Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
KAY
The food at dinner is warm. Spiced. Comforting, maybe, if I could taste anything right now.
Instead, I stare at it where it appeared on the sideboard.
Something soft and root-like, glazed in something sweet.
A bowl of rice that isn’t rice. A cup of broth that smells like rosemary and embers.
None of it is bad. Most of it I’ve actually liked in the past few days.
But tonight, it just tastes like…not home.
I poke at the food with my fork or whatever the Daemari call it. Or maybe I conjured it from my own thoughts of home. Probably by the same invisible magic that made my bed, my clothes, my toothbrush. They got the details right, more or less. But it doesn’t feel like mine. Nothing here does.
Time slips strangely in Crimson. It’s not slow.
Just soft. It moves like fog, curling around me in a way that makes it hard to track.
I keep thinking maybe if I slept better, or counted meals, or scratched tally marks into the wall like some movie prisoner, I could figure out how long I’ve been here.
But the truth is I don’t want to know. Or didn’t, Until now.
“Hey,” I say without looking up. “How long have I been here? In Crimson?”
Caziel doesn’t respond right away. He’s been standing near the outer wall of the room, one shoulder braced casually against the stone, his arms crossed. Watching. Always watching.
He answers calmly, as he always does. “Crimson counts by flame cycles. You’ve been here nearly four.”
I glance up at him. “And in Earth time, that’s what? A week? A month? A year?”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “I’m not sure. A few weeks? A few days? Your realm and ours are not aligned.”
Days? Weeks? That’s all? I feel like I’ve been here a lifetime. I drop my not-fork into the bowl and lean back.
A few days is long enough for my neighbor to notice my mailbox is overflowing. Long enough for work to start calling. Long enough for George to knock over a lamp in protest, claw the bathroom door, rip apart a cushion, or attempt to consume an entire houseplant.
A few days is long enough to be missed. A few weeks? Long enough for new routines. How long until I’m forgotten? I stare down at the bowl again, suddenly nauseated. The warmth from the food curls up toward me, sweet and unfamiliar, and my eyes sting for no reason at all.
“It’s still spinning,” I murmur.
Caziel shifts slightly. “Your world?”
I nod. “My world is still spinning. People are waking up, going to work. Drinking coffee. Making toast. Complaining about traffic.” I let out a laugh—soft, bitter. “It’s all still happening without me.”
He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t need to. The silence is answer enough.
I thought it wouldn’t matter. I really did.
The first night I got here, I told myself none of it was real.
That I’d wake up soon. That the ache in my chest wasn’t grief or fear, just chemical misfiring.
That this was just a waiting room, or a hallucination, or some weird subconscious art film brought on by burnout and low blood sugar.
But that was then. This is now. And now, I can’t stop thinking about what I’ve left behind.
“Have I been erased?” I ask. It comes out quieter than I intend.
Caziel doesn’t move. “I don’t know.”
My eyes fall to the tray again. “I didn’t even feed George before I left.
I didn’t fill up his water dish or leave a window cracked or top off the automatic feeder.
He was mad at me that morning—I’d left for the conference early, and he doesn’t like when I skip our routine.
He sits on my chest and screams if I don’t cuddle him by 6 a.m. sharp.
” And because I wasn’t leaving him leaving him.
My coworker was… I blink fast, because for some reason my throat’s closing up.
George is a cat. Just a cat. And yet…
“It wasn’t supposed to matter,” I whisper. “I didn’t think I’d be gone this long.”
Caziel still hasn’t moved. He’s watching me like I’m a wildfire he’s meant to guard, not extinguish. I take a breath, then another. It doesn’t help.
“Has anyone tried?” I ask. “To send me back? Is there a way back? Can I go home?”
His expression doesn’t shift. “No.”
“No?” I repeat, a little too loudly. “Just like that? Let’s make the human compete in our gladiator death match just for funnies?”
“There is no known way to return someone who enters this realm by accident. Or… through force.”
The word hits me strange. Force. Like I was taken. Like that stupid elevator—the man I tried to protect—was some kind of cosmic trap, and I just fell for it.
I blink. “But you travel. Between worlds.”
“I am Daemari,” he says. “But it is rare, and never without cost.”
I wait for more. He doesn’t offer it.
“So that’s it?” I say. “You don’t even know how to try?”
“There are records. Warnings. Accidents. But no controlled crossing between Crimson and the mortal plane has been successful.”
My jaw tightens.
“You’re telling me,” I say slowly, “that no one—not you, not your precious council, not the fire cult who assessed my soul like a résumé—no one is even looking for a way?”
“We don’t know where to look.”
“You haven’t tried.”
He meets my gaze evenly. “You assume that.”
That pulls me up short. He’s not wrong, but it still feels wrong. I’m the trapped one here.
“I just—” My voice cracks. “I didn’t mean to come here. I didn’t ask for this.”
“I know.”
“I had a job. A life. A cat who thinks I’m his emotional support human.”
His brow knits. “George.”
I nod. “George. He likes sunbeams and hates mailmen. And I just left him.” I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes. “God, I don’t even know if time works the same. What if I get back and he’s gone? What if it’s been years and he’s—”
My voice dies. My throat burns. I shouldn’t be unraveling over a cat, but it’s not just George.
It’s my apartment. My ugly couch. The smell of coffee in the morning.
The sound of my neighbors arguing through the walls.
It’s my life. I didn’t love, not really—but it was mine.
And now I don’t know if it still exists.
“Do you think anyone’s noticed I’m gone?” I whisper.
Silence. And then, carefully: “I don’t know.”
The answer shouldn’t hurt. But it does. I sit back, folding my arms across my stomach like I’m trying to hold myself together.
“I keep trying to forget,” I murmur. “Like if I don’t think about it, it won’t hurt. Like if I pretend this place is just a weird extended dream vacation from hell, it’ll fade out eventually. But it doesn’t.”
“No,” he says quietly. “It doesn’t.”
The calm in his voice feels like a slap. I turn on him, eyes narrowing.
“Is that it? That’s your plan? Just wait until I give up hoping someone’s going to fix this?”
“No.”
“Well, it sounds like it.”
Still, he doesn’t flinch.
“I haven’t given up,” he says, with quiet conviction. “But I won’t lie to you, either.”
And there it is. Not cruelty. Not indifference. Just the truth, and it cuts sharper than either.
“I don’t need a lie,” I say, my voice shaking. “But I wouldn’t mind a little hope.”
“You’re alive,” he says. “That’s more than most who cross between realms.”
“That’s not enough,” I snap. “Surviving isn’t enough.”
Silence stretches between us. Heavy. Unforgiving.
“You’re right.”
I look away, too wrung out to respond. The fire in my chest is already flickering low, giving way to a hollow ache. I don’t know what hurts more—the idea that I might be stuck here forever or the fact that, until now, I hadn’t let myself care.
“I know it can be done,” I say sharply.
Caziel tilts his head just enough to acknowledge me. He’s listening, but he’s not rushing to respond. He never does. And that’s part of what makes it worse.
“You act like I fell into this world by accident,” I go on, voice rising.
“Like it’s some unrepeatable cosmic glitch, but it’s not.
There are centuries of stories. Folklore.
Paintings. Texts. Exorcisms.” He still doesn’t speak.
I take that as permission. Or maybe defiance.
“Demons. Possessions. Crossroads and soul bargains and hellfire. We didn’t invent those.
We recorded them. Documented them.” I push to my feet, the chair scraping across the floor behind me.
“I didn’t dream you. Or this world. Or anything I’ve seen since I got here. And I’m not the first. I can’t be.”
Caziel’s expression doesn’t change, but there’s something new in the room now. Some subtle tension in the air. Not anger. Not even discomfort. Gravity.
“We’ve been writing about you since language began,” I say, quieter now. “Don’t tell me it’s impossible.”
Finally, Caziel speaks.
“Perhaps it’s not,” he says. “But your records—your stories—have a pattern. It’s always demons in your world, not humans here.
” I fold my arms tightly, as if that will help me brace for whatever truth he’s about to drop.
“And we are always the shadows. Nightmares.” His voice is calm, like a scalpel.
“They take your cruelty, your chaos, your bloodshed, and they give it a name. Demon. Devil. Evil spirit. They carve out their own darkness and shape it into something that isn’t human, so they don’t have to look at what they’ve done. ”
The silence that follows is louder than any scream. I let it sit for a second. Maybe two before I explode.
“Oh, come on,” I snap. “You’re telling me humans just made you up because we’re scared of our own shadows?”
“Yes.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It is consistent.”
“Not everything humans do is evil.”
“I never said it was.”
“But that’s what you meant.”
He watches me carefully. Like someone approaching a wounded animal. Not because I’m dangerous, but because I’m bleeding and lashing out.
“You think we’re all the same,” I spit.
“No,” he says. “I think your world is built on fear. Fear demands scapegoats. And I recognize it because Crimson has does the same thing.”