Chapter 19 #2
“My whole family thought my research was nonsense, you know. Runhilda is a dear, but she thinks I’ve wasted my life.
Who’s going to believe a village librarian and her shelf of smuggled papers?
” She set a stack of slim, bound volumes in front of me, careful as eggs.
“But if you read enough of what slips out of Liminia, you stop seeing nonsense and start seeing a pattern.”
I took the top volume off the stack, as careful as she’d been, and let the pendant work on the handwriting.
It was somebody’s journal, a customs clerk by the look of it, and I flipped until a phrase stopped me cold.
“Hey. This clerk says the man they pulled out of the harbor kept raving that the water had gone soft.” I looked up.
“Soft. That’s my word. The mirror went squishy. ”
“That’s the only account from Qoksmere. The harbor man.
” She didn’t even need to check. “He appeared in the middle of a bay outside Reach, with no boat and no memory of one. He spoke a strange language, and once they got him a spelled object to help with understanding, he kept asking to make a call, whatever that means.”
“What happened to him?”
“They put him in an asylum, but as far as I can tell from the records, eventually he settled down, realized he’d gone mad, and lived a normal life. But what if he didn’t realize he’d gone mad? What if he just resigned himself to his fate?”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“No, he passed away a long time ago, before I even found his account. But the details are so similar. I see you’re using aetherweaving to communicate as well.”
I touched the pendant and nodded.
“Could you speak your language without it?”
I laughed and lifted the pendant away from my skin, holding it by the silver chain. “Now that you put me on the spot, I don’t know what to say!”
She was delighted even by that. “That’s incredible. And the same details, repeating across accounts that could never have touched each other. That is how you know a thing is real.”
“Is there a theory behind it, do you know?” I asked.
“I’ve found several proposed theories. Some think that you’ve traveled through time, or from a distant, far-off land across the universe.”
“Like a wormhole in space,” I said, nodding.
“My favorite states that the world isn’t one world,” she said.
“It’s many. Stacked. Like the pages of a book pressed shut.
Every page a whole world, lying flat against the next, every one of them certain it’s the only page in the book.
And here and there, where the binding wears thin, holes appear where people or objects can slip through. ”
I frowned, stories from some of my favorite books coming back to me. “Okay. Where I’m from, it’s an entire literary genre, but no one has found any evidence that it’s true.”
“A fictional genre, though?”
“Yes. In books, stories, movies. Those are like… plays.”
“Fiction often mimics reality, though. Even the most fantastical tales have a basis in reality.”
“You mean how people think maybe the idea of dragons came from finding dinosaur bones?”
She frowned. “My dear, dragons aren’t a fantasy. Do you not have them where you’re from?”
“Holy shit. You have dragons? I wonder if they look like our dragons in books.”
She chuckled. “We can investigate that if you like. What does your magical community think?”
“That’s the thing. We don’t have magic, not really.”
“No magic at all? But it is in our very life force!”
“I suppose I can’t say no magic at all, because you never know.
But it’s not like it is here, not like this necklace, where someone enchanted it, and I can see a real result.
” I tapped my aetherwoven pendant. “Where I’m from, everything even a little bit magical seeming can mostly be written off as coincidence or a strange unexplained phenomenon. ”
“Fascinating. I should very much like to see your world.”
I grimaced. “My world also doesn’t have trolls, so you might stand out a bit.”
“No trolls!” Her eyes went wide. “Who writes great literature, then?”
I chuckled. “Humans. Everyone is human.”
She frowned, like she doubted humans’ ability in this area, then sat and wrote a few more things down on her paper. “I suppose a world that only has humans in it would be lacking in magic, as humans have the shallowest magical well of all sentient creatures.”
“I beg your pardon, I am not shallow!” I teased.
She chuckled. “It’s not an insult, just a fact. Like you have black hair and mine is gray. The size of our well, the life force inside us that creates magic, is determined at birth and cannot be changed by ethical means, unless you match to a soulmate with a much greater well.”
“Oh,” I whispered. “That’s interesting. People have many explanations for life force where I’m from, but I’ve never heard that one.”
“I wonder if that’s how it is between worlds. A shift in the evolutionary timeline creates a different world.”
“That’s how it is in our stories. A world where some different circumstance made everything different. A world where an evil dictator never lived, for example.”
Kethilda nodded, and jotted that down, then asked me a few more questions about how my world was different, taking detailed notes as I tried to explain things like computers and the internet as best I could.
Finally, I worked up the courage to ask her the question that had been sitting heavy in my heart.
“In the accounts you’ve read, did anybody ever go through, and then come home again?”
She looked up. “That must be a truly frightening thing to worry about.”
I nodded and picked at a splinter on the table. “It’s a bit of a mess now, because I’ve grown quite attached to Moerrven. But I have a family back home, and the thought of never seeing them again—” My voice broke, and I blinked back tears.
Kethilda’s sharp eyes had gone soft. “Well. The Liminal Order does not want this out, but there seems to be a portal in Liminia that goes to a land where there are no people at all. They come and go freely, using it to search for resources.”
“Resources? Like mining and stuff?”
“Yes, but this is their most guarded secret. So it’s difficult to find the source of it. There are also rumors that time runs differently in each world.”
“Time runs differently.” Something cold and hopeful turned over in my chest. Pip had fallen hours before me, back on Earth. If a handful of Earth-hours could unspool into days over here, then by the time I came through, he’d have been gone long enough to be anywhere at all.
The thought of Pip out there alone snagged on a worse one. “What if he ran into someone dangerous? Is the Queen dangerous? She’s been requisitioning copies of Liminian texts from the library in Highmark.”
“She’s a queen, and she is fae. Of course she’s dangerous. But if she’s requisitioning texts, it seems more like she’s doing research than declaring war.” She flipped open a book. “Perhaps the best move is to see if we can figure out what she’s researching.”
I nodded, set the clerk’s journal aside, and took the next volume from the stack, flipping it open and waiting a beat for the pendant to do its magic, as strange symbols blurred and changed into letters I could read. “Research is my least favorite kind of reading.” I stared down at the dry text.
She chuckled. “Mine, too. But I should like you to find a way to see your family again. And perhaps, when you return, you could bring me some of the novels from your world. It would be quite illuminating.”
“Would I return?”
“Of course you would! You’re Moerrven’s soulmate. His heart has already been broken once, and we must protect it at all costs, don’t you think?”
I closed my eyes, and an image of Moerrven’s grumpy, adorable face popped up. “Yeah. We do,” I whispered, before remembering the soulmate thing was all a lie.