Rusty dreamed of home.

He dreamed of rain soaking the Texas hardpan, of his mother humming as she cooked dinner with the drought-ending patter of the drops hitting the earth outside. He dreamed of his father tuning in to the Dallas Eagles game, and laughing with Ray Ray and his other brothers whenever they got a home run.

Rusty dreamed of his sisters, giggling and gossiping as they prepared for school in the morning, dreamed of putting down the milk bucket to wave to them as they filed out to wait for the bus in the pre-dawn light.

Rusty dreamed of Cyrus but not as he was now, battered and torn and missing an eye from the war that had chewed him up and literally burned him alive. He dreamed of Cyrus grinning down at him in his crib, playing airplane with him while he laughed, lifting Rusty high into the air and running while Rusty stretched out his arms and made jet noises as best as his four-year-old mouth would let him.

And Rusty dreamed of the wizard.

He had met many in his journey through this green and war-torn world, five in total. But the first one he’d met, Terathon, was the one he dreamed about. The tall man all in brown, with piercing eyes and a sardonic smile through a long, gray beard. Rusty dreamed of Terathon extending his hand and an invitation by the creek, so long ago. And no matter how Rusty tried to take control of the dream, to turn away and run from the mage who had so misused him, it never ended well.

Always, the dreams turned to nightmares. Sometimes Terathon would speak words of power, and explode Rusty’s already-fleeing brothers into piles of screaming guts. Other times, Terathon would catch him, and pull him through rippling rainbow madness into green and verdant hell. Sometimes dream logic would take over, and Terathon would laugh long and distorted and deep, while Rusty struggled to run, his footsteps slowing and stretching as if he was moving through mud.

There was no way to tell how long the dreams went on, flickering off and on like the stories his brother had told him of enemy contact on the wire. Trying to creep inside his mind like the North Koreans had tried to creep into their firebases, and Rusty had no barbed wire in his brain to stop the invading dreams.

But there was one small mercy, at least.

Rusty no longer had the enchantments he’d first cast in this world; the enchantments to give himself a perfect memory and total recall. Rusty didn’t remember all the details of the nightmares that plagued him.

So when he started the long journey of pulling himself out of unconsciousness, only a few images stuck with him. Like Terathon teleporting behind him over and over again, and stabbing him in the back with his knife. Or Terathon grabbing his right arm with a hand full of bees, and making it swell into a red, lumpy mass. Or Terathon throwing Gunther’s corpse in front of him, as Gunther twitched and writhed and rotted in real time, maggots exploding out of his eyes and mouth and nose like someone had turned on the maggot faucet in his head.

And then, it was done. Light replaced darkness, as Rusty blinked his eyes open, and stared upwards at cracked and mossy stone. He had come through the dreams reasonably intact.

When Rusty tried to move, though, he found that he couldn’t say the same for the rest of his body.

His muscles ached, and trying to stretch his arms was a huge mistake. A burning pain in his lower back made him shriek, and when he tried to roll over and grab at whatever molten chunk of lead was burning his way through his spine, his right arm gave out, tearing the bandages slightly. His face sunk into the moss, and…

Moss?

He inhaled green scent, coughed, regretted it more as the ache in his back throbbed, and almost blacked out from the agony.

But… at this point, Rusty and pain were old friends. He’d seen more of it in the last few weeks then he had in his previous twelve years back on Earth.

Slowly the memories crept back to him. And with them, came something else.

“Oh good, you’re awake!” said a familiar voice next to his head.

No. Not a familiar voice. A familiar’s voice.

When Rusty had claimed his first rune, it had unlocked a familiar. Roz, who took the form of a little Roswell alien. Roz only existed in his head, and claimed to be a part of his brain that the rune had given free will and the ability to think for itself. Everyone who got a rune got a familiar, and theoretically learned how to control their rune with the familiar’s help.

“Roz,” Rusty croaked. “What happened? Is my back okay?”

“So I missed a good chunk of it myself, because when you’re out I’m out, but… good news and bad.”

“Good?”

The little alien came into view, black unblinking eyes in a gray, smooth-skinned face. He leaned over Rusty’s head, looked down and patted his cheek. “The good news is that you’ve still got ONE kidney.”

“What? Why…” Feet were echoing on stone in the distance, hurrying closer. “Wha’ happen my kidney?” he slurred through clenched teeth. The pain was receding a bit, but slowly.

“Long story short, you used too much magic, boss. The rune drew more from your body’s life force. Gave yourself some gray hair, made your right arm muscles bulge up and burst the skin, and turned one of your kidneys into soup.”

That sounded horrible, but the mention of soup made Rusty’s mouth water. His stomach felt empty. He shoved it aside, found dim memories stirring again. Yes. He’d used the spell to save everyone. Everyone except Gunther, and he closed his eyes as he remembered the German boy’s horrible death. He’d saved the others, though. And the Lion, too.

The Lion…

“Um. That’s… something to talk about later,” Roz said, gesturing in the direction the footsteps were arriving from. “We’ve got company!”

Rusty moved his head carefully, closing his eyes and resting his cheek on the cool moss. He opened them in time to see a curtain billowing in a stone doorway, and a small, green-robed boy sweeping it out of the way.

“Ken!” Rusty tried to shout, but coughed as his throat dried up at the wrong time, and oooh, there went the back again.

“Rusty! Shit, don’t move.” Ken was short. Ken was half-chinese. Ken was from California, which was pretty cool.

And Ken had healing powers now, Rusty remembered. He’d claimed a rune of restoration from a wizard’s corpse.

“It hurts,” Rusty said. In the distance he heard more quick footsteps, getting closer.

But Ken was more concerned with explaining what had gone down. “Yeah, we couldn’t just heal your kidney. It was bad, cat. The amount it would’ve taken from your body to recover it would have killed you for sure. So they cut it out while you were unconscious, and I healed just enough to keep you alive and get you on the mend. On the plus side, your arm shrank down so… score one for the home team?”

“Good. Thank you,” Rusty said. “Can you heal it more?”

“Not till you recover more fat and flesh. We had to feed you broth while you were out, couldn’t do much to keep you from losing weight that the spell would take to restore your lost flesh. But.. according to our new friends, you might be able to do something for yourself. If you’re… Uh.” Ken bit his lip, and brushed his spiky black hair back, nervously. “Are you still Rusty?”

“What? What kind of question is that?” Rusty asked…

…and a thing that looked like a bundle of roots shaped into a vaguely feline form, a thing that wore a round mask of worn metal carved with vaguely cat-like features, strolled out from behind the curtain and sat, “tail” twitching, staring at Rusty.

“Be cautious in your answer, child,” it rumbled, in a voice that was entirely too deep for its size.

“Oh yeah, I should have mentioned THEM,” Roz stage whispered, pointing a thumb back at the monstrosity.

And honestly, it would have been a horrifying moment, if the creature wasn’t the size of a house cat.

A blink, and Rusty remembered. Remembered the great armored figure, the dark lord he’d been told over and over again that he and the others had to kill. The dark lord that they’d allied with, when the wizards betrayed them. And then, when some chucklehead with a gun had blown that dark lord away, the dark lord had betrayed Rusty and tried to take him over.

But Rusty had declined.

“They believe that the rebirth worked. They may slay you if you disprove their assumption,” said the Lion.

While this was going on, Ken was studying his face. “Well heck. It did work, didn’t it? Are you the Lion? Sir?”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Kind of…” Rusty said. “It’s complicated. I—”

“We!” Insisted the Lion.

“We’re still working it out. It’s… fine?”

“Uh-huh,” Ken said, neutrally. Then he turned to look, as the distant running feet became nearby running feet, and soon became another figure bursting through the curtained doorway.

He got a flash of blue and white check pattern, had less than a second to think Oh hey, that looks like one of my sister’s dresses, before Beth was hugging him and crying.

Ow! Oh ow. He bit down hard, felt his teeth grind, and tried to shift her so she wasn’t putting pressure on his spine. That was… ow.

“Beth,” he croaked.

His sister smelled like sweat and berries and bread, and her hair was tied back and held with spikes like golf tees that poked at him as he tried to shift and keep his eyes from getting gouged. It took her a while to stop crying, and he just let her get it out of her system. He kind of wanted to as well, but Rusty had been taught early on that boys don’t cry where other people could see them. So he snuffled a bit, and blinked as the hot pressure grew behind his eyes, but he managed to keep a little dignity. And if his cheeks were a little wet after, well, those were obviously HER tears. Yeah. That was the ticket.

She stared at him from a few inches away, her nose snubby just as he remembered it, and her face thinner in a way he didn’t remember. “Are you still you? They said you’d be the Lion now, but you’d still be Rusty, sort of! You have to be Rusty! Mom’s gonna kill you if you’re not Rusty!”

“It’s complicated. Yeah, I’m me, but he’s me too. We’re a we.”

Beth glared at him, and grabbed his ears.

“Ow!” Rusty tried to disentangle himself, whined a little as the spot formerly known as his right kidney throbbed.

“You listen up mister Lion, you better treat Rusty right! Or I’ll… it’s going to be bad!”

Off behind him, Rusty could hear the sound of the Lion snorting. Not in a mean way, but just amused.

“I like her,” Roz said. “Are your other sisters cool? Please say yes.”

“I imagine so,” said the Lion. “Tell her that I would not dream to mistreat the scion of such a fierce family.”

“He says he’ll be cool. He won’t start anything with me.” Rusty put up his hand, and squeezed her shoulder. “It’s all right.”

She put her hand over his, and her face sagged. The cheeks reddened even more, the tears on them oozing down as new ones threatened to blossom. “Okay. We still have to get home. The satyrs, they say that, well I mean…” she took a deep breath. “ Ran Tan the Meril Janniseva Dok did.”

It took a second for Rusty’s muddled memory to click the pieces back together. “The satyr girl?” he blurted.

“There’s a couple of those,” Ken said, off to the side of thing. “And boys, too. There’s like six or seven big families working for him, but they call them something else. Um…”

“Bandelos,” Beth said. “She’s from the Muir Bandelos. They’re like families but anyone can join or leave. You don’t have to be a satyr either, but most of them are. Except that there are tests and trials and things and she says I’m too soft. Not that I want to leave my family!” Beth added, hastily. “I just, I mean—”

“She thinks one of the satyr boys is cute,” Ken said, grinning widely.

He stopped grinning and ran for his life, as she came after him, squeaking in outrage with her fists swinging. Rusty heard the Lion chuckling now, in that deep, weird voice. Roz was cracking up too, and Rusty joined them, even if it hurt a little. His back was easing up, some. The laughter seemed to help more than it hurt.

It helped more than that. How long had it been since he’d had a good laugh? Stuck in this nightmare world, trained to kill a stranger he didn’t know… looking back on it all, he’d had precious rare moments to just relax, much less anything to amuse him.

This was good. And in that moment Rusty had never loved his sister more.

But he knew the moment couldn’t last, and in the meantime there was much to do. Rusty was already missing a few of the hard-won advantages that had saved his keister during his stay on this alien world. And he thought it would be a simple enough thing to get them back.

“You’re not wrong,” the Lion told him. “But when you start casting spells, you will have many people drawn to you. My allies… your allies too, now, are doubtless waiting for my resurrection, and watching for signs that we are active. They will assense your use of magic and come to discuss the way forward. And if we show weakness or hesitation, then it shall go poorly for everyone here.”

“So we can’t cast spells?” Roz asked. “What’s he supposed to do? Besides, these two haven’t exactly been quiet. Someone’s gonna come sooner or later.”

“We must talk, privately and swiftly,” the Lion said, padding around into Rusty’s field of vision. There were window-like holes in the mossy stone of the side wall, and in the greenish light that filtered in, the Lion’s mask shone bronze. “I must tell you what you need to pretend to be me until we can have a longer discussion. Can you tell your friends to leave you alone for a little while?”

Rusty thought it over.

The Lion had seemed like actually a pretty swell guy, up until the moment he’d tried to possess Rusty. He was pretty clearly a monster. But the satyrs were working for him, and Ken and Beth might be in trouble if the satyrs knew what was really going on. And there were the grach, and evidently they weren’t that bad or something, but Rusty didn’t know what was going on there… yeah. Rusty decided that yeah, for now he’d play along.

“Thank you,” the Lion said.

“Oh yeah, if you haven’t figured it out yet, he can read your thoughts like I can,” Roz said. “I think it won’t hurt if you send them away, just uh, think up an excuse or something. Like you have to poop! That should work! Nobody likes seeing other people poop!”

The lion turned his mask toward Roz. “I envy you your naivete.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Are you decided, Rusty?”

“Yeah,” Rusty said out loud, realized he’d meant to think it.

“That is why it needs to be private,” the Lion said. “In your state, it’s hard to keep thoughts and words separate.”

“Rusty?” Beth said, leaving off from the industrial-strength noogie she was giving Ken. “Are you okay? Do you need something?”

“I think I need to sleep.” Rusty eyed both the Lion, and Roz, who’d padded over to join him. “I’m seeing double.”

“Sorry man. We’ll give you some space, and stop bashing your ears.” Ken got up and dusted himself off. “Maybe line up some proper grub, too. Sound good?”

“Sounds good,” Rusty said.

He took the opportunity to look around the room. The pain in his back had faded to a dull roar, enough to let him shift slightly and move his head.

Moss-covered slabs filled a rectangular room. The walls were bare stone, and trails of vines traced music-like scores along them. Windows, hexagonal-cut into the stone revealed walls that were many feet thick, and a view of the greenish sunlight that seeped in from an overcast sky.

Rusty thought he knew where he was. When last he’d been awake, they’d found the Lion occupying a crumbling ruin, a place of cut stone slabs somewhere between a castle and a tower. He remembered that because of that “Two Towers” book he’d read with Cyrus, back during those long evenings in his brother’s workshop, keeping Cyrus entertained while he worked endlessly on his scope.

“This ruin is the gate,” the Lion said. “If it falls to the Unicorn’s forces, then this world is lost.”

“I thought that place at the pyramid was the gate?” Roz hopped up to sit next to Rusty as he spoke.

“No. It is a thin place. They opened a world door there.”

Rusty bit his lip as the place his kidney had been throbbed. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be awake,” he confessed. He’d lied to Ken and Beth, but now maybe it wasn’t a lie. Though he’d just woken up, he had no energy left. And while maybe he wouldn’t sleep, not really, he thought he might not be that useful if this went on too long.

“Then let us make this short,” the Lion said. “I do not have to tell you everything now. And in fact I shall not tell you everything, in the event that you fall, and your secrets are torn from you. You do not need to know everything; only enough to convince my allies that the transferral has happened without issue. The rest can be imparted later, when we come to more equitable terms.”

“Why should I trust you?” Rusty blurted out. “You tried to take me over!”

“I had to. My only other potential vessel was already stepping through the portal. I would not have finished in time, and… that one dreaded me. I would not inflict myself upon him, lest he fall to despair.”

“You sure didn’t have a problem inflicting yourself on Rusty,” Roz said. “Now it’s crowded in here! You’re really big, you know that? Where am I supposed to put my record collection now?”

“Record collection?” Rusty asked.

Immediately, Roz snapped his little stubby fingers, and a jukebox materialized next to him. Roz pulled a nickel out of thin air, and put it in, and the arm lifted and slid a vinyl platter onto the turntable. The first few notes warbled out, and Rusty shook his head, ignoring the pain. “No! No no no, that’ll be stuck in my head for days. No Rock Around the Clock, please.”

“Fine. Sinatra it is then.” Roz fiddled with the buttons… up until the point the Lion started stalking his way, then he backed off, fast.

“Child. Focus, I beg you,” the Lion said, staring up at him, amber eyes glinting in the beams of sunlight that cut through the mossy room. “Remember this, if nothing else. Our allies in this realm are fourfold: The satyrs who followed our banner after the betrayal of the elves. The grach, whose home this is, freed from their sorcerers through struggle in ancient days. The duskwraiths, who cannot exist if the gates are opened. And one more… you will not have to worry about her, for a time. She holds the eastern way, and we need her there. But eventually I will tell you of her, for she will be the most likely to see through our ruse.”

“What ruse? You’re still here, right? You’ll be telling me what I need to know. It’s not like I killed you, or anything,” Rusty said. Or did to you what you were going to do to me, he thought, but decided not to say it.

But he couldn’t hide his thoughts from the Lion. The creature looked away, and Rusty thought its root-face body hunkered down in shame, just for a moment. Then it straightened up again. “Be that as it may, they will expect you to know what I know. And it will take time to communicate such things to you. Moreover, our allies will be watching for spellcraft, since you have brought stormfolk in as allies.” It nodded over to where Ken and Beth were sitting and talking, through the blanket. “They will be suspicious. So you may not use your rune of memory to alter their thoughts, if you make a mistake.”

“I wouldn’t anyway!” Rusty said, hotly. “Not without a good reason, I mean. Not unless they were jerks.” he added, a bit more quietly as the conversation outside stopped.

A new voice rose, low and deep. Not as deep as the Lion’s, who had abandoned its relaxed stance and was tensed, tail flicking. “That is Omen, of Raster. He is the speaker for their Bandelo. He should not be here, not yet. Something has gone wrong!”

No sooner had he finished, when the curtain parted, and a tall figure moved through, crouching so that its horns would not tangle. It was over seven feet, and had the body of a weight-lifter, with a barrel chest covered with scars, and a furry lower half supported by thick, backwards-jointed goat legs. His hooves clattered on the floor as he approached, and the long cloak which was his only clothing rattled with bone and brass charms. He had long eyebrows which twitched as he looked down on Rusty, and a pointed, curvy chin that moved like a puppet Rusty had seen once, as he spoke.

“Great One. You must rise. The elves march, and the western flank shall crumble unless we rally it. If you cannot join the fight, then we are lost.”