When Heroes Die

“The safest way to negotiate with the Fae is through somebody else. That way, when they come to collect, you’re not the one who has to pay the price.”

– ‘Essences of the Fae’, written by Madeline de Jolicoeur

I found myself on the streets of Chicago. I was about a block away from the PRT building. The streets were unusually empty. It was nice, peaceful.

Maybe I can have a part of the city to myself for once, just for today.

I started to jog, going past the trees by the lake. Their leaves were a verdant green, the life of Summer bleeding through. I felt the early morning rays of the sun beating down upon my back, urging me forward. I smiled, it was pleasant.

This is wrong.

Why was I jogging? I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be. I had always wanted to just take a day to sit by the lake and relax. Frowning, I slowed down, then came to a stop. The world was saved now, right? There was no schedule I needed to follow. The leash was gone, and I could finally rest on the shores.

Slowly, I made my way to the edge of the lake and just sat down, enjoying the view. It was serene.

This isn’t me.

“Hey, you’re ready to go?” Theo asked half an hour later. He sounded impatient.

“Where to?” I replied, puzzled. I didn’t recall needing to be anywhere.

“The celebration, of course. We did it.” He was grinning.

“What did we do?”

“We stopped Jack. Don’t you remember? You were instrumental. You helped coordinate us all and cut off his escape with your Swarm.”

This never happened.

Something was wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I knew it. Deep inside of me, something was protesting that I should be somewhere else.

“Come on, let’s go.” He urged.

I stood up and followed him.

We reached the PRT headquarters, one of two in Chicago. It was squat, broad, and not terribly pretty, but it sported a statue on the roof that had been paid for by an old member, Stardust.

Standing outside was a crowd of people. In the faceless masses, I could see the faces of people I cared about. My dad, Lisa, Brian, Rachel. Everyone was here. They greeted me warmly and I was ushered inside. Apparently there was a celebration.

The end of the world had been stopped, and those of us who had stepped up to do our part were being honoured for the part we played. Eidolon came up to speak.

He should be dead.

Why was he here? He died, didn’t he, in the fight against Scion?

The sky darkened and the people vanished. Clouds rolled in. The surrounding buildings decayed, crumbled, and then collapsed. There was a flash in the sky, then a rumble of thunder not long after. The rain began to fall.

People started running away, panicked. The wind picked up, howling. In the distance, out on the open water, the vague silhouette of a wave could be seen approaching.

I clenched my hands and reached out for my swarm. Maybe I could do something, help with search and rescue.

I only have one hand.

Where were Max and Roland? Why weren’t they with me? This was wrong. This was all wrong!

I reached out with my mind, my indignation made manifest, and pushed against the world. There was resistance, as if someone was contesting what I was doing. They didn’t appear to be giving it much attention, though. It seemed almost like something they just passively maintained. A sharp pain wracked my head.

That wasn’t acceptable.

Filled with determination, I shoved again, ignoring the pain. Something gave. The world around me shattered.

I was in a forest, standing between two maple trees. The waning light of the sun broke through from above, casting dappled shadows on the crimson leaves below. I took a step forward, tilting my head and looking around. The leaves crunched underfoot and the chatter of birdsong stilled.

Where had I seen this before?

I took another step, a fox dashed out from behind a bush. It looked at me, sending a grin in my direction before turning away. Then it ran, disappearing between the trees. I reached down and picked up a long, reasonably straight, branch. Poking the ground ahead of me as I walked, I made my way in the direction of the sun. The hope was to find my way out.

The sound of bells jingling in the distance distracted me. I stopped for a moment and listened. It was faint, almost imperceptible. Then I heard the baying of hounds. That meant there were probably people here. I should head that way.

A painting. There was a painting like this.

Suddenly, I panicked. Hounds, there were hounds coming. I ran, dashing between the leaves on my paws. I had my nose to the ground, my snout sniffing the trail ahead. My ears twitched as the riders drew close. I needed to move!

Paws? I wasn’t a fox.

A moment of clarity. I rolled through the underbrush, landing on my stump. I suppressed a wince. Then, I climbed to my feet. Concentrating, I tried to keep my thoughts organized. I had gone to sleep, then woke up in a vision of Chicago. When I tried to escape the vision, I had ended up here.

I remembered visiting a caravan and looking at the paintings inside. One of them was a landscape of Chicago, another was a forest in the woods.

I was under the influence of some kind of master effect.

The effect was subtle, it made it seem like ideas that were just on the edge of being reasonable were reasonable and then kept pushing the boundaries for what counted. When dealing with master effects, it was best to use an emotional response to logical manipulations and a logical response to emotional manipulations. At least, that is what was taught.

I wasn’t sure which one this was, but I was leaning more towards logical than emotional. I focused on the situation. On my feelings of frustration at falling into a trap. How did the Painter so easily trick me? Did he have more compulsions? I let the irritation of having to constantly be invited inside places mount up.

The vision kept trying to distract me, but I drowned myself in my feelings instead.

There had been many paintings, and I couldn’t afford to keep moving from one to another.

The hounds came closer and the tolling of bells grew louder, but I put that all out of my mind. Closing my eyes, I concentrated on the idea of simply being out. I refined the idea, honing upon my intent. Being in another portrait was unacceptable, I needed to escape.

Once more I felt resistance. The illusion, or whatever it was, tried to fight back. I could hear the panting of the hounds. I ignored it. My attempts weren’t working. I wasn’t making any progress at all. My frustration rose, but still I kept trying. It felt like there was someone actively contesting what I was doing. They were no longer just sitting idly by. Whoever it was had a stronger grasp than my own.

So I tried something else.

Instead of trying to bulldoze my way through, I tried subverting their purpose. I felt around what they were trying to do. It was like a uniform wall all around me. Experimentally, I tried sending something else through it. Focusing my will, I tried to shove some of the painted landscape around me beyond the wall. It went through uncontested. That meant whatever my opponent was doing was selective.

I hadn’t tried using stranger powers yet, but this seemed like a good opportunity to try. My experiments with other power types had shown me that the more absolute the power I tried, the more difficult it was to enforce. I’d need to be careful to choose an ability that didn’t leave me knocked out for an hour. I didn’t need Imp’s power here to escape, just anything that could convince my opposition that I didn’t belong inside. So I chose to try something a little more subtle. There was nothing out of place about me. Everything I was doing was completely normal, just what you would expect from the average nice girl.

The effect went through. It took effort on my part and was more draining than I expected, but to the world it was suddenly as if what I was doing wasn’t worth paying attention to. The focus of my assailant drifted somewhere else.

I capitalized, focusing on the idea of ejecting myself. At the last moment, I felt whoever was on the other side scrambling to try to stop me, but it was too late.

The scene shattered.

I landed unceremoniously on a bed of snow. Experimentally, I tried feeling out the existence of a similar effect again. My will found almost absolutely no purchase on the world around me. Ominously, they seemed much stronger here than inside the painting. Whoever had been containing me was now actively working much harder to keep me contained.

Usually I had a vague sense of the world up to just over a mile out. As if it was almost a part of me. It wasn’t like my swarm sense, I couldn’t tell where things were in relation to each other. Just that I could affect them. It had taken me a while to notice because of how subtle it was. It wasn’t something that I often played around with, considering the effort it took and the likelihood of being found out. Here, that was just gone. I could feel out no further than maybe thirty feet. It was like the essence of me was being squeezed real tight, down to the size of a ball.

It was claustrophobic, unpleasant. I didn’t like it at all.

I tried to impose a stranger effect again, but my assailant noticed and struck out, shattering it almost immediately. What they were doing felt similar to what I was doing, but not exactly the same. If I was to qualify the difference, I would say it was almost as if… What they were doing was tacitly allowed by the world, while my actions weren’t.

It was like a house invader destroying the coffee table instead of the house owner. The table was still broken, but the circumstances were different.

That wasn’t good.

There also wasn’t anything I could do about it. Whoever they were, they seemed much more adept at this than I was. They knew how to fight this way, and I was still learning.

Running when I didn’t know where I was also seemed to be a bad idea. So it was time to find out more about where I was.

I took a look around.

Around me on every side were rows upon rows of glass spheres, all placed delicately on cushions seated upon plinths. The room was an oval, with a roof that looked to be made of transparent ice above. The walls of the place were unnerving. If I was to describe them, I would swear they were carved out of the blackest of night skies. I was near the centre. There was a narrow path that led out to a door that terminated where just shy of my position. Near me was a basin that was intricately decorated in silver plating.

I was in the middle of a very big stadium.

I stood up and took a closer look at the ball closest to me. Inside was the scene of the forest in miniature. Puzzled, I moved to the next one. This one contained a tavern. To my horror, a man was drinking himself into stupor within.

Souls. They were prisons containing souls. There must have been thousands of them. What kind of person could do such a thing? Wherever I was, I didn’t think it was inside another painting. This seemed more like the… artist’s containment facility.

Looking back over how I ended up here, I felt like slapping myself. I hadn’t taken the warnings that I had been given seriously and ended up trapped as a consequence. I should have been more cautious, but instead I had walked right into some sort of master or stranger effect. Max had told me I would need to worry about travelling with a hero. I hadn’t taken that warning to heart.

I still didn’t quite believe in the power of stories, but you didn’t need to believe in a weapon for it to be able to cut you. Treating them as if they were a threat to me wouldn’t cost me much. If it saved my life, it would be worth making the effort.

I turned around and trudged towards the basin.

To my surprise, I heard murmuring as I approached. The basin contained a pool of mist. Puzzled, I was about to look at something else when I realized that I could see figures moving within. It was showing somewhere else. Looking closer, I tried to make out the scene below.

“You do not understand my vision, the true beauty of my work.” A figure said. He was standing in a poorly lit room filled with mostly empty canvases. It was the painter.

“I understand that you have stolen the soul of one of my friends, return it.” Roland demanded firmly.

The painter ignored him, rambling on.

“All my life, I lived in the shadow of someone else. My parents snubbed me, for I had not the gifts of my sibling. My friends pitied me, then cast me aside. Then one day, on my journey through the Waning Woods, I was approached by one of the Winter Fae. It made me an offer and I accepted it. Finally, I had a way to earn the respect I was owed.”

“And what was it that you bargained your soul away for?” Roland asked, aghast.

“It was not my own soul I bargained away.” The painter laughed.

“A paintbrush tipped with unicorn hairs that, when fed a drop of blood, can paint windows in and out of Arcadia. For the paltry price of one human soul a month, I had a way to climb out from the shadows of others and finally live. For a time I profited, amassing for myself a fortune through trade. Moving across the land far faster than any other merchant could.” The painter continued.

To my incredulity, this was a storybook villain giving a genuine monologue.

“And where is this brush now?”

The man tapped his side, grinning gleefully.

Why was Roland just allowing him to talk?

“Then, my brother became jealous and confronted me, demanding I turn it over. For he was the one in the family with magic, and clearly he was the one who deserved it. It dawned on me then that I would never have my due. That, if I wanted recognition from the world around me, that I would need to take it from others and manifest it as my own.” He spread his arms dramatically.

Is…this…for…real?

Why was somebody actually acting like this.

Behind him, the painting of a tiger came to life. It leapt towards Roland, snarling, and Roland dove to the side.

“Maxime!” he shouted out.

The wall of the caravan detonated into a shard of splinters and from behind it, my friend came hurtling through. His face was contorted in rage and from his palms, two fireballs leapt out. They struck the tiger.

It was good to know that they were seemingly fine, but I had my own situation to deal with. I had a dagger strapped to my left leg, but I doubted it would help me against whoever was restraining me. My struggle against them continued, but I was making no ground.

I was just about to turn around and start looking for an escape when a voice called out.

“Amusing, is it not?” It reverberated eerily, not against the stadium, but seemingly against the air itself.

I turned around warily.

A figure stood at the entrance. Despite how far away he was, I had been able to hear his words perfectly. His face was pale and narrow, almost vulpine in nature. He had long ears and was missing one eye, a black silken patch covering it over. He was clad as he was in a sober long-sleeved tunic with buttons of shade, and wore a sword at his hip. It was slender and lacked a sheath. The man radiated an aura of violence.

Beside him, strode a black horse carved from wood. Ebony, I realized.

I had read stories of these creatures. There were myths and legends about them on Earth Bet as well.

This was one of the Fae.

That meant I was probably somewhere in Arcadia.

I would need to be very cautious.

A part of me wanted me to attack, but I shoved it down. He was clearly the one currently keeping me contained, and I suspected a fight wouldn’t go in my favour. When trying to find out more about myself back at the tower, I had found passing references to the Fae. Apparently, they lived life entirely through stories. I was doubtful.

Unfortunately, it was unlikely that I could fight the creature on my own. My efforts to resist him were going poorly, I would need some help. Hopefully the other two would be able to either pull me out of here, or provide me with support. That meant I needed to buy time.

I didn’t think that stories would help at all, but they were a valid way to stall. There was no reason to be reckless here just because I didn’t believe they would do anything, though. Fae were supposed to trap people with words, so I would need to be on my guard.

“May I have the honour of knowing who I speak to?” I asked, careful in how I phrased my query.

If they did follow stories, then I had no idea how many stories told about these creatures on Earth would hold up. The idea of escaping one trap to end up in another did not appeal to me. Was lying to them dangerous? How about bargains? Was he weak to iron and lulled by music?

“So cautious,” the figure mused, laughing delightedly. “You may refer to me as the Prince of Nightfall. And who may I have the honour of talking to?”

He walked closer, then came to a stop. Watching his eyes, I noticed he was warily staring at what I would approximate to be the perimeter of my presence. He was also going out of his way to remain outside of it.

Would making a rush towards him be a mistake? Possibly. I wouldn’t take the chance just yet. Everything about this man screamed danger. That if I messed up, he would kill me in a moment.

I didn’t know if there was any risk in me giving him my name. Better to err on the safe side here, rather than take the plunge. If the world really did listen to stories, though, perhaps I could try to tell one of my own.

“A captured Princess, waiting for a hero to rescue her,” I replied.

Max will never let me hear the end of this if he finds out I said that.

It was the first story that came to mind, as much as I didn’t like it at all.

His lips twitched. I guessed he found the idea that I was a Princess just as ridiculous as I did.

“And from where does this Princess hail from, then?” He fished.

Wait, he’s actually playing into this?

… That wasn’t what I expected at all. Did that mean I needed to actually come up with a plausible Princess story now?

How do I justify this?

… I should have just gone with damsel.

The fight continued to play out in the bowl below. Maxime was keeping the painter tied down and Roland was moving in. I wasn’t sure what he was trying to achieve, exactly. I just hoped he would break me out of this prison soon.

Every word I said would need to be considered carefully.

“From the court beyond the stars,” I answered.

Technically, I was from beyond the stars. If lying to Fae was as foolhardy as the stories I knew would suggest, I wouldn’t try it here. The Faerie Queen might have been mad, but if she kept calling my passenger a Queen, that made me a Princess, right?

His eyebrows rose for a moment. Then, he smiled, seemingly satisfied with my answer.

I hope I don’t come to regret that.

“And what does her Royal Highness think of my humble accommodations, then?” He inquired.

I stared into the bowl, buying myself some time to think. It was nerve wracking seeing a fight play out and not being able to help.

Suddenly, Roland leapt. He grabbed at the paintbrush at the artist’s side, tearing it away.

“No, that’s mine!” The painter cried out in anger.

“You are not worthy of the power granted by an artefact like this. You are misusing it, wielding it to the detriment of all those around you.” Roland declared.

“I am the only one worthy of it,” the painter shouted, “for I am the Arcadian Artist.”

“Confiscate.”

I turned back to the Prince.

“I think the manner in which I was brought here leaves much to be desired,” I evaded.

The Prince walked away from the path, moving towards the globes. “Only thirty of these souls were payment made by my little friend there. The rest were payments delivered by others.”

Right, so it sounded like this wasn’t so much the Artist’s soul storage but instead the storage of some dangerous Winter Fae. I wasn’t sure where he was going with that digression, but at least he hadn’t tried running me through.

Why hasn’t he tried killing me?

This entire situation was ridiculous.

“I will offer you a trade, a question for a question. Truly answered, to the best of our abilities.” He continued.

I was out of my depth. A voice at the back of my head warned that if he wished to, he could talk circles around Lisa. Unfortunately, every moment I kept this creature talking was another moment in which the others potentially freed me. I would have to take the risk.

“I accept this trade,” I replied.

“Bargain struck then,” he acknowledged.

“I offer you the privilege of asking first.” he stated.

I almost began to speak, but then realized that accepting the offer might be a bad idea.

“The privilege is all yours,” I denied.

“Very well, then,” he smiled. “Does the Court from Beyond the Stars intend to lay claim to these parts of the Garden?”

That was not the question I had been expecting. I could practically hear the capitalizations when he spoke them.

That wasn’t a real place, was it? Surely it was just a name that I had made up.

The question had come out of nowhere, and left me thoroughly confused. Even if it was a real place, I wasn’t actually a Princess from it. This creature had to know that.

Fumbling, I answered. “The Court from Beyond the Stars lays no claim to these lands.”

Claiming territory I had no right to was probably a bad idea. If he wasn’t trying to kill me now, I didn’t want to give him a reason to.

I felt a sudden weight pressing down on me. A presence, an outside observer, listening to what I had to say. The feeling disappeared and with it, I was left even more confused than before.

I paused, taking time to gather myself before I made a mistake.

Now I had a question to ask of my own. I considered what to ask. I could ask him to point me to the shortest way out. In fact, I was sorely tempted to. If the power of stories was as real as people believed it to be, though, then doing so might be a mistake. I had begun with the story of a trapped Princess waiting to be rescued. If I tried to escape on my own, I would be changing the narrative.

Do I rely on others to try and rescue me, or try to rescue myself?

Lisa’s words about never relying on others came back from the grave to haunt me.

I… didn’t want to rely solely on someone else to save me. That didn’t mean I couldn’t have it as a fallback option. I could make room for someone else to save me if my escape attempt failed. Stories might be a weapon here, but they wouldn’t be my first weapon. For the Princess story to work, I would probably need to climb back into one of those balls. I wasn’t willing to do that unless I knew exactly what they did.

The pressure of his will against mine shifted constantly. It was like he was testing the limits of my ability to respond.

It seemed stupid to not take the opportunity to try and make my own exit, but I had no idea how far the closest way out from here was on my own. I only had one question, and I didn’t know if the creature could lie or not. Between risking escape without directions and climbing in a prison without knowing the cost if I couldn’t win a fight, I would rather do the former than the latter. Swallowing my pride, I chose to find out what the balls really did.

“What is the mechanical functionality of the spheres?” I asked, pointing at one.

If it came down to choosing between running, going back into a ball or fighting him, I would try fighting him first. This way I knew if I had a fallback option. If those prisons did something truly insidious, then I would have to be willing to fight to the death. It was important to know if playing the damsel was an acceptable, although humiliating, way out of here.

The Prince’s expression remained unchanged as he continued to speak. I wasn’t sure if that bode well or ill for me.

“Each soul tells a story. Each sphere, a dream in which the events that transpire compose the tale of their life as they will it to end. A life spent in a painted world, unending, save by the breaking of the glass. As the warden, I claim their stories as my prize.”

That told me most of what I needed to know, but it didn’t tell me everything. He also hadn’t really answered my question either. He told me what the prison contained, not how they worked. Time to see if this creature would truly play by stories.

“You have not truly answered your question,” I challenged. “You told me what is inside the spheres, not what they do.”

The air of danger around the creature thickened. It seemed he wasn’t happy with my assertion.

“The dreamscapes draw the essence of a person into a world carved half the distance between the Garden and Creation. The spheres anchor this end and the paintings, the other.”

… Right. He actually answered me.

Maybe my doubt in the effectiveness of stories was misplaced.

I still didn’t have the last answer I needed. What would happen if you broke a sphere? I guessed it would eject someone out into the world again. That was what would happen if you removed one anchor, right?

“You have not told me what happens if the spheres break,” I tried.

“That is not the question that you asked of me,” the Prince smiled.

It was worth a try.

“Now, it is time for the Princess to return to her cell, for it seems that she was caught in her bid to escape.” He stated.

It seemed that my stalling had come to an end.

“I would rather not,” I declared.

I dashed his way. He had been afraid of me closing in, so why not try that first?

Faster than I could blink, he leapt back, landing on a platform of ice suspended high in the air. I tried throwing a beam of light his way in response. Spots appeared on my vision. The beam departed from my fingers, only to fizzle out at the edge of my influence.

… That wasn’t what I had expected to happen.

Then, a bigger problem. The moment in which I had summoned the beam, my focus on defence had slipped a little, and he had compressed me even further. My range was down to just over twenty feet now. I tried to push out again, but my efforts slid off. It was like trying to grab at mist.

It seemed like fighting wasn’t going to work. I turned towards the exit.

The Prince’s mount had moved to block the path. That didn’t matter. If the Prince was scared of me, his mount was definitely not a problem. I dashed its way. A dome of ice materialized around me. It was just a little larger than my presence and seemed to be slowly shrinking towards me.

What was even the point of that?

The moment I moved a little, I would be able to contest it.

And I wasn’t about to let him trap me in.

Which was when I started to feel the pressure against me mount. This time it was targeted. As if he had evaluated all of my weak points and knew where to strike. My presence began to shrink.

Ah.

It seemed that fighting and running wouldn’t work.

That meant trusting that the story I had tried to tell would. The Prince’s dome of ice was uncomfortably close when I dove to the side, landing against one of the plinths. I suppressed a wince of pain. It tilted, and a globe fell into my hand.

The globe was familiar. In it, a little girl strode through an empty castle.

Here was a hope my hair brained backup scheme worked. These prisons were supposed to be gilded cages. I wouldn’t be happy in one, but it played into the story I was trying to tell, and my first plan hadn’t worked out.

“Fine, I’ll go in!” I shouted out.

The approaching sphere stopped, then faded away. The Prince looked at me, as if waiting for me to move.

“Is this one fine?” I helped up the sphere of the girl.

The sphere of Chicago was harder for me to resist the influence of. It was a familiar landscape and one I could easily buy into. It was a risk to enter a different one. I didn’t know if Roland and Max would be able to find me in this one. We had been trying to save the girl before I was trapped, though, so there was a chance.

A darker part of me whispered that if Roland didn’t break me out, then I wanted my cage to be one where there wasn’t a chance of me falling under the effects. That way, I could make another attempt to escape on my own.

The creature gave its assent.

Reaching out with my will to the globe, I impressed upon it the idea of me falling in. It was within my sphere of influence, so I had no trouble achieving the outcome I wanted at all. Then, I felt myself compress inwards, hurtling towards the globe. Finally, the world flickered for a moment before my new reality set in. I just had to hope that if the sphere was broken, nothing bad was going to happen to me.

“Who are you?” A child’s voice asked from beside me.

“My name is Taylor,” I replied.

“Do you know where my mommy went to?” She asked.

I felt the surrounding space try to warp and instinctively fought against it.

“Your mommy isn’t here, Aisling.” I answered her softly.

“But I want my mommy,” she cried out, tears starting to run down her face.

I felt the world shift again. I realized what was happening. In a way, the Prince of Nightfall had already told me. This was a prison designed to try to trap the prisoners inside a vision of what they desire. If there was only a single prisoner, it was shaped by only a single mind. Now, the mirage it was creating was a melding of her wishes and mine.

That made it easier for me to resist.

She cried out, visibly upset, and I felt a pang of guilt. It was easy to resist this version of the prison, but did I really need to? So long as she was the one directing the scene, it wasn’t like I would be convinced by it.

The next time I felt Aisling wish the world try to change, I allowed the change to take hold. Resisting it would be needlessly cruel. The actors who materialized unnerved me, but they seemed to make the girl happy.

Allowing her vision of the world to rule made the unreality of the place far more clear.

I sat on a fake rock and watched her laugh and play while I waited. It brought out a deep melancholy in me. A reminder once again that I was in this world, but not truly part of it. An invader.

This place viscerally disgusted me. It imprisoned people in a way that made them happy to stay trapped, not even aware that their real lives had come to an end.

Waiting was all that was left to do now. That and a large amount of hope. I didn’t like having to place my trust in someone else like this.

I could feel the presence of the Prince outside the sphere. Fortunately, it was much easier to resist from inside. Much like before, it seemed like he wasn’t trying to crush me now that I was inside. He was only attempting to keep me contained.

So now I was stuck in a cell, hoping to be rescued. I had to put my trust in a story, rather than any actions of my own. It rankled.

I didn’t know how much time was passing outside. According to Max, time passed differently in Arcadia. We could have been trapped here for years already.

I felt invisible walls closing around me. I clamped down on the urge to tap on my leg nervously. They would rescue me. I wasn’t trapped. This was just a… Temporary vacation.

Suddenly, I heard a voice again, coming from all directions.

“Manifest.”

The world seemed to fade, the colour leeching out of it.

Reality winked out.

I woke up in the room I had rented. After blinking away my drowsiness, I unsteadily climbed to my feet. Then, I changed and left the room. I was suddenly grabbed from the side and enfolded in a firm hug. It caught me by surprise, but was nice.

“Don’t fucking scare me again like that, Taylor.” Max said, his voice hoarse.

“I’ll try not to,” I replied.

The fact that the story had actually worked surprised me more than anything else. I had been largely discounting the power of narrative up until I got caught in one. To my dismay, I was beginning to realize that being less sceptical of the world I was in might actually help to keep me alive.

We made our way to Roland’s room. After he had ensured that I was fine, we started to discuss what had happened. It turned out that a day had passed since my capture.

“So after you disappeared-” he started.

“Didn’t I just fall asleep like Aisling did?” I interrupted.

“No girlie, you vanished.” Max answered.

Roland launched into his tale. After I had disappeared, they had retraced my steps from the days before. First, they visited the artist. It was Maxime’s suggestion, he had found the timing of my purchase suspicious. They tried being circumspect, posing as people interested in purchasing a painting. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to draw anything out of him. After that failed to provide any results, they checked the with family, then they visited the various merchant stalls.

It was only then that they looked closely through my possessions and took another look at the landscape. It was the lead that they needed. There was a difference to the painting now. The image of me was animated, moving around as if alive. That was the only real proof that was needed.

Roland and Maxime tried to pull me out, but were unsuccessful. They didn’t know enough about the kind of magic that messes with souls to succeed. They almost went after the Artist immediately, but then thought better of it. If they couldn’t do it, it meant their only real hope of free me was bargaining with the enemy.

So they took some time to plan. They needed to find a way to blackmail him into getting me out. Having proof of what the paintings did, they asked the parents for theirs. There was no reason not to try saving both of us at once, after all.

Then they had gone to confront the artist. The plan was to get him to pull me out, then kill him afterwards. That had led to the confrontation I had witnessed. After seizing the paintbrush, they managed to bargain for the release of me and the girl. Unfortunately, he got away. Terms for his safe departure enforced by a binding were part of the deal. Then he painted a doorway into Arcadia and made his escape.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, that after all of this, the villain got away. Still, Aisling was saved, and that counted for something.

Which brought us to the next topic of discussion.

“Would you shed light on at which point you were planning to inform me that you weren’t from Creation?” Roland’s eyes were hard as flint.

“When the time was right.”

“Would the time ever have been right?” He pressed.

It…probably wouldn’t have.

“I…don’t know,” I admitted.

“There is bruising between us, Taylor. This is no minor slight. If you wish to continue sharing my fire, you cannot choose to keep me in the dark.”

“So you’re fine with me still travelling with you then?” I asked.

It surprised me.

“Make no mistake, I considered reporting you to the priests. Were it not for Maxime’s speaking up in your defence, I would have been hard-pressed to choose.” He said.

The two of us continued to discuss the matter tensely. Roland was understandably upset that I had kept the truth from him for so long. Fortunately, it seemed that it was not a total dealbreaker. It would take a while for the bridge to be mended, but I knew that with time it would be. I had experience, after all.

Aisling’s parents thanked us profusely for our help when we next spoke with them. Fearing drawing too much attention, we left the town not long after.

Thoughts of the Prince of Nightfall’s prison weighed down on my mind. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do anything about it, but I wouldn’t be leaving it alone. Something about me had made him cautious. I may not know enough to do anything now, but that wouldn’t always remain true.