A fog had descended over the both of us. I can’t remember contacting the authorities but they were suddenly there, trying to get us to speak on the matter. Guards bumped into me as they passed into the room. That fucking room. I tried to ask questions, tried to get answers but it was useless because currently I knew the most out of anyone. I met Percival, saw his face, talked with him, and saw his hideous darkside.

I told them everything I knew, Hana standing next to me, eyes widening a little bit with every new sentence of mine. I felt bad, revealing that I was holding the truth back from her but I also told myself I barely knew her and I was trying to keep her safe. Eventually though, they allowed us to leave.

It was dark. We had returned to her apartment but hadn’t yet gone inside. We were talking underneath the dim gas street lamp, our tones hushed and worried.

“I can’t go in,” I restated, hoping that the third try would get it across.

“But why?” She dragged out her ‘why’, almost like she was a child pouting.

“You are in danger, Hana. This guy is pulling off something, some kind of evil plan and I was brought here because of it. Do you understand? I really appreciate everything you’ve done over the last, like seriously appreciate it but he’s going after people I know and that means he’s going to be coming after you.” I grabbed both her shoulders, doing my best to drill it into her very thick skull that this was not a game and fucking dangerous.

She brushed me off, glaring. “Absolutely not.”

♠

I was seated in her apartment room, cradling a cup of herbal tea. It was getting late, quickly passing up dinner time. Hana was digging through some drawers, trying to find something. She said it was a magic incantation book or something.

Her argument was that I was penniless and it would be good to stick around for the night just in case the guards wanted to interview me again but honestly the argument hadn’t really mattered because she had set her mind to making me stay and I was too wimpy to fight against the intense little spirit that she was. Really though, I was beyond scared myself and had hoped she would take me in. Another night out in the streets after seeing that… sight? I couldn’t do it.

“Found it!” She yelled, holding a rather large book up into the air. It really looked like every stereotypical magic-related book I’d ever seen on TV. A large blue jewel graced the front and it had all these elegant gold-plated carvings.

“Ok, now do you remember what the incantation circle looked like? I think it had Zarion triangles in it.”

Her mood had rebounded so quickly from the gruesome sight that I was entirely suspicious of it. I studied her carefully, looking for anything out of place. She flipped through page after page, bringing a finger to tap against her lip as she stopped every few pages or so.

“Hmmm. Not this one.” She flipped again and saw a slight tremble in her hand and she drew in a shaky breath before continuing her scan through the book. She was just as shaken as me, a thin facade covering up her true feelings.

If I was more straightforward, more brave and courageous, I would have grabbed her tight and held her close, telling her it was okay. Maybe that was just my image of what a manly man would be, drawn from TV and the discourses surrounding ‘masculinity’. But I couldn’t draw myself to do it anyway.

Instead I opted to just keep looking at her, hoping, praying that she wouldn’t break down and start crying. I had no idea what to do with real emotions, no idea what to do with fragile people. Intimacy scared me.

As she searched, my thoughts drifted off to a long time ago, a time that was almost entirely lost to the fading amnesia of the past.

I used to have a brother. He was older than me but I never knew by how much, too young to be able to really tell. I was four when he died. No one ever told me what happened, exactly. Instead, one day, he just wasn’t there anymore. His casket at the funeral had been closed and I remember my teary-eyed Aunt explaining that his body was too mangled to show. Like bad enough that the mortician wasn’t able to save his appearance.

My running theory was that he had fallen in one of the gorges near our house. A tumble through the rocky cliffside. It might have mangled his face enough that they couldn’t show it. It seemed plausible to me, at the time. He had been such an adventurer too, always leading me along to different places, me toddling along, him making up these incredible narratives about whatever we were doing. Sometimes we were knights going to save the princess, sometimes we were Mario and Luigi trying to take down Bowser, sometimes we were detectives hunting down the mysterious criminal.

The clearest memory, though, was on the playground one summer day. There wasn’t really anyone there except for a few older kids, older than my brother was. All I remember was that my brother was off climbing the monkey bars or something and I was working fastidiously on my sandcastle. I don’t remember when the older boys had come over and when they had kicked sand in my eyes but I do, at least, remember that. I was already crying at that point because they had destroyed my little castle. A group of four had surrounded me.

The next thing I remember is my brother soaring through the air, a ferociousness emanating from him that I had never before seen in anyone and will likely never see again. He looked like an animal, teeth bared kicking, punching, biting, flinging sand. Blood covered the sand in front of me as he tore into them, screaming. One kid had fallen to the ground, unconscious, before the others were able to get a hold on him. The murderous, feral intent never left, even as they held him down and pelted him with blows and kicks.

Eventually he was too weak to resist anymore and the boys took that as their cue to leave, leaving a battered and bruised boy on the ground. His eyes were glazed over but even then, I saw the anger boiling underneath.

I was too young to know what to do in a situation like that so I just sat by him and cried until he was able to pick himself up off the ground. He hugged me close and we walked home. The final thing I remember, my final image of that day, was his smile and one, simple short sentence.

“Sure gave them the beat down, didn’t I?”

After he died, my parents never spoke about him again. I had already forgotten his name by this point. When I would ask about him, my mom would close up and start to cry. My father would become a brick wall, face expressionless. The photos of him were all removed, piece by piece from the house. Soon, all I had was memories of him. They largely left me alone after that. We spoke, sometimes, but not much. I quickly became used to being alone.

I was still the same little boy I was back then. Weak, defenseless. Hell, Hana saved me in almost the same way my brother did all the way back then.

Hana hadn’t been able to turn up anything. Apparently, it wasn’t a common incantation. She got bored of sitting around and, somehow, someway, convinced me that taking a walk late at night was a good idea. I was able to negotiate for food first but afterwards, we were wandering the streets.

Hana was talking about her time in school. The slight tremble still hadn’t left.

“In my final semester, I took three classes. One has to be in your specialty. So I’m was taking a Devor path class and then I was also—”

“Devor is the illusion stuff, right?” In light of everything I had seen, in light of the horrors I was witness to, talking about this seemed so strange and alien, and I was intimately aware now of the utter pointlessness of small talk, how trivial it was in comparison to the fact that death was just around the corner, smiling in all its horrid brutality. But I couldn’t bring myself to give voice to my thoughts.

“Path of the mind,” she corrected. Then, without missing a beat, resumed her monologue. “I was taking a class on the use of magic in other races—”

I couldn’t help interrupting her again. “Like people of other nationalities and ethnicities?”

She gave me a confused look. “No, all humans use magic the same way, essentially. I mean, there are differences I guess since we are really the only city to incorporate steam technology but no, I’m talking about nonhuman races.”

I stopped walking, the faint street lamplight and a smattering of store lights illuminating her face in the dark streets.

“No way. There are other races?” I said, and attempted to sound as stunned as I could.

“Of course.” Her look of confusion only intensified. “You don’t have nonhuman races on your planet?”

I struggled to think of what else to say. “We… have like animals and stuff. None that are, like, equally as conscious as we are. I mean some are close but…” I drifted off, thinking about what she was saying but also not, at the same time.

“Our world’s history is long so a lot has changed but, currently, there are eleven races.” She started to list them off, counting on her fingers. “The Woodkin, Blood Elves, Moon Elves, Kreken, The Forsaken, Jinn, Fenrir’s Chosen-”

“That’s crazy.” We resumed walking. “Are, like, humans in contact with them?”

“Hmm,” she said, thinking. “It’s a complicated question. Yes and no. Our empire really only has humans and it's relatively isolated except for the outskirts, where you might encounter villages that have merged with other races. I mean, some don’t mingle at all, like the Blood Elves but others do, like the spirit dwarves. So no in that sense but our ascendants and the gods are all nonhuman. Giaos, for instance, isn’t human but she’s close I think. She’s the youngest of the gods and goddesses so far. Some of the ascendants might have merged with humans—”

“What are ascendants?”

“Oh those? They’re like creatures and entities that have inscribed themselves into the domain of ascendancy. We call it the path of the gods but that doesn’t make sense because they aren’t gods. I don’t know who started it but it was a dumb idea. Too confusing. Ascendants usually have a lot of special properties and stuff. Long life, dark magics, cleansed auras, the works.”

I could only nod. This world was certainly a crazy one.

“Also, the ascendants—” This time, she cut herself off.

In the glint of the window next to us, three figures stood, faces blurred.

“Adventurer,” one of the three hissed, drawing it out with a tone that screamed danger.