“So you guys do have Christianity, and you have the Christian God, but not Jesus? You just have some dude named David? That’s stupid.”

“Well, Christianity’s an old religion practised by the Elves when they were still around, so the Messiah’s real name is something I don’t even want to try to pronounce. David’s just the modern Ashanic version of it.”

“What’s modern Ashanic?”

“The language we’re speaking?”

“What? But we’re speaking English, aren’t we?”

“No? We’re speaking Ashanic.”

As the two boys talked while we walked, I let out the breath I’d been holding as the conversation finally shifted away from the topic of religion. While it was admittedly a fascinating topic to think about, knowing that our worlds somehow shared similar religions, watching Jamie talk about Gods was nerve wracking when I knew that learning about one particular God could lead to the destruction of the world. Realistically, there wasn’t really a way that Jamie could stumble into learning about the existence of the Guide in a random conversation, but that didn’t stop me from sweating profusely.

“Maybe it’s just magic,” I suggested, joining into the conversation in hopes of keeping the topic away from Gods. “I mean Jamie has that whole anime constitution thing, and he’s got an infinite amount of mana. What’s to say he doesn’t have some weird magic thing that lets him translate stuff too?”

“Wait. Does something like that really exist?” Bran asked. Jamie looked at me too, obviously curious about my answer.

“How would I know?” I asked.

“Because you just said it did?” Bran asked. “Besides, you’re a mage. You know about magic stuff.”

“I’m hardly a mage,” I scoffed. “I’m just a magic user.”

“What’s the difference?” Jamie asked.

“A mage is a title given to someone who can actually use magic well,” I said, shaking my head. “A magic user dabbles in it. Anyways, I was just throwing out ideas. Magic can let you do some pretty weird things as long as you have the mana for it. I’m sure translation magic could be a thing.”

Bran furrowed his brow. “Ashi vativi.”

“Huh?!” Jamie shouted, recoiling away from Bran, his arms windmilling until he’d gotten a few feet away from him.

Bran laughed awkwardly, looking pointedly off to the side. “Just checking if it really was a magic translation thing. I guess you were right, Lena.”

Jamie still looked absolutely confused, so I decided to help him out.

“Bran just said something in another language. I couldn’t understand it, but I assume you did?” I asked.

“O-oh,” Jamie said, his stutter returning for some reason. “Yeah. I did. Sorry. I just didn’t expect that.”

Bran laughed, scratching his cheek in embarrassment. “Don’t worry, Jamie. I don’t see you that way. Just wanted to test it out. It means, ‘I love you,’” he added, for my sake. “It’s the only Timuran I know. Polly taught me.”

“Since when does Polly know Timuran?” I asked.

“She doesn’t know much,” Bran said, with a shrug. “She became friends with a travelling merchant during one of her visits to Redstone. He taught her a few phrases.”

“And you’re not bothered that some random man is telling your girlfriend that he loves her?”

Bran shrugged casually. “I trust Polly. Besides, I’ve heard that Timurans are a little more liberal with who they say ‘I love you’ to. It’s more of a platonic thing for them.”

It didn’t sound like a familiar stereotype to me, but I didn’t know enough about Timurans to confirm or deny it.

“Umm,” Jamie said, raising his hand for some reason. “Actually…”

He paused. Bran and I glanced at each other before looking back at him.

I noticed a blush on Jamie’s face, even with how badly he looked like he wanted to hide his face deep within his hood.

“You didn’t say, ‘I love you,’” he muttered. “You said, ‘I want to have sex with you.’”

Ah. So that was why he flinched away so violently. I chuckled as Bran repeated Jamie’s reaction, flinching away like he’d just slapped him.

“No, that can’t be right. It means, ‘I love you,’” Bran said, his face growing pale. “We say that all the time. In public. It’s our thing! You’re just joking. Right, Jamie?”

Jamie’s only response was a shaky smile.

I laughed as Bran groaned, hiding his face in his hands.

“Goddammit,” he said.

“Sorry,” Jamie replied.

“Not your fault,” Bran sighed. “You apologise a lot, you know that?”

“I keep telling him that,” I said, looking around us as we started to enter the denser parts of the forest. I was surprised by how deep the villagers had decided to bury the Demons. “Are we getting close to the graves?” I asked.

“I think so,” Bran said, taking the excuse to look around and direct his attention at anything aside from Jamie. “Mr. M- I mean, the gravedigger made sure to mark the area with some paint. It shouldn’t be hard to see.”

In a few minutes, Bran proved himself right by pointing out several splashes of bright blue paint smeared over a large number of trees. They were applied very liberally, with more focus on being seen than accurately pointing out where the graves were located. Even with the general area marked down, we had to search around for a few more minutes before we stumbled across the graves.

“Is this really it?” Jamie asked.

His scepticism was justified, as the “graves” looked like nothing more than a few dirt mounds with nothing to mark them. Even if they only contained the remains of Demons, it still felt pretty disrespectful. I glanced at Bran for an explanation.

“Nobody really wanted to acknowledge what happened,” he said, avoiding my gaze. “People kind of just wanted to forget. So we tried to make sure it didn’t become a landmark.”

“Then why the paint?” Jamie asked.

Bran’s eyes widened for a split second before he smiled nervously.

“I’m not sure?”

Jamie stared at him for a few seconds before turning his attention back to the graves.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“I’m gonna dig them up,” he said. “Move Earth.”

I’d already realised about halfway into our walk that we hadn’t brought shovels with us, but Jamie didn’t seem to be too bothered by it. He simply closed his eyes and raised his hands up in the air. I should’ve seen it coming, but I still yelped and fell back on my ass when the ground shook beneath my feet. Thankfully, my dignity was saved when I saw Bran doing the same thing beside me.

I was surprised at how cleanly Jamie managed to dig up the graves. Despite how violently the ground had shaken, all that ended up happening was a few clumps of dirt floating up and landing softly in neat piles beside each grave.

Ignoring Bran’s awestruck look, Jamie moved forward to peer inside of the graves, but he stopped at the first one, staring into it with a blank expression on his face.

Curious about what he could be seeing to cause such a reaction, I peered into the graves.

They were empty.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Jamie said, his voice flat.

“They’re empty. The Aether must’ve dissipated by now,” I said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I mean, yeah? I guess? But the graves being empty doesn’t necessarily mean that they were always empty, right? For all I know, this could be a fake grave, and some very real Goblins could be buried somewhere else. An empty grave doesn’t prove anything.”

I raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t surprised that he could potentially come to this conclusion, since it was the exact same conclusion I might’ve come to if I were in his situation, but where had this level of scepticism been when he was dealing with the Mediators?

“It doesn’t,” I said. “But I know what I saw. You didn’t kill any Goblins. You just destroyed some Demons and scattered their Aether to the wind. Can you trust me when I say that?”

“I trust you,” Jamie said, but he grimaced when he turned to face me. “But that’s not enough. What if you were wrong? I need to prove it. Sorry.”

“That’s fine, Jamie. I wasn’t trying to challenge you. If this is really that important to you, then you shouldn’t just take my word on it,” I said. “That being said, how are you going to prove it?”

Jamie thought furrowed his brow.

“Maybe I can use some magic to see if there were Demons here,” he said.

“You can do that?”

“I can try,” he said, giving me a shaky grin that he didn’t seem too confident in. “Translation magic exists, so why can’t a ‘detect demon’ spell exist either?”

I was about to protest, but realised he was right. Jamie was an all-powerful being. Anything he imagined, he could probably accomplish. While the idea of such a nonsensical and convenient use of magic existing was absurd, so was the idea of Jamie’s very existence. I saw no real reason to believe he couldn’t accomplish it before he actually tried it.

“I guess it could…” I said, trailing off.

Jamie waited for me to continue, but I simply shrugged. Apparently taking that as a vote of confidence, he closed his eyes and raised his hands.

“Detect Demon.”

At first, it looked like nothing happened, but with Jamie keeping his eyes closed, I assumed it meant he wasn’t done. Jamie kept his hands up, hovering them over the empty graves.

About a minute in, Bran pointed off in the distance with his mouth opening and closing like he was trying to say something. Following the path of his finger, I noticed a few faint pinpricks of pulsing red light floating gently towards our direction, like leaves caught in an unnatural wind.

I was so focused on the ones that I could see that I flinched when a pinprick of red light floated directly past my ear. I jerked my head around to see that we were surrounded.

“Umm, should we be worried?” Bran whispered to me, as he dodged around a small red light that barely brushed by his head.

Bemused by his naivety, I gave him a smile and a pat on the shoulder.

“If there was any reason for us to be worried, we’d have no way to stop it,” I whispered back. “So my suggestion is to just stop worrying about it.”

Bran stared at me, like I’d said something crazy, though he couldn’t keep his eyes from darting around to look at the red glowing lights that flew lazily around him.

“I don’t think I can do that,” he said.

I shrugged and turned back to watch Jamie.

As the red lights continued to float gently towards Jamie, they piled up inside the once empty graves, melding together as they converged to the same spot, until the seven graves were occupied with formless blobs of pulsing red light.

They didn’t remain formless for long. As Jamie furrowed his brow, his fingers twitched and closed into fists as the blobs moved to his command, twisting and morphing until they seemed to adopt a robust shape.

Once they were done, Jamie opened his eyes to look down at the Goblin-shaped blobs of light.

“So, did it work?” Bran asked.

Jamie didn’t react to the question for a few long seconds, simply staring down at the pulsing Goblin-shaped lights. When he did react, it was with a sigh, and a smile.

“Yeah,” he said. “Turns out, I can do anything I put my mind to. I’m pretty broken, aren’t I?”

“No.”

Jamie and Bran turned to me, and for a split second, I couldn’t figure out why. It took me a moment for me to realise that I was the one who’d said that.

“No?” Jamie asked, with the smile still plastered on his face.

That damn fake smile of his. Among all the liars I knew, Jamie was the worst one of them all.

“No,” I said, gritting my teeth. “You’re not broken. Don’t you dare say that about yourself.”

Jamie tilted his head in confusion, and the scared look on Bran’s face helped me realise I was raising my voice against an Otherworlder.

“Lena,” Jamie said. “It’s alright.”

“No!” I said again, not caring at all that I was yelling. “No, it’s not alright. I don’t know what happened to you, in your previous world, and I know it must’ve been terrible for you to see yourself like how you do, but you’re not in that world anymore! You’re in a new one, and a much better one at that! Yeah, yeah. I know I don’t know anything about your old world aside from the fact that it has video games and anime, which I still don’t understand at all, by the way, but the fact that your old world could possibly leave such a sweet, innocent, dumb kid like you feeling like you’re so lonely and unconfident and broken means that it can’t possibly be one worth caring about.”

“Lena,” Jamie said quietly. “Seriously-”

“Shut up!” I said, angrily wiping away the tears that were forming at the edges of my eyes. “If I hear one more vague hint about your depressing backstory, I swear I’m going to beat the crap out of you, infinite power or not. I know you’re too nice to fight back, so you can’t fucking scare me.”

I don’t know what I sounded or looked like right now, but it can’t have been pretty, from the way that Bran looked like he was more scared of me than he was of Jamie. Jamie’s reaction was a bit more subtle than Bran’s, his fake smile slowly melting off his face into a blank expression.

“Don’t you dare say you’re broken. Never again, Jamie Nightblade.”

Jamie stared blankly at me, and the world was quiet, save for my panted breaths and the squeaking of damp moss on the forest floor as Bran tried to slowly back away from me. I glared back at Jamie, silently daring him to say anything.

And then he started to laugh.

It started small at first. He let out a few muffled giggles that he immediately tried to cover up by placing his hand over his mouth. It worked for a moment, but as his laughter grew, it spilled between the cracks of his fingers and echoed through the trees surrounding us. It didn’t stop, growing in strength until he bent down, clutching at his stomach and doubling over from the sheer weight of his emotions.

Jamie gasped for breath as it left him, faster than he could draw it in, in peals of ecstatic laughter. More than once, his breath caught in his throat and he coughed and sputtered as he fell on the floor, but he didn’t seem to care as he continued to laugh.

By the time he’d calmed himself down, he was filthy and covered in foliage and dirt, laying down on his back on the forest floor, but he didn’t seem to notice as he struggled to wipe away tears from his eyes, his hands still shaky from the heaving giggles that were still escaping his body.

“Lena,” he said, still giggling. “My name’s Jamie Campbell. Did you seriously think Nightblade was my real last name?”

I sighed, feeling my frustrations slowly bleeding out of me in the same breath. While I didn’t particularly enjoy being mocked, it was impossible to stay angry at him. Though he had his arm draped over his eyes, the laughter in the air and the genuine smile on his face was infectious.

“Hey,” I said. “How was I supposed to know? You never told me.”

“Even so,” he said, interrupting himself with another giggle. “Jamie Nightblade. Imagine.”

“How the hell am I supposed to know what’s normal in your world?” I said, bending down to lightly flick him on the forehead.

“Ack,” he said, flinching at the touch. “That surprised me.”

“Serves you right, Jamie Campbell,” I replied.

“I guess it does,” he said, giggling again for some reason.

He moved his arm away from his face, and looked up at me from his position on the floor. The entire upper half of his face was stained with the marks of half-dried tear stains, and his eyes were bloodshot and puffy, but there was a childish joy that was reflected in them now that hadn’t been there before.

“You’re pretty broken. You know that, Lena?” he said.

I frowned, raising my fist. “Jamie Campbell,” I said, as threateningly as I could.

He laughed and raised his arms to defend against the blow that would never come. “No, no. It’s slang from my old world! It means that you’re overpowered enough to break the rules of the game.”

It took me a moment for me to understand what that meant. My fist dropped limply to my side.

“Wait,” I said. “So when you were calling yourself broken…”

“I wasn’t being down on myself?” he said, completing my thought for me.

I stared down at him and that shit-eating grin of his and groaned into my hands.

“I blew up at you for no reason! Why didn’t you stop me, you little bastard?”

“I mean, I tried,” he said, with a laugh. “Not my fault you wouldn’t let me talk.”

I groaned again. Jamie laughed at that and finally found the strength to stand back up. I couldn’t help but think he looked taller for some reason, and it took me a moment to realise he just wasn’t slouching as much.

“Hey, Lena,” he said.

“What?”

“Sorr-” He paused and shook his head. “I mean, Thanks.”

I sighed again, but gave him a smile.