The air was still. Ellie and Shannon were silent in return. The little creature was quiet and staring forward patiently. Parentally. Waiting for an answer without assumption of intelligence. Neither Ellie or Shannon seemed particularly inclined to speak up at that very moment. They had gotten nervous, clammed up. Ellie’s fists were balled up tight and she was biting her bottom lip. Shannon was very still. She was breathing slow and heavy.

This was unfortunate, because Pandora had never claimed to be the socially apt friend.

“Hi.” She said. She hadn’t fucked that up. It was pretty hard to fuck up. Her voice did waver just a bit, though, and the tone was less than friendly.

Thoughts to mull over when not faced with a motherly magic mammal. Filed away under how do greetings work? for later dissection.

She wasn’t even scared. Really. Just uncertain. About what to say, when to speak. But again, that wasn’t a just-this-situation thing. She was used to those feelings by now. But the bitch of it was, it never seemed to get easier despite the frequency. Man.

The creature seemed to smile at the short response even though her face didn’t move at all. Her whole aura seemed to get happier. Delightfully scary. Leaning more towards one for Pandora and the other for Shannon and Ellie, said the silence.

“I don’t know how much of a help this will be, but you don’t need to be scared.” She said. Both Ellie and Shannon remained scared. This was a very big ask for someone who wasn’t Pandora. Ellie was withdrawing like she normally did in most situations. Shannon tended towards something so different it was polar, though. Ellie and Pandora hung back; it felt like the natural formation. They were the base of this friendship triangle and Shannon formed a very vocal tip that they often took for granted but never regretted.

“You’re going to have to prove that.” Shannon said.

Which Pandora was frankly thankful for. Again, no fear head empty and all that; she just had two to twenty trains of thought riding through her head at any given picosecond in this scenario and they were attempting very violent and fiery crashes when she wasn’t focusing solely on them. These trains were named things such as why are we here and how are you doing such things and what are you, ma’am?

“Gladly. Tell me how I can make you feel more at ease, and I’ll do it, within my power.” Shannon seemed to be taken aback by this. Pandora made a well-educated guess that Shannon had no way in mind for this statement of civility to be proven.

“What is that?” Pandora interrupted. “Your power.”

“That’s a broad question.” The fox-mom responded. Pandora reoriented her brain to focus the inquiry.

“What is this?” She gestured around, arms encompassing blue light and still air and statue-grass.

“Without getting too in the weeds with terminology, because I know you girls have places to be and we could be here for hours otherwise, it’s a pocket dimension. I own it, as far as anyone can own anything like that. It’s not very large; the borders don’t even reach the edge of the forest.”

“Please just hold on a minute.” Shannon said roughly. She was looking through the creature that aesthetic-d like a prize from a Pokémon vending machine, but the way she was hovering her shushing finger between where Pandora stood and where the general space of the motherly-vulpes began made it clear she was talking to both parties. Pandora attempted to steer those trains once again in the following silence.

“Let us out of this place and I will be a lot calmer about talking to you.” She shot a level gaze at the creature. Her lips were pursed. Pandora noticed the little shakes running through the now-being-lowered-from-an-accusatory-point hand, like someone was playing piano on Shannon’s tendons.

“I assumed you had places to be. Time doesn’t move in here, so I thought it would be more convenient.”

“I don’t really care.” Shannon responded. This could be read as off-the-cuff and casual. However, Shannon combined pissy exasperation and fear in appropriate quantities to really sell the tone. Potentially just a you had to be there sort of thing.

The thing nodded slightly and then inclined her head. Wind tickled skin like the first few centimeters of a worn horse-hair brush. Gentle, but still shocking to the nerves after dead stillness.

Shannon took a deep breath and the warm forest air had an effect on her. Her eyes softened tonally without much real change in physicality, and her mouth had colour juice back into it as the thin line of lip-to-lip pressure gave way.

“What’s your name?” Ellie asked softly. Pandora and Shannon both turned to look at her. As if to say, “Ellie can speak?” Which is a stupid question. Statistically, most humans can.

Ellie was still tense. Hands still in fists. But the question showed that there was still some calmness beneath all that tightness.

“Lady.” She said. Ellie nodded at that.

“Hi.” She said, minutes after the initial greeting from Lady. Pandora had an errant thought of how Ellie had really just copied her attempt at a lame greeting. Then she made it go away. Lady glowed with that feeling of a smile again. It was contagious.

“Why are we here?” Pandora asked in the break that followed that.

“I sensed your girls presence in this particular spot. It was faded, but legible. It was one of the only places you seemed to frequent that wasn’t full of other people, so I thought it was appropriate.” A literal interpretation of the question. Not what Pandora had meant, but knowing was said to be half the battle. And she wanted to know the fuck out of this situation.

“We just happened to wander out this way while you were here?” Shannon asked. Her arms were crossed now.

“Luck played a part in it. This clearing has been a temporary residence of mine for a week or so, I think. I was going to give it another day or two and then try something else.” Shannon arms got even more crossed at that answer. The crossing of limbs yielded diminishing returns, but it wasn’t stopping her.

“You wanted us? Specifically us?” Pandora asked.

“Yes. Well, no. I didn’t. Someone did, and then I was sent here, and then I was told to find you. I think that’s how it usually goes.” Lady’s tail was moving back and forth in small motions now. It was rustling the grass as it went.

“I would like to play this game of twenty questions in a more comfortable mental space, okay Socrates?” Pandora took that as a dig and ate it silently. She was pretty sure Socrates was a very old Greek dude that was connected to intelligence in her head somehow. She didn’t think she was being insulted for being Greek or old, considering neither of those were factual statements. So she just let that one go.

“Please tell me why you are here in this town and what you want from us that was so important you were sent here to find us.” The interruption jarred Pandora a bit. More silence. Time to look to Shannon and put hands on those trains.

“You three have inherent qualities that attracted something important. You’re going to want more details on that aspect but I can’t give them to you. I wasn’t told what sort of great traits you possess, or who recognized them inside you,” before Shannon could speak, Lady continued:

“There are things none of you know about. After I tell you this, even if you don’t go forward with what I want, you’ll see beyond the veil. You’ll see creatures you thought were only in books. The Fae and spirits of the elements and ghosts of mortals since passed from this realm. You’ll notice the mages who use deals to barter with these creatures and gain power you three see in films and fantasies.”

Shannon was looking at her impassively. Stone faced. If this was anyone else, anywhere else, it would end with the same energy she gave peddlers that had the gall to hand her small religious pamphlets of questionable origin. A politely awkward greeting-slash-goodbye and immediately throwing everything she had been given into the trash. Both mentally and physically.

But the disappeared blue light and the sudden reappearance of wind on command really sold the whole thing.

Ellie was wide-eyed and blinking. Her hands were still fists hanging at her sides. She was grabbing a bit of her shorts between her knuckles and palm now. Ellie wasn’t dumb or gullible. But she was more willing to believe things and then be embarrassed if they turned out to be lies.

And Pandora was feeling something. It wasn’t whatever peace came with her walks around town and her music in her ears and the time she spent in the dark in her bed. Excited. She was excited. It was something that wasn’t going to school and coming home to her dad and then going to school and coming home to him again, with one more additional thing to place on the pile of things Pandora was lectured about.

“There are people who fight all this. Despite the look beyond your small world they remain wholly human, unwilling to change. They use whatever they can to hunt and kill dangerous things for whatever reasons they have. To answer your question, that is what I want from you; to fight. But not like that. These hunters, they train from a young age, which you three have not. You would die, and that is not the outcome I desire.”

“What do you want?” Pandora asked. Hadn’t even really meant to. The words were quietly unintentional and spoken between shuttered lips. They’d just slipped out, an intrusive thought given physical weight.

But she wasn’t scared. It wasn’t the muted tones of being fearful. She was thinking that an hour ago, she had been fighting off the images of her in Atwood, circa twenty years from now, stuck in another schedule she didn’t care about. An hour later, that image was being shattered like a metal boxing glove to a glass pane.

“I can’t tell you all there is in this world. The creatures that roam it are immeasurable. But I will leave that fight to the mages and the hunters who desire it. Because there are even more powerful things that lie in the spaces between the pieces of this world. They can’t be labelled like the vampires or the ghouls. They are old and ever-changing, and that is where their power lies. They cannot be fought with the guns and traps of the hunters or the small hordes of magic the mages build. I want you three to accept this simple deal: great power accompanied by the responsibility that goes with it.”

They all looked at Lady for a few moments. Ellie said nothing, as thinking it over slowly was her brand. Shannon said nothing because her brain was a overheating like an improperly cooled computer tower. And Pandora said nothing because she hated being the first to speak.

“I need you to go into some more detail, because this is close to just shutting my brain down.” Shannon said. Lady didn’t respond for a couple seconds.

“What would you like me to explain?”

Now it was Shannon’s turn for silence. Pandora could see thoughts forming on her face, which was a rare sight for her. Ellie spoke before she could.

“What exactly are we fighting?”

“That is difficult to answer in specifics. Old things. Things that have been around since fire and light created this universe. If left unhindered, they will be around until fire and light consume it.”

“They’re-,” Pandora struggled for a word that didn’t sound lame,” Powerful?” That was still lame.

“Yes. That power varies. Sometimes they can draw others into their realm. Sometimes they send things out to cause chaos or bring others back. But inside the spaces they reside, they are all-powerful.”

“And you expect us to fight these things and win?” Shannon asked. Pandora could tell she was starting to catch up to the speed of the conversation, because her anti-bullshit tone was making itself apparent. Zero to a hundred in ten seconds. She didn’t know enough about cars to compare Shannon’s brain to a nice one.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Not as you are. Humans are like motes of dust to these things. Even the powerful mages of this world would be slaughtered like insects. The power they draw on is finite and requires rituals and limitations.”

“Yours doesn’t?” Ellie asked softly. Not as scared, anymore. Curious. Feeding off the energy of her friends, which was moving from the apprehensive side of the dial to something less meek.

“I draw from whatever sent me, and you draw from me in turn. To your comprehension, this well is bottomless. It requires no bindings or symbols to access, and no words or incantations to use.”

“Okay.” Shannon said. Not an agreement. Just acknowledging the statement. She understood. She was in the know. She continued after a deep breath.

“You said it was a deal. We get this power, and we use it to fight, but what’s the upside for us? Power is nice, but I don’t want power for power’s sake. That’s not me.”

Lady seemed to think on this for a few seconds. She tilted her head back and forth and swished her tail.

“I do not have an answer that will satisfy you, I think. You three have been tapped because something was seen in you that could do good for this world. This is not something I will force on to you. It is yours to decide, just as any role of protector should be.”

Shannon nodded at that. She pursed her lips and looked down. Thinking hard. Her arms were still tightly crossed. You could slip some coal between her torso and her biceps, and just maybe a diamond would pop out.

“I think-“ Ellie began, stopping as they all turned to look at her. She took a small breath, “I think that I would say yes.”

Shannon blinked in surprise at that.

“Me too.” Pandora said. Shannon turned dramatically to look at her. Betrayal and shock. Wow.

Pandora had found- an in? an out? A door to something else? There was a lot of terms for it that she couldn’t decide on. She was told she didn’t care about x so often that it was like spilling water in your lap during a downpour. X, in this equation, could be solved as school or university-slash-college or a career. She couldn’t stand to think that far. To think of the same routine for the next five years, and then an equally routine sort of routine for the next fifty or sixty or seventy (probably closer to forever, with how Ontario was looking. Would retirement even exist when she came of age?) years.

“Stop. I’m not agreeing to this yet, we haven’t even talked about this, just us.” And that was what worried her. Shannon was very good at talking. Pandora could see her talking them out of this. And Pandora resenting it, blaming her best friend for a what-if that got away until they both perished.

“If we don’t say yes right now, will you leave?” Ellie asked Lady. Lady shook her head at this.

“Your friend isn’t wrong. This is a big change. Take a day to talk among yourselves. I will be here when you get back.”

Shannon seemed satisfied at this. For the first time in a few minutes, her arms hung at her sides. The chance for that diamond, gone now.

“Tomorrow. At the same time. We’ll answer then.” Shannon said, looking to Pandora and Ellie. Pandora looked down at her phone as she pulled it out. She nodded. Ellie did as well.

“I shall see you three then.” Lady said. The girls turned and breached the tree line. Lady sat under the sparse leaves of the old tree, fur blowing in the wind.

No one spoke for a few minutes. They walked and crunched and snapped along until they hit the edge of Atwood. Shannon only spoke once she took in the small town noise and hot sun and familiar buildings.

“That doesn’t give me a good feeling.”

“Why?” Pandora asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t had time to organize my thoughts yet because my brain feels like it was blown up, but I don’t like the permanence of it.”

“Do you have a problem with it? With what we’d actually be doing?”

“Uh, fucking yes. She said these things live in the cracks in our world or something, that sounds so insane, Pandora. That sounds like where things go to die.” Shannon’s arms were crossed again. But she didn’t hunch her shoulders or draw herself in when she did it. She was still standing tall, shoulders back, looking strong.

“But it sounds like we would be helping people.” Ellie said.

“You’re going to med school. I don’t think you’re against helping people.” Pandora added.

“Jesus, guys, that’s not my fucking issue with this! What’s going to be the cost of that? When I become a doctor, I’m going to be giving up a lot of my time to care for people in need. That’s so far from risking my life and diving into some hell world that it’s comical.”

Neither girl could dig up a response to that. Worry of bodily harm was a fair point of contention. Pandora silently wondered if her lack of worry should be worrying in-and-of itself.

“I still want to do it.” Ellie said, lips pursed and eyebrows pulled together.

“Why?” Shannon asked.

“Because Lady said people were drawn into these places. Imagine what it’s like for them in there, without whatever power Lady is giving us. They can’t do anything, from the sound of it. But we could.”

Shannon uncrossed her arms and cupped her hands and put her face in them. For a split second Pandora’s hackles raised from none to done because she thought her friend had burst into tears. The rarity of that from Shannon made the uncomfy meter go up even higher. She needed to leave but that would also make her a huge asshole.

But then she started rubbing her face and pandora could see she was just exasperated without a trace of much sadness or moisture.

“I don’t think I can have this argument right now, in the field behind the convenience store. My brain feels like it’s in pieces and I’m already fucking tired, and it’s only five.”

Ellie and Pandora waited for her to finish her thought. The could sense the thinking still happening.

“Can we sleep on this? Meet up for breakfast or lunch tomorrow and talk?” Shannon asked. Ellie nodded.

Oh. That had been an unexpected turn. Pandora had been banking on another handful of hours with friends. Or maybe even a sleepover. Could have avoided going home completely.

“Yeah.” She said neutrally. There was a few seconds of feet-scuffing and looking at shoes before they said good-bye. Once they were out of sight, Pandora grabbed her chaotic and tangled snake of earbud wires and charmed them into a straight line. She occupied one ear with music and begrudgingly began an unwanted journey.

The door was unsurprisingly unlocked. Pandora’s dad wouldn’t go anywhere but the store when the couch and the TV were in his living room, and it wasn’t grocery day yet. Maybe if the furniture and electronics were attached to a parade float and sent down the busiest street in town, he’d finally get out of the house.

“Hello?” Her dad called out. From the living room.

“Hi.” Pandora said. She was practiced in slipping her shoes off without much fuss, which let her get up the stairs and into her room without any more words exchanged. She tried to keep that to a minimum. Stairs to the left of the front door, bedroom to the left of the stairs. Et voila, her own space. Safe, once the door was shut behind her. She dropped her bag and didn’t spare it another glance.

She stood in the center of her room and stared at not much of anything for a few moments. It was small-ish. With your back to the door, her bed was tucked into the corner to the right, underneath the windows. Her dresser acted as a footboard. Across from that setup, a desk and a conglomeration of light wood planks that could kind of hold books if they weren’t too heavy. Beside that, a tiny closet that required the constant giving-away of clothes.

The curtains were slightly open, from her bumping and tugging them with stray body parts in morning dark. Seventeen years and she couldn’t wake up without the gyroscope inside her chest needing minutes of calibration. She gently closed them. Made sure the edges were touching before she let go. She snaked her arm (that was getting a bit too grown-up big for this maneuver now) between desk and wall without disturbing the peace of the curtains again. With a plastic sort of flick, the switch hanging from white wire brought a hot ember glow to strands of bulbs above the bed. The only decorative thing in her room, giving off just enough light to see what she was doing without becoming an annoyance.

Her not-completely-full sketchpad was sitting on the corner of the desk. She picked it up. Let a pencil and eraser roll off and tried to guide them to the desktop. They hit the wood with two very distinct sounds.

She thumbed through the pages quickly. Saw small sketches of Ellie and Shannon. Nothing more than little pictures in the corners of actual projects. More detailed drawings of things she found cool. A bird that had landed on her windowsill and stayed for an almost suspiciously long time. Some attempts of practicing hands at different angles. Different sets of eyes. They looked a bit too cartoon-y to her.

She found the next blank page. Grabbed the discarded pencil and eraser and sat on the edge of her bed. This tended to be accompanied by the throwing-away of jeans and the clothes-of-the-day so she didn’t associate her bedroom with the outside world, but she didn’t want to turn this into a thing. Just lay down a base for the lately-very-rare feeling that was projecting from head to hand.

Her foot tapped as she drew. It had been a while and the pencil felt awkward in her hand. Sometimes it felt like she assumed a sword felt to a master warrior, an extension of her fingers. Easy to push along the page. Right now it was actively fighting to do everything she didn’t want. Maybe it would have been more helpful to try to draw a fruit and see if her desired outcome would appear by happenstance. But it helped that she had a picture in her head. Lady began to form on the paper in broad, light lines.

Then her stomach made tiny, angry noises, and she put the book and pencil and eraser down on the bed (where they would inevitably get lost in the covers and require her to strip the bed to find them) and swung her feet a couple times. Blew a raspberry. Then stood up.

Her room always felt comfortable. There was a sense of something weird underneath that, because if her dad knocked she couldn’t really just tell him to go away, which broke the illusion she tried to set up in her head, the invisible and tenuous wards against the rest of this building’s atmosphere. But it wasn’t the rest of the house. It was hers. She didn’t feel like she was aware of every movement she made.

So she sighed through her nose as she opened the door and made her way down the stairs. Always swung the door closed behind her. Learned behaviour from impromptu lectures given in the living room or the kitchen or the room itself, wherever her dad caught her when he’d see some dishes on her desk while passing by the door.

She had been right earlier. They had cheese and they had crackers. Saltine crackers, which, not a favourite. But she was hungry and impatient and sometimes that required eating like a frat boy. And she didn’t want to spend time watching something cook. If she sat here it would end in words pertaining to homework not done or some poor performance in some aspect of the life she lived. Chores, grades, exercise, what she ate. If she left something cooking to sit in her room, she’d probably miss the timer. And there is the illusion broken once again, when she’d be told from the doorway without a knock about how she couldn’t just leave things cooking, and has she done this or tried that yet? Which was just a long journey to get to the same destination as option one.

“How was your day?” Her dad asked from the kitchen doorway. He was walking in, going for the fridge. She double checked quickly to make sure the crackers were back and the cheese was in it’s proper place after both had left her hands maybe five seconds ago. They were. No words about that.

“Good.” She said, grabbing a flat, shallow bowl and putting in the row of crackers and hunk of cheese. A plate would have been ideal, but it was the first dish her hand had touched.

“You’re eating when I’m going to put dinner on.” It should have been a question but it wasn’t. A statement, interrogator to perpetrator.

“I’m hungry.” She was making her way to the other door now, where she’d come in. Nate would have just walked away.

“I’m gonna end up throwing out this food, because you won’t eat it now and you don’t seem to want to eat leftovers.”

Sometimes the things he said were true. It was like having a terrible opinion on crime statistics. Sometimes you get to the correct conclusion through the completely wrong deduction. She didn’t always hate leftovers, she just consistently managed to forget that they were there when everything was in the same clear container with a red top. Which was on the rare occasion she decided to go searching for things to eat.

“Sorry.” She said. Automatically. Nary a thought before the word came out. She waited for a comment on that but it didn’t come. She was arched awkwardly around the doorway now, like she was trying to have as much physical presence outside the space as possible while still being involved in the conversation.

“That’s also a lot of crackers. And cheese. Lunch was a few hours ago. If you ate better, threw some protein into your meals, you’d probably be full for longer.”

“Sorry.” Automatic. Like a robot. And now there definitely had to be something-

“You say sorry or you shrug and I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. It’s not an answer.” He said. It didn’t feel like a complete thought. There was stuff left unsaid from all the previous interactions. Pandora was consciously thinking Don’t say sorry halfway through his statement.

“I’ll eat dinner when I get hungry later.” She said. She was staring at the dish in her hand as she said it.

“Thank you.” He said. She couldn’t tell if he believed her, and couldn’t tell if it mattered sometimes. Theoretically, she was doing what he wanted in this moment. If she deviated later, he’d deal with it later. Which was fine with her, because she just wanted to get out of this moment.

Honestly, she didn’t even believe her. If she was hungry later, she’d just nibble on leftover crackers.

She put the bowl somewhere on the desk, in a place reserved for things she didn’t care about anymore. She’d been imagining sitting at her desk in a real chair, lamp on to radiate more brightness than she usually tolerated, food easily available to grab between pencil scratches. She just let it sit beneath the unlit light and curled up in a sandwich of variety, her back and the wall serving as bread for a stack of pillows. She rested the sketchbook on bent knees, close to her face, and tried to slide into where she left off. Whatever little bit of magic that her fingers had entertained had fled in the intervening minutes, which was clear to see after maybe sixty seconds of absolute garbage put to paper.

She drew and erased and then tried in another spot and hated that too. She threw the pencil and eraser across the room in a sudden spiteful mood, one after the other to show them who was boss. It most likely didn’t work. They landed on the desk smugly, with two distinct noises.

She almost did the same with the sketchbook. Thought better of it as it sat plainly in her hands. The barely-started silhouette of Lady was good. It had form, okay proportions. She didn’t want to ruin it. So she closed the pad and placed it on the floor, under her bed so her morning feet wouldn’t trample the poor creature to death.

Then it was time for the ritualistic removal of the jeans and the socks and the blind fishing in discarded pockets for phone and earbuds. She plugged one into the other and placed the buds in her ears and opened Spotifiy. Which Shannon had so gratefully decided to help out with by putting Pandora on her family’s plan. She pressed play on the last thing she’d been listening to, and the album continued down its digital journey.

She opened her texts and went into Shannon’s messages. A new one, sitting at the bottom in apologetic colour.

S: Sorry about me freaking out back there. I don’t want to sound like a bitch and shoot all ideas down that aren’t mine

P: It’s okay

S: I can never read your tone when you say that, so it always sounds like you hate me. Please confirm I didn’t piss you off

P: It is actually okay in the literal use of the word

S: Okay

I’ll send details in the group chat about our meeting tomorrow.

Breakfast cool?

P: Yep

S: Yay

Ellie is fine with breakfast as well

Don’t let me steamroll you guys. I’m unsure about whatever this is but don’t let me do that

P: I won’t.

Don’t really have anyone to talk shit about you to if I let you get away with stuff and hold feelings in, so this will have to do

And I want this