Of the Realm #3

Part 1
Part 2

“So,” the hero said. “How do we do this?”

The first time they had ended up in Realm, it was because a portal had opened up in the back of their closet. It had been a Saturday morning. They’d been invited to a party later that day, and had been consumed by the familiar feeling that they hated everything in their wardrobe, and themselves. Their crush of the time, a boy named Danny Porter, was supposed to be at the party too, and the hero was supposed to be talking to him before it was too late because graduation and the rest of their lives were upon them. They were supposed to be brave enough to do stuff like that.

For a while, after they got back from Realm, they had been. Brave. They’d asked Danny Porter to dance, and it had been wonderful.  Then the happily ever sailed by and it was just life.

It had taken them two days in Realm to figure out they weren’t dreaming and that was a thing that actually happened, because as a kid they’d always sort of thought that there might be a secret doorway in the back of their closet, but by the age of seventeen they’d mostly figured it was just wishful thinking from reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe too many times. But they’d never quite stopped wanting.

The hero eyed the dorm room wardrobe, not sure they would even be able to squeeze inside its narrow frame, if Izel opened a doorway there.

“How much do you know about magical portals?” Izel asked.

“I know going through them makes me slightly queasy.”

Izel watched them through the reflection in the window glass.

“Portals between worlds happen due to…let’s call it a mixture of resonance and places where the barrier between worlds is thin. Resonance being something that strongly connects the individual to the world or person they are travelling to. Thin walls between worlds being…” Izel weighed his words. “There is a mythology around doors, stories and ideas that spans across universes. Certain places, symbols, objects, etc. are more likely to become a portal. Theoretically, it can be any door if the resonance is strong enough, but…” Izel wobbled his fingers. “It’s easier if the crossing place has meaning. If the person crossing truly believes that there could be a door between worlds. If the place is dark, so that it is only seem by a few, and magic doesn’t have to convince more people that what is mundane can be extraordinary. You went through a wardrobe, right?”

The hero blinked at him. “Right.”

“The portal opened the first two times due to resonance between us,” Izel said, and the hero snorted pretty sure it hadn’t and couldn’t be that (could it?), but the villain ignored them. “Currently, we are both here. We are together. There is no neat point in a story that you have heard a thousand times before that starts here, for the wall to be thin.”

The hero narrowed their eyes. It didn’t seem a good thing that the villain was talking around the topic, instead of smugly wrenching them through worlds already.

“Are you telling me, after the entirety of the past week,” their voice shook, hope and relief and horror all dashing against their ribcage like something loud and shattering, “that you don’t know how to get us back?”

“If it were that easy, another door would have opened for you already. Everyone would world-walk. They don’t,” the villain snapped, before getting himself under control. “I have a theory.”

“And why the hell should I go along with your theory?”

Izel whirled on them, and the hero stumbled back a few steps on instinct, hitting the one of the wardrobe doors behind them. Izel had crossed the room in a few stalking steps and the hero was abruptly and painfully aware all over again that they didn’t have magic, or even a sword.

They were not the hero of Realm. The hero of Realm might be pinned up against a wardrobe door by an enemy, but they would be coolly confident, with the perfect witty response, and a power that gave the danger of a situation a spark instead of just a sick lurch in the pit of the hero’s stomach.

“Do you remember all your little friends in Realm?” Izel murmured. “The people who, when you were a stumbling stranger in a strange land, took you in and cared for you before they ever realised you could save them? The people you were willing to risk your life and even die for fighting me? The people who you abandoned?”

The hero straightened their spine against the wardrobe, gratified when it gave them an inch or so of height on Izel. Looking down their nose at the villain didn’t make them feel much better – but at least a bit.

“I – I didn’t abandon them. You were gone. I’d-“

“-Do you remember,” Izel’s voice was husky, and he licked his lips, “the feeling of raw power coursing through your veins?” He trailed his fingers down the hero’s cheek, raising goosebumps, leaving another flickering comet of magic tingling along the hero’s skin.

The hero swallowed. They sucked in a sharp, desperate breath.

Izel’s hand, predictably, continued down the path of the scar. The one he’d left. The one that sliced the hero in two, forever marking them as a creature of more than one world, the visible proof that battles had been fought and lost and won, even when it was easy to think it all a dream.

“I don’t need you to plead,” Izel said, “I can see the plea in your eyes every time you look at me. You want to go home. Tell me what you felt the first time the door opened.”

The hero had the absurd urge to close their eyes, like throwing clothes over the naked and vulnerable desire of them. They’d already decided they were returning to Realm, if only for a little while. They’d hate themselves forever if they dithered on the decision. They stared back into the dark, hungry abyss of Izel’s eyes and thought (even more absurdly) that a portal to another world could be found in that stare too.

“I wanted to jump out of my skin,” the hero whispered.

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

The hero managed a nod.

“You wanted to become someone who could fight monsters, and win,” Izel said. “Someone, perhaps, who could do what was right against all temptations, like all your favourite characters in all the books that you love did, right?”

The hero nodded again.

Izel smiled. “And yet you pretend you weren’t meant for me. What is a hero without a monster to fight?”

And the hero – well, the hero suddenly didn’t know how to argue with that at all. There was a lot they had loved in Realm, but hadn’t it (selfishly), been the power most of all? The dizzying sense of victory when they overcame all challenges to defeat the person standing right in front of them?”

“Good defeats evil. Child becomes hero. Happily ever after.” Izel was so close, his breath a caress on the hero’s lips. “Let’s write another story.”

And then Izel was kissing them, and yanking over the closet door and -

And then, they were both falling, clutching hold of each other as the only real thing, into the yawning gap between worlds.

***

The first and second times the hero had world-walked, it had felt natural, like turning the pages in a book and stepping from page to the next. That time, it did not feel natural, it felt like flailing, like being kicked off a building, like being the fish with the hook tearing through its mouth hauling it up and up and up out where they should be.

The hero landed hard, airless, with Izel’s mouth still crushed against their own. It was a very one-sided sort of kiss, claiming and fierce, all about heat and taking and what Izel considered their own. Obsession and not love.

He pulled back, a little dazed, and they both turned in the same second to check if it had worked. If they were in Realm. If they were home.

“No.” Izel was off them, eyes wide, disbelieving…perhaps, even, a little scared.

The hero flopped back against the thick, mossy undergrowth.

They could see no portal in the nearby trees for them to have fallen out of, no swirling void closing up in the sky above them. The canopy of trees was unbroken. It revealed no familiar sky.

“No!” Izel surged off his knees, whirling around, as if he could deny what the hero already knew.

They were not on Earth anymore.

But they were not in Realm either.