I walked into my apartment, still too numb even to appreciate how nice it looked in the light of early afternoon even though it had been ages since I’d seen my own place in normal daylight on a weekday.

During the week I’d been getting up as the sun rose to take a circuitous metro route to get to my internship where I often stayed until I absolutely had to leave –unless I wanted to walk home. That meant I often didn’t get back until after dark.

I suppose that wasn’t a problem I was going to have any longer.

My shoes made a satisfying clunk as I kicked them off and I wandered over to flop over onto my couch with the intention of staring at the wall until I came up with the energy to have feelings again.

Unfortunately for me, that position put me eye to eye with my coffee table and the neatly folded blanket on top of it. Specifically, it was a blanket I had not put there. It was a blanket I had never seen before.

I stared at it.

Now, I wasn’t bothered by the idea that someone had been in my house while I was gone. There were something like twenty keys in existence for my apartment. My family shared most everything so my apartment was more like a timeshare than anything else. I often came home either to visitors or evidence of their passing in the form of new food in the fridge to replace whatever they’d eaten, but that was family.

The blanket, on the other hand, had a bow on it.

If my family left things for me then they usually just put it away and left me a note about it on the kitchen white board. None of us were gift wrapping sorts except my mother on rare occasions when the spirit moved her.

It wasn’t my birthday and I didn’t even celebrate Christmas in December, much less on the Summer Solstice.

I reached out to nudge it around in a circle. Sure enough, there was a price tag on it sort of carelessly tucked under the bottom fold. Out of curiosity, I slid it out and looked at it. It was from some boutique home goods company I’d never heard from and the price had been blacked out with a grease pen.

Amateur.

I tilted it this way and that until the light coming in the window caught it just right and I could make out the slight impressions made in the cardstock when they’d printed out the price.

A pained whistle escaped me as I realized that there was no decimal point in all those zeroes. No wonder he’d blacked it out.

Right around that point, I realized I didn’t have the energy to deal with the mystery blanket.

I rolled over onto my back and stared at the ceiling like… well, like someone whose five year plan had just gone off the rails. The brief surge I'd experienced as a byproduct of my curiosity exhausted itself almost immediately.

Part of me was still sitting in front of a desk in the HR office as Mandy, the rep in charge of herding the interns, explained with a tense smile that I needed to take an open-ended break or we were going to have a problem.

I pulled my cellphone out of my pocket and dialed mom’s number without even looking at the screen because that’s how often I call my mother. Whatever power watches over unhappy young women must have been on duty because the call not only connected, but mom answered right away.

“Hello darling.” She was surrounded by the sound of distant voices. “What a pleasant surprise! Did they let you out early today?”

“Sort of.” I wet my lips. “They let me out forever. I got fired.”

Mandy had called it an ‘extended leave’, but I wasn't that bad at reading subtext in English. Her tone had left no doubt that the leave would be extended for longer than I could ever try to wait it out.

The other end of the line went dead silent. For a minute I thought the call had dropped until someone said, in heavily accented Arlese, “Are they insane?”

I realized mom had me on speakerphone.

“I’m going to take this into the other room, ladies.” Mom switched over from English with great dignity. I heard a chair scrape and the sudden babble of voices, at least one I recognized as the oldest auntie in my mom’s household, erupt in angry mutters. A door creaked open and then shut away the noise. “Okay, Alessa honey. Lay it on me. What happened?”

“I don’t know.” My voice cracked. My feelings were coming back on line and it made everything that much more awful. I rolled over on my side, facing the back of the couch. “I mean, I do know, but… it just doesn’t make sense.”

Mom was quiet. “Is this about the Jorgumandr expedition?” She asked.

It probably was, although Mandy hadn’t said so. I hadn’t made waves in the office until the expedition had been announced. “Maybe.” I sighed and tried not to relive the humiliation of the past two weeks. “Yeah. It is.” I amended.

“Then I don’t understand.” I could hear her start to pace. I’d told her about the expedition as soon as I’d heard about it. She’d taken the news worse than I had. Her position meant she couldn’t intervene without causing a whole host of additional problems. That meant it had been up to me to avert the oncoming disaster ---and I’d failed.

“They wouldn’t listen.” My face flooded with blood leaving me feeling hot and miserable. “They’re leaving today. They’re probably leaving right now.” I tried not to picture it.

Mom stopped pacing. “You cannot be serious.” She said after an agonizing pause. “Did you…”

I cut her off. “I tried everything, mom. I made appointments no one showed up to. I made phone calls and left messages. I sent emails no one ever opened. Today I tried to get into the third floor to talk to someone in person, but my keycard wouldn’t work in the elevator.”

My workstation was in a corner of the Deputy Administrator’s office suite and that was on the main level so I hadn’t ever needed to use the elevators, but I’d seen other interns come and go. I’d just assumed my keycard had the same permissions. “I caught Administrator Markham’s aide in the lobby and tried to talk to him.” This was the most embarrassing bit. “He called security on me and I got escorted to human resources.”

“Human resources.” Mom’s voice was flat, but starting to show signs of her thick Midwestern American accent. She usually had a better lock on it, but when she got upset she tended to slip up. “They didn’t walk you out of the building?

I shrugged even though she couldn’t see it and closed my eyes. Duvall was a busy, important person who wasn’t used to being asked to question the decisions of the Administrators —not that he’d let me get that far.

The Bureau of Interplanar Relations was a new organization, relatively speaking. If you believed the bio page on their website, it had been founded in the forties shortly after the Veil, a massive curtain of shifting insubstantial white light that circled Earth like a lopsided equator, had first appeared.

In practice, though, BIR started out as a civilian organization that had consisted of four semi-government-sanctioned conspiracy nuts working out of an old bomb shelter with some sporadic grant money, but they’d been mostly crowdfunded before that and in a time when crowdfunding wasn’t really a thing. There was a lot of interest in the Veil in those days. It appeared not too long after the United Stated first deployed an atomic bomb so people were understandably concerned by the correlation.

There were tons of crackpot theories about the Veil in those days.

Some people thought it was part of a convoluted Soviet plot. Certainly, a sudden giant mysterious atmospheric phenomenon on American soil made the Cold War even more tense than it would have been otherwise.

Other people -Evangelical American Christians for the most part- thought it was a sign from their God announcing the Great Tribulation.

I’d also heard stories about New Age cults in the 1960s who were very convinced it's presence meant that aliens were coming to take them away.

Markham and his cronies had the dubious victory of coming closest to the truth and were on the record as the people who’d made first contact with an interdimensional being.

That happened shortly before the US Army rolled in, confiscated all their records, and relocated Markham and his team somewhere. There was a period between 1977 and 2010 -when the Obama administration overturned a Reagan-era act of secrecy concerning all contact with beings from beyond the Veil- when no one was really sure where the original members of BIR were or what they’d been doing.

Only Markham was left by the time the Bureau was made public. The other three had either died or retired or disappeared. BIR became an independent agency of the US Government; a bit like NASA, only without the same level of funding or brand recognition.

My immediate (former) boss had plans for the first, but the second required the cooperation of elves willing to be shown off on camera. So far that hadn’t happened and that meant the average US citizen probably knew about the Bureau, but not why they should care.

Before 2010 the American party line was that the Veil was just an atmospheric phenomenon like the northern lights; pretty and harmless. Once people got accustomed to the fact that they could pass through it without getting hurt or mysterious cancer it became just another landmark.

Knowledge of its real nature had been restricted to the White House, certain key figures in the Pentagon, and people like my mother and I whose nationalities were an issue of extreme bureaucratic frustration.

In reality, the Veil was a thin spot between realities. Some spots were more permeable than others. Those spaces functioned like gates for anyone who knew how to use them. If you just walked through it then nothing happened. You stayed on the same material plane. If you knew how to open a Gate, however, that was different.

All Gates on Earth lead to Anwyn; home to creatures and races that up until recently only existed in fairytales as far as anyone knew.

I wasn’t born there, but I’d lived there for most of my life. All song and story to the contrary, elves don’t actually kidnap human babies –not unless they’re an impulsive young adults like my dad with a human wife at home who wanted a baby he couldn’t give her.

Mom and Dad met a little bit after the Veil first appeared. Dad was part of a scouting party sent to Earth to explore the new alien landscape that had intruded into their reality. Mom was the Wisconsin farm girl he fell for halfway through his mission when she -thinking he was a stray dog or hitchhiker- went to chase him out of the barn he was sheltering in with a rifle.

Unlike humans, elves could cross the Veil whenever they wanted so long as they were at a spot where it was thin enough and there was solid ground on the other side.

Anwyn was host to multiple Veils so when the Veil leading to Earth became visible, they (unlike anyone on the other side) knew what they were dealing with.

Some spots were so dense that only a Guide could penetrate the barrier, but the majority of the Veil crossing through North America is permeable enough that no force on Earth could keep Dad out.

Elves and humans can’t reproduce and -while my mother wanted very badly to be one- she’d been willing to sacrifice that in order to be with Dad. Dad, on the other hand, wasn’t the type to sacrifice anything if he didn’t have to.

Mom wanted a baby so as far as he was concerned she was going to get a baby.

That was where I came in.

I’d been left at a safe surrender site somewhere; only a few hours old. My dad had been casing the place for weeks and, according to family legend, afterwards he presented me to my horrified mother with all the enthusiasm of a cat giving their owner a live mouse. He never did understand why taking me was such a big deal, but in his defense mom wasn’t so horrified by what he’d done that she was willing to give me back.

That had been in the late eighties.

I was raised in Anwyn, but eventually chose to attend school on the Earth side of the veil. I was curious about Earth and wanted to engage more with my heritage. I spent some time in a human boarding school followed by college. After graduation I was offered an internship by BIR’s deputy administrator and chief financial officer, Charles -call me Chaz- Brinkerman.

While nominally Markham’s second in command, Brinkerman dealt with the Earth-related parts of BIR’s day to day affairs; boring stuff like fundraising and reporting to Congress.

It had been going well until the Jorgumandr Expedition was announced even though it seemed like half of what I did was follow Brinkerman around at parties, tutor him and his direct reports in Arlese, and take notes at meetings. He never introduced me as his date and I knew social gatherings made up a large part of how regular humans built their networks so I gritted my teeth and did my best to become a familiar face among Brinkerman’s set.

I’d never worked closely with Markham –or with much of anyone except Brinkerman. The person who oversaw my first few days in the general intern pool before I was released to the deputy administrator’s office was Shelby Cruz, a senior intern who’d been hired and re-assigned as a junior aide within my first month. After that I spent most of my time either working on my own projects or assisting Brinkerman in the field.

Things might have stayed that way except for an email that the intern distribution list had been copied on by accident. There had been a little bit of correspondence about travel plans that had been going on seemingly forever between Amos Duvall, Markham, and the Associate Administrator and Markham’s real right hand person; Angie Devereaux.

I’d been bored and under-occupied that day, so I’d read through the email chain until I got to an embedded scan of Ylem’s original invitation. It had read, in typical Dwarven style, ‘Come if you will. A party will meet you at the Gate on Jorgumandr at Midsummer.’

At that point, no one in the Bureau aside from me had ever actually been across the Veil. Their only contact with Anwyn natives had been carefully chaperoned seminars with the Elves of Red Harbor -i.e. my family- who had more experience with humans than most and so were much harder to offend, but even those encounters had dried up.

My dad, Duke Eran Harou of Clan Harou in Red Harbour and Western Land Warden of the Tapama continent, had been given responsibility by the Allied Clans for building up an acceptable relationship between Anwyn and Earth. It wasn’t going very well because Markham had done something to offend my mother years ago that my family refused to discuss.

Whatever it was hadn’t been serious enough to cause an immediate rift or get Markham killed on the spot, but was bad enough that the Council of Elders who made decisions for the Allied Clans agreed that no further overtures would be made by the elves to Elliot Markham or anyone who served him until my mother received a sincere apology.

Having met the man, I was half convinced that they were blowing it out of proportion. Mom probably would have forgotten about it, but elves have long memories and the longer Markham went without apologizing the less they wanted to deal with him. At this point I was fairly sure they were just waiting for him to die before trying again with that side of the bureau.

Brinkerman had stepped into that breach somehow, despite being Markham’s subordinate, and now my Clan had decided they would only deal with him. It was outside the scope of his role at BIR, but little things like that rarely stopped him.

I remember re-reading the whole email over and again, hoping I remembered it wrong –but no. The Jorgumandr Expedition would leave bright and early on the Summer Solstice in the US with no idea of what they were heading into.

Jorgumandr was one of the two major southern continents of Anwyn; roughly equivalent in size to Africa although much further away from the equator. The landmass corresponding to the Adirondack Gate was Tapama; home to a multitude of species and political entities, but mostly the Elven Alliance of Clans. Jorgumandr was where the dwarves lived.

Up until 2018, the dwarves had not shown much interest in their extraplanar neighbors. The Earth Veil only touched a narrow corner of Jorgumandr and that patch was not thin enough to act as a Gate unless you had help from something much bigger than an elf.

Something changed their minds, although I had no idea what. The High Prince of the Dwarven Nation, Ylem, sent a messenger first to my family’s seat at Red Harbor in Tapama and then through the Adirondack Gate. We were friendly enough with the dwarves though to trust they weren’t interested in making trouble. No one on our side knew the contents of that message or things would never have gotten so far.

“I’m officially on leave,” I continued, determined to get it all out. “…but I had to fill out an exit interview before they had me clean out my desk.”

Mom was quiet for a bit and resumed her pacing. “Well.” She said after a moment. “I suppose nature still has a way of weeding out the stupid even in a post-industrial society.”

I sat up, “Mom!” I wheezed. “He’s going to get people killed.”

“Who?” She huffed. “The expedition staff is Markham, Duvall, and Devereaux, yes? Maybe their replacements will be more tolerable. Where was Brinkerman during all this?”

“He hasn’t been around.” I reminded her. “Remember, he had to have that procedure done on his shoulder.”

“Then you’re not really fired.” Mom sighed. It sounded like relief. “You’re just getting a little vacation. There’s no way he’d let you go just on Markham’s say-so. Not even he thinks he's the one in charge there.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Markham could fire anyone he liked. He was the Director. He’d never actually done it, to my knowledge. He always seemed harmless and sort of bemused by where he’d ended up in life on the rare occasions when we’d had anything to do with one another, but that was just an observation. We’d never actually talked. The most he’d ever done was nod in my general direction.

Still, I remembered the sneer on Amos’ face as I’d been escorted away from him towards my final encounter with Mandy. Admittedly, I’d lost my temper. It’d been a long couple of weeks before I’d spotted him carrying a box of files to the elevators from the basement archives and I'd seen one last opportunity to divert a disaster.

I’d spent weeks trying to meet with someone -anyone- who could get my message through to the expedition team. It would have been easy if Brinkerman had been around, but I’d arranged meetings and passed messages for him before. Usually I dropped a note with Amos or the receptionist and I’d get a call when someone on his team had a minute.

Days passed before I checked again and that time the receptionist told me to my face that my business would have to wait. She didn’t come right out and say that the others were scrambling to prepare for the Jorgumandr expedition because her desk was in the middle of the lobby.

I tried a few more times after that until she made it clear that no appointment times were available nor were there going to be any in the future.

“Look, honey.” She’d told me, expression pinched around what aspired to be a calming smile. “Whatever it is, it’s gonna have to wait until the Deputy Administrator gets back. He’ll take care of it so you just need to be patient. Okay?”

It could not wait, but I wasn’t about to air the Bureau’s dirty laundry in public and I could take a hint. She was tired of dealing with me and wasn’t interested in helping. I couldn’t afford to be seen to beg. I’m not as concerned with my dignity as the rest of my family is, but even I could only go so far.

Besides, her tone had bothered me. She made it sound like I was Brinkerman’s anxious pet rather than a normal employee and that was so far outside my experience that I didn’t know how to respond.

From there I’d moved on to phone calls. I didn’t have the direct number for any of the administrators nor could I seem to get my hands on it. I tried leaving messages on the general office line, but the phone system generated emails to let you know when your message had been deleted without being heard. Not one of my messages had been listened to.

By then, I’d discovered that I didn’t have the building access I thought I did. Brinkerman’s other direct reports were sympathetic, but didn’t have any more luck getting through to the Administrator’s office than I did. Bless them, though. They tried.

Then, this morning, I’d spotted Amos in the lobby. He’d been dressed in a slick charcoal suit with black and white wingtip shoes and I'd known in that moment that I was looking at my last chance to avert a disaster.

The thing to understand is that Amos Duvall is an asshole. We haven’t ever gotten along although I made the effort to try a little bit at the beginning. I don’t know his exact age, but I know his job as Markham’s aide was his first job after college. He’s driven, ambitious, and comes from a lot of money.

We can work together sort of if I don’t ask too much of him, but whenever he sees me coming he always starts to walk faster.

For once he didn’t beat me to the elevator.

What followed was a huge mistake on my part.

I hadn’t lived in the human world long, but I’d been there long enough to understand that there were invisible codes of behavior for different types of people broadly assigned by skin color and then refined upon by how well you could present yourself.

I pass for white among the right company although I’ve never really put any effort into it. Given my background, I don’t know what the combination of my actual ethnicity is and can only make some vague guesses based on the town where Dad found me; predominately white, some black, and no hispanic people at all.

Among white people, I look like a fairly light complected woman of color and sometimes it causes me a kind of trouble that I'm not good at heading off at the pass just yet

The point is that people like me don’t get to be angry in public. We can’t raise our voices if we want to be taken seriously. I ended up doing both.

I jogged up to him. “Amos, I need a minute.”

He kept walking like I didn’t exist. That was new. Normally he would slow down enough to say something snide and I’d honestly been counting on it. All I needed was to secure his attention for one minute and I knew afterwards his sense of self-preservation would take care of the rest.

He’d never iced me out like that before. My already frayed nerves stretched and snapped.

I caught him by the arm and my voice was louder than I intended when I repeated myself only getting as far as his name. The box in his hands went flying, papers inside spilled across the floor, and he shoved me away shouting, “What’s wrong with you?”

Things happened very quickly after that. The security team doesn’t get to do much in the normal course of things, but the two officers stationed in the lobby got me by both arms and dragged me away from Amos. I was too stunned to defend myself. I hadn’t thought I’d grabbed him that hard. I’m not a large or strong person. Amos had several inches of height and at least fifteen pounds of muscle on me.

“Ma’am, you need to calm down.” One of them told me while the other asked Amos if he was all right.

“I’m fine...” Amos told him as he rubbed the spot where I’d caught his sleeve. “...but she’s been harrassing Administrator Duvall for over a week now and it’s getting out of hand.”

“Amos, you need to…” I didn’t get much further than that before he talked right over me.

“I don’t need to do anything.” He snapped, straightening his collar. He addressed the security officers. “Mandy asked to see her if something like this happened. Could you take care of it? We’re moving out soon and now I’ve got to clean this up.”

The officers did not let me get anything else out before taking me away. Mandy didn't really let me talk either except to say 'yes', 'no', and 'I understand.'

I only looked backwards by happenstance to find that Amos was not cleaning up the papers like he said he was. He was watching them hustle me away and smiling.

I blinked myself back into the present.

“There’s support staff too.” I watched my free hand clench in my lap. “Shelby Cruz and Emil Patterson.”

“Ah. I hadn’t heard they were bringing junior staff.” Mom said, suddenly much more sympathetic. “That’s a shame. Poor kids. Maybe they’ll make it. It’s still cull season in those parts. Someone is sure to find them. I’ll have your father send word. Maybe one of the hunters will hear it.”

“Maybe.” I admitted, although the likelihood of that happening was dim. I hadn’t been in Jorgumandr since I was fourteen, but I still remembered the trip there and the bitter cold that lingered in me long after we’d reached safety.

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.” Mom paused as something rustled in the background and sighed. “One moment. Your father was spying.” I heard her put her hand over the receiver. She said something and then something else. Her voice got louder and then the line was no longer muffled. “…you give that back!” Mom snarled, but Dad must have already had the phone out of her reach.

“I’m sending someone out.” He growled and I knew he wasn’t sending them over to pat my hair while I cried. I sniffed and felt oddly better. Mom would listen and give me good advice, but my dad would give me somebody’s head on a pike if I wanted it. That wasn’t often a practical solution, but sometimes it was comforting to know that option was on the table.

“Dad, the expedition is probably at the Gate by now. Ylem will be pissed if you send an assassin into his keep.”

“Not if I send a keg and an explanation in with them.” He grumbled, but I could tell from his tone that he knew I was right and he wasn’t going to fight me about it. Bloodthirsty as he could be, he was in fact a very good diplomat.

“Maybe later. Can you give the phone back to Mom? Someone left a $4000 blanket in my living room.”

“Is that a lot?” He asked and I could hear mom say, “Yes, dear. For just one thing, that’s a lot.”

“Well, good.” He had that odd note of approbation in his voice that showed up a lot when I’d started receiving gifts from this particular suitor. It was someone dad knew and liked. “I’m sending Aster to you with an escort. If you don’t have to drudge for the humans then I want you home. Your aunts will have questions for you too.”

Of course they would. My only consolation was that they wouldn’t try to have Markham killed unless they saw a clear benefit for the family coming out of it. The aunties didn’t kill over pride. They were far more mercenary.

Assuming he survived Jorgumandr; Markham would probably wish they had killed him once they’d finished making him pay for this insult.

“Okay, dad. Love you, see you soon.”

“And I, you.” His tone was solemn and sincere. “Here is your mother.”

“Thank you for talking him down, dear.” Mom said as she came back on. “Now what’s this about a blanket?”

“My secret admirer has left me a…” I reached for the tag again and read it out loud. “…weighted qiviut fur blanket. I don’t know what a qiviut is.”

“It’s a type of fur from a muskox.” Mom hmmmed thoughtfully. “I think this is my fault. We had dinner guests last week and I was showing someone an article on my phone about weighted blankets. We were talking about human physiology and psychology. It’s supposed to help you sleep better, reduce stress, and that sort of thing.”

“Not going to tell me who was visiting, huh?”

She laughed. “Of course not, dear. That’d be cheating.”

The list of people who casually dined with my parents and could move substantial amounts of American currency wasn’t that long, but it wasn’t more than I already knew about my mystery suitor.

He wasn’t the first suitor I’d had, but he was the most persistent and yet so far the most considerate. I’d had a glut of them when I was a teenager starting with a disastrous encounter when I was fifteen, but the attention had died down after I went to college and started spending most of my time across the Veil.

My current admirer had started sneaking me gifts about the time I’d started at the Bureau, but I hadn’t been able to learn anything about him except that he was very sneaky and familiar enough with the human world that I hadn’t been able to catch him; not even on camera.

Honestly, I could have put more effort into catching him, but I’d had so much going on that I hadn’t had much energy to spare for convoluted elven courtship games. I hadn’t put the word out that I was looking for a relationship so he was doing this on his own and that meant I didn’t have to play if I didn’t want to. The burden was on him to engage my interest. So far I hadn’t had the time.

“Why don’t you change out of your work clothes if you haven’t and make something to eat.” Mom advised me, sounding a bit more sober. “Your escort won’t be there for a while. Take an hour for yourself.”

‘Lick your wounds’ is what she really meant.

“All right.” I dragged myself off the sofa and trudged towards my room. I stopped almost as soon as I entered. “Oh… my.” Words failed me.

“Dear?” Concern sharpened my mother’s tone.

I took a picture and sent it rather than try to explain the dress laid across the foot of my bed.

“Oh…my.” My mother squeaked.

The dress was a deep red brocade figured with abstract botanical designs on the bodice and a scene of the hunt above the hem on the skirt. It was lined in soft golden fur with bronze tips and subtle rosettes. A modest chapel-length train dripped over the edge of my bed and had been arranged on the floor so I could see the embroidered scene of a clever-faced fox lounging on a stone above a milling pack of oblivious hounds.

“Am I the fox?” I wondered aloud.

“I doubt he’s one of the hounds, darling.” Mother countered and I bit my tongue to keep from echoing ‘he?’ at her. A pronoun was more than I’d ever gotten out of her.

I’d assumed my suitor was a boy. Elves verified their potential sweetheart's orientation before starting courtship and I'm straight ergo my suitor was likely male, but I hadn’t known for sure. I wasn’t about to let mom know she’d slipped up though.

I gently lifted the train and turned it so I could see more of the back of the dress. Sure enough the scene continued up the skirt. The embroidery thinned out to meld seamlessly into the brocade’s pattern of vines, flowers, and… a tail?

Frowning, I turned the dress all the way over and found a tree cat lounging on a bough between the shoulders. It wasn’t embroidered, but instead the picture had been woven into the brocade itself. Its soft gaze was directed down at the fox. It didn’t look threatening just fond --and patient.

Hah. Subtle.

I took another picture and my mother barked a laugh.

A small smile clung stubbornly to my mouth as I went to my closet to see if I had a spare garment bag. One day I’d catch my mystery suitor and while I might not marry him I’d thank him for this little bit of brightness in an otherwise bleak day.

An odd feeling engulfed me as I sorted through the hangers in my closet. The air closed in and light bloomed all around until everything in my apartment had been drowned out by it.

At first I thought I was sick or maybe fainting. I was alone in my room, but then there came a terrible anger that did not belong to me. It crashed through me with physical force, breaking me into hundreds of little pieces before forcing me back into one. Somewhere far away I could hear a familiar voice rising in panic, but I couldn’t make sense of her words.

Then, just as quickly, the pain stopped. The light held me tight in its grasp, but all that rage had abated.

Images rolled through me; a group of humans on a platform all wearing smart business clothes and carrying luggage with them, a white wasteland of snowy rock, and a looming sense of urgency.

My mind cleared enough that I finally recognized the massive presence for what it was.

Somehow, some way, I’d pissed off a Guide.

Guides were the vast, multidimensional beings that lived along the borders of the Veil. The spots where they made themselves known were called the Gates. They didn’t bother themselves with the thinner spots where smaller beings with enough magic could cross by themselves.

No one really knew why Guides presided over the Gates. The human public had only been aware of them since 2015 and in the sixty years that the US Government had been studying the Veil, they hadn’t learned more about the Guides than they’d known at the beginning. The elves knew more, but so far no one on Earth had been able to offer them enough to share.

Guides didn’t really interact with mortal beings at all beyond ferrying them across the Veil. At least there was no reliable record of one doing so. There were fables in Anwyn of one intervening in a murder that happened nearby, but the details were so inconsistant that no one knew if there was anything true about those stories. If I survived the next hour that might change.

They would help anyone cross no matter who asked or how dangerous it was on the other side. Not every Gate led to somewhere people could survive.

I knew they could move around, but generally didn’t unless something motivated them to do so.

You couldn’t dissect one or force it to pay attention to you except through the ritual that asked them to part the Veil on your behalf. They didn’t answer questions. They didn’t talk.

As far I knew there was only one Guide in North America; the one that lived in the Adirondack Gate.

Acknowledgement tolled through me like a bell and I realized they did talk; it was just beyond anything a squishy mortal creature like me could withstand. Its words were pictures and feelings all projected straight into my brain at a frequency that felt like it was shaking me apart at the atomic level.

The Guide’s ‘voice’ was softer than it had been before when it kicked my psychic door down, but I still felt like the inside of a whirlpool. If I’d been able to move I would have curled up into a sobbing knot. As it was, I could feel hot tears spilling down my face.

There came a sense of motion. I could feel it all the way in my bones. I’d felt something like it before, but I couldn’t seem to remember where.

I closed my eyes and opened them elsewhere.