Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Gwen woke up and immediately wondered if the night before had been some kind of delirium.
Had her mother’s attempt at an American Christmas Eve dinner involved psychedelics?
She put on a bathrobe before she came out of her bedroom, just in case, and was somehow unsurprised to find Robin standing on her desk, frowning at the computer screen.
Had they gotten past her passcode with magic?
“What are you doing to my browser history, Tinker Bell?” Gwen demanded, looking over their head at the screen. “No fairy porn or gnome fetish sites, I hope.”
“Just a little selective sprite bondage,” Robin joked, leaning on a pencil like a cane. “I’m researching the mythology of magic in your world, nosy.” They sighed. “I seem to be drowning in new age nonsense and sleight-of-hand. How is so much of your so-called knowledge this contradictory?”
“You have to understand what you’re searching for,” Gwen said, shuffling to the kitchen to find a bowl of cereal.
“It’s all run by machine logic, you’re only going to get results as good as you put in.
Filter your search to legitimate sites, or use more specific keywords.
Magic as a search word is just too broad. ”
She came back with her cereal bowl to find Robin painstakingly typing on the keyboard by reaching each letter with the pencil. She’d never considered how challenging it would be to be smaller than an American Girl doll.
“Are the things in your old world sized to you?” she asked curiously.
Robin shot her a quick look. “In my world, I am normal-sized. The magic here is like running on a used up battery, and being magic is…all I am. My knights’ human forms will not be affected in this world, but their mythic form is similarly diminished.”
Gwen felt bad for the sorrow in their little dark eyes and sat down in her swivel chair at the desk. “Tell me more about your world,” she said. “Maybe I can help you narrow down your computer search.”
Robin moved to the side, dragged the case to Gwen’s earphones with them, and settled cross-legged to watch, stealing a dehydrated marshmallow from her cereal first. Gwen briefly threatened them with her spoon.
“Let’s search for portals. Veils to the fairy world. Maybe faery with an A-E. You said that there seemed to be a distinct break at the new year. Let’s see what we can find about that.”
“Not a fairy,” Robin muttered.
“Well a search for fable land is going to take you in very different directions,” Gwen pointed out. “And whatever you do, don’t put in fantasy. Oh look, smutty vampire romance named Broken Crown. Let’s filter out fiction and erotica.”
Robin told her tales as they fed her keywords and made suggestions for her searches, impossible stories about noble knights and desperate battles in a world with winged foxes and groves of trees hung in crystals.
They lamented their part in the downfall of their world, and told harrowing stories of the dark power that had followed them and what it did to people.
“I hope you never have to see the people that you love looking at you from angry, empty eyes,” Robin said mournfully.
“Have you met my Aunt Ruby?”
Robin’s tired look suggested that Gwen’s joke had fallen flat.
It took half a bowl of cereal and ignoring a phone call from her mother to find anything useful and that was barely deserving of the title.
“Several cultures agree that the end of the year is a time when boundaries are weakest and magic is wildest. I’m not paying good money for access to an academic paper titled ‘The Spirit Veil as it relates to the Modern Christian Calendar,’ but the summary is promising, and the fact that someone dredged a scholarly paper out of the topic says that there’s enough source material to support the idea. ”
Robin paced Gwen’s desktop, their wings rippling behind them.
They had raided the bowl of Halloween candy and opened a package of mini Swedish Fish.
“That matches with what I observed before. That means our time is getting short.” They narrowed their eyes at Gwen.
“I’m going to try casting a clarity spell.
I want you to stay very still and don’t sneeze. ”
“Sneeze?”
“It would startle me. I don’t have much power here and I need to conserve my limited resources for a battle with a bleak. The last thing I want to do is waste this attempt. I would…appreciate your assistance.”
They were proud, Gwen recognized, and she had a moment of pity for them. They didn’t like to admit that they had to ration their magic and they resented that they needed help.
“As long as not-sneezing is all I have to do…?”
“I still suspect that there is some reason you were dowsed instead of Henrik. I would like to use you as an anchor for my casting.”
Gwen set aside superstitious misgivings about being used for witchcraft and spread her hands. “Give me your best shot, Tinker Bell.”
Robin didn’t gesture or draw any symbols, but Gwen suddenly felt like her chair had gone electric. She was glad for the warning not to sneeze, because it was an all-body tickle, and it took all of her self-discipline not to leap to her feet.
As quickly as it had started, it stopped, sputtering out like a candle out of wax or wick.
Robin looked wiped, and Gwen wondered if they weren’t a little shorter, or if they were just hunched in unhappily on themselves.
“That was it?” she said. “I expected more.”
“That’s what she said,” Robin quipped, but they said it distantly, like they were still shaken by whatever had happened at their end.
“Did it work?” Gwen asked reluctantly.
Robin raised their chin, and whatever color their eyes were, it was the exact shade of sorrow, with a little dash of new hope and urgency.
“You are Henrik’s key,” they explained. “When we were cast into this world, my desperate spell gave my knights a loophole, a hope for escape, and it attached them to a key on this side that would break their curse and set them free. Daniella is Trey’s.
You are Henrik’s. You are his connection to the strange magic here, his soulmate, and you are the one who will unlock him as you learn to love him.
Much of this mess is my own fault, but there is a possibility that we can recover.
My world is gone, but we can still save yours, if you come with me and fight for it. ”
“So, you’re not actually Tinker Bell,” Gwen observed, joking to cover her struggle with the enchanting idea of a soulmate.
“Fable,” Robin corrected angrily.
“You’re Merryweather from Sleeping Beauty,” Gwen declared. “You tempered Maleficent's curse so that Aurora fell into a deep sleep instead of dying.”
Robin opened their mouth in outrage and clamped it shut again. “That’s almost worse than Tinker Bell,” they said.
They gave Gwen a piercing look. “The veil will be weakest where it was broken before, and that is where the battle for our world will be. You need to come with me, and the time is now. Bring your blade and your courage and meet your destiny! You will be the sword to Henrik’s axe, and we will triumph, and if not, we will go gloriously. ”
Their regard grew pointed as they spoke and Gwen shivered under the power of their galaxy gaze and the implication of their words.
Gwen had always dreamed of being Chosen.
Not lowercase chosen like reluctantly picked for a sports team from a pool of disinterested players, or You’ve Been Chosen!
publications that will print your name and a feature of your business for the low investment of one copy of the beautiful hardcover book at a cost of $225 plus shipping and handling.
(Nevermind that Gwen didn’t have a business and had long ago run out of bookshelf space.)
Gwen wanted uppercase Chosen.
The kind of Chosen that came with quests and destiny.
She felt like, until now, she’d been stuck in the world’s worst video game, constantly trying to keep her avatar’s lifepoints up with mindless employment, grinding away at the same level forever, unable to find the clues to advance or escape, not even sure what her objective ultimately was.
And now, finally, would she understand her purpose?
Common sense quenched Gwen’s excitement. It was more likely to be a bug or a fluke. If it looked too good to be true, it probably was. Especially when it came to true love.
And she was afraid.
She always failed under pressure. She never met her expectations, or anyone else’s. Who would even want to be her soulmate?
“As fun as it is to think that I can save the world, really, I’m a math major with a minor in wasting my life. I’ll help you file a missing persons report for Henrik if you want, but I honestly think you’re barking up the wrong tree here.”
“You said you are a warrior,” Robin pointed out.
“I am an athlete,” Gwen said. “I’ve never been in an actual battle for blood. It’s closer to gymnastics than it is to brawling.”
But Robin didn’t seem discouraged as they steepled their hands and continued to regard Gwen. “It’s a starting place. If we survive the turning of the year, I can train you from there.”
“That’s assuming I want to help you,” Gwen said sharply.
“You can’t ignore your destiny.”
Gwen bristled. “Are you expecting me to, what? Quit my job and spend my life savings on a plane ticket on the weight of your words and some vague Internet research? I have a career, Tinker Bell, and a family, and commitments. I can’t just leave everything behind to join your fantasy crusade!”
“I believe it is worth expending the magic to make a portal, even large enough for you, but I will only be able to do it once.”
Gwen was not sensitive about her weight and kept herself in fit fighting form, but she still felt a little stung by Robin’s implication that she was inconveniently large.
“A portal? Is that how you got in here? I figured you came in through the air conditioning vents.”
Robin gestured impatiently. “The time for jokes has passed. You are the key to finding the rest of my knights and saving the world.” Robin seemed to sizzle righteous outrage, larger for a moment, and more solid.
“This is more important than your job and your life savings! This is the fate of your entire world and all the innocent people who live here! You haven’t watched a world crumble, and you don’t know the pain and horror that you’ll suffer if you turn aside now in self-serving cowardice.
This isn’t a crusade of vanity or a self-serving agenda; this is your life, and your world, and if you shirk your duty now, you will have nothing but regret for the remainder of your pitiful mortal existence. ”
Gwen wasn’t sure how something less than two feet tall could be that vehement.
“Look,” she said, retreating to the stubbornness that had always served her well.
“It’s not that I don’t want to save the world.
It’s not that I don’t want to be important.
It’s definitely not that I don’t want to find a hunky knight and be his everything.
But that’s someone else’s story, not mine.
Find someone else to live your fairy tale! ”
“What do you think your story is, then?” Robin demanded. They waved around at the cluttered little apartment. “This?”
Gwen hissed like an angry cat or a kettle of steam. “Maybe. I don’t know! I don’t know! It’s not that I don’t want to help you, but you’ve got the wrong person. I’m just a barista with a math degree! You said yourself that your magic is strange in this world. Maybe you’re just wrong about me.”
“I’m not wrong about this!” Robin said furiously. “Not this!”
“Oh, so you’re infallible now? You just finished telling me how this was all your fault, and you’d made a terrible mistake, and you still expect me to ditch my entire existence and follow you gleefully into the sunset?”
Smack!
A Swedish Fish hit her square in the brow.
“You just hit me with a fish!”
“You’re being a stupid little child!” Robin snarled. “Snap out of it!”
“You’re the one who’s little,” Gwen retorted, and when another tiny candy fish hit her in the face, she got to her feet and upended the desk trashcan onto the spitting fable, pinning them underneath it to the desk.
She could hear Robin’s little fists hammering on the inside of the trashcan with a string of colorful—and surprisingly crude—curses, and then there was a sizzling, snapping sound that made Gwen worry that they’d just started a fire, followed by silence.
When she tipped the trashcan carefully on its lip, wondering if fables were flammable, a candy wrapper rolled out, but there was no sign of Robin.
They were completely gone, like the entire incident had been a reaction to bad eggnog, leaving Gwen feeling slightly empty and disappointed. Had they made a portal like they’d said they could? Had she suffocated it? Had the magic use dwindled it to nothing?
Had she imagined it all?