Of the Realm #4

“Get up,” Izel rounded on them. “Kiss me again. This is your fault.”

“My fault?!”

“You didn’t kiss me back.”

The hero gaped at him, sitting up more in stunned outrage than anything else. “That wasn’t a kiss, that was you mashing your mouth against my face. You didn’t even ask!”

“Who asks before kissing someone!?”

“Anyone with a reasonable view of consent!” The hero took a deep, calming breath. They still continued through gritted teeth. “Speaking of. What exactly were you trying to accomplish? I assume it was something about your stupid resonance theory and not a particular desire to kiss me.”

“Obviously.” A terrifying scowl twisted Izel’s face. “Hero gets the boy. Or the girl. Happily ever after, time to go home. I made sure you were thinking about home, about everyone who you loved who you heartlessly abandoned—”

“—For the last time, I didn’t abandon—”

“—And hey,” Izel folded his arms. “It should have worked! Ergo, get up. Fix this. Get us out of here before anyone notices us.”

“You don’t think anyone noticed the big portal opening up in the sky?”

“Come.” Izel’s voice was deadly. “Here.”

“I’m not kissing you again.”

“I know you insist on sabotaging everything I do, but lest you forget—”

“Have you considered that maybe the hero kissing you, or whatever, didn’t work because you’re the villain? And we hate each other?”

Izel stayed silent for a beat, and the hero pushed themselves from sitting to standing properly because being on the ground when Izel was around seemed like a poor decision. As a general rule. Especially when he had that dark, unreadable look on his face.

“Or maybe,” Izel said, “you’re just not a very good hero anymore.”

The hero resisted the urge to swallow. The words shouldn’t have come as a surprise, Izel was well-known for his particular brands of cruelty in Realm, but somehow it still felt like being punched in the throat. Their hands curled into fists.

“After all.” Izel advanced on them, and the hero backed up instinctively. “You’re not even trying to figure out where we are, or trying to get home. You haven’t even tried seeing if you have magic again! You’re just-” Izel waved a hand as if to encompass everything not quite enough that the hero had become.  His lip curled. “I honestly don’t know how you survived me. Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe Realm is the only place where you’re anything special at all.”

The hero did not resist the urge to swallow. They gulped, but still didn’t feel like they could quite get rid of the lump clogging up their airway.

“Maybe,” they said, keeping their voice steady with the same mustered bravery as the time they had been caught out by an assault of wrathwraiths on the edge of town. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you stalked me across universes. Maybe you should have thought about that before you coerced me into coming with you!”

“Oh, please. You wanted to come home. I gave you the push you needed, as ever.”

“And yet.” It was the hero’s turn to wave a wild, all-encompassing hand. “We’re not home, are we? We’re here. Wherever here is.”

There was something strangely familiar to the location. Maybe something they’d read? It would make sense if world-walking worked by resonance and what one expected to happen.

“Maybe it’s the fact that I kissed you. You’re the hero. You’re supposed to kiss me.”

“I’m not kissing you.”

“You want to be stuck?”

The two of them glared at each other. The hero looked away first, one hand pressed protectively over their mouth.

“At least try using magic,” Izel snapped. “You try opening the portal, you’ve done it before. Go on.”

But the hero hadn’t dared test if they had magic again yet. What if they didn’t? What if this place was closer to Earth than Realm and they were still entirely useless without their power? What if they’d got themselves stuck because they couldn’t seem to ever be happy where they were? Maybe the world wasn’t the problem. Maybe they were.

The hero closed their eyes, briefly, shoving the thoughts away. It was the world-walking shock. It was being stuck with Izel. It was the crash and burn of hope. When they opened them again, they caught Izel watching them, obviously having noticed something on the hero’s face. At the very least, he didn’t say anything mocking.

“We should find some place to set up camp,” the hero said firmly. “Get the lay of the land. Find out if this world is friendly, see what we’re up against.”

Izel snorted as if that was funny.

“You have a better plan?”

“Get back to Realm.”

The hero took another steadying breath, and thought they were rather out of practice being noble, because it didn’t work very well on calming or steadying them.

“Look,” they said. “If your theory is right-“

“-I am right-“

“If your theory is right,” the hero bit out. “Then there’s a reason that we’re here, right? In this specific world. One, or both, of us has something here that is resonating.”

“Or maybe your wardrobe was made out of these stupid trees.”

“Oh, yes. Because that’s the more likely option.”

“So, the universe dropkicked us into ruin. That’s not a valid reason to stay.”

“If we were dumped here for a reason, maybe figuring out that reason and doing what we’re supposed to do, will get us back home. That’s how quests and adventures work. Trust me, I’m going to do my dissertation on second-world fantasy.”

“You’re doing your what?”

“You do the quest, and then you go home,” the hero said. “So. If we want to get to Realm, we have to stay, actually. Is that a valid enough reason for you?”

Izel glared at them again, and it should have been terrifying, and it was terrifying, but…well. Izel’s jaw clenched after a moment, but he didn’t exactly come out with a scathing and brilliant retort for why the hero was totally wrong about everything ever. So Izel spun and started walking instead, in no particular direction as far as the hero could tell, except away.

The hero was rather tempted to let him go, but after a sigh, they followed the villain. They tried not to think about magic, or the possibility of doing magic. They tried not to think about everything Izel had said. Or about the entirely unnerving, but not entirely unpleasant, feeling when Izel had kissed them.

They found their hand rising to their lips, for a different reason, and quickly dropped it.

After fifteen minutes of walking in a sullen silence, the world around them was still forest. There were forests in Realm, but they were all nice-looking woods. The sort that turned up in a children’s story, and always had plentiful allies and water and food sources. It was why the first they had come across Izel’s forces, of the Wrathwraiths, or any of the dark magic that was like Izel, they had been so surprised. It had felt like the rules had suddenly changed. Enid Blyton, except suddenly the Famous Five stumbled upon ritual sacrifice in gory detail. With that in mind, it was a little surprising too that Izel hadn’t levelled an entire clearing with his magic yet, trying to punch a way out with brute force.

The forests that surrounded them in their new world felt ancient, and gnarled, and like they would block all light by the time the night descended upon them. It all felt wild.

“What were you thinking about,” the hero asked, “when you kissed me?”

“Getting home.”

“Was that a specific place or a feeling?”

Izel didn’t speak.

“You said you wanted to write another story.”

Izel didn’t speak.

You wanted to become someone new, someone else, Izel had said. Someone better.

In the end, in Realm, all of Izel’s loyal forces had fallen around him. No one had welcomed his dark reign. No one had come to save him, in the final fight between the two of them.

“Join me,” Izel had said, in the weeping gardens. His eyes had been bright beneath the cascading shine of a hundreds precious jewels glinting in the moonlight, hanging from branches above them like so many glittering tear drops ready to fall. “Join me, and together we can have everything. You are mine. You were meant to be mine.”

“You haven’t told me what happened in Realm,” the hero tried again. “Or how you came back to life.”

“Magic doesn’t die. Neither do I. I told you that.”

“And Realm? It’s been three years for me.”

Once again, Izel said nothing. The hero mentally went through a whole speech about how they were in it together, and yeah neither of them had exactly wanted this to happen, but they were going to have to at least try and be on the same side until they were back on familiar ground. Right? They said none of it.

“I can’t tell you about Realm,” Izel said. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t.”

“Sudden amnesia?”

“Doorways between worlds. Anything I tell you will affect how you think of it.”

“And you don’t think what you know might affect you when you’re the one casting the spell?”

“I never belonged there the way that you did. Why do you think I needed you to get back”

The hero…had absolutely no idea what to say to that, even if Izel didn’t say it with any particular sorrow. It was matter of fact. Their brow furrowed. It still wasn’t a side of Izel they had seen before. The villain they knew was dark and seductive, vulnerable enough to foil anything that the hero had felt when they were seventeen, but not…well. Not real. Not real in the way that the strange expression in Izel’s eyes was real.

The hero didn’t know what to do with the slump in Izel’s shoulders either; less nightmare, more young man far from home, more human than he’d ever seemed in the uni pub or anywhere else. It almost made them miss the awful possessiveness that Izel normally displayed.

It struck the hero, suddenly, that the forest around them suited Izel – far more than Realm had. He looked normal among the trees because they were like him; a grim fairy-tale, a gothic watercolour, a stained-glass window in a long-abandoned church that showed gods so powerful and so forgotten that they could only be demons to the strangers wandering through their crumbling temples.

You’re like me, Izel had said, in the weeping garden. You’re magic. You walk worlds. Tell me then, hero, out of all possible worlds, why do you think you walked into mine?

“You know a lot about magical portals,” the hero said, conversationally. “Exactly how many worlds have you lived in before?”

Izel didn’t speak.

The nagging sense of something grew in the hero’s chest at the silence.

“Have you been here before?” They remembered the flicker of fear that had passed Izel’s face when they first arrived. They had put it down to a terror of the unknown, of plans gone astray, or even queasiness from the journey, but…what had Izel said? “You said the universe dropkicked us into ruin.”

Izel grimaced.

“Did you mean that your plan had gone wrong and we were doomed, or…?”

They reached a clearing, under Izel’s wandering. In the centre of the clearing was a small stone cottage, overgrown with black roses, that looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.

“You’ve heard of parallel universes? They have that concept in your world?”

“Yes.”

Izel simply looked at them.

The hero looked back at the trees, so at odds with what they knew of Realm and so everything they knew of Izel and…

“Oh,” the hero said, feeling dizzy. “Oh my god.”

They reached out a hand, and if it was just waiting for invitation, all of the magic and the power flared to their fingertips like a welcome home parade, shimmering gold amid the shadows.

“You’ve been to Realm,” Izel said, with a bitter smile. “Welcome to Ruin.”