Damien stood at the door, his hand gripping the handle with white-knuckled intensity. He had checked and triple-checked through the windows on either side of the door, confirming that the stretch of cobblestone path and the smithy at its end were still there.

The void also remained, an ominous weight pressing in on either edge of the path like water held back by an aquarium’s glass, and it was the presence of that darkness that gave him pause.

Behind him, Oleg and Layla watched apprehensively. Despite their stubborn claims that nothing was unusual about the darkness outside - they insisted it was just another ordinary day outside - they lingered a good ten feet behind Damien, their muscles coiled and ready to race to safety should the boogeyman come inside.

“You’re sure it’s safe?” he asked for the umpteenth time.

“Aye,” Oleg said, nodding, “Why wouldn’t it be?”

If it’s so safe, why did you insist I be the one to open the door, you arsehole? Why are you standing over there like a virgin at a social?

He peered out the window again. The path remained unchanged. From above, it looked completely normal, right down to the baked in mud between stones and the insistent tufts of brownish-green grass jutting up here and there, but a side-on view showed something entirely different. The stones and earth of the path floated in the void, unmoving, a bridge across an unfathomably deep and unknowable abyss.

The path stretched in a straightish line about a forty feet, ending at the island of earth, stone, and green grass atop which the blacksmith’s shop stood. it too appeared perfectly stable, although Damien felt sure both path and island would collapse the moment he set foot on them.

Don’t be stupid. Why would Sam go to the effort of bringing you here and leaving you the gift if he intended to drop you into a bottomless pit?

We were kind’ve cunty to him… he countered. The whole abandoning him thing might not have sit too well.

Acting like your farts don’t stink. You think your friendship is so valuable that he’s been stewing over it all these years? And what? He created a whole other world - something out of fucking fantasy - just to screw with you? The ego on you, mate!

The longer he waited, the weirder this all felt. Why was he bothering with this at all? He could just go back to his normal life, forget the tavern had ever existed, and let Sam fuck with somebody else. His life was boring and it was miserable, but he wasn’t sure the addition of demon flowers, strangely dressed people from Sam’s past, and murder-rats were necessarily an improvement on that.

All of this was true, but he hadn’t so much as ventured into his mind to try and achieve that. Deep down, terrifying though it may be, this was the first time he had felt alive in a long, long time.

The knowledge of that was the kick in the arse he needed. Gritting his teeth and praying to god he wasn’t about to be pulled out into the vacuum of space, he turned the handle and pushed.

Nothing.

No boom, no rush of air. Nothing.

“Ye need to pull, mate,” Oleg offered helpfully. “It’s a pull door.”

Fuck’s sake…

Before he could second guess himself, he did as Oleg instructed, pulling the door towards him and looking out into the darkness beyond.

Not darkness, he reminded himself. Not really.

The tavern’s exterior walls, the path, and the smithy were illuminated as if by some unseen sun. No warmth kissed his skin, nor did the cold of the void wash over him. It all felt like, and it felt weird to think it, room temperature.

Not to hot, not too cold. It’s just right.

The cobblestone path came right up to the Goose & Child’s front step, ending at a dusty and worn welcome mat whose letters had long since been stamped and rubbed into nothingness. An ant crawled aimlessly through the mat’s forest of shaggy straw every bit as lost and confused as Damien.

Still, its presence reassured him. If the ant was unharmed out here, albeit trapped, surely he would be okay? Thus far nothing terrifying had come screeching out of the darkness, nor had anybody dropped to the ground, grasping at their throats as a foreign gas strangled the life out of them.

Tentatively, like a fat tourist trying to get onto a longtail boat in Thailand, he stepped awkwardly onto the mat.

Nothing.

He had half expected it to drop out from underneath him, or at the very least bob in inky waters, but it felt every bit as solid as if it sat on hard-packed earth. Buoyed by this realisation, he followed the first step with one, two, three more.

Before he knew it, he was a few strides outside the tavern, standing on the slender path that connected the two islands of isolated life.

The old adage, “don’t look down,” came to mind at that point. While the path beneath his feet remained stable, he could not help but wonder at what might lie above, below, or beyond his view. Did things live out there in the darkness, or was this simply a place in which there were two states of being: “there” and “not there?” Was it that simple?

Regardless, looking down came with the same intrusive thoughts that he got whenever he stood somewhere particularly high. Not a desire to jump as a suicidal act, but a kind of self-destructive devil on his shoulder that just wanted to see if he’d do it. Head reeling and skin suddenly slick with cold sweat, he tore his gaze away from the abyss and focused on the island ahead that constituted his horizon.

He was halfway across when the door the smithy opened. It was not barrel-chested Voril - a virtual carbon copy of Oleg in personality - that strode out, but Sofia.

Fuuuuck me, he thought. Was she always this… hot? No, not the right word. Beautiful.

He had seen some gorgeous women in his day, and slept with more than most. The perks of being a professional athlete were many, and one of them was being seen as far more attractive than you might otherwise have been. He didn’t think he was ugly, but he wasn’t so conceited as to think he’d have enjoyed the same luck with women if he’d been a teacher or a sparky.

Sofia had been a fairly nondescript NPC in their campaigns. Sam had described her as beautiful, sure, but she wasn’t a source of information, experience, or treasure, and so she’d been largely ignored by the group.

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Was this what Sam had been describing? This gorgeous, pale-skinned girl with curly, black hair, sparkling grey-blue eyes, and a spattering of freckles so perfectly placed that they had to have been hand drawn?

Or, is this what you think of as beautiful, and so that is what you’re seeing?

He didn’t know. Didn’t care.

Music didn’t swell, birds did not suddenly appear, and the stars did not dance overhead, yet he felt as if he had tumbled from their teenage games of Hand of Fate and into one of those romance novels the girls on BookTok were so obsessed with.

Jesus Christ, he chided himself. Calm down.

And then she looked up. Her blue eyes pinned him in place and her smile - her smile - it made the butterflies in his stomach turn dizzying somersaults that felt like they could throw him off balance.

Calm. Down.

Was this part of Sam’s plan? Was she as disarmingly beautiful as she appeared, or were these sensations he felt some kind of magical effect? Fred the Fighter had been hit with his fair share of Charming Word and Mesmerising Gaze spells in his time, and while he had never really thought about how those spells might have felt, perhaps that was all this was.

The thought allowed him to rein in the more chaotic impulses bouncing around in his head. Do a cartwheel, they said. Chicks love cartwheels!

Her smile wavered a little, and he realised he was staring. Not just staring, either. He was staring at her with house mouth open. Had his mother been alive and present, she’d have asked if he were trying to catch flies.

“Da?” Sofia called over her shoulder, never taking those sapphire eyes off Damien. “Are you coming?”

A response rumbled from within the house, although Damien could not make out the words.

You’re freaking her out, my dude, a rational part of his brain warned him. Say something normal.

“Hello.”

Super normal. Good job.

Summoned by the concern is his daughter’s words, Voril emerged from the quaint cottage the pair called home. He towered over Damien’s not-inconsiderable height, his broad shoulders and overall proportions the kind conjured from a teenage imagination rather than the real world. If the guy existed in the real world, he’d have been a pro-wrestler or an NFL linebacker. He pinned Damien in place with a possessive glare that said, “Stay the fuck away from my daughter.”

“Hi,” Damien repeated. “Sorry if I freaked you out. Just wasn’t expecting to see anybody out here.”

“Where else would we be?” Voril answered in a menacing growl. “Shop’s always been here. Seems to me like you’re the one out of place.”

“Touche,” Damien quipped. “It’s just… uh… nevermind.”

He looked nervously back to the open tavern door, where Layla and Oleg watched him with obvious amusement. He was not the first man who had been dressed down by Voril for so much as glancing at his daughter, it would seem.

“Little help?” he called back to them.

“Yer on yer own, lad,” Oleg teased. “Yer a big boy.”

Layla’s amusement faltered for a moment, keenly aware that Damien (or Fred, as she knew him) had never clammed up like this around her. She shot daggers at Sofia.

“Friend of yours, Oleg?” Voril called out, the growl completely gone from his voice.

“Aye, ye could say that. This is the lad that rescued Layla from them ogres. He’s stayin’ with us for a few days.”

The big blacksmith regarded Damien with fresh eyes now, although they still held an ominous steel that warned of a quick and brutal death if he mistepped around Sofia. Did the big man know of Damien’s party’s role in his wife’s death? He couldn’t recall if their feud with the warlord responsible had ever been a matter of public record and, besides, hadn’t they avenged her when they’d mounted the warchief’s head on a pike in the middle of the village.

What was his name? Grolk? Grolluck? Grorbol?

“Grasnikh,” Sofia said softly. “You’re the one that brought Grashnikh and his horde down upon the town.”

Voril’s face darkened at this, taking on a fierceness that made Damien wish the cobblestone path beneath his feet would give out and drop him into the merciful darkness of the abyss.

Yet he did not turn this anger on Damien, but towards his own daughter. He softened it for her, dulling the edges and padding the blow, but he scolded her nonetheless.

“Don’t be a fool, girl,” he chided her. “Grasnikh had been menacing these parts for a decade or more before the lad and his companions came along. Hells, he might still be menacing us if they hadn’t put a stop to his raiding and reaving.”

“And mother might still be alive if they hadn’t brought them down on us. They killed her!”

She turned and ran back into the house, her dark hair trailing behind her as she dramatically threw the door closed behind her.

“Don’t mind her, friend” Voril apologised with remarkable softness, “She was but a babe when she lost her mother, and it still haunts her. You and yours did us a great service in killing him, even if it did mean the loss of my Maree.”

Damien did not remember feeling particularly guilty when he and the others had discovered the blacksmith’s wife pinned to the barn door. Why would they? She had been a nameless, faceless background NPC attached to the guy they bought their armor and weapons from.

Sam had been a terrific storyteller, but he had not been able to adequately describe the warring emotions that moved across the big man’s face in this moment, nor the pain that had so disfigured Sofia’s face the moment before she had fled inside.

He had a pit in his stomach like a shotput.

If nothing else, the awkwardness and emotion of the conversation had thoroughly quashed his fears of the path collapsing or of him mistepping and falling to his death. Nonetheless, he took the final three steps onto Voril’s island quickly, attempting to cover up his nervousness by thrusting out his hand. Voril’s mighty paw enfolded his in a surprisingly gentle handshake for a man of his size.

“I never did properly thank you,” the blacksmith apologized. “You’ll forgive me if I was a bit distracted in the moment.”

“Of course! I know how I was after my parents passed. I can only imagine -”

Voril lifted his hand. “Best that you don’t try,” he rumbled. “Nothing quite prepares you for losing that person. It wouldn’t have mattered how it had happened - the absence is still the same. One moment they’re there, a constant upon which you’ve come to rely without knowing it, and the next they’re gone, leaving you adrift and disoriented in a world that used to make so much sense. No more smiles, no more secret squeezes of your hand during an uncomfortable conversation, no more quirks of speech or turns of phrase. Just the yawning hole they’ve left behind and the woeful lack of anything or anybody who could ever hope to fill it.”

“I -”

“I don’t blame you, and I try not to bear a grudge for your part in it, but you’ll understand if my daughter has some trouble coming to terms with it. A man can always remarry, although I’ve never had the desire nor the heart for it, but a mother’s love is not so easily replaced.”

“Amen,” Damien agreed, remembering the days and weeks after his mother’s sudden passing. He’d been in the throes of his own legal issues at the time, and had not bothered to check in on her as much as he should have. He’d let her last three calls go to voicemail; left her emojis and memes on read in Messenger.

Fuck, but the guilt had consumed him. He knew rationally that him sending a thumbs up in response to a video of a cat using a people toilet was unlikely to have changed things, nor would one of their famously terse conversations have done anything to soothe her ailing ticker, but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach. She had died alone in the house he now called home while he’d been busy with what he had thought was the worst week of his life.

Had she thought about him at the end? Felt sadness at the fact he had ignored her? Or was he giving himself too much credit? Had his mother been living a full life in his absence, completely unphased by her prodigal son’s inability to call?

Tears tickled the corners of his eyes unbidden, and he struggled to absorb them back into his traitorous eyes before Voril noticed.

The big man didn’t say anything. Instead, he pulled Damien into a bear hug.

“Let it out, lad.” he said, his gravelly voice muffled against Damien’s shoulder, “Anything less betrays their memory.”

And so, for the first time since his mother’s death and his own fall from grace, Damien cried.

Wept.

Sobbed.

And let himself feel everything he had kept bottled up for all those months.

image [https://i.imgur.com/hdlJsSd.png]