Demonworld Read Online Free Page A

though he had come into the forest just to see what it was like to sleep under the stars, something deep inside told him that this was not the forest he had originally entered.
     
    Wodi propped himself up and swallowed his rising panic. He planned to get his bearings as soon as the sun rose, head northwest, take the rail back to his University apartment near Central Haven, fix something hot to eat, forget about ever going on hikes without good reason, and then he would -
     
    A bushel of flowers caught Wodi’s eye. In the deep blue of early morning he could clearly make out white petals against black tree bark. The flowers were strange; some of their whiteness had splashed onto the black tree bark, as if they were thickly painted and then clumsily handled. Wodi carefully crawled over to the bushel, peered inside the flowers, and saw something like purple spirals nestled against fleshy pink folds. He pulled away quickly.
     
    The alien flowers were not native to Haven.
     
    Wodi rose and looked around. Though the idea was difficult to grasp, he was truly beginning to believe that he was no longer in Haven. In the growing light he could dimly make out a complicated spiderweb high in a tree, looping from branch to branch, patterns repeating like some kind of equation. He saw a cluster of white trees with holes gnawed through their centers, with thick syrup the color of blood running down to the forest floor.
     
    Wodi had heard of such places before. Though most of the world was baked dry and hostile to life, this place was an oasis - a dreadful and forbidding place deep in the wasteland. If he was correct, then he was nowhere near Haven. An oasis was a place of genetic wildness, a dark land where life was crowded and hemmed in on all sides. A place of vicious and unending competition where living things developed savage defenses, facing a grim choice between death and an unhappy existence.
     
    And oases were always, always inhabited by flesh demons.
     
    * * *
     
    Wodi waited on the edge of a nearby clearing and watched the sky unravel into white and pink. The stars grew dim. As long as he stood still, he could almost imagine that he was the first man in an alien world, standing by as the first garden gave birth to itself. Eventually he could make out black leaves against twisted trunks, then he could see that the forest stretched in all directions. When he got a hint of where the sun would rise, he knew that soon the day would begin and he would have to bottle up the chaos in his heart and come up with a plan.
     
    He checked his pockets for anything that might help. All of his usual possessions were gone; they had been replaced by a small, folded, hand-drawn map.
     
    Surely he was dreaming. The map was drawn with a spidery thin script, more representative than practical. There were hints of imagination in the controlled flourishes of the pen.
     
    The Island of Haven was at the top, in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility, with Sunport on the far shore south of Haven. Below that lay hundreds of miles of arid wasteland, home to lone demons and the burning sun. At the bottom of the map Wodi could see a horseshoe formation of mountains that enclosed a forest. A prominent X was placed in the middle of the forest. A river ran through the forest, disappeared under the mountains, wound through more arid waste, and cut through the center of the city of Pontius far to the west. Wodi could only assume that he was standing on the X, thousands of miles from Haven, trapped in a world he was not equipped to deal with.
     
    As confusing as it was, the existence of the map confirmed that he was a fly trapped in the web of a sadist with access to resources. The situation was not as dreamlike and nonsensical when he reasoned that someone, a person, a human like himself, was behind it all.
     
    Had he pissed off someone dangerous? Or been mistaken for the child of someone important, kidnapped for ransom, and then dumped far away when the