Leopold fed her lesser spiritual pills and thin pieces of cooked meat. She didn’t know where he was getting them, but each bite brought her essence back a little more. She remembered the meat of magical creatures doing a lot more for her, she even remembered when they’d slaughtered a couple salamanders and jerked them for the trip to the Celestial Kingdom, but now such preparations seemed ridiculous. The meat was giving her something, but almost nothing.

And he talked. She couldn’t get her head around what he was saying, but the sound of his voice was soothing in a way she hadn’t experienced before. It was the polar opposite of that howling void, the thing she’d seen when she looked at the colossal watcher. Leopold’s voice was life and hope, from a place of no hope and no intimation of what life even was.

He’d changed as well. He no longer had that coiled feeling about him, always looking for the next danger—a stance he’d picked up during that night of slaughter. Something about the trees was soothing him, or maybe a decision he’d made. Because nowhere in his jumble of words did she hear any mention of the doorway.

Three days after they arrived at their hideout in the forest, he asked something of her. To open a portal a hundred miles in a particular direction. It was too much to figure out what lay in that direction, but a hundred miles was almost nothing. She did it automatically and they stepped through.

The next day he asked her again, and they stepped through. And the day after that, and the day after that. For a week or more they took hundred-mile strides before he hunted for their lunch, until she had no idea where they were. He seemed to have some idea, because he carefully aligned her before asking her to cast each portal. The only indication of the distances they were crossing was the recession of the mountains into a rolling piedmont, and then the gradual flattening of even those lesser hills.

They camped in the open one night and the next day, after some mental calculation on his part, he asked her to open a portal ten miles away. She wondered in a far-off part of her mind why this one was so much shorter, but didn’t object. The elliptical tear in reality opened and they stepped through—into her past.

They weren’t far from the dilapidated road, but even so Willow could recognize the town in the distance. It was much as she’d seen it from the back of the caravan so many months ago. Thin drifts of snow blew across the ground on gusts she barely felt. The thin trails of chimneysmoke felt like home.

Leopold asked if she could walk the rest of the way. She gave a slight nod, still barely comprehending, and they began to trek across the half-frozen ground. She’d been in the mountains for the beginning of winter and had almost forgotten how Bridgewater never got much of a snowfall, nor even many freezes. So many miles had passed between then and now that the climate itself had changed.

Unlike the unnamed frontier town, no guards came out to challenge Willow and Leopold as they strode past the outlying buildings. Willow craned her neck to catch sight of her parents’ house, and Leopold steered her in that direction. Sooner than she expected, they were on the doorstep and Willow heard a familiar voice on the other side of the door.

She wasn’t ready for this.

Leopold knocked. Steps from the other side preceded the door opening. Willow blinked twice and even then could barely recognize the man on the other side. It wasn’t that he’d changed, it was that he hadn’t. After so much that had happened, her father still looked exactly the same.

He let out an anguished cry and rushed forward, bowling Leopold out of the way and enveloping Willow in arms toned by years of loading and unloading crates from his shipments. Willow caught the familiar scent of him and pressed her face into his shoulder.

“Gloria,” her father shouted. “She’s back! Willow’s back!”

A plate broke and Willow’s mother ran full tilt around the corner, fully bedecked in her doctor’s apron and a frenzied look on her face.

For the first time in a long time, Willow felt nearly at peace.

🜛

The words meant very little to her, but Willow listened nonetheless. She had nothing else to do, lying on her back in the infirmary at the back of the house, covered by a woolen blanket after her mother’s inspection and cleaning.

“She’s catatonic,” her mother said. “She’s with us in a way, but not at the same time. I’ve read about this in soldiers, or people with brain damage…”

“She doesn’t have brain damage,” Leopold said. He’d quickly introduced himself as her husband earlier, which Willow supposed she should feel some way about, but couldn’t quite figure it out. From the sounds afterward, he’d been hugged fiercely by her father.

“I got her out before it touched her.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“What touched her,” Willow’s father asked. “At the fall of Durum?”

“No, this was much later, only a few days ago,” Leopold said. “Far away in the mountains, a few dozen miles south of Asche.”

“That’s hundreds of miles away,” her father said. “How did you travel so far with her… like this?”

“Bernard, Gloria, this may come as a shock, but Willow isn’t quite the same as when she left. She had a professor in Durum that took an interest in her—”

“What’d he do,” her father growled.

“Cured her, believe it or not,” Jeremy said. “The way she was before—”

“I noticed,” her mother interrupted. “She’s got muscle tone now. How did he cure her? We hired a mage…”

“It’s a long and complicated story, but suffice it to say that she was much more heavily damaged from the Wasting than anyone suspected. When she was cured… well, it opened up certain possibilities for her. Willow’s magic…”

“Hah, so she became a mage after all,” her father said with pride. “I knew it. She has the stubbornness of a mule.”

“She’s much more than that,” Leopold said. “The most powerful mage that’s ever existed. Like I said, I’ll fill you in in more detail later. What I need to know is: will she recover?”

There was a long silence in the room before her mother spoke.

“I can’t be certain. The literature doesn’t talk a lot about stuff like this. If she doesn’t have brain damage, then nothing’s physically wrong with her. It’s something she experienced.”

“Something nobody should have to experience,” Leopold said.

“We’ll have to guide her back to us, and hope it’s enough,” her mother said. “It may take a very long time.”

“We’ve got all the time in the world,” Leopold said, and something in his voice almost sounded relieved at the thought.

🜛

They lived with her parents in her old bedroom. Every morning Leopold would get her up and he’d work with her mother to clean and dress her. They led her to the table and placed food in front of her—always soup or thin strips of meat—and she’d eat when she was told to. The house looked so familiar, but it was so different. It took a few days for her to realize that the difference wasn’t in the house or her parents, but it was in herself.

She laid awake at night in the darkness for hours before sleep claimed her. In those hours she heard Leopold tell the story of her, of everything that had happened since she left Bridgewater and met him on that caravan, to the things he could only guess at during their time apart. He told them about the first warbeast and about the doorway in the night. Her accomplishments and her failures.

As she listened to her story being told, the pieces began to reassemble themselves in her head. The pieces of her, of who she was and who she’d become. But it wasn’t until her parents had started to tell stories of their own, of her childhood, that the final key fell into place.

Who she had been. Who she was. Past and present. The only thing missing from their conversations was the future, of which Willow knew far too much already.

🜛

Leopold awoke on the other side of the bed in the chilly morning light to see Willow already sitting up, her thin shift the only thing standing between her and the cold.

“Willow,” he asked softly. She heard the doubt in his voice, as if he’d dreamed this moment for days or weeks. It had certainly been weeks, although she couldn’t be sure how many.

She turned her head toward him and after a moment she smiled shyly.

“Hey you,” she said, and his eyes grew wide as saucers.

🜛

“You’ve got to slow down, honey,” Willow’s mother said as she horked down her second full plate of pulled pork. She barely paused for long enough to throw back a glass of water before pulling a third plate toward her.

“And she was like this when you woke up,” Willow’s mother asked. She saw him nod out of the corner of her eye, sitting beside her father who also seemed like he couldn’t get enough of seeing his daughter choke down food again at a mighty speed.

“Like an inscribed light,” Leopold said, and made a flipping motion beside his head. “She got herself dressed and everything.”

Willow’s mother shook her head and didn’t prepare a fourth plate of pork, which was fine because Willow was almost full after the third. She greedily slurped down the rest of her cup and, almost as an afterthought, wiped her mouth of the truly disgusting amount of grease and meat which had adhered itself to her.

She belched, then turned to Leopold. “I’m right here you know.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I still can’t believe it.”

“What happened,” her father asked. “How did you come back to us?”

Willow shook her head. “I don’t know. When I saw that… watcher, I saw eternity. I saw the future, at least as it perceives it. It’s been waiting for a very long time for the doorway that I opened. It’s been waiting a very long time for Earth.”

“What’s it want,” Leopold asked. “Why did it come through?”

“It and the others like it are the enders. They want only one thing, which is to end all life. These ones have chosen Earth.”

“There are others,” Leopold said in disbelief. “Other things like that?”

Willow nodded. “They’ll come through the doorway in the night. They know the future, or at least think they do. I saw them arrive, but in the far future. This is only the first.”

“But,” Leopold said, closed his eyes, and seemed to force out the rest of the question. “How do we stop them?”

“We don’t,” Willow said. “There is no stopping this. Everything ends, and these are the end of life on Earth. They are entropy incarnate. It is impossible to stop their crusade.”

“W-what,” Willow’s father blurted. “There’s nothing the Arcana can do? How do we know that if we haven’t even asked?”

“Because I’ve seen the future,” Willow said. “These Watchers can only be slowed. They cannot be stopped. They move with the grinding of time, toward the place where the last of humanity shall fall. But they aren’t our biggest problem.”

“They aren’t,” Leopold asked. “They seem like a pretty big problem.”

Willow shook her head. “I’ve opened the door to more than just the watchers. It’s the other things that can change the future. The pneumavores.”

“The soul eaters,” Leopold whispered. Willow nodded.

“They are coming through even as we speak.”