The blue-white fire crackled with magical heat as a crescent moon peeked at them between the silhouettes of trees. The fire wasn’t actually burning hot enough to produce this color naturally, Sahni had assured Kendrick—it was magically enhanced with a spell meant to deter imps and shades, and hopefully mask their aura if anything bigger than that might be lurking in the woods that night.

Over the fire was a pot filled with stew. Usilde stirred it every once in a while until it was ready to be ladled into wooden bowls for everyone to take one at a time. Kendrick breathed in the soothing warmth and the fragrant herbs, sipping at it gently. A fine meal after a hard day’s work.

“S’pose I can answer that,” Usilde said finally, plopping down on a log next to the fire. “Put simply, I was doin’ quite a bit of nothin’ before the Rift opened. I was the town witch in a time of peace and I didn’t have much work back then. Mend a broken bone or a burn every now and then. Banish the occasional shade once every few moons—they really weren’t as much of a problem in that time. I blessed people’s homes. Blessed the farms once in sowing season and again at the harvest. We take for granted the uneventful times in our life.

“After the Rift...” Usilde sipped at the stew she had made, staring off into the dark forest. “After the Rift, weren’t such a cheery job no more. The shades were awful, awful pests, but nothin’ quite like the first night the imps descended on us. Lost a few of the animals. Easy prey for the little buggers. Almost lost Elziah that night, too. Imps, I’m sure you know,” she turned toward Kendrick for this part, “are a bit like horseflies, except they’re after aura instead of blood. It’s the nature of the Underworld, to take and destroy rather than to give and create, so forth. You get it.

“At any rate, Elziah had four on her when I finally found her. Hateful things. Could’ve blasted them all back where they came from but she woulda been caught in the crossfire. Took me Aldiel knows how long before I finally freed her and took care of ‘em. By that time, I couldn’t feel any aura in her, but she was still breathin’.” Usilde’s voice cracked at that and she cleared her throat. “Figured there mighta been some residue left behind, less than one but more than zero somehow. Any rate, that was the day she stopped talkin’. Has a glazed look about her now. But I still think I can see her eyes smiling on sunny days or when she sees a butterfly. Hard to believe she’ll be ten next moon.”

“That’s just awful,” Sahni said, hanging her head at Usilde’s story. “I’m so sorry to hear all this.”

Usilde slurped her stew loudly. “Odd thing is it was almost a relief to have to deal with nothing but shades. We’re so far from the Rift still that their forces are concentrated elsewhere. Not so lucky in those parts. But I don’t have to tell you two none of that, do I?”

Bellara shook her head. “No, you do not.” She took a moment to swirl the dregs of her stew around in her bowl idly and then heaved a deep sigh. “I can go next. I’m from the fishing town of Narmur off the southeastern tip of Kanthos. I had actually just gotten home from the Academy to spend the summer on the boat with my parents, helping them with the family business, when the imps arrived. They came in droves and latched onto any target they found. Adults. Children. Animals. Pilfering any crystals with aura in them or any other magical artifacts they could find.

“But that was nothing compared to what the demons did...” Bellara downed the rest of her stew in one powerful gulp. “We were long gone before the worst of it. Tried to get people out. There’s only so much that even a witch can do, you know?” Usilde nodded vigorously and with an empathetic look as if to validate the same sort of feeling she’d felt herself. “We made it to Kelgrin after a few days’ travel. Stayed there for another two moons before the Redrune Academy called on all former and current students to lend help where we could. Said that the following school year would be canceled, what with the Rift and all these infernal goings-on... I went back to the Academy thinking they would know just what to do, and that’s where I met with my classmate and old friend Sahni. We’ve stuck together ever since. Haven’t we?”

Sahni gave a bashful, bittersweet smile. “That we have.”

“We’ve been traveling to different towns on the border of the invasion ever since,” Bellara went on. “That border seems to be creeping steadily westward with each passing day. We witches beat back the Underworld where we can, but it’s a bit like plugging a dam with your thumb. No stopping what’s coming...” A long and uncomfortable silence elapsed after that. The fire crackled and spat sparks into the air that spiraled up into the starry sky above. “Why don’t you go next, Sahni?”

“Oh,” the blue-haired one murmured into her bowl mid-sip, “sorry, of course. Well, I’m from the eastern village of Earlyfrost, not far from the western coast of the Grandest Lake. It’s far, far to the east of here. We had bitterly cold winters and very humid summers, but it was a good life we had. I think so. I think they would say the same, too.” Kendrick thought he saw her eyes glisten in the glow of the fire. “The demons didn’t send anyone else to do their work in Earlyfrost. They just showed up one night and... Well, I suppose, if I really think about it, the one consolation that I have is that it was all over pretty quickly. The only downside is that I didn’t... I-I didn’t get to say... to say goodb—” In an instant, Sahni buried her face into Bellara’s shoulder, sobbing silently.

“Oh, dear,” said Usilde. “Poor thing.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bellara. “I thought it was getting easier to talk about. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”

“It was,” Sahni replied through her tears. “It was. It’s not your fault. I’m sorry I still can’t—”

“Don’t.” Bellara stroked her friend’s blue braids consolingly. “Don’t ever. Not for that.”

“We’ve all had hardships since the Rift opened,” Usilde mused. “Some more than others. S’pose maybe people on the westernmost coast of Varyngard maybe haven’t. Underworld’s spilled into nigh about everywhere else, though. Towns and cities keep fallin’ left and right. No tellin’ how much longer Oakenpost has left before we have to flee, too. Maybe all of Kanthos one day.”

Bellara shook her head. “We cannot let that happen.”

Kendrick tried not to stare as Sahni’s grief came pouring out her eyes and onto her friend’s shoulder. He suddenly felt more out of place than he had since arriving here, something like a tourist in a land that seemed to harbor so much misery. He was even afraid to take another sip of his stew, so deflated was the mood now around the fire, and he simply held it as it grew lukewarm in the bowl.

“Well,” said Usilde after a long while, “we’ve all answered your question. Now, just what was your life like before all this mess?”

He looked at Bellara, who waved her hand as to dismiss his worries. “I told her the basics. She knows. No need to keep a secret from her.”

“Okay,” Kendrick answered. “Well... As you know, I’m not from around here per se... In my world, I don’t know if we had magic. I don’t think we did. We had other things...” He thought of wearing his sunglasses and driving his car. “Things made of metal that made our lives easier for us.”

“How so?” Usilde asked with what appeared to be genuine curiosity. “You mean tools?”

“I guess you could say they were tools. But they were more than that. They... You don’t have cars here, do you?”

“Cars?” Bellara echoed uncertainly. “No, what’s that?”

“Do you have carriages?”

“Carriages, yes. Most are pulled by horses. Some special ones by magic, but those take a lot of aura to run. You usually only find those in wealthy cities, mostly in Varyngard or Alfrheine.”

“Where I come from, a lot of people could buy carriages made of metal. Carriages that could roll wherever we wanted to go.”

“But you said you don’t have any magic in your world,” Usilde contended. “How’d they do that, then?”

“It wasn’t magic. It was a thing called... science.” It felt like that word promised to unlock another threshold of memories for him, but then he lost that feeling in the back of his mind. The memories still wouldn’t come. “We had other things like that, too, made by science.”

“What powered these things?”

“Well, electricity, of course.”

The town witch held out her arms and chuckled. “You speak as if I know how such a thing could be! Electricity? What do you mean by that?”

“You know...” Kendrick racked his brain for a way to explain what he meant. “You know, like, lightning? When it rains?” The others nodded. “We put that in our tools to make them work for us.”

“Just like that, you did? Held ‘em up to the storm and they were stricken and then did what you wanted? Just any piece of metal in your world?”

“No,” he laughed. “No, not like that. They had to be built a certain way.”

“Could anyone do it?”

“No. People had to be instructed on how to do it. We had... There were places where people were taught just how to build them by following a long list of directions in order. They had to gather the right raw materials—we mined them from the ground—and put them together in just such a way in just the right sequence, and then when electricity was put into the tools, they did what we wanted. Sometimes we even made tools that could build other tools.”

“You’re tellin’ me,” Usilde said, leaning closer to him, “your people dug metal out of the ground, then followed a ritual involvin’ lots of your people to fashion the tools in a way passed down to them by learned masters, then put lightning in the tools, and then they did just as you commanded them?”

Kendrick nodded. “I guess you could put it that way.”

“Well, boy,” Usilde laughed uproariously, “what else is that but magic?” Then Bellara joined in and even Sahni, with creases under her eyes from crying, started laughing, too. Kendrick couldn’t help but follow suit. They all laughed heartily for a good while until they wiped much happier tears from their eyes, hands on their bellies from laughing with such force. “Ah, what a riot. Any rate, sounds like your land is not such a bore as you might think living in ours. What else can you tell us of it?”

The saccharine mood seemed to sour slightly once again and he missed a few moments ago before he felt this way. He thought of the white room. We need to get out of here. The look. The noise at the door... “If I’m being honest, I don’t really remember too much else.”

“That’s the harmonizing materialization as a result of the portaling effect,” Bellara explained. “Or at least that’s my understanding. It should clear up in time.” She was stern as ever once more, too, all the laughter wrung out of her like water from a cloth.

“Lass seems to know her stuff,” Usilde commented, polishing off the rest of the stew in her bowl.

The redhead smiled sadly. “Not as much as you might think. I’m just trying to do...” She gave Kendrick an apologetic look. She looked like she wanted to say more, even opened her mouth for a moment, but then just looked away. Another long silence followed.

They made more small talk until the first light of dawn crept up from the horizon and the fire was no longer needed. Then it was finally time to get on the road to their next destination, a neighboring town with an inn where Kendrick slept like a rock.