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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.