Bellara led them out the door of the shack and into a dense thicket of woods beyond. Kendrick could see light filtering through the leaves of trees above his head, but whether it was dawn or dusk, he couldn’t tell.

“Sahni, walk behind him,” said the redhead. “Feel the aura. Use the aurimeter if need be. If it gets too close, we may need to draw warding sigils.”

“Understood,” Sahni replied demurely.

They hiked up a steep path in the forest, contending with bushes and ferns as they went, and Kendrick felt a mounting sense of unease at the whole situation. Where he was, who these people were, what they were doing, why he was here—questions surfaced one after another in his mind. He knew nothing better to do than to go with the flow. When in Rome, he thought to himself. Wait... what is Rome again?

A long while later, they reached a rocky outcropping with a dark cavern carved into its side. Bellara motioned for them to hurry into it. The floor of the cave was rough and uneven at first, but upon ascending some naturally eroded rock stairs, they reached a wider atrium in the formation with a smoother floor of stone. Bellara and Sahni each took a crystal out of their respective bags.

“Ald,” they said in unison. Kendrick thought he saw a little electric spark travel from the blue-haired girl’s arm into the crystal she was holding; in the next moment, both crystals shone with enough luminosity for them to see comfortably in the cave.

“Are we safe now?” Kendrick finally asked. His new travel guides had set the lit crystals on the floor and were now rummaging through their bags again.

“Take this,” Bellara said without answering him. She held out a circular lime green lens of glass affixed to a thin golden temple that terminated in a wide hook shape; it was like one half of the most peculiar pair of glasses he’d ever seen, or an oddly designed monocle without a string. “It’s a lens we enchanted for you. Put it on and then touch the rim of the lens.”

Kendrick did as he was told. He thought of how he would put on a pair of sunglasses...

Sunglasses, he thought. Sunny summer days. The beach. Driving... my car... Memories washed in and out of his consciousness like the tide. Then he returned his focus to the task at hand. Donning the lens, his vision was now entirely lime green, despite the glass only covering one of his eyes. He felt the golden temple curling around the underside of his earlobe, attaching itself to his head. The sensation was strange to say the least but not painful or really unpleasant.

Then he tapped the rim once just as instructed. Instantly, words and numbers that he could read appeared before his eyes.

SAHNI

{62}

HUMAN WITCH

The name “Sahni” appeared above the blue-haired one’s head. Beneath it was a number in braces: {62}. Finally, on the third line at the bottom were the words “human witch.”

He looked at the other one.

BELLARA

{68}

HUMAN WITCH

“What does this mean?” Kendrick wondered aloud. By now, the world around him had lost its citrusy coloration and returned to normal, but the informative popups remained.

“Do you think we lost it?” Bellara asked, ignoring him again.

“I... I'm not sure,” Sahni answered. She closed her eyes, clasping the pendant around her neck. “I can barely feel it now. I wonder if it’s moving away from us. What we felt before is gone, but something else...”

“Something else what?”

“Something else feels... off.”

“Imps, do you think?”

Sahni shook her head. “No. Smaller than that.” She gave a start and looked suddenly at Kendrick. Then her face melted into another polite smile as she added, “It must be, er, really far away or really not a big deal at all. Right, Bell?”

“I can see your names,” said Kendrick. “These numbers, what are they? And why does this thing say that you’re witches?”

“Those numbers are our aura readings,” Bellara answered matter-of-factly. “I’m guessing mine is way higher than Sahni’s, right? No offense.” She elbowed her blue-haired comrade.

Kendrick double-checked the readings. “Yours is 68, hers is 62.”

“Wow, that’s pretty close,” Sahni said with a shy smile.

Bellara waved her hand. “Well, it might still be calibrating itself. Never mind that.”

“What’s aura?” Kendrick asked. He felt the need to keep asking questions at every minor break in the conversation. Never had he felt so out of the loop and so lost in his life. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to him. He couldn’t really remember much of anything of his life before being brought to this place, a realization that began to trouble him.

“Aura can be both singular and plural,” Sahni explained helpfully. “My aura is currently 62. An aurum is the smallest indivisible unit of magical energy that a person can have. Aura exist everywhere in our universe, in humans, beasts, insects, plants, even in the rivers and in the wind. Aura are the points of energy that keep everything moving in one grand and interconnected magecology.”

“Magic… cology?” Kendrick echoed dumbly. “Huh.”

“And you, my friend,” Bellara said, pulling something out of her bag. She crossed the cave and boldly invaded his personal space, placing a firm hand on his shoulder. She smelled vaguely of equal parts pine, sweat, and cinnamon. “Kendrick, right?” He nodded nervously. She took his hand in hers, and then placed in it something cold and metallic with a leather handle. “You’re here for one very important reason. You see, Sahni and I, if we practiced and meditated and stole aura all our lives, the most aura our bodies could ever hope to hold would be in the 200s. A reading of 300 would be legendary. But you...” She closed his fingers around the object, and, glancing down, he saw that he appeared to be holding a sword with no blade. “Kendrick, your mind has been forged in another place without aura, without magic. It’s not part of the same magecology that our minds are, and therefore it’s not bound by the same rules. That’s my theory, anyway. I hope to put that to the test.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It seems like you’re pretty passionate about this, but I’m still lost.”

“Don’t worry.” She touched the tip of her finger to the tip of his nose. “You’ll get there.” Bellara finally backed away from her disarming proximity to him, striding to the center of the room and holding out her hands. “Now, let’s get right to it. Kendrick, I want you to focus your aura as tightly as you can into a single point. If you can, try to channel it through the gem in the crossguard of your weapon.”

Upon closer inspection, the crossguard of the imaginary sword had a long, thin gem embedded in its center where the blade would normally be attached. The gem rose no more than a finger’s width or so from the metal crossguard that encased it. A sword with no blade, he thought to himself. Worst sword I’ve ever seen. Is this a joke?

Before he could voice his confusion again, a subtle flicker of light played across his lens. Turning toward the deeper parts of the cave, he saw something move. He tapped his lens again.

{3}

SHADE

“What’s happening?” Kendrick asked. Out of the darkness crept a pitch black figure, gliding slowly across the wall of the cavern like any other shadow. When he looked at where its source should have been, there was nothing—the shadow itself seemed to be moving of its own volition. It was hard to make out its true form as it grew, shrank, and wavered across the bumpy, uneven wall, but it had the appearance of a gaunt humanoid stretching out its arms and opening a featureless mouth. “Guys? I mean, girls? Er—ladies? A little help?!”

A cold feeling came over him. He could see his breath. Then came the sensation that something bad was about to happen, like the moment just before a strange dream pivots into a nightmare.

“HELP!” Kendrick screamed. The shadow lurched toward him.