Fiction — The MagicLand Chronicles
Triage — Part One
A young woman returns home after the Third Eradication. Let the magic begin.
She looked across the lake at sculptures morphed from the ruins of old steel mills. Hammond, Indiana, she thought. That used to be Hammond.
Her dad had taken her fishing here as a child. Wolf Lake had its charms during her childhood despite being in the middle of old industrial parks. The bluegill always looked fat and happy, even as they flopped on the pavement with hooks in their mouths.
Now there were towers rising up on the other side of the lake where Hammond used to be; long thin structures not wide enough for housing or offices, tapering into the sky like immense foils from a fencing match among giants. She couldn’t imagine what their purpose was.
She needed this fresh air. She had spent the last days in caves made from warehouses crushed by time and abandonment, the halls of forgotten factories split apart by years of winter storms, underground cities filled with denizens too sick to crawl out of tunnels once used to carry cable and electric current to a formerly vibrant city.
These days the remaining city was an impenetrable fortress of gleaming spires and mansions populated and worked by those…
