Kendrick didn’t know where he had been taken. He didn’t know where he’d been, or how he got here. Certainly not why. For a moment, in that formless dark between here and there, cold nothing rushing past him like a bracing wind, he didn’t even know who he was.

He knew he was upside-down. He knew that much. Then gravity resumed and he fell from a high place onto his shoulders against a hard wooden surface.

Ow, he thought. That was about all he could think at the time.

“Sahni, you idiot!” said a voice. It sounded feminine, loud, and sharp around the edges. “You could have killed them! Were you not watching what you were doing when the portal opened?”

“I-I was just... You told me to close my eyes for the ritual,” a different voice replied. This one also sounded female, but softer, quieter, less sure of itself. “Right?”

“Only for the activation of the crystals! When opening a portal, you have to maintain direct visual contact or the subject... Oh, forget it. Look, they’re waking up!”

Kendrick opened his eyes. A hazy world came into view, a world that was still upside down. Two humanoid forms stood on the ceiling where he rested and walked over to him, their shoes thumping against the hardwood.

“Not what I would have expected,” said the more confident of the two. “Sufficiently tall I suppose. Shoulders could be broader. Neither scrawny nor soft, just sort of a lump.” Kendrick didn’t even care what was being said about him, or why—the pain of his fall took center stage in his mind. Everything else was just background noise. “I pictured someone more gallant.”

“Yes, but their true strength comes from within, doesn’t it?” the softer voice asked. “We may yet be in for a surprise, don’t you think?”

“True. The Psysword isn’t just some brutish metal to be swung around, it’s elegant. It requires far more than physical strength. Still...”

“S-…” Kendrick tried to mimic what he’d just heard. “Sigh... s-sword? Sigh... sword?” Concentrating on the words seemed to bring focus to the rest of his world. The vaguely people-shaped blobs in his vision coalesced into real people.

“Hello, stranger,” a blue-haired young woman greeted him. Her voice was gentle and lyrical. She smiled politely. “My name is Sahni. This is my friend Bellara. We welcome you as a guest in this place.”

“Can you even understand us at all?” the redheaded young woman, apparently named Bellara, interjected. She put her hands on her hips. It was already clear which one of the two believed herself to be in charge.

“Um...” Kendrick answered uncertainly. He rolled over onto his side, getting a much better look at the both of them. “My back and neck hurt... A lot...”

“They know the common tongue,” said Bellara. “That’s a good start. Tell us, what’s your name?”

“Kendrick,” he answered. “And I’m a guy. You can call me... he. Where am I?”

“We’re already successfully communicating with him. I can’t believe the spell worked—a blind portal at that! The wonders of bleeding-edge magic...” Bellara’s tousled crimson hair was roughly chin-length; she wore an olive romper of sorts with an amber-colored gem in a silver choker around her neck.

“I just hope we don’t get in too much trouble for stealing from the Academy...” Sahni poked the tips of her index fingers together. Bellara shot a glare at her. “Sorry.” She was dressed in a loose-fitting gray dress that flowed past her knees, with a pendant around her neck containing a jade-colored gem, her long aqua hair pulled back in a braided ponytail resting on her shoulder.

“Hello? Can you hear what I’m saying?” Kendrick asked. His initial sharp pain, all-consuming at first, was now shrinking to a dull throb that annoyed him and set him on edge. “Is this a dream?”

Looking around, Kendrick saw that they were inside a rickety shack of some sort. Two small windows, each on opposing sides of the shack, were warped around the edges; any glass that once filled them was long gone. The shack contained a table built of rough-hewn wood. On the table rested two bags made of a strange, antique-looking fabric. The door to the shack rested on rusted hinges. Everything he saw looked like it was taken out of an old storybook.

Immediately surrounding him was a circle that looked like it was drawn with chalk. Beyond the rim of the circle were ten symbols, each of them different, each of them unrecognizable, and in the spaces between the symbols were ten prismatic crystals standing upright on their own. They looked like they had recently contained a glow now slowly fading like molten metal gradually cooling.

“This might work, Sahni,” Bellara thought aloud. “This might actually work.” There was an excited urgency in her voice. Her eyes flitted around the room and Kendrick could see that the gears in her mind were turning in a frenzy—to what end, he had no clue.

“Do you feel that?” Sahni asked. She sounded frightened.

Kendrick noticed a subtle, almost imperceptible motion coming from the inside of one of the bags. The bag inched forward ever so slightly on the table.

Bellara nodded once, looking out the glassless window at nothing. “Now I do. Must have been drawn to the aura spike. It’s slow, but it’s moving. We need to get out of here.” She dropped to her knees and began gathering up the crystals from the floor. The other one followed her lead, and they stuffed the crystals in their bags, each slinging a bag over her respective shoulder.

“I feel like I’m invisible,” Kendrick complained. “Hello? Can either of you hear me?” He stood up. “I am trying to ask you if—”

Bellara about-faced and grabbed him by the wrist. Hard. He gasped involuntarily. “You need to come with us. Now.”

Her audacity alarmed him, but he tried to stand his ground. “Or what?”

She looked out the window again, then back at him. “Or a demon will rip the hearts out of our bodies. You’ll die. We’ll die. And bringing you here will all have been for nothing.”

“Bringing me... here?”

A low sound rumbled out from the dense heart of the woods outside the shack. It was an alien sound Kendrick had never heard, yet somehow composed of others that he had. It sounded like a cross between a tiger’s growl and the wailing of someone grievously injured... emanating from the same source. He couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

“Come with us now,” Bellara said. It wasn’t a plea, but an order—and yet something in Kendrick felt compelled to trust her. “We’ll explain everything.”