“Good things come to those who wait.” He’d read it in a book, maybe. Mike had said it to him often, and Aloram had always nodded along, not caring enough and not wanting to hurt their relationship by arguing against the man. With no real expectations, he’d waited and waited, but never got his hopes up.

Good was not a term that stuck much for him, nor was bad, for that matter. Aloram simply was, as life was. An endless, repetitive, boring chore. A septic river of disappointments and annoyances, great and small, littered with the occasional glimmer of interest or entertainment. After a while, nothing really came as a surprise.

“Nothing worth having ever comes easy.” That one he’d said to Max once; it had seemed the right thing to say at the time.

All the lies we tell ourselves to make life just tolerable enough to justify keeping it going.

Nothing worth having ever seemed to come to Aloram, though, easily or otherwise. Objectively, good things might’ve happened, but that was the issue. The value of anything is purely subjective to the individual in question, and for him, no matter what high watermarks his life had reached, no matter how his plans had failed, and his ambitions had been crushed, he’d remained aloof. Detached. For all he might’ve tried, Aloram simply couldn’t bring himself to care. He’d fake it sometimes, just to see if believing hard enough could make it so, but in the end, he always felt like an imposter and gave up.

For all his life, his desires had been fleeting daydreams—the lowest burning embers of an imaginary world to which he did not belong. The world that Max lived in, and Amanda, Stefani, Mike, and so many others before them—even the addict he’d killed was probably a denizen of that world—the world where things mattered, where what you did, what happened, and what you achieved all had personal consequence and meaning.

Even though he lived in the same space as those people, breathed their same air, Aloram had never truly been privy to what it meant to care.

But he had waited, and he’d been transported. Released from the shackles that bound him on and to Earth and delivered to a world where he felt alive. His chance had finally come. Aloram knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was where he belonged, that this was where he’d forge a life of meaning, of control, and of unquestionable dominance.

But now there were a different kind of shackles binding him. The kind that bit into his wrists and chafed the skin, rubbing it raw near to bleeding. There was yet another shackle around his neck, a heavy, closefitting collar, and a chain between them. Worse yet, Aloram couldn’t call on his rei; the warm-black fire inhabiting his core felt walled off, distant, and dormant, leaving him with a feeling of profound loss and emptiness.

The sack was torn from his head, rough canvas rubbing abrasively against his face, and Aloram’s vision returned. The hall was dimly lit by orange-burning torches, their flickering glow bathing the stone walls in light. Before him was a small, rectangular space that could hardly be called a room, with a bunk bed along one side, a barred window set high into the center of the far wall, and a reeking bucket in the opposite corner from the bed, a puddle of liquid at its base trickling in a slow river away from it across the stone floor.

A hand yanked him around, and an ugly man of middle years with a pockmarked face and brown hair the color of runny shit slid a key into his manacles, unlocking them. The man was stout and several inches shorter than Aloram, the hilt of a shortsword peeking out beside his hip, under the rumpled edges of layered furs.

Aloram considered headbutting him, throttling him, making some move to reclaim his freedom, but in the time it took to think about it, his ugly, fat captor planted a fist firmly in his face, sending him reeling back into the cell. The iron gate door slammed closed with a clang, a heavy lock clicking into place, runes engraved on the bars pulsing once as the door shut.

Punches hurt, and they hurt twice as much when you aren’t prepared for them. His nose pulsed painfully, but not nearly as badly as he’d expected it to.

Fuck.

Aloram felt at the collar around his neck, his fingers digging into the space between metal and skin, his neck straining as he tilted his chin upwards and clawed at the devilish contraption. The collar made him feel uncomfortably claustrophobic; it wasn’t the fact of metal clamped tight against his skin that made him feel like a caged animal, but the stomach-turning wrongness of being separated from his core, from his rei.

The collar oppressed him in a way that ran far deeper than physically restraining his neck and head, it was like an overbearing father, poverty, starvation, and the insidious gloom of depression all wrapped up into one emotion and made inescapable by the band of iron binding him.

The guard stood on the other side of the gate, pocketing the key and laughing at him, a high, grating chortle that irritated Aloram to the point of murder. The guard wore shabby, torn black robes; a leather jerkin that tried and failed to stretch over his fat belly, straps tied haphazardly in the center; and a layer of light brown and yellowed white fur pelts.

He spat between the bars at Aloram’s feet, smiled up at him with twisted yellow teeth, then turned and waddled away.

When I get out, he dies first, Aloram thought, etching the man’s grotesque pig nose and lopsided face into his memory.

But how had he gotten here? There was the necromancer, the hallway that led out of the cave, then the tundra and the bear. His new cloak, so recently acquired, was missing, as were the backpack with all of the books and gemstones in it and the medallion. All that was left to him was the tattered cloak that he wore as a long skirt, and, he was surprised to find, the twisting silver ring wrapped tight around his finger. Then he remembered the weight pressing down on him, the incredible pain in his legs, and his meeting with unconsciousness.

My legs were broken… then how?

His hands dropped reluctantly from his neck and moved to touch his legs beneath the robes. They hurt, but it was a distant echo of pain, and he was standing upright with little difficulty.

Interesting. Maybe I imagined it and my legs didn’t break in the first place?

That didn’t feel right, but he moved past it. Face contorted, Aloram began clawing at the collar again. He felt wrong. The rei that usually permeated everything, flowing in the air and between objects like liquid threads of crystalline energy, were now just blurry, fuzzy lines like smeared ink on a page. There was an indescribable feeling of weight and powerlessness seeping from the collar and ebbing into his neck and through his body, interfering with his ability to circle rei through his system. The collar had to come off, but it wouldn’t budge.

“You might as well stop tickling yourself; it’s no use.”

A silky smooth, aristocratic voice came from the wall above him. It was lazy and amused, addressing him with all the oily self confidence with which a serpent might address a mouse. Aloram spun to face the bed, dropping his hands from his collar and taking up a high guard, lowering his hips, and loading his weight onto his rear leg.

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The bunk bed was nothing more than two slabs of stone that hung parallel over the floor, one atop another, seemingly drawn straight from the wall itself. A blanket drooped from the top bunk, thin fabric lolling over the edge. A moment later, a face appeared as the man, his cellmate, rolled over onto the edge of the top bunk to look down at him. His gaze swept cooly over Aloram, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Oh ho, a feisty one, aren’t you?”

Below a mass of raven black hair that was molded and shaped backwards as if it had an aversion to his forehead, the man’s face was paler than moonlight. Aloram noted his eyes immediately—an obsidian black that seemed to gleam in the cell’s darkness flecked with shining maroon-red shards like bits of bloody, suspended gold leaf.

Everything about him was sharp; his eyebrows were neither thick nor thin but a robust black and perfectly shaped; the tips of his ears were narrow points; his cheekbones were high and proud, and his face was lean without being gaunt or sunken.

There were no wrinkles anywhere on his satiny smooth skin; his face resembled a sheet of white linen pulled taut across a human skull and molded to the contours. It was impossible to determine his age, but something about his eyes screamed a warning of ancient power and unknowable secrets to Aloram.

Above the dull iron collar encircling the man’s neck, his jawline was a sharp V. But neither that nor his eyes nor his pointed ears were his most striking features. From atop the bunk, Aloram’s cellmate smiled down at him, revealing two perfect rows of blindingly white teeth. The upper and lower canines were long, pearly fangs, glistening in the torchlight.

“Top bunk’s mine, my fine fellow. What brings you to my humble abode?”

The vampire’s eyes flashed a knowing smile, and he propped his head up with his hand, elbow against the stone bunk, pale hand and long fingers flat against his ear and temple. Aloram narrowed his eyes, angling his body towards the vampire in a bladed stance, preparing for violence.

Aloram squeezed his hands, flexing his fingers and the muscles in his forearms, feeling the hot sting of chafed skin. The collar was subduing his rei, but some of the strength he’d gained since arriving on this planet had integrated into his very being, and he felt at least three times stronger than he’d ever been on Earth, and he’d already been strong enough to kill a man with his bare hands.

The vampire’s smile fell away, replaced by a terrible scowl that came over his face like a thundercloud. The playfulness left his eyes, and suddenly the room felt chill, stiff, and suffocating. In an instant, the impassive room became utterly hostile, and Aloram felt a cold terror wash over his skin and seep into his body.

“Settle. Down,” the creature atop the bunk said, and his voice was flinty and cold, the words slow and deliberate.

The tension broke. The room seemed to warm, and his smile returned—a wide, beaming show of teeth and friendliness that almost entirely erased the memory of the prior moment.

“Don’t talk much, I take it? That’s quite alright. I’m not much of a talker myself, but I’ve been in here for so long all alone, and I just can’t help it.” He paused for a moment, keen eyes weighing Aloram from above his predatory smile.

“My name is Emrys,” he said, sticking out a thin, pale hand. His fingers were long and elegant, and the fingernails were conspicuously sharp. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Aloram stared at the hand, tempted to grab it and yank the vampire from the bunk. He met Emrys’s eyes, the red flecks glowing with a subtle smugness that Aloram knew intimately and never underestimated. Those were the eyes of someone willing to do anything, risk anything, gamble completely and entirely on themselves, and have total confidence that they’d win. His gaze lowered to the fingernails, sharp as daggers and each at least an inch long.

Aloram huffed a short, single exhale through his nose, then lowered his guard and took Emrys’s smaller hand in his own. It was like plunging his hand into ice water, but he showed none of it on his face.

Emrys’s eyes lingered on the silver ring around Aloram’s finger. After a firm squeeze and two protracted bobs, Emrys let go. Resisting the urge to clench his hand into a fist, Aloram leaned against the bars of the cell door, forcibly controlling the urge to finger the collar around his neck.

“I’m Aloram.”

Emrys looked at him with amused eyes and a thin smile that were permanent fixtures on his hawkish face, contemplating him like a cat might contemplate a new toy. There was something new in the vampire’s eyes, as if some bit of information he’d discovered in the previous interactions pleased him immensely, but he was trying not to show it.

Emrys raised his immaculate, dense black eyebrows and tilted his head, as if to say, “Go on?”

A long moment passed. Aloram crossed his arms to stifle the temptation of tugging at his collar, then turned his head to look out of the high window, moonlight pouring in through the bars and falling across his face.

“Aloram,” Emrys said quietly, experimenting with the name’s flavor in his mouth, then continued more loudly. “What, pray tell, led to your capture? Or are you here voluntarily?”

Aloram snorted and looked briefly over at Emrys before returning his gaze to the window. He didn’t deal well with people he couldn’t hurt, and something told him that he couldn’t do much to this vampire. More than anything, Aloram hated being at anyone’s mercy. He had structured his life to remain at the top of any hierarchy of power he was personally involved in, and not only having access to his rei revoked, but also being imprisoned with this monster left him utterly annoyed and deeply uncomfortable.

Miraculously, the single, tiny window afforded a view of the moon; it was huge and white in the sky, hanging nearer than ever he’d seen it on Earth. Of course, it's not the same moon, but it looks similar. He began to pick out the craters, his mind searching for any semblance of normalcy to calm him, but then realized that there were only two on the whole surface of the dinnerplate planet.

I wonder what dad would think of me now. Did it all turn out the way you thought it would, old man?

Finally, unable to resist answering any longer, Aloram spoke.

“Fate brought me, I suppose,” Aloram said. It was a stupid answer, and he didn’t know what the hell he meant by it, but he didn’t know what else to say either. He’d woken up on a different planet with magic and necromancers and vampires; he'd killed a bear with his hands, then someone had touched his shoulder, broken his legs, and bundled him off here.

Emrys’s smile grew a fraction wider. Fate indeed.

“I see. And what fate might that be?”

Aloram’s head leaned back against the bar behind him with a soft thump as he surveyed the imperfect moon.

“Look to the stars, my love; they stand so high above us all, yet even they are not your masters.”

His mother’s words came back to him, an often-repeated refrain; he’d never known what she’d meant by them, but now, staring up at the foreign moon, he felt he understood just a little of their meaning.

Aloram hefted himself off the bars and strode to the bottom bunk. There were no blankets. No pillows. He lay down on the bare slab, the cold stone like ice on his skin. Lying flat on his back, the collar was just thick enough that it filled the empty space between the back of his head and his shoulders. Sort of comfortable, actually. Or it would be if the front didn’t press into my throat, and the sensation of it made me want to kill myself.

Rolling onto his stomach, Aloram put an arm under his forehead. “I’m going to sleep.”

As his new human cellmate shifted on the bunk below him, Emrys's mind raced with excitement. Aloram... a peculiar name; well storied—but on an outworlder? Fascinating. I suppose I must forgive his brutishness; the young are always naive and arrogant, and he’s almost certainly unfamiliar with our ways.

Snow drifted quietly through the air outside the window, and Emrys watched it as it fell, marveling at each unique shape and pattern, the stone cobbles of the courtyard outside melting it even as it landed. I wonder how he came to possess a soulbound artifact. Was it gifted? Or did he bring it with him? From which of the sapling worlds does he originate?

Emrys clicked his tongue. Idly spinning a fist sized ball of blood above his finger, he closed his eyes but couldn’t keep the smile from tugging at his lips. After so many years of boredom, I can hardly contain my excitement. Forgive me, my children, but I believe it’s time I come out of my retirement.