You are changed.

There is fire in your blood, now, magic in your veins. Enchanted markings glide across your skin and nightmares stampede though the fields of your dreams. You’ve seen too much to ever be “normal” again—when you startle, it’s the daggers up your sleeves that you reach for, and when you speak, it’s with every phrase carefully worded against an unwanted contract. You skirt around threats that no longer exist, tread paths circling voids that habit says should be filled. Even that emptiness feels wrong, a trick-trap-wrong there must be something there—

There isn’t. That only drives home a single point: this world isn’t yours, not anymore.

You’re pretty sure it knows that, too, because you’ve been back for all of a week and it’s already trying to kill you. Not literally, because that’s not how this world works, but it’s suffocating. There are too many adults trying to wrap you up in soft blankets, trying to hide you away as they fuss about trauma and treat you like a helpless child.

Good intentions, to be sure, but unnecessary. Trauma is nothing new, and you’ve long since learned how to handle it.

What would be much better than all the awkward hovering, you think, would be going back to the support system you’ve already built, back to people truly aware of what you’ve gone through or who were there when you were going through it. At least they know exactly what they’ve gotten into.

So. You try to leave. Not immediately, but you start small: a hop off a street curb to a wood-shingled roof, a leap from a tree branch to the soft carpet of your bedroom, and so on. Your powers, at least, still work. That’s more of a comfort than it probably should be, but… well. You’ll take what you can get.

Except, when you truly try to vanish, when you step and feel reality shift around you—like stretching your stride a little too far, like trying to walk across a gap instead of jumping it—reality snaps back, a rubber band drawn too tight, and all you are left with is the sting of its recoil.

(Once upon a time, you would reach, and the world would meet you halfway. Now, it doesn’t seem to care any longer, and that hurts.)

You retreat from the now-alien life you were forced to return to, a bristling wolf slinking away to lick its wounds in peace. It’s easy to disappear when you can teleport, only showing your face (or a decent enough glamor of it) often enough to reassure people that you’re still alive. Those in your life are civilians now, all of them, and you have to remind yourself that they don’t understand. That you have to be patient with them, because they don’t know what you’ve seen and what you’ve done and you pray that they never need to.

Time flows on. You don’t stop trying to leave, though, because you don’t belong here any longer and everyone around you knows it. School rumors whisper that you don’t fit in, that you’re different, that you’re a criminal or doing drugs or something. Other students gossip about how you sit alone and watch the exits during class, how you keep odd hours and never talk to anyone unless spoken to first and the scars.

...The tattoos probably don’t help your image much, either. Your parents quite vocally made their displeasure about them clear, but it’s easy enough to ignore every too-loud word. You’ve got bigger things to worry about, after all.

The seasons change.

Winter falls in a crash of snow and storms, and every time you touch the frost that lays glittering crystals across your window, you remember.

You remember the way it crunched under your boots as you pushed yourself to travel farther and more precisely with each space-bending warp, its icy chill seeping into your bones and scraping over your throat with every breath. You remember stardust carving sculptures with an exhale and a touch of will, gleaming eyes with ice-dagger fangs bared in lunging attack. You remember haphazardly-decorated bowls and handmade mugs, their contents burning on your tongue and in your hands. You remember laughter and camaraderie and hearthstones warm with flame, orange cast dancing with the shadows on the walls.

(The colors of your memories are stained glass, faintly warped with sentiment but beautiful all the same. They’re prisms catching the sun to turn it to something more, light given form and shape and design and—

You can’t help but treasure them anyway, even when you know they’re viewed through a rose-tinted lens.)

You remember your family, the battles you fought beside them, the sticky-slick feeling of blood in the lines of your palms and drying in brittle flakes beneath your fingernails. It had been so vivid against the snow, all bright splashes of color on an empty canvas. Artful, almost, in a morbid sort of way. But… well.

War was distinctly less pretty.

You take a breath. The air tastes of smoke and smog and chemicals here, artificial things rising from artificial streets. It isn’t right. It isn’t—

It isn’t home.

You miss the places, the people that you’ve left behind. You miss the heady scent of herbs, a thousand plants you could never identify spilling over the rims of clay pots and creeping up old red-brick walls. You miss the taste of foods and spices that you’ve never been able to recreate, brilliant starbursts of flavor that linger ghostlike on your tongue. You miss the sound of the crystal falls, the songs of creatures that don’t exist here outside of fairy tales, the chatter of unknown yet familiar languages rising and falling in comfortable rhythm.

You miss his laugh, the play of morning sunlight over her armor, the way their knife-sharp grins turned downright vengeful when it came time to fight. You miss a lot of things, but most of all?

You miss your home. You miss your family. You miss your people.

You want to go back.

Here, in the forest depths, where redwoods stretch into the endless sky and creeks flow cold and clear over smooth-worn stones, you are the closest you can get to where you were taken from. It’s not the same, it’ll never be the same, but for the moment, it’s close enough.

You lean against a tree, bark rough through your shirt, and watch dappled light shift across the forest floor. Somewhere in the distance, a hawk screams. Perched on the branch above you, a songbird trills and ruffles its feathers. Greeting calls echo back, bouncing through the leaves, high and sharp through the fading mist.

Your mouth quirks up at that, the tense set of your shoulders softening. Unbidden, an image presents itself in your mind’s eye: bright wings black against a sunny sky and a darting, too-intelligent gaze, glossy feathers and thorn-prick claws and a beak that wouldn’t hesitate to draw blood.

Fearless, you think, and smile.

The bird chirps. Tail feathers spread, then fold back together. It waits half a beat, wind shifting the boughs just enough to cast it into a halo of light, and then—

There’s a flurry of wings, a dark shape against the blinding sun, and it’s gone.

You close your eyes and sigh.

One more try, you think, because there is fire in your blood and magic in your veins, hope cradled fiercely in the hollow of your chest. One more try. One more try. What’s the harm in trying, just one more time?

A pause. A heartbeat. You step, feel reality shift, deliberately overextend and sense it pushing back. But, this time…

There’s no snap. No pain. Just pressure, like walking through a waterfall, then a sudden lightness as your pulse skips a beat.

Did I-?

You take a breath. The air is cleaner than you’ve ever tasted, fresh and green with new growth and crisp wind. All around you, this world’s magic sings, and you can finally say—

I’m home.

When I was a younger, I never realized how reckless I was. Looking back, the seemingly overprotective tendencies of my parents and the adults around me made a lot more sense. I was old enough now to see that children were more fragile than they realized, but when I was that age, I had considered myself invincible. No wonder my parents always said that I gave them heart attacks.

What goes around, comes around, I thought, wry. Aloud, I asked, “Are you sure this is safe?”

My companion laughed, a sharp, rough sound akin wood cracking in a fire. Her scales gleamed red and gold in the sunlight, like the lanterns that lit up the streets on festivals. Lying coiled up with her limbs tucked neatly beneath her body, she appeared as regal as all the stories said.

At the edge of the mountain, her son curled his claws over the cliff’s edge and peered down. He was balanced on the knife’s edge between solid ground and empty air, the tip of his tail flicking with anticipation. I resisted the urge to rush over, scoop him up into my arms, and carry him back to safer territory where there was no risk of him falling to his death, knowing he wouldn’t take it well. Dragons learned by doing, and his mother had told me that this was how her mother had taught her how to fly—as had her mother’s mother, and her mother before that, so on and so forth.

“He will be fine,” Chieko assured me, whiskers twitching in amusement. “Besides, if he doesn’t fly, I will catch him. As will you, I suspect.”

I ducked my head, a bit embarrassed. “Well, he’s just a cub. With humans, our cubs are a lot more fragile, so we tend to raise them for longer. To me, he seems too young, but…” I shrugged. “You’d know better than I would.”

“Mm.” She still seemed amused. “Trust in his abilities. And in ours. He’s safe.”

We both looked back at Shou, who had crouched in a way that suggested he was about to leap. Sure enough, he narrowed his eyes—muscles tensing—and propelled himself off the mountainside.

Before I realized what I was doing, I had bolted to the cliff’s edge and was leaning over, heart in my throat. Below, I saw Shou flailing as he tried to figure out how to fly with no success. Chieko followed me at a more sedate pace, though when I glanced over at her, I could see that her shoulders were tight and ready to jump out and save him if the need arose.

Shou plummeted worryingly fast. “He’s not flying.”

“Wait for it,” Chieko said. “It took me a while, too.”

I gritted my teeth. If he didn’t pull out soon, he would hit the trees and be seriously hurt. “Chieko–!”

“Wait for it.”

The only thing that stopped me from ignoring her was our long years of friendship. I had trusted her time and time again; this had to be no different. She had to know what she was doing.

Chieko’s long neck curved over the edge of the cliff, the fur that ran along her spine rippling in the breeze. “Watch,” she told me as Shou fell.

Shou was almost past the point of no return. I knew that Chieko could still catch him, as she was the fastest flier I had ever seen, but fear clawed my heart out as it defied all logic and rational thought. I was so tense that I thought I might vibrate myself to pieces, wound tightly enough to shatter with the force of it.

Half a second passed, and then—

Shou flew.

The tension in me eased. The fear ebbed away as I watched Shou pull himself out of his dive and soar, twisting across the sky in the characteristic way that all dragons of his species shared. A distant snatch of his exhilarated cry was carried to us on the wind, even as he arced back around and skidded to a clumsy stop before us.

“Did you see that?!” he yelled, bouncing on his toes. “I flew!”

Chieko curled herself around him with a pleased hum. “Yes, I saw. That was a very good first flight.” Shooting me a mischievous look, she added, “wouldn’t you agree, Moriko?”

I let myself fall back in relief. “Sure,” I replied, and thought, That was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.

Chieko looked at me and laughed.

The memories come gradually—a trickle, not a flood, a thin line of sand through an hourglass that he doesn’t even realize is running low.

When Vincent is a child, he dreams of stardust and silver blades and a world that is saturated with vivid color, a world where the air is so crisp that it almost hurts to breathe. But he is a child, and thinks them nothing more than dreams, for the idea that they could be anything else simply does not occur to him.

As he grows, his dreams expand to encompass people. Vincent dreams of two other children just his age, laughing and playing and running by his side. The name they call him is not the name he bears in waking life, but somehow it fits like a well-worn glove all the same. These children grow with him, rounded edges becoming sharp and lean and elegant, all three bonded so closely that they function as one unit. It is then that he begins to wonder, thinks that maybe, just maybe—

After all, mere dreams would not be so constant or so detailed, would they? Surely these must be something else. If there’s even the slightest chance that they are real…

Well. There’s no sense in wondering about something that he has no control over. Time will tell, and all he must do is wait.

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One day, the trickle runs dry. The sand is gone, the hourglass still.

One day, he wakes—and knows exactly who he is.

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Vincent is sixteen when he meets a boy with the sun in his eyes and the stars on his fingertips. The boy has a face right out of his dreams; literally. Vincent knows that face as well as he knows his own, having watched it develop from childhood.

Or, well. He says meet, but it goes more like this:

Vincent is hurrying to school. It’s a frozen winter’s morning, his breath billowing out in thick clouds and what little exposed skin he has is numb. Never has he been so glad to be a sorcerer; if he was anyone else, he wouldn’t have the benefit of hidden warming charms sewn into his clothes.

Mind wandering, it’s little wonder than he doesn’t notice when he turns a corner and runs smack into someone who's pelting the other way, bodies crashing headlong into each other. He staggers back with a yelp, barely managing to keep his balance. The other teen is less lucky, all flailing limbs that end up sprawling into a hedge. At first, Vincent doesn’t see his face, hair covering the side of it and the keychains on his backpack swinging, but then—

Vincent freezes, because he knows those symbols.

(Protection in battle, good luck, warding away sickness, a high voice whispers in his memories, pointing out runes in a book that is yellow with age and far too big to comfortably hold in child-sized hands. These are the symbols of the gods.

The two on either side of him stare in awe, wonder etched in every line of their faces. Symbols of the gods, they echo. Wow.

Yeah, he laughs. Wow.)

The boy hauls himself out of the hedge, babbling apologies, but Vincent is too stunned to reply. Words die to ash in his throat, magic rising involuntarily to the surface as something in him shifts back into place. Like a piece that has been missing from a puzzle, slotting back into its spot after a long absence. Vincent reaches out with metaphysical arms to grasp the storm that whirls around the other teen, heart in his throat, and then—

Their eyes meet, and magic sings.

“My sorcerer,” the boy whispers, staring at Vincent like he is home. “Aranies.”

Vincent smiles up at him. “It’s Vincent now,” he says. “Kesevon. My king.”

“Then call me Roy.” The boy who was once a king draws Vincent into a tight hug, choking out a watery laugh. “You are here, you’re alive—how can this be?”

Vincent hugs him back, uncaring of the passerby that stare at them. “I don’t know,” he admits, “but we defied Death so many times that maybe it just gave up on us. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Roy snickers. “Only us, eh?” He lets Vincent go, grinning wide and bright. “If you’re here, and I’m here… do you think that Likana’s wandering around this world somewhere, too?”

Vincent blinks. “…You know, I can’t believe I never thought to check.” Without a moment’s hesitation, he casts out his senses like a fisherman’s net, feeling for the shining beacon that would be—

As one, both teens turn towards the edge of town.

“So,” Roy starts, already starting to move, “what do you think about skipping school today?”

Vincent falls into step beside him. “We won’t miss much. They’re all boring children anyway.”

Roy knocks his shoulder against Vincent’s, laughing. “Hey, be nice. We’ve got decades of experience on them.”

Vincent inclines his head to concede the point. “Fair enough.”

Side by side, the two of them set their eyes on the horizon and move to reclaim the third member of their triumvirate. The King has his Sorcerer. Now, they go to fetch his General.