Across Worlds with You, Part 3
Kit Campbell
When the light finally died down and Will could see again, he was in yet another new hall, though this one was made of a gray-ish stone, maybe marble, with a large terrace in front of him overlooking a green valley. He blinked once, rubbing his eyes.
Then Destia and Theo barreled into him, and all three went down.
“Shut it, shut it!” Destia scrambled to her feet, sword in hand.
“It’s shut,” Theo answered, not bothering to right himself. “I built that into the spell. What we need to do now is lock the gate.” He finally sat up, rubbing the back of his head. “I have no idea how Deathcrawlers are managing to move between worlds, but I don’t like it. And we have enough Deathcrawlers here without having to worry about more coming in from elsewhere.”
Will was half-pinned under Theo’s legs. “Where are we now?”
“Beautiful Helstena,” Destia replied. “Or what’s left of it, anyway.”
Will twisted so he could see over the terrace again. “Looks fine to me.”
Theo’s eyes went blue and something unseen blew through, messing up everyone’s hair. Will had the strangest urge to straighten Theo’s. After a moment, Theo’s eyes faded back to normal and he extricated himself from Will, offering him a hand. “I’ve sent a report. They’ll take care of the gate.”
Will accepted Theo’s help. The other man pulled him up with surprising strength, his grasp lingering a little longer than expected.
“We’d better go see the Historian.” Theo ran his hands through his hair. “I am sorry about this, Will. When you turned twenty-five, there was a whole plan to bring you back and tell you everything you needed to know. It wasn’t supposed to be sprung on you like this.”
Biting back the “It’s fine” that he instinctively wanted to say, Will kept silent, walking to the railing at the edge of the terrace. Tall, rocky mountains, almost purple against the blue sky, ringed the valley, and from this vantage point he could see a town down below, mixed in with the trees.
…being gathered up, carried up marble stairs, his mother holding him tight against her chest, an older sister and his father staying behind, tears streaming down his sister’s face…
Will blinked. Remnants of an old dream, one he’d had often as a young child. He hadn’t thought about it in years.
But what if it wasn’t a dream? What if it was a memory?
Theo lightly touched his arm. “Will?”
There were really two possibilities here. One, Will had gone insane, hallucinated something chasing him, and now was having a full psychotic break. Two, he was actually from here, and he’d been removed when he was little for his protection, and everything he knew back on Earth was, well, not a lie, but just something to do to bide his time.
If it was the first, nothing he did here would change anything. But if it was the second, then he was perhaps this world’s only hope—and wasn’t that a weird idea, he couldn’t even get employee of the month at the coffee shop—and could do some good.
It didn’t seem to hurt anything either way to go along with it.
“Sure,” he said, “let’s go see the Historian.”
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