

  "They're confused, Dax. They don't understand how anything works. They're reading people's minds but can't tell the difference between reality and fiction." I glanced back at Shady, who was now trying to eat the TV remote. "I have a plan."

  "What plan could possibly—"

  "Just trust me. Please. Can you get a drone to your President’s palace? This is very important. Probably the most important thing in the world right now."

  Dax was quiet for a moment. "Sis has a commercial drone for her real estate work. This is insane though."

  "The whole world is insane right now. Look, just get the damn drone. I'll keep the Telegram call on my tablet. You fly it to the palace entrance, and I'll handle the rest. Just do it. Please."

  He stared at me for a long moment. "If I die because of this shit, I'm haunting your ass."

  "Deal."

  "Give me thirty minutes. And Ash? This better fucking work."

  "BEEP! Pa?ac Prezydencki! Drone!" Shady bobbled beside me, licking my neck.

  "Who’s voice is that...? You got someone over?"

  "I'll explain later. Just get that drone."