Stanley swerved over the road with a screech, barely avoiding hitting another vehicle.

“Are you trying to get us killed?” Chrysalis snapped at him, whipping her head toward the sweating human.

“No,” Stanley lied, wiping the back of his neck nervously. “Where’s this conversation point again?”

“Conversion point,” the changeling corrected him snappishly. “And you’ll know when we get there.”

“Christ, you sound like my dad,” he replied conversationally, whipping around a curve in the road. He couldn’t tell why Chrysalis had him driving in the same direction that he had run her over in; but then again, he was mainly preoccupied on keeping her talking, some kind of distraction.

When she didn’t respond, Stanley said “What exactly is a conversion point again?”

Chrysalis breathed in exasperation through her nostrils, fixating her glare on the road ahead.

“You’ll find out shortly. Stop here.”

Begrudgingly, Stanley slowly pulled over to the side of the road. He nervously stared about, vainly wishing that he had his phone on him; whether or not she could read his mind, maybe he had a slim chance of calling the police. Or the military, the CIA, somebody better equipped to deal with this than he was.

“Get your weapon.”

“What-what weapon?” Stanley asked innocently, to which Chrysalis deadpanned. She jerked open the glove box, magically levitating the pistol and dropping it in Stanley’s hands.

“… How did you know that was in there?” he breathed, and he swore that if she had fingers she would have pinched the bridge of her nose.

“You told me where it was, idiot. Now, get out. You are going to protect me with your life while I attempt to reopen the focal window betwixt the gravitational fulcrums.”

“… What?”

“Just stand nearby and try not to die!” Chrysalis snapped at him, magically jerking open the car door and leaping out onto the side of the road.

At this point, Stanley was actually glad that a few more cars were moving along the highway; unfortunately, there seemed to be more people slowing down instead of calling anyone about the changeling walking around in broad daylight. It then occurred to Stanley exactly why Chrysalis had forced him to take the revolver.

“If any of them attempt to approach,” Chrysalis nodded to him as she tramped up the roadside ditch and stopped atop it. “Kill them.”

“Back!” Stanley yelled in panic to a couple of the approaching people from cars who’s curiosity had gotten the best of them. “Back, run for help!”

Against his will, Stanley fired off a shot straight over the crowd – several of the people scattered with screams upon hearing the gunshot, and he could only hope that someone had finally called in police. It didn’t appear that he had hit anyone, but it also might have just been his wishful thinking. Stanley stole a glance at the changeling queen, and much to his surprise, she was completely distracted – her mane was whipping wildly in a nonexistent wind, and her eyes were glowing a brilliant white.

For a moment, Stanley’s heart soared; he had the loaded pistol clutched tightly in one hand, and she was clearly distracted. Time to see if she was eager to gain another hole.

However, Stanley never got the chance, as a violent bolt of purple lightning hatefully pierced the sky. It blasted apart the ground in front of them, and Stanley nearly dropped the gun from the shock.

“The window closes,” Chrysalis breathed gleefully, whipping her head back to him and he saw that her eyes had returned to normal. “Now, servant – while I am weakened.”

If Stanley hadn’t been so stunned, he might have even been able to use this vague wording as a command to fire on her; however, it was all he could do to pull his mouth closed. The whirling vortex shimmering midair seemed to hold the majority of his attention, and he could only shake his head.

“What?”

“Carry me, idiot!” Chrysalis barked, and he was forced to obey. “Quickly! Get through, it’s closing!”

With one last pained, mournful glance back at the life he used to know, Stanley jammed the revolver in his pocket and leaped through the portal.

Stanley was awash with a bizarre creeping sensation, burning his skin. He felt as if he were falling, everything in his sight a violent, multicolored blur. Although he couldn’t tell how long he was falling, he did notice when he finally landed – and he didn’t manage to roll when he hit the hot sand, which only made the impact all the more painful.

He tumbled all the way down the sandy dune, the painfully scorching sand stinging his eyes. Stanley coughed and spat out sand, struggling to his feet. His head whipped around in confusion, and he covered his eyes with one hand to peer around the endless sea of blazing white sand.

“What in the hell…?”

“Keep moving!”

Stanley jumped at the changeling’s bark, finding her stomping angrily through the sand past him and back up the dune.

“What – what just happened?” Stanley stumbled in confusion after her, the shock of the incident still buzzing in his veins. Long gone were the trees and grass, the dully grey-blue morning sky. This place was unbearably dry and hot, all agonizingly white beneath a grim, vast crimson ceiling that coalesced into a deeper red the further to the horizon it drew. Stanley couldn’t bear to look up at the sky too long for the intense light, but he would have sworn that the place had at least three suns.

But that was impossible.

“The next focal point is close,” Chrysalis hissed, kicking up sand with her trotting. Stanley barely managed to keep from sinking into the gripping grit and fine powder, thankful that at least there was no wind whipping it about. Which, the more he thought about it, Stanley found even stranger. “This one should be simpler to find, although I doubt it shall be effortless to reopen.”

“I don’t see anything,” Stanley huffed, sweat already pouring down him. The heat was so crushing, so insanely powerful that he wondered just how anything survived out here.

“It is close,” she sounded just as pained as he did. “And it doesn’t. There is no life here.”

Stanley hid a scowl, forgetful that the wretched thing could read even the vaguest of his thoughts. Perhaps there was some way that he could manage to hide them, but he quickly swiped the thought away, lest she read it, too.

“Impossible,” he grunted, hoping to distract her long enough to get some sense of privacy back for his own mind. “You’re telling me this is a whole different world? Like, planet, or dimension? Why’s the air so still?”

“Shut up and keep walking!” Chrysalis snapped angrily at him, the heat evidently draining her. Even her already raggedy mane seemed to wilt from the extreme temperature. “All you need to know is that this is a dead land. And there’s no wind, either. It’s dead, it’s all dead! I’ve already seen it.”

Although he bitterly stomped behind her and was nearly ready to collapse into the sand, Stanley was admittedly curious as to the world’s history. Chrysalis had obviously been there before; how long would it take to escape? Had she seen the whole planet? Was the entire thing a fiery desert? How were there dunes if the place had apparently no wind? How did she know everything was dead, and if so, how were they breathing without any kind of plant to produce oxygen?

Thankfully, Chrysalis finally stopped him from bumping into her; and by that point, Stanley was certain that any longer would have boiled him alive.

“Here,” Chrysalis gasped at the bottom of another of the endless dunes. She threw her head back, and Stanley watched carefully as a vibrantly green spark alit atop her jagged horn, rippling from the tip and piercing the sky. He hadn’t seen that happen before – possibly because he had been too busy trying to warn people back. However, just as before, a violet burst of lightning forked down from the sky in front of her and a shimmering crack silently formed before her.

“… Okay, that was kind of cool,” Stanley admitted. “How are you even-?”

“No time!” she snapped again. “Jump through.”

“What?” he looked at the fading portal warily, but felt himself being slowly dragged forward by his own body nonetheless. “Why?”

Stanley expected her to answer with ‘because I said so’, but instead she smirked.

“Because your queen requires a shield, stupid.”

Stanley did not like the sound of that.

Within the moment, however, he found himself tumbling through a similar hole even smaller than he had before, lights and stinging sensation creeping over his skin. Determined and a little more prepared for it, Stanley forcibly shifted his body around, straining to land on his feet.

Stanley did not land on anything for what felt like hours, but must have only been four or five minutes.

He fell and fell, and was forced to clench his eyes tightly shut to avoid becoming sick from the painfully bright colors whizzing past. He tried making out a couple of the shapes once or twice, but swiftly found that it only made him develop a slowly growing migraine.

He was caught by surprise when he forcefully hit the ground, biting cold and darkness enveloping him.

Stanley flailed, the unexpectedly freezing ice and snow burying him the more he struggled. He kicked and thrashed, the panic setting in as he struggled to clamber out of the snowbank and free himself from the cold’s frigid grip. He strained for breath, his frantic actions only burying him further and further-

Chrysalis magically jerked the man from the snowbank by one of his arms, and he would have yelled from the pain if he had any air left in his lungs. He could have sworn that he heard something pop, too, but the sound must have been torn away by the wind.

“Are you finished?” Chrysalis snarled at him, as if it had been his fault. She glowered at him in the dark, and began trekking up what he could only assume was one of many mountainsides. Stanley couldn’t even see the ground, and quickly discovered just why it was so bitingly cold that even hugging himself as tightly as possible and tucking his fingers beneath his armpits did nothing to avail it.

“F-f-f-fuck y-you,” he spluttered, desperate to keep up with her lest she leave him to freeze to death. Snow quickly filled any crevices in his shoes and clothes that the landing did not already feel filled with icy water, and he was beginning to miss the boiling heat of the previous desert as compared to being on what he sincerely hoped was Mount Everest.

At least that would have meant that he was on his own planet again.

“There is shelter not far from here,” Chrysalis mumbled, but he still managed to hear her, mysteriously. The wind violently whipped his hair and clothes, snow and the start of a freezing rain dropping from the sky. “The next rift is within, but we haven’t much time.”

“H-h-how can y-you t-t-t-t-tell?” Stanley shook viciously, struggling to cover his eyes protectively from the snow and trudge up the steep slope after the changeling simultaneously.

“Shut up and carry me,” she commanded. “And keep up your pace, or we’ll be devoured by rabid snow scorpions.”

Despite the fact that his body forced him to carry the arrogant queen, Stanley was fully in favor of keeping up the pace and now thoroughly searching the snow he stepped in. He wouldn’t be all that surprised if there really was a world with gigantic ice scorpions lurking just beneath the snow, and this only spurred Stanley on further.

He grunted and tramped onward with Chrysalis in his arms, which he had long since lost feeling in. The sweat he produced was beginning to freeze from the intense weather, and a warmth had begun to spread in his toes that shouldn’t have been there. Stanley was on the verge of passing out when he dimly recognized the command to release the queen, at which point he collapsed hard on the ground.

Fortunately, he seemed to have landed on something softer than snow.

Unfortunately, it happened to have been Queen Chrysalis.

He remembered being dragged for a short while, and blacking out a little afterwards in a peacefully dreamless sleep.

When he awoke he was lying stiff in one corner with a tattered, heavy red cloth draped over him like a tent. A billowing green flame roared not three feet away, where Chrysalis sat staring somberly into it. He stayed silent for a few seconds, pondering if he could get away with pretending to be asleep.

“No,” she breathed. “It would be fruitless, Stanley.”

Instead, he said nothing and righted himself, clinging to the ripped red cloth and inspecting his surrounding curiously in the emerald light. Stanley rubbed the sleep from his eyes, smelling something akin to burning, but there was something unfamiliar about the scent. He seemed to have been dragged into a stone shelter of some kind that strongly reminded him of a monastery – however, it had obviously been abandoned for quite some time. It was heavy with ice and what looked like frozen cobwebs, tattered tapestries worn by time and defilement dangling precariously along high rock walls.

It was breathtaking, in a way; the halls of the monastery loomed before them and dripped away into darkness, the raging blizzard outside oddly reminding him of a horribly demented Christmas special.

It was then that Stanley realized just what was being used as fuel.

“Jesus!” he lurched away from the bodies in horror, trying to crawl further into the corner.

“Oh, stop whining,” Chrysalis rolled her eyes at his display of terror over her use of the dismembered and clearly human body parts. “I found them like this, they’ve been dead for ages.”

“They’re f-fucking people!” Stanley resisted the urge to vomit, covering his nose to protect himself from the stench. “Jesus Christ! You – you can’t – human people!”

“They serve, even in death,” Chrysalis purred in what was almost a pleased fashion. “These wretched meat sacks were not of your race, cease your gibbering. Look at them.”

Even though all Stanley wanted to do was turn away and retch, he did indeed look more closely at some of the burning bodies. True to her word, the more he looked, the more Stanley realized that the bodies were definitely not human – too small, almost the size of children.

That thought didn’t help matters in the slightest.

The bodies also bore burning rags of the same color that he was draped in, which Stanley suddenly found himself eager to rid himself of. Many of them had oddly shaped pincers or claws instead of hands, and rat-like, sharp faces that had grown gaunt with time. The sound of sizzling fat as one of them popped really did make him retch, which Chrysalis watched in morbid fascination.

Stanley wiped his mouth with his elbow, shakily turning away from the fire.

“… From what I have gathered,” she spoke eventually in a light, conversational tone. “These folk were known as devout worshippers to a sun god.”

The way she spat out the last part made him briefly wonder why Chrysalis pronounced it with such disdain, but didn’t get the chance to ask as she pointed out some of the small but finely woven intricate patterns on the tattered red clothing. Many displayed green half suns that had might have at one point been beautiful to look at, but had long since lost their luster.

It took a little bit for his disgust to begin to wane as Stanley’s curiosity and captivation by an alien race started to take hold, and it settled in on him just how impossible it all was.

“Is this a dead world, too?” Stanley asked suddenly, his voice hoarse.

“The conversion point is opening,” she stood swiftly, kicking out the flames. The long, eerie shadows that had been cast over them threw the room into stark emptiness, the cold promptly swarming them the moment the flames were stomped out.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he followed the changeling queen as she trotted swiftly down the enormous, creepily empty halls.

“Keep moving, buffoon. Had you not awoken, I would have left you here to rot.”

Stanley frowned heavily, not doubting that she really would have done it.

Then again, she might not.

The crazy bitch probably wouldn’t want to give up someone who would carry her fat ass around.

“I heard that.”

“Hey, so how ‘bout them snow scorpions?” Stanley marched a little faster with a forced grin, nearly bumping into a crumbling stone pillar in the dark.

They walked quickly and without pause for a short while, traveling deeper and deeper into the monastery. The more of it that they saw, the more Stanley earnestly wanted to see such a magnificent structure when it was full of light and populated, despite its denizens being apparent rat-lobster hybrids that worshipped a sun god. It might have been an incredible sight.

“At the altar,” Chrysalis commanded, pointing toward the end of the hall. The darkness loomed over them, and although he peered into the dark, he could see no such altar. Just deep shadows.

“… I don’t see it,” Stanley froze at the entrance to the much larger room, squinting hard.

He heard the changeling heave a heavy sigh of frustration, and a brilliant emerald light blossomed up from behind him and bathed the entire room of worship in a garishly green glow.

Stanley suddenly found himself ready to vomit once again.

Bits of the area’s populace were strewn about in horribly gruesome manners, some of which seemed to be impaled on pikes lodged deeply into the stone walls. Rubble and bodies intermingled on the floor, some of which were piled indiscriminately around the room. And in the center of it all, bathed most deeply in what Stanley sincerely hoped was just a very nasty stain, stood a simple little altar in the shape of a black anvil.

Said anvil was populated with heads.

“I’m ready to go back outside now,” Stanley felt a shiver run up his spine at the sight of the hollowed skulls. “I’ll take my chances with the snow scorpions, thanks.”

“And what precisely do you think did this, hmm?” Chrysalis mockingly asked him as she callously swiped the heads clean from the altar, a vibrant green spark already alighting atop her horn as it had before.

“Scorpions did this shit? How? How in the fuck did scorpions do this?!”

His words were drowned out by the deafening crack of violet lightning that pierced the air, striking the altar. The black anvil vanished behind a shimmering tear in the air, which Chrysalis nodded toward.

“Carry on, minion. Unless you wish to stay and find out for yourself, of course.”

Stanley wasted no time in leaping through the portal, and was swiftly enveloped by darkness.