Three steps and I was through, staring out into a grayish light. Heavily overcast sky, with gray and brown walls, left and right.

Strange...and not natural. This was her world?

The walls looked like rusted metal, thirty feet high and about a hundred feet apart. Farther down, I could see a building above the left wall and something...maybe cages?

Yua gestured for me to follow, so I moved forward as the others emerged from the black hole in the stone wall behind us. Our soldiers would have a story to tell their grandkids...should we survive.

I sheathed my sword and unlimbered my bow instead. I didn't see any people.

"As we expected," Cornelia said. "This isn't Realm technology or anything similar."

I pulled off my heavy cloak and passed it back to my squire Gabriel to stow away, My other counterparts did the same. It was warm, upper seventies. Much different than the low forties back at camp.

Yua chattered something back to my newly knighted Sobeck Cavalier, Sir Ishen.

"She says this isn't her world" he lisped his translation, his almost-human mouth having problems with some of our sounds. "There is another portal, but her man died here from the thunder weapons the people used who herded them through."

"That would've been nice to know earlier," Ellie muttered.

"I assume we go forward," I replied to Ishen, and he pointed that way.

Yua slipped behind us next to Sinense's Maid of Honor Mara. I guessed that meant she thought her job was done for now. But then again, the path was obvious, so I stepped out.

Five hundred feet, and it was definite that those were cages. Large cages like for an old-style zoo. A little while later, we were at the bars of the nearest cage on the left, four terrified Sobecks, or rather, Ilyen, inside. Did they recognize us?

Yua ran around and into the cage...the door was open? I'd missed that.

She chattered with them. One looked like Yua but with full breasts, a baby in her lap, and a bandaged thigh. There was another older woman and a young male, probably not fully grown.

Sinense sighed. "Well, for once, my bad aim was a good thing."

"What do you mean?"

She held her bow out to me, and I took it. "I shot her and was pissed she and the baby got away back then. Now, I have antibiotic cream in my kit, and I'm going to use it so she doesn't get infected and die." She stalked away and into the cage next to Yua and pulled her first aid kit out.

I passed her bow over to Mara and surveyed the area. There were dark windows high in the rusty iron walls, so whoever might be on the other side could observe the cages. Things that might be electric lights were affixed above the windows, but no light shone from them. An iron door was set into the wall not that far away.

There was no sound besides what we and the Ilyen made. I was beginning to think this had been abandoned when I heard noise from the iron door and the screech of metal on metal.