Nobody volunteered to go first.
Caelum had asked us something that sounded simple enough: tell him who we had been before we came to this world.
And suddenly, five people who had faced giant monsters, armies, demons, and several extremely unpleasant deaths had developed an extraordinary interest in the surface of the table.
Myself included.
It wasn't exactly that I didn't want to talk about Arthur. I'd already told Morgause quite a lot.
But doing it here, in front of the other four, felt different.
Blazer drummed his fingers against the arm of his chair. Elizabeth avoided looking directly at anyone. Sogard studied one of the floating diagrams with far more concentration than it probably deserved. Monkar remained completely still.
Caelum waited.
It didn't help.
Finally, Monkar raised a hand.
"I'll go first."
We all looked at him.
Monkar was probably the least dramatic person I knew. He could take a hit strong enough to send Blazer through a wall and react as if someone had accidentally bumped into him while waiting in line.
So when he rested his forearms on the table and spent several seconds staring at his own hands, I stopped smiling.
"I had a family on Earth," he said.
His voice was the same as always.
Calm.
Somehow, that made it worse.
Caelum didn't interrupt.
"My wife's name was Elena. We met when we were still pretty young. I was..."
Monkar paused.
"Well, I was an idiot."
Blazer breathed out through his nose.
"That I can believe."
Monkar looked up.
"Thanks."
"Anytime."
For a moment, some of the tension faded.
Just a little.
Monkar looked back down at the table.
"I worked too much. I thought that if I could make enough money, buy us a better house, and make sure we never lacked anything, then I was doing my part."
He intertwined his fingers.
"Elena used to say my problem was that I was always preparing to live later."
Nobody joked this time.
"After the next promotion. After the next project. After saving a little more."
A faint smile appeared on his face.
It wasn't a happy one.
"Always later."
Something tightened slightly in my chest.
Monkar continued.
"We had a daughter. When she was born, I thought I'd change, and for a while, I did. I tried to get home earlier. I kept my phone off during dinner. Sundays were for them."
He swallowed.
It was a tiny gesture.
But all of us saw it.
"Then Elena got sick."
Blazer stopped moving his fingers.
"At first, we thought it wasn't anything serious. Then came the hospitals. The tests. Doctors saying complicated things because they didn't want to tell us they had no idea what to do."
The room seemed to grow smaller.
Even Caelum had stopped looking at his papers.
"She died two years before I was brought here."
Nobody said anything.
Monkar took a slow breath.
"After that, it was just my daughter and me."
He lowered his eyes again.
"She was—"
BOOOOOOM.
The table jumped.
So did I.
One of the measuring crystals fell to the floor and shattered.
For a fraction of a second, nobody reacted.
Then everything happened at once.
The five projections of the summoning circles lit up so violently that I had to shield my eyes.
"Back!" Caelum shouted.
Another blast shook the building.
This time, I felt the floor move beneath my boots.
Not vibrate.
Move.
As if the entire structure had been shoved sideways.
The windows shattered.
William lost his balance and stumbled into a chair. Tess caught him by the arm before he hit the floor.
Blazer already had one hand on his sword.
"Tell me this was expected."
"It was not expected!" Caelum snapped.
"Excellent!"
A magical alarm began ringing somewhere nearby.
Then another.
And another.
Caelum sprinted toward the doors.
"The Central Chamber!"
Elizabeth grabbed her spear. Sogard was already moving. Blazer followed Caelum, and I went after them, with Tess, William, and the other messengers close behind.
Then I heard a voice behind us.
"Hey..."
I kept running for two more steps before looking back.
Monkar was still sitting there.
Alone.
His hands still resting on the table.
"But I was going to tell you about my past."
Another blast rattled the ceiling.
Monkar looked up.
Then at us.
He sighed.
Picked up his shield.
"Of course."
He stood and followed.
I couldn't help laughing.
Just a little.
The situation stopped being funny approximately twelve seconds later.
We rushed outside.
And I looked up.
"Oh."
That was all I managed.
The sky was broken.
I couldn't think of any other way to describe it.
Enormous lines of light stretched across the blue from one horizon to the other. Some were thin as scratches. Others looked like cracks spreading across a gigantic sheet of glass.
And inside some of them, there was no sky.
There was darkness.
Deep darkness, cut through by flashes of color that appeared and vanished too quickly to follow.
The streets around Central Hall were packed with people. Soldiers shouted orders, mages raised barriers, a carriage had overturned, and someone was crying near one of the entrances.
Caelum came outside behind us and stopped dead.
"That... shouldn't be possible."
"You're making me feel so much better," I said.
One of the magical circles installed in the plaza lit up.
Then another.
Then all of them.
Transportation points.
Communication seals.
Even the runes around a nearby fountain began to glow.
Caelum went pale.
It was the first time I'd seen him do that.
"No."
Blazer turned toward him.
"What does that 'no' mean?"
Caelum never got the chance to answer.
A woman running across the plaza disappeared.
There was no explosion.
No scream.
She was there.
And then she wasn't.
I stared at the empty space.
"...What?"
A guard appeared exactly where she'd been.
He dropped from half a meter above the ground, landed flat on his back, and immediately started shouting questions.
Then a horse disappeared.
Then an entire fruit stall.
A pile of apples appeared several meters above our heads.
"LOOK OUT!"
We jumped aside.
Apples rained across the plaza.
One hit me in the shoulder.
"Seriously?!"
Reality itself was collapsing, and it still found time to attack me with fruit.
Then more people began disappearing.
One.
Five.
Ten.
An entire group on the other side of the plaza vanished in a flash.
A tree appeared in their place.
An entire tree.
Roots and all.
It landed straight through one of the stone benches.
People started running.
That was a mistake.
Because nobody knew which direction was safe anymore.
"Stay together!" Caelum shouted.
Excellent advice.
It probably would have been even more useful about thirty seconds earlier.
I felt something beneath my feet.
A vibration.
Except it wasn't coming from the ground.
It was coming from me.
I looked down at my hands.
The same lines of light I'd seen around the summoning circles were crawling along my arms.
"Caelum."
He turned.
His expression immediately informed me that this was bad.
"Don't move."
"I was thinking exactly the opposite."
Blazer started glowing too.
Elizabeth.
Monkar.
Sogard.
All five of us.
Caelum raised a barrier.
Nothing happened.
William shouted something.
I couldn't hear him.
The sound was gone.
All of it.
The plaza was still full of people running and screaming, but suddenly it was like watching a moving painting.
I looked at Blazer.
He looked at me.
His lips moved.
He probably said something intelligent.
Or swore.
With Blazer, the odds were roughly equal.
Then I thought about Morgause.
I didn't know why she was the first thing that came to mind.
Well.
Yes, I did.
She was Morgause.
She probably occupied a medically concerning percentage of my brain.
But this time, I didn't think about her body.
Or her bed.
I didn't even think about kissing her.
I thought:
Where is she?
Light swallowed me.
And the world disappeared.
The next thing I felt was dirt in my mouth.
I opened my eyes.
I didn't move.
For several seconds, I simply stared at a blade of grass roughly three centimeters from my nose.
Then I spat.
"Ugh."
I rolled onto my back.
The sky was blue.
Normal.
No cracks.
That seemed like good news.
Probably.
I sat up.
"Okay."
I quickly checked myself over.
Two arms. Two legs. Ten fingers.
My staff was lying a few meters away.
My bag was still with me.
Five intact potions.
I looked at the sixth bottle, shattered against a rock.
"You will be remembered with honor."
I retrieved my staff and stood.
Then I looked around.
My optimism suffered a minor injury.
I stood on a hill covered in tall grass.
Below me stretched an enormous valley, cut through by a river glittering beneath the sunlight. Beyond it were forests.
A lot of forests.
And behind them, mountains.
I recognized absolutely nothing.
No tower.
No road.
No wall.
No city.
"Blazer."
Nothing.
"Elizabeth?"
Nothing.
"Monkar?"
Silence.
"Sogard?"
Only the wind.
"William?"
Some kind of bird answered from a nearby tree.
It didn't sound particularly useful.
I slowly turned in a circle.
"Anyone?"
Nothing.
I was alone.
Completely alone.
I looked toward the horizon.
Then at the ground.
Then back toward the horizon.
"Perfect."
Reality had exploded, and apparently my prize was a hiking trip.
I pulled the map from my bag.
Thankfully, it was still there.
I spread it over a rock and studied my surroundings.
There was one small problem.
I had absolutely no idea which part of the map I was looking at.
"All right, Nellie. Think."
Contrary to what certain people might believe, I had received actual training after being summoned.
Not all of my knowledge consisted of routes into Morgause's castle, fire resistance, and calculations regarding how long I could cling to the Demon Queen before she incinerated me.
I'd been taught navigation.
Map reading.
How to orient myself using the sun and stars.
How to use rivers and terrain as landmarks.
All the things a hero was supposed to know to avoid getting lost and dying in a forest.
I had paid attention.
Mostly.
Besides, Instant Movement was considerably less impressive when you had no idea where the hell you were moving to.
I checked the sun first.
It hadn't reached its highest point yet, which gave me a rough sense of direction.
Then I studied the mountains.
Two peaks stood out from the rest. One tall and narrow, the other lower but considerably broader.
I frowned.
Looked at the map.
Then at the peaks.
Then back at the map.
"No."
I found the river.
The water flowed southeast.
I looked at the mountains again, then at the small illustration beside one of the western regions on the map.
Two peaks.
The Vael River.
The Rhel Highlands.
I went still.
"No."
I brought the map closer to my face.
Maybe I'd read it wrong.
I turned it around.
Now north was at the bottom.
That didn't improve anything.
I turned it back.
"Come on..."
There was a perfectly reasonable possibility that the cartographer had made a mistake.
A small possibility.
A very small possibility.
An insignificant possibility.
A ridiculous possibility.
I held on to it for another thirty seconds.
It didn't work.
I let my forehead drop against the map.
"Shit."
Rhel.
I was in Rhel.
Very, very far from Valcrest.
The Rhel Highlands had once been part of the Kingdom of Caerwyn, one of those ancient kingdoms that, according to its own history books, had been glorious, prosperous, invincible, and apparently incapable of making mistakes.
Then it had discovered an extremely efficient way to stop existing.
A civil war.
Then another one.
Then three noble families claiming the same throne at the same time.
Eventually, the neighboring kingdoms did what neighboring kingdoms tended to do whenever someone destroyed themselves.
They took the useful parts.
Aldren had incorporated most of the territory much later, although "incorporated" was a fairly generous word for building a few military outposts, repairing two roads, and planting flags in places almost nobody wanted to live.
Rhel was still Rhel.
Mountains.
Forests.
Ruins.
Small isolated villages.
The occasional unpleasant monster.
And now me.
I found Valcrest on the map.
My finger had to travel an offensive amount of parchment.
I calculated.
Then calculated again.
Then tried a third time, hoping the numbers would feel guilty and change.
They didn't.
"...That's a lot."
On horseback, assuming the roads still worked and nothing tried to eat me, it would take quite a few days.
On foot...
No.
I refused to calculate that.
I had Instant Movement, of course, but there were two minor problems.
The first was mana.
The second was that using Instant Movement toward a place I couldn't see or didn't know well was an excellent way to materialize inside a tree.
Or a rock.
Or over a cliff.
I'd learned that last lesson once.
Only once.
I was a very quick learner when falling a hundred meters was part of the exam.
I studied the map again.
If I followed the Vael River southeast, I would eventually reach an old Caerwyn road.
That road connected to Rothen.
From there, I could find transportation, information, or some communication point that was still functioning.
After that...
Valcrest.
I stared at the name.
Central Hall.
The others.
And then I thought of something else.
Demon territory was even farther away.
My good mood dimmed a little.
If I'd ended up in Rhel...
Where had Morgause ended up?
I looked toward the sky.
For the last several minutes, I'd been too busy figuring out whether I was a hundred or a thousand kilometers from home to really stop and think about it.
The Rupture hadn't affected only the five of us.
I'd watched people disappear.
Guards.
Merchants.
Animals.
Objects.
An entire tree had appeared in the middle of Valcrest.
If the same thing had happened in other regions...
My grip on the map tightened slightly.
Morgause was powerful.
Ridiculously powerful.
I'd had plenty of firsthand opportunities to confirm that.
She was probably fine.
She'd probably watched a crack appear over her castle, frowned at it, and then threatened it until it closed out of fear.
That sounded like her.
I smiled a little.
"She's fine."
Saying it out loud helped.
"She's completely fine."
I paused.
"Probably."
Another pause.
"Definitely."
The wind stirred the grass around me.
As soon as I could contact someone, I'd find out what had happened in Valcrest.
Then I'd locate the others.
And after that...
Well.
I'd worry about everything else after that.
I folded the map and put it away.
Then I checked my supplies.
Five potions.
I opened another section of the bag.
Two travel bars.
I stared resentfully at one of them.
Those things tasted roughly like a wooden plank raised by emotionally unavailable parents.
"All right."
I reviewed my situation.
I was alone.
I was on the western edge of Aldren.
I had no idea where my friends were.
I had no idea how many people had been displaced by the Rupture.
I also had no idea whether the respawn-point network was still functioning properly now that space itself had apparently gone insane.
I had five potions.
Two terrible travel bars.
A limited amount of mana.
And a very large portion of the kingdom between me and home.
I carefully considered all of those facts.
"Could be worse."
Something cracked inside the forest.
I froze.
I looked toward the trees.
Silence.
I gripped my staff with both hands.
"I take that back."
I waited.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Nothing came out.
Eventually, I relaxed my shoulders a little.
Probably an animal.
Or a monster.
Or another person who'd been teleported.
Or a monster teleported from somewhere where monsters were considerably larger.
Excellent.
I adjusted the bag on my shoulder and checked the map one last time before putting it away for good.
The river would be my first landmark.
Then the old road.
Then Rothen.
And from there, I'd find some way back to Valcrest.
It wouldn't be fast.
It wouldn't be comfortable.
And knowing my luck, it probably wouldn't be particularly safe either.
But I could do it.
I'd survived worse.
Many times.
Some of them voluntarily.
I looked east.
Far beyond those mountains was Valcrest.
And even farther away was Morgause's castle.
I had no idea where she was now.
That thought wiped the smile from my face for a few seconds.
I tightened my grip on the staff.
"You'd better be okay, Morgause."
I put the map away, adjusted the bag over my shoulder, and started down the hill.
After a few steps, I smiled again.
"I'm not letting an interdimensional catastrophe ruin my love life before I even manage to have one."