Kendrick sidestepped a wall of flames that roared between him and Bellara. Despite his lucky dodge, the sleeve of his tunic still caught fire—he slapped at it until it went out.

“Aldiel above!” Bellara gasped. “It’s fast!”

He tapped the side of his lens. The magical display scanned the entity and reported its species:

JINN {186}

“Is my weapon even going to scratch that thing?” Kendrick wondered aloud. Meanwhile, the fire dissipated, and a smoggy cloud of dark aura hovered in its place. It had two claws of sorts, as well as two piercing red eyes glaring at the humans from within the darkness.

“Jinn are shapeshifters. Now that it’s in its true form, smoke and fire, it’s reverted to a state of mostly pure aura—the Psysword will be extremely effective if you can land a hit. But use it defensively so it doesn’t—”

Shoom! The jinn donned its infernal flames once more and dove at Sahni, who stood alone.

“Glaczin!” Bellara shouted. It was a well-timed snipe—a spear of ice issued forth from her hand and pierced the jinn’s tail, causing it to recoil with a hideous shriek.

Sahni held out her hands. “Parto!” Another translucent barrier materialized in the air, but the jinn dodged it at the last moment.

“That trick won’t work on me twice, witch!” said its growling, reverberating voice from within the smog. The jinn’s fire crackled back in full force and it swooped down on Kendrick. “Hand it over! Now!” He closed his eyes and swung the Psysword over his head. The spirit shrieked again, and when he looked up, he saw he had sliced off the creature’s ethereal tail; it dissipated in the air like black ash while the majority of the smog cloud survived. “Bastard! There goes the last of my mercy! Now your deaths will be slow and painful!”

“Parto!” Sahni called out again. The jinn ignored her—and it seemed as though her spell wasn’t even close to its mark. Kendrick wanted to ask her what she was doing, but there was no time. The jinn rattled like a snake, and in that moment, what looked like little black blades swarmed out of it toward all three of them. “Parto!” Again, Sahni’s spell was no use. The blades bit through their clothes and sliced at their arms and shoulders.

“Son of a...” Kendrick hissed, grabbing at one of his wounds. He brought back a palm smeared with blood. The cuts were far too shallow to be killing blows anywhere on their bodies—they were only meant to inflict pain.

“Where should I aim next time?” the jinn asked them tauntingly. “I know! I’ll go for your eyes!” But then it changed back into its fire form and hovered over them, close enough that Kendrick felt the heat breathing on him like an oven. He swung the Psysword again but the jinn was already on the move.

Bellara swung a fist. “Glaczin!” It effortlessly dodged another ice javelin. “Glacios ampla!” A follow-up wider-ranged attack tempered the spirit’s fire with bitterly cold flakes of snow; it hissed and retreated momentarily.

“Parto!” Sahni shouted.

“Sahni,” said Kendrick discreetly, “everything okay? You’re missing. Like, a lot.” The jinn divebombed Kendrick again, its flames raging back to life. He swung—missed again—and even a glancing blow of its fury was enough to make him cry out in pain. “AAAGH!” He dropped the Psysword into the dirt and the aural blade vanished.

“Kendrick!” Bellara cried out. In the background, he could hear Sahni still barking out barrier spells. He didn’t care. Pain rooted his feet to the ground and rooted his mind to the red, swollen, blistering skin left in the jinn’s wake.

“A small taste of the torment in store for you three,” it cackled in its smog form once again.

Bell ran to him. “Kendrick, I know you’re in pain, but you need to pick up the sword again and—”

“Shut up!” he snarled back at her. She looked genuinely taken aback. “Shut. Up. Just... let me breathe...” In the heat of his excruciating burn, it was difficult to summon the strength even to suck in another lungful of air. “You need... to get us out of here...”

The jinn launched itself at the two of them yet again. “Glacios ampla!” Another torrent of icy wind beat it back into temporary submission. Bellara was shaky on her feet now.

The nerve endings in Kendrick’s outer left arm were screaming with activity. He saw smoke or steam or some sort of vapor rising from his pink flesh, as if his arm had been partially cooked alive. He gritted his teeth so hard he felt like they might shatter in his mouth from the sheer force of it. There was no way he could even lift his left arm, let alone hold a heavy metal object with it.

Bellara clasped together her outstretched hands. “Obstrae!” A ring of aura closed around the jinn, but its incorporeal form allowed it to slip out easily and continue its onslaught. “Kendrick, we’re only going to have one shot at this. I’m so sorry. Please, I’m begging you—”

“My master will be quite pleased with this find,” growled the jinn. “I bore of this game. Give Aldiel my regards!” It descended from the sky like a bird of prey ready to deliver the final blow.

Sahni’s voice was like a dream. “Parto!” Did she even really call out that incantation, or was Kendrick’s pain-addled mind simply hearing things? Time slowed to a crawl. It was as if he could see all the individual movements of the world around him, every little sway in each blade of grass, every shiver of every leaf.

His right hand held the Psysword again. Bellara closed his fingers around the hilt, and this time it was easier than ever to hold with just one hand.

Thunk. The jinn collided with a barrier an arm’s length or two away from Kendrick. It shook its flaming head like a startled animal.

“As I’ve said,” the spirit snickered, “you only delay the inevitable.” It darted to one side, ready to make another diving attack—thump. It hit another invisible wall. “Insolent children!” Thump. Thunk. Thwump. It darted in every direction, but each time it did, an unseen spell cast by Sahni blocked its path. Try as it might to escape, it only ricocheted.

Kendrick realized, in the fog of adrenaline mingled with agony, that Sahni had maintained each and every barrier spell she’d been casting this entire time. Sweat trickled down her face in rivulets. Her eyes and lips twitched with the effort.

But she wasn’t done. Her arms, spread out as if to hold the weight of all her spellcasting, now closed slowly around one another, drawing each individual barrier toward a central point—and locking the jinn in a labyrinth of aural blockades.

“No matter!” it yelled, its voice muffled inside its prison. “I broke your spell before, middling! I can break it again!” It focused its strength on one of the barriers, throwing itself against it repeatedly—with enough force, it was bound to break through, and then it would only be a matter of time before it escaped the other layers as well.

Bellara lost her balance, falling to one knee. Her eyes were half-lit but she willed her body to keep moving. “Glacios ampla!” One last time, a rush of icy wind flew from her fingertips and doused the fiery jinn. It shook off the attack like a wet cat, angered, frazzled, but only for a moment. Then Bellara collapsed.

“Kendrick, NOW!” Sahni shouted.

He didn’t think. He couldn’t. He only acted.

Kendrick stepped forward, the Psysword raised in his right hand, aimed squarely at the jinn. Thuuum. His aura whirred through the weapon’s crystal, sharpened under the pressure of his adrenalized focus.

“Your aura is astonishing,” the jinn observed curiously. The frantic self-preservation had left its voice; it seemed resigned to what was about to happen. “Different somehow... It isn’t much now, but I can tell there’s no ceiling to it. You aren’t part of this intricate web of aura—it's all your own... Outsider. The redhead was telling the truth after all?”

“Kendrick!” Sahni called after him.

The spirit’s voice proved too enthralling to ignore. “It took the greatest mind in the Ecumene to open the Rift to the Underworld. And yet, the Three Realms are part of the same universe... That she could bring you here from another universe entirely is nothing short of sheer dumb luck. And if you think there’s any hope of you returning home, well...” Kendrick thought he saw a smile forming beneath its slitted red eyes. “You truly are every bit the fool she needs you to be.”

Kendrick thrust his blade into the jinn. It let out a sinister howl before its body disintegrated into innumerable particles of dark aura. It was finally over.

The last thing he remembered was falling on his burned arm.

***

The white room—it was the white room again.

Kendrick helped someone through the open doorway and into a white bed. A flash of lightning heralded a wrathful peal of thunder just outside.

It’s going to be okay, he told the person in the bed. He set their body down gingerly—they were hurt, or sick, or something, but he treated them like something fragile.

He closed the door behind them. For good measure, he slid a chair across the room and wedged it under the handle.

Kendrick, said a voice.

Hold on just a second, he answered. Hold on. I need to... His voice wandered off, rebounding off the walls of his dream as he passed through a different doorway and into another room.

That room contained a mirror, a mirror which he could barely use due to the low light of the storm outside and the encroaching dusk. There were no other lights by which he could see.

Even still, his gaze was drawn to the barely-lit mirror, peering into the dying light reflected in his own eyes...

***

“Bhisalva.”

Air flooded his lungs. Light assaulted his eyes.

When he awoke, the morning sun was now high in the sky, directly overhead. His eyes reflexively shut again. A low, pained groan slipped past his lips as his body stirred back to wakefulness.

“Easy does it,” Sahni warned him softly. “You’re not healed all the way yet.” She sat next to him in the grass as she worked her healing magic on all the wounds Kendrick had sustained.

“Did I get it?” he asked. She nodded with a small congratulatory smile. “Awesome...” He turned his head to see Bellara sitting on the ground as well, her back resting against the trunk of a tree. She was staring off into the distance at the path ahead of them. “She okay?”

Sahni continued muttering healing words and hesitated to answer at first. “She insisted I heal you first. I certainly didn’t argue. The worst that happened to her was that she expended most of her aura. She got the same cuts. You had the worst of it, though, with that burn.”

It was so jarring that he could scarcely remember what exactly had happened. He remembered being confronted by the Warden on their path out of town... the Warden wasn’t what he seemed to be... The rest of it was mostly a blur of action.

Your aura is astonishing. He remembered the words of the evil spirit that regarded him as a curiosity... an outsider in this realm and this universe. He remembered the spirit’s hatred.

The flames rushing against his arm, lapping away at his skin—the memory came rushing back to him and his heart started racing.

“I didn’t have the aurimeter out,” Sahni broke the silence, “for obvious reasons, but I am sensitive to aura... I would say your aura must have been well over 100 in that battle, with your utilization just a bit lower than that. It’s truly incredible how—”

“Are you just doing a good cop, bad cop thing with me?” Kendrick interrupted her.

She cocked her head. Brushed a strand of blue hair out of her face. “Cop? What is a cop?”

He sighed, sitting up with some effort. “Are you just here to be nice to me and pretend to take my side? So she can push me to do what you need me to do? Is that how this works?”

Sahni arched an eyebrow. “I was nice to you because you were our guest. And, well... because we asked so much of you.” She finished the last of her healing; he stretched his arm, flexed it, and looked down to see that even all his little cuts and scrapes had been mended as well. The only evidence that anything had happened was the part of his sleeve that had been burned away. “After that, though... I was nice to you because, I don’t know...” She looked at him shyly, uncertainly, and then away again. “I suppose I thought we were friends.”

With that, Sahni stood up and went to tend to Bellara.

“You did good work today, Kendrick,” said the redheaded witch, twirling blades of grass between her fingertips. “A jinn is usually as powerful as a full-fledged witch, sometimes more so. They’re cunning, merciless, and exceedingly dangerous. We couldn’t have dispatched it without you.” She looked at him sternly, with all of her usual humor and sarcasm stripped away. “Truly, you are becoming the warrior the Ecumene needs you to be.”

You truly are every bit the fool she needs you to be.

The jinn’s voice spoke to him from a deep, dark place, poisoning Bellara’s words of congratulation.

He stood up and dusted himself off. “What will you do once this threat of the Underworld is resolved?” Kendrick asked.

“What will I do?” She smiled weakly. “Celebrate, of course! Celebrate this years-long nightmare being over.”

“What about me?” Her smile faded. “Will you send me home?”

“If you want to stay here with us, you’re more than welcome—”

“Do you know how to send me home?” he cut her off. “Do you know the spell, Bellara?” Her only response was silence. “Or did you just figure that it was easier to ask my forgiveness once you were done with me?”

“I-I,” she sputtered, “I mean, truthfully, I thought we could use a similar spell to the one that brought you here. We proved that it could work! And besides...” She stood as well, crossing the dirt path to approach him. Sahni stood back and folded her hands. “You’re doing amazing things here in the Ecumene. You’ve slain a horde of shades, numerous imps, even a jinn! You’re helping people! There are thousands who would jump at the chance to be able to do what you’re doing. Don’t you want to be a hero?”

“A hero is someone who rises to the occasion and fights for something they believe in,” he answered. “Like you two.” He shook his head. “They’re not conscripted against their will or dragged into it. They’re brave for the right reasons. Not because someone made them, and not to get something out of it, like the right to return home. I am not a hero.” Somehow, although he was describing himself, Bellara looked wounded by his words. “Look, I know you expected a lot from me, but you have the wrong guy.” Only in this moment did he realize he was still clutching the Psysword in his right hand, holding it so tightly that he could hardly feel his fingers anymore. He dropped it at Bellara’s feet. “I’m done.”

She picked it up and turned it over in her hand, looking up at him with a shifting face. She looked almost disdainful now. She had the air of an adult who was frustrated with the antics of a child. “Done? Kendrick, what do you mean you’re done? Done with what?”

“All of it. The training. Putting my life on the line because you told me to do it. Being used. Lied to. I’m over it.”

Bellara scoffed. “Well, like it or not, you’re here with us now. No spell can undo the fact that I brought you here. It’s done. And I won’t spend valuable aura trying to send you home now when the Underworld is gaining more ground every day. I can’t put the lives of other people at risk—”

“Just mine, though, right?” He scoffed back at her. “Whatever. I’ll just hide out in these woods until it all blows over.”

A long silence elapsed after that, in which not even Sahni approached him, and he sat against a tree trunk and took in the sounds of a forest far from home. He dug through the fog of his own mind searching for memories that still wouldn’t come to him. So, he contented himself with the ones that would—sunglasses, driving his car, the beach, billboards along the highway, and machines that functioned with a much more comfortable and practical magic than the kind he found here. He missed his world. He wondered what he’d be doing this very moment if he were back home.

“Somebody die or what?” asked a high-pitched voice. “I felt a huge aura surge on my way back. Got here fast as I could.”

Looking up, he saw a little green light flitting down the path past him. It stopped and hovered before Sahni.

“Keex,” said the blue-haired witch. “You’ve been gone so long! I was worried about you.” She turned to Kendrick with wide eyes that quickly went somber again. “This is my fairy friend, Keex.”

“Fairy business associate,” Keex clarified. “Bad news to report from the front lines, I’m afraid... I trust you still have my, ummm...”

“Yes, yes, I have it right here.” Sahni reached into her bag and pulled out a sealed jar, which contained a pile of assorted leaves at the bottom. The fairy flitted about excitedly for a moment before regaining composure.

“Right then. Well, I suppose I should start at the beginning...”