The Gate at the End of the World
Posted 24 July 2026
Word Count: 5,290
Renyeten trailed behind Elier, keeping a few feet of distance between herself and the border of the Exclusion Zone. Multiple layers of contain and repel spells were painted on the ground in the bright red of the flower that only grew within the tundra. It was just paint. Nothing physical prevented anyone or anything from stepping over the border. Renyeten took occasional breaks from scanning the horizon to glance down at the ground.
Their patrols had settled into a pattern quickly after Renyeten had arrived at the Base Camp: Renyeten kept watch for threats, and Elier examined the border for disturbances. Elier had been here almost twenty years and knew exactly what abnormalities to look for.
"See anything yet?" Elier asked.
Renyeten took one more look behind her before facing Elier. "No. How does the border look today?" she asked in Kitlinar.
"The paint needs to be touched up in a few places. Nothing is faded enough to be dangerous," Elier said in International.
The official language of the Exclusion Zone research project and its Base Camp was International. Of everyone at the Camp, only Renyeten came from a country that had it as an official language. The others primarily used Kitlinar. The Exclusion Zone was physically located in the country of Kitlin. The research project had been created by a team at the University of Tyrsä, located in Tyrsä, the capital of Kitlin. Most of the members of the research project, past and present, were Kitlinar or Qitiniina from the neighboring country of Qitin, who all had to learn Kitlinar anyway as Qitin had no universities.
Renyeten had only been here four months and her knowledge of Kitlinar was still very basic. The others kept speaking International "for ease of understanding", even though Renyeten had repeatedly told them to speak Kitlinar so she could actually learn it.
If one considered western and eastern Kitlinar dialects to be separate languages - and plenty of people did - then every member of the current Base Camp had a different native language.
Elier had lived in Kitlin for decades but was originally from Sger, a country that took up half of the island south of Kitlin. He spoke Sger natively, was fluent in both western Kitlin and Qitiniasaaq, and had very little trace of an accent when speaking International.
Sajiiqqitin, being from Qitin, spoke Qitiniasaaq and Kitlinar. Her International was decent but became incomprehensible when she was excited, which was often.
Gorten was from Tyrsä and spoke International with a heavy Kitlinar accent, but was mostly understandable. Harnur, who was from a town in eastern Kitlin, only knew a few words of International and relied heavily on the others to translate, which didn't always work as the others, including Elier, quite commonly had a hard time understanding his accent.
"Do we need to tell Sajiiqqitin?" Renyeten asked in Kitlinar.
"No. The paint will last a few more weeks," said Elier. This time, he spoke in Kitlinar.
As the border was only 1.5 km in diameter and located in a very flat part of the tundra, the two of them finished their patrol quickly. Elier noted no disturbances of significance, and Renyeten noted no signs of animal life, not even birds. The tundra had been eerily still this morning. Renyeten hadn't been here long enough to know if that was normal during this time of year.
Both Elier and Renyeten were scientists - Elier a geologist and Renyeten a biologist specializing in plants. Neither of them needed to collect any samples, so they went back to the Base Camp after they completed their patrol.
Gorten was outside the cabins, looking over one of the generators. He looked up at the two of them as they passed, his eyes going from Renyeten to Elier. He nodded at Elier, not saying anything. Gorten was a man of few words, and after these few months, Renyeten hadn't been able to determine whether or not she would consider him to be friendly by the standards of his culture.
"I'm going to check the greenhouse," Renyeten said to Elier. He gave a grunt of acknowledgment before stepping inside the main cabin.
Not many plants grew in the tundra. The greenhouse contained a few native species as well as some species of domesticated fruits and vegetables from other parts of Tyrsä and the surrounding countries. Researchers at the university in Tyrsä had been involved in a decades-long project to breed crops that were more resilient to cold climates, and the Base Camp team had always been a willing part of that effort. No one had a problem with saving a portion of the seeds if it meant they got to eat fresh produce.
At this time of year, the plants were overproducing. It looked like either Harnur or Sajiiqqitin had been in here earlier. The kitchen would be full of fruits and vegetables for tonight's dinner. Renyeten grabbed a small bowl and filled it with blackberries. Those would be for her exclusively.
There were no blackberries in Renyeten's home country of Haraz; they grew exclusively in the northern countries of the world and Haraz was almost three-fourths of the way to the equator. Renyeten wondered if efforts had been made to grow heat-resistant strains. If she remembered later, she'd send a memo to the university to ask.
Sajiiqqitin and Elier were both in the main cabin, chatting about something in Qitiniasaaq. Renyeten sat down at the table, eating her blackberries, and looked at the clock on the wall. It was almost six in the afternoon. She still hadn't gotten used to relying on a clock rather than the position of the sun in the sky to tell what time it was. Here, it didn't set during the summer.
Over the next hour, Gorten and Harnur made their way into the cabin. Dinner was prepared and then served. This was when everyone learned what the others had done during their days. The three scientists (Renyeten, Sajiiqqitin, and Elier) hadn't noted any changes in their respective samples, but samples taken from the Zone were unremarkable and typically unchanging during the summer. Per Gorten, all the machinery was functioning as normal. Harnur had received zero messages from the University or anyone else in Kitlin, but would be going into the Zone to pick up a radio in the next few days and needed a guard.
After dinner, Renyeten went to the lab to check up on her plants. They'd been taken from an area close to the center of the Exclusion Zone weeks ago. Like all plants in the Zone, they didn't need water, fertilizer, or sunlight to live - if what they were doing could even be considered living.
There was no change in them from the previous day, or the day before that, or the week before that. The plants had remained exactly the same as they'd been when Renyeten had scooped them out of the ground and put them in their containers. They were not wilting, or decaying, or changing color, or doing anything at all. It was like they had paused.
Every time she examined a sample under a microscope, she saw the same thing: plant cells matching the samples from the regular, non-Zone plants that lived and died as living things should. These cells were, however, unnaturally still. Just looking at them made her feel strange. It was as if some instinct buried deep inside her knew she was looking at something that should not exist.
Nothing interesting had happened in the past few weeks. According to the others, nothing interesting tended to happen in the very middle of the summer, when the red flower was blooming all across the tundra. It somehow managed to keep things in check, even inside the Exclusion Zone.
Renyeten and Elier's next patrol of the Exclusion Zone border was two days later. This time, they found something new - a disturbance in the border. Something from the outside had stumbled or maybe even dragged itself across the red-painted rocks, which were strewn all over the place.
"What kind of animal usually does this?" Renyeten asked.
"There are many," said Elier. "Rabbits, owls, deer. Injured, I'm sure, probably by some other animal."
Renyeten frowned. "How can you tell it was injured?" she asked.
"Not all of the red you see here is paint. Some of it is animal blood," said Elier. He nudged one of the rocks into the Zone with his foot. "And some of it is outside the border. I'll let Sajiiqqitin deal with the rest of it once she gets here."
Elier turned to leave. "Protocol when this happens is to go back to the Base Camp and create two teams. One to hunt down whatever animal caused the problem, and one to fix the border. Let's do that now," he said.
They made it back to the Base Camp quickly. The other three were gathered into the main cabin in just a few minutes; they never wandered too far from the camp during working hours. All of them seemed to know what was happening before Elier started talking. Renyeten assumed they'd all been through this before.
"How bad is it this time?" Sajiiqqitin asked. In lieu of sitting, she'd opted to lean against the back of her chair.
"It's fairly minor. There is some blood outside the border this time," said Elier. "Gorten, go with her."
"Why me?" Gorten asked.
"Because I want Renyeten to help me hunt down the animal," said Elier. "Harnur will stay here at the Base Camp and ensure that nothing happens in our absence."
The entire conversation had been in International, but Harnur seemed to have understood, because he nodded.
"We should leave now," said Elier.
"Right!" said Sajiiqqitin. "I'll go get my things and then we can go. Where is it?" That question was directed toward Elier.
"Right at eight o' clock," said Elier.
This was the first time Renyeten had heard anyone refer to a part of the border with a clock. It did make sense; the segments weren't marked or numbered otherwise.
Neither Renyeten nor Elier had bothered to put down their equipment, including their rifles, when they'd gone back to the base camp, so they headed right back outside again, Renyeten trailing after Elier. He didn't lead her out of the camp like she expected. Instead, he walked toward one of the sheds.
"How do we know where this animal is?" Renyeten asked. "It could be in the Zone or outside of it. Or do they all head toward the same place once they're inside the border? Is there something that attracts them? We don't even know what kind of animal it is. If it's a bird, it could have flown away."
Elier disappeared inside the shed. "There are lots of questions we can't answer until we actually see the animal," he said, his voice muffled despite the open door. He was probably standing behind something. A moment later, he reappeared in the doorway with a wheelbarrow. "For instance, it could be a deer, and I don't want to carry a deer all the way back here. Do you?"
"I don't," said Renyeten.
Sajiiqqitin kept her supplies for repairing the border in her backpack. She rummaged through it and found that everything was just where she'd left it. The brushes were there, her tools were there, the small tin of paint was there, and it hadn't dried out.
Gorten was standing outside the door of the cabin, leaning against the wall with a rifle in his hands. "Ready to go?" he asked in International.
"Yep!" said Sajiiqqitin, also in International.
Eight o' clock on the border was around a twenty minute walk from the Base Camp. The Base Camp had been established at a "safe" distance from the border by a group of Kitlinar researchers and their Qitiniina guides only a generation ago. Sajiiqqitin had read through all the literature written on the establishment of the Base Camp and hadn't found too much on why the camp was located here in particular. It was simply stated to be at a "safe" distance from the border. Personally, she would have put it a little further away.
The border was the same bright red she'd left it as months ago. Even from yards away, she could feel the "magic" that radiated off of it. None of the others had ever mentioned it, not even Elier with the decades he'd spent around here. Sajiiqqitin suspected it was the amount of time she'd spent around the tundra flower and creating the paint that allowed her to pick up on it.
The disruption wasn't quite at eight o' clock - it was partway between eight and nine, closer to eight. Sajiiqqitin spotted the blood immediately. It had dried slightly, but animal blood was darker than the paint even when it was fresh.
Sajiiqqitin dropped her backpack to the ground and squatted down to examine the disturbance. "This doesn't look very bad," she said. "It shouldn't take too long to fix."
Gorten remained standing, looking around and holding the rifle awkwardly. Everyone had to do basic firearms training before they got to the Base Camp, but the only people who really had any skill were Sajiiqqitin herself, Elier, and, surprisingly, Renyeten. The others mostly didn't touch the rifles. Sajiiqqitin wasn't sure Gorten would even remember to take off the safety if he had to use it.
"You can sit down, you know," said Sajiiqqitin. She grabbed a couple of the bloodied rocks and tossed them back into the Zone.
"Rather not. I want to see if anything's coming," said Gorten.
He seemed content to keep standing there, so Sajiiqqitin turned her attention back to the ground. The first thing to do was make sure all the blood was moved to the inside of the border where it wouldn't cause problems.
The Exclusion Zone had existed since time immemorial - or so everyone thought. When the Qitiniina had arrived in the area over 1500 years ago, they'd noted the presence of an area where animals behaved strangely and plants did not grow as they did elsewhere in the tundra. The only plant that grew without issue was the red flower. And not only did it grow without issue, it, for some strange reason no one had been able to figure out after all this time, passively repelled the Zone's influence.
The Qitiniina had learned quickly that bringing the flowers with them prevented the unwanted ailments that occurred when going into the Zone without protection. Later they'd learned how to turn the flower into pigment and painted their tools, weapons, and clothing with it. Even later, they'd created the contain and repel spells.
The Zone did not stay in a consistent location. Some years it moved a few inches, and some years it moved a few feet. Some years it didn't move at all. There was no pattern to its wandering; it went south one year and then east the next, or west several years in a row, or north and south and north and south again. Even in the present day, the only real way to track its movements was with the red flower. The Qitiniina had been doing it for over a thousand years, and Sajiiqqitin suspected they would be doing it for a thousand more - this time, with the help of the Kitlinar and anyone else who came to the Base Camp.
When she'd finished repainting the border, Sajiiqqitin stood up and stood back, looking over it as a whole. There was no blood outside the border, which was now solidly red with several layers of thick paint.
"We're done here," she said, turning her attention back to Gorten. He was still standing, looking very bored. "See anything interesting?"
"Nothing at all," said Gorten. "Nothing interesting, either. Can we go back now?"
"Yeah, just let me get everything together," said Sajiiqqitin. After everything was back in the backpack, she took one last look at the border. It was solid and all the blood was inside of the Zone. It was fine. It would be fine until the next animal came by and knocked rocks around, or after a hard rain washed away some of the paint.
Renyeten had been inside the Exclusion Zone a few times. She didn't think it was something she would, or even could, get used to. The very air inside the Zone felt different. There was a heaviness to it in some areas and a lightness in others. Sounds didn't travel the way they should have. Sometimes she heard a footstep that wasn't hers (or Elier's, or whoever was accompanying her that day). But whenever she looked around, she never saw any animal, or anything that could have caused the noise.
According to Elier, the Zone had a way of transferring sounds from one location to another. If she heard a footstep, it could have been produced by a rabbit five hundred meters away. The regular laws of nature didn't apply here.
"Have you finished your self-check?" Elier asked. He stood a few feet inside the Zone, the wheelbarrow right next to him.
All their equipment had spells written into them; they were painted with the same contain and repel spells that were used to create the border. The spells had two purposes: keep the Zone from affecting the people (repel) and keep the people from bleeding out into the Zone in return (contain).
Renyeten had absolutely no idea how a human being, or any animal at all, could "bleed out" into the Zone, but that was the wording Elier had used. And since he had been here longer than anyone else, Renyeten was inclined to take his words seriously, even if they didn't automatically make sense.
She had tried asking Sajiiqqitin about it, but Sajiiqqitin had launched into an explanation that was even harder to understand. It had had plenty of Qitiniina terminology, only half of which she'd bothered to translate on the fly.
"It's done," said Renyeten. Taking care to avoid touching any of the paint, she stepped over the border. The spells on her clothing and rifle lit up immediately: bright red.
The change in the air was also immediate. There was an instantaneous feeling that something, or someone, was watching her. Renyeten looked around, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
"Does it feel like we're being watched?" she asked. "It didn't feel like this when I was in the Zone previously."
"Yes. There's definitely something in here," said Elier. He grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow. "It will probably be close to the center of the Zone. That's usually where animals end up when it feels like this."
Close to the border, the Zone looked like the rest of the tundra - grasses broken up by the occasional larger plant and spatterings of the red flower. If it weren't for the marked border, you could wander right into it and have no knowledge of that anything had changed until your blood left your body and started wandering around on its own. The Qitiniina had plenty of stories about it, and Renyeten had heard a few from Sajiiqqitin.
Everything got weirder the further you went into the Exclusion Zone. It was hard to notice because of the sparse plant and animal life, but that made what they saw that much stranger. Leftover blood from various animals that blended together and reached toward the sky like fingers, plants that grew tall and started spiraling, animals barely alive (or maybe dead) whose anatomy had been stretched and molded to resemble other animals.
They found the animal close to the Gate. It was a deer and must have died recently, as it wasn't showing any visible mutations.
"I didn't think it would be that easy," said Renyeten. She leaned over the deer. There didn't appear to be anything strange about it, but she had no idea what it looked like on the inside.
Elier had somehow produced a canvas bag larger than his backpack from his backpack while Renyeten had been looking at the deer. "Help me bag it," he said. At Renyeten's hesitation, he continued. "You can touch it with gloved hands if the spells are active, which they are. We will be sterilizing everything as a precaution when we get back to the Base Camp. You can never be too careful with this sort of thing."
It some finagling, but the two of them got the deer into the bag. Elier zipped the bag shut, then lifted the whole thing into the wheelbarrow without Renyeten's assistance. "I'll take it right to the lab. If Sajiiqqitin's done repainting the border, she'll already be there. She should have some results later today," he said.
"Is that how it usually goes?" Renyeten asked.
"It is. When we're done with the deer, we'll incinerate it and dump the ashes back into the Zone," said Elier. "I'm sure if you ask nicely, Sajiiqqitin will let you start the fire."
Renyeten went straight to decontamination when they got back to the Base Camp. Her clothes and gear went into a locker. The lockers used some kind of radiation to kill any organic life that was put into it. Each cycle took around twenty minutes.
She jumped into the shower afterward and scrubbed herself down as best she could. There had been zero cases of mutations happening after people came back from the Zone. According to the Qitiniina, the contain and repel spells were enough to keep someone safe; they destroyed any particles that were affected by the Zone. That hadn't been enough to convince the Kitlinar, who at the time had been so scientifically-minded that they didn't trust anything that didn't have dozens of tests with various controls. They'd come up with the decontamination procedures over a century ago and everyone who went into the Zone was required to follow them. Renyeten was happy to do so. She didn't have the inherent trust of spells that Sajiiqqitin did.
Renyeten grabbed one of the robes outside of decontamination and made her way back to her private quarters. Once she was dressed again, she went back to the common area.
Gorten was already there, sitting at the table and drinking something. "Where's Sajiiqqitin?" Renyeten asked.
"In the lab," said Gorten, not looking up at her. "She said she was going to...cut up an animal? I don't know how to say it in International."
"Autopsy," said Renyeten. "Or necropsy, since it's an animal instead of a human."
Going by the look on his face, Gorten wasn't familiar with either of those words or why there would be a difference between them. Renyeten didn't think that any further explanation would help.
"How often do deer found in the Zone need to be cut up?" she asked instead.
"It's another deer?" said Gorten. He finally looked up from the table. "It's always a deer. Always. And when Sajiiqqitin cuts it up the blood jumps and the organs move. Sometimes Elier has to help."
"Help?" Renyeten questioned. "That happens outside of the Zone? I thought there were spells in the lab to prevent that sort of thing from happening."
"Yes, but they aren't always fresh. Sometimes unexpected things happen," said Gorten. "There are windows. We can go watch. I like to, sometimes."
"I think I'll just wait here," said Renyeten.
The deer lay on the table in the lab. It was very obviously dead, but it hadn't been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in. Elier hadn't said anything about the temperature of the corpse when he'd picked it up, but that didn't mean anything in the Zone. It was unfortunately common for blood and organs to move around in a dead animal, and that would warm up a corpse that had been dead for weeks.
The deer probably hadn't been dead for weeks. There were no signs of decomposition, which tended to occur at a regular rate inside the Zone. It smelled like a regular deer and looked like one as well, despite being dead. It had no obvious signs of injury and there was no blood anywhere, not even around its eyes, nose, or mouth.
If Sajiiqqitin had to guess, this deer had been dead for less than an hour.
She looked to the table that held the tools and reached for a scalpel. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a movement; it was Gorten and Renyeten standing by the window. Gorten grinned and waved. Renyeten looked concerned.
Sajiiqqitin waved back, then grabbed the scalpel. The necropsy would take an hour at minimum. The two of them would probably get bored of watching and go to do something else.
The necropsy was finished two hours later. She had taken pictures, put specimens in jars, taken swabs to culture in agar, written down notes, and made voice recordings. The tools were sterilized and put away, the deer had been re-bagged and put into the freezer, the lab had been cleaned, and she herself had gone through decontamination and was now getting dressed. All that was left to do was report the results to the others.
Gorten, Renyeten, and Harnur were waiting in the common area. Renyeten had her chin in her hands, staring at nothing in particular. Harnur was reading a book, and Gorten had a mug of something in front of him, looking incredibly bored.
"Where is Elier?" Sajiiqqitin asked immediately. "He will want to hear all of this and I don't want to repeat myself."
"I'm here," said Elier. He emerged from the kitchen with a glass of water. "What's the news? It seems serious."
"Well, it is," said Sajiiqqitin. "That was not a deer."
Renyeten frowned and raised her chin from her hands. "What do you mean, it wasn't a deer? Is there some species here in the tundra that looks like a deer but isn't?"
"No, I mean it isn't a deer at all," said Sajiiqqitin. "It looked like a deer on the outside, but I didn't recognize anything on the inside. I've dissected plenty of deer and other mammals. I know what a mammal should look like on the inside. This was not a deer. It was not a mammal. I have taken samples for DNA testing, but I suspect that once we receive the results of those tests, we will find that this animal is not from our world."
Renyeten frowned and opened her mouth to ask another question, then shut it again, still frowning.
"It came through the Gate, then?" Gorten asked.
"That's what I suspect," said Sajiiqqitin. "The DNA will confirm it. The preliminary test is running right now. We'll know what it isn't in about thirty minutes."
"This really happens?" Renyeten asked, sounding baffled.
"It's called 'End of the World' for good reason," said Harnur in Kitlinar.
"That it is," said Elier. "You have read all the literature about the Gate, haven't you, Renyeten?"
"Yes, but it was all stories from hundreds of years ago about how the veil between the real world and the spirit world is weak here and evil spirits come through from time to time," said Renyeten. She blinked and frowned again. "Those were just explanations of aliens coming through the Gate from another world by people who didn't know about aliens, weren't they?"
"Of course," said Elier.
"How have you not heard of this before?" Gorten asked. "Everyone in Kitlin and Qitin knows about it. Even the Sger know about it, even though they probably dismiss it as a northern superstition."
"We also dismiss it as a northern superstition in Haraz," said Renyeten. "It doesn't exactly sound scientific. When was the last time this happened?"
"About two hundred years ago," said Sajiiqqitin. "It's not a common occurrence. Our oral history records crossings happening just a few times over the past fifteen hundred years. This will be the second time it's happened since the Kitlinar arrived to this continent."
"So an alien comes through the Gate to our world. Is there a protocol for this?" Renyeten asked. "What do we do with it? Alert the university first, I assume?"
"There is a protocol, but it was developed after the well after the last incursion. We've never had to use it," said Elier. "If this follows the pattern of all previous ones, then many more aliens will be coming through."
"It's true," said Sajiiqqitin. Everyone looked toward her. "All the stories start like this. First one, then more and more in waves that become overwhelming. And then one day, the crossings trickle to a stop, and nothing happens for two or three hundred years."
"What are we supposed to do about it? Build a wall to keep everything in?" Renyeten asked.
"We'll need to contain them somehow. The paint won't be enough to keep that volume of animals inside. It wasn't last time," said Sajiiqqitin. She took a deep breath. "Last time this happened, the aliens brought diseases that killed thousands of people. Hundreds of communities were wiped out. That's why the tundra was so barren when the Kitlinar started exploring up here. So many of us died."
Gorten raised his hand. "I think we have another problem," he said. "If that alien came through the Gate, then it isn't the animal that disturbed the border. Where did that one go?"
Everyone sat there in silence for a moment as they thought over the question. Renyeten was the first to speak up. "Is that really what's important right now?" she asked. "We're facing an invasion that could bring alien diseases that no one on this world has an immunity to. I think one mutated rabbit or deer can be ignored for the moment."
"As much as I like to be thorough, I'm afraid Renyeten is correct," said Elier. "Harnur, we need to radio the university. I'll tell you what to say." Those two sentences were in Kitinar; he continued in International, addressing the others. "The rest of you should read up on what's been written of the Qitiniina history of the Gate. It'll give you an inkling of what to expect."
Harnur and Elier left the room. Sajiiqqitin, Renyeten, and Gorten looked at each other. It seemed like no one wanted to be the first to speak or make a move.
"I think this is going to be bad," said Sajiiqqitin quietly.
Renyeten sighed and put her head in her hands. "This is definitely not what I signed up for," she said.
Sajiiqqitin considered telling Renyeten that she could leave. She could simply radio the university and ask for transportation back to Tyrsä. The University would grant it. Renyeten was a foreign national whose injury or death would cause serious diplomatic problems, and that wasn't something the University liked dealing with.
Renyeten likely already knew that. All foreigners had to meet with multiple people who explained the dangers of simply being in close proximity to the Zone, as well as going inside it. She'd understood the dangers before she'd even been cleared to come to the Base Camp.
"You came here to study plants that were affected by the Zone, right?" said Sajiiqqitin. Renyeten lifted her head back up. "Our stories also talk about an abundance of strange plants popping up once the creatures start crossing over. I don't know if they bring their plants with them, or their presence spurs mutations in our own plants, but there will be plenty of plants to study. You might even be able to describe a new species."
Renyeten let out a laugh and shook her head. "You might be right," she said. "I could be the first person to describe an alien species. That would definitely make this trip worthwhile."