Welcome to the Point: A Point Epoch Tale by Cloud Riser (polar express read aloud txt) 📕

Welcome to the Point

A Point Epoch Tale

International Bestselling Author

Cloud S. Riser

Dedication

To all of the fans who so patiently stick by me. I appreciate you all so much.

Chapter One

Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

There’s a song that says the beginning is the very best place to start, so that’s what I’m going to do. Start at the beginning.

Let’s go back a hundred years and change. A hundred years sounds dramatic and cool, even though I think it truth it might have been only about eighty-seven or ninety-two. The time was the early 1900s. Life was still relatively simple. Technology wasn’t quite booming, and people were still superstitious about stupid things like black cats, breaking mirrors, and salt spilling on a table.

That was the time that I was last born into.

I’ll add that in my time and my place, the town’s people believed in public executions. Awesome, huh?

At the age of nineteen, I had a noose around my neck and an angry mob cheering for my demise. There were somewhere near thirty people witnessing the grand event. I made sure to look each of them in the eyes. As I made my way through that crowd, one by one, I took great joy in watching them go from eager and cocky to cold and afraid. That one second of eye contact was enough for me to communicate the truth: not even death can stop me.

“William Hough Hermans, you have been convicted of ten counts of murder in the first. The state has hereby sentenced you to death by hanging,” Mr. Kellan Lutgin the fine judge who ordered I should die in the first place said. I gave the guy props for having the strength to watch his commands be carried out. Not everyone had the stomach for it.

Personally, I think Mr. Lutgin got off on seeing someone in his final moments because he had the highest death penalty sentencing in the area—and he never missed a show.

Mr. Lutgin gazed over at me with a whole lot more arrogance than he should have. Like everyone else, he thought he’d won. “Do you have any final words?”

Did I have any final words?

“When I take my last breath, Becker is no longer going to be the precious town you once knew,” I sneered. “Everything will be changed, and so will everyone in it. Your great grandchildren will be celebrating my return.”

Then I said the three words that sealed their fate.

“It is so.”

I had a lot more I could say. A lot. I actually had a twenty-minute speech planned out that I could have easily stretched into hours. Did Mr. Lutgin give me that luxury? No. Not like I should be surprised because I didn’t even get a last meal before I died. A shame, too, because I was looking forward to some good old fashioned blueberry pancakes.

Mr. Lutgin nodded at the officer in charge of pulling the trapdoor from under me.

And...snap!

And that, as they say, was that.

Chapter Two

Where Things Are at Today

I succeeded in everything I said on that scaffolding all those years ago. All thirty of those people have great grandchildren that still reside in Becker, now Point Epoch, and those grandkids love the crap out of me. I call that part of the story the beginning because it was the moment everything was set into motion.

When I died, the barrier keeping my home separate from the other dimensions broke free. That was the day Point Epoch became the center for all things paranormal and strange. Because before that day, Point Epoch was just a normal First Earth town. First Earth being the original Earth. No, not the Earth most people think of. That earth was actually several attempts down the line from mine. Our homes are pretty darn different too. Example: in my earth, darn is actually the worst swear word on the planet.

Supernatural creatures don’t exist on First Earth, either. By breaking the veil between the worlds and letting out all of the monsters into town overnight, it ushered in the beginning of my reign of chaos. Imagine, going to sleep on your boring farmland and waking up to vampires feeding on your pigs or goddesses trying to seduce your spouse. Magic became readily available to anyone who wanted it. Ordinary people took a leap of faith to become something more than what they were originally destined for.

It was a fate a lot of Epoch resisted for a number of years. About twelve in, they finally embraced it and the constant influx of residents. Eventually, the supernatural citizens outnumbered the regular people.

Point Epoch became known more for being a supernatural hub between dimensions than anything else. There was only one family left that is completely ordinary, and that is the home of my beloved Delia.

She and I had been on a long journey. I had loved her for a while. Admitting when my affection for her started could be embarrassing. She’s only a teenager. As soon as her personality started to blossom, I knew we were going to get along smashingly once she reached a dating appropriate age. Plus, there’s this thing called destiny. I felt it the day she was born. That’s one of my many gifts, being able to feel the pull of fate.

Delia was just the beginning of my resurrection. With her help, I would be able to return. Unfortunately for me, she was dating this doorknob of a guy named Trevor. He’d been given the task of protecting her from all of my evil plans. Well, evil according to his guild of goodie-goodies.

For a while, she didn’t know he only existed in Point Epoch to protect her. Thanks to some well-orchestrated shenanigans on my part, that information has been brought out into the open. I wrote of that in