Maxfield Willow

Tag: portal fantasy

  • Chapter 5 – The Child at the Edge of the World

    Chapter 5 – The Child at the Edge of the World

    (The Lost Path)

    By the time anyone realized Eli was missing, the fairground had already become another world.

    Daylight drained out of the sky in streaks of pink and copper, and all the coloured lights along the booths seemed too bright, too loud, as if someone had turned the whole evening up a notch. Voices blurred into a single rolling roar. Music from three different rides tangled into something that wasn’t quite a song.

    Eli stood in the middle of it, small and alone, clutching the crumpled corner of a map he’d been so proud to carry.

    “Stay by us,” Mum had said.

    “Don’t wander off,” Dad had added.

    And he hadn’t meant to. He’d only stepped aside to see the wooden dragon on the carousel up close, just for a second, because its emerald eye had seemed to be looking right at him. Then the crowd surged, somebody bumped his shoulder, and when he turned around his parents were gone.

    Not “a few steps away, scanning the crowd.”
    Not “right there if he just pushed through.”

    Gone.

    He tried to do what they’d told him. Go back to where you last saw us. Stay put and we’ll come find you.

    Except “where he’d last seen them” no longer existed.

    The booth with the stuffed bears was now selling glass stars. The truck with the hot chocolate had somehow become a tiny stage where a magician pulled scarves from nowhere. Even the path under his shoes looked wrong, the gravel crunching into something finer, smoother, more like the pressed stone of an old street.

    His heart thudded in his ears.

    “Dad?” he called, voice swallowed by the fair. “Mum?”

    No answer. Just the cheer from a ride spinning somewhere out of sight, and the distant crack of fireworks test-firing.

    He swallowed the hot knot in his throat. He was nine, almost ten. Too old to cry about getting separated. Too old to be scared of the dark that was rolling in like a slow wave over the horizon.

    The map in his hand fluttered. He looked down at it, hoping for a miracle.

    The bright lines of rides and food trucks and exits had smudged. The little icon of a smiling fox advertising “Funnel Cakes!” had stretched impossibly long, its tail curling around the edge of the paper like it was trying to slip away.

    He blinked hard.

    The fox lifted its head.

    Not on the paper. In front of him.

    Lantern-light bloomed where there had been nothing a heartbeat ago. A small shape stepped out of a crack between two stalls that shouldn’t have been large enough for anything bigger than a cat.

    The fox’s fur was the colour of embers at midnight, dark at the roots, burning brighter toward the tips. Its eyes were molten amber, reflecting the fairground lights and something deeper beneath. A lantern hung from its tail, light swaying gently, casting little ripples of gold across the gravel.

    Eli forgot how to breathe for a moment.

    The fox tilted its head, studying him. No one else seemed to notice it. People drifted past, laughing, brushing close enough that Eli had to edge aside, but no one glanced down at the glowing creature at his feet.

    “Hey,” he whispered, because it felt wrong to raise his voice. “Are you—are you real?”

    The fox didn’t answer. It simply stepped closer until the lantern light wrapped around Eli’s shoes and soaked into his jeans and skin, warm as a hand around his fingers.

    The panic loosened its grip on his chest, just a little.

    A soft gust of warm air rustled his hair, smelling faintly of woodsmoke and something sweet, like toasted sugar. For a moment he could hear—beneath the roar of the fair—another sound entirely: low conversation, clink of mugs, the murmur of a hearth.

    Then it was gone, as if someone had turned down a volume slider inside his head.

    The lantern fox turned away and trotted a few steps, then glanced back over its shoulder. The lantern on its tail swung, a gentle beckoning.

    Eli looked over his shoulder, in case some sensible grown-up had appeared to take charge.

    No one.

    He was lost. The exits kept moving. The map had turned strange.

    And yet… he wasn’t alone.

    He took a careful step toward the fox.

    It waited.

    Another step. Another. The fairground around them seemed to blur at the edges, booths stretching a little taller, lights smearing into long streaks of colour. Each step away from where he’d been felt like walking off the edge of something familiar and into a picture book you weren’t supposed to fall into.

    “Where are we going?” he muttered.

    The fox’s ears twitched. It didn’t speak, but the lantern flared a fraction brighter, as if answering: Somewhere you need to be, not somewhere you expect.

    They slipped between two stalls that had not been there a moment before: one selling glass bottles that glowed softly from inside, the other hung with wind chimes that made no sound. People moved past like shadows, a little slower now, a little less distinct.

    Eli realized the noise had changed. The roar of the fair had softened, receding like tidewater. He could hear his own breathing again, and the faint pad of the fox’s paws.

    Ahead, the chaos of booths and rides thinned. A narrow lane appeared, cobbled stones pressed into the earth, running away into the deepening dusk. Old brick walls rose on either side, patched and mismatched, doors tucked between them where no doors should have been.

    This wasn’t part of the fairground. This wasn’t part of his town at all.

    He stopped. “This… this isn’t right.”

    The fox stopped too, turning back toward him. For the first time, it closed the distance between them completely and pressed its forehead lightly against his knee.

    Heat poured through the fabric of his jeans, spreading up into his chest. Not burning, but a deep, steady warmth that seemed to push out the cold knot of fear. Images flickered at the edges of his thoughts: a little boy at a different crossroads, a woman on a ship staring at too many stars, a man in a forest with no path… all of them wrapped in the same lantern glow.

    Then, clearer than any of those, he saw his mother’s face as she’d looked at him earlier that day when he’d made a joke about “getting lost on purpose so no one could make him do chores.” She’d laughed, but her eyes had softened in that way they did when she was worried and trying not to show it.

    “Never on purpose,” she’d said, ruffling his hair. “You belong with us, you hear? If you ever feel lost, you yell loud enough for me to find you.”

    Eli’s throat tightened again, but now it wasn’t only fear; something else tangled there too. Regret. The sudden sharp knowledge that he had wished, just a little, to disappear. To step sideways from all the bickering and noise and rules.

    The fox leaned back, watching him.

    “I didn’t really mean it,” he whispered. “I don’t want to vanish. I just… I don’t like it when they fight. Or when they’re tired and forget I’m there.”

    The lantern’s light shifted, shadows tucking themselves neatly away, as if the world were listening politely. The fox turned and padded down the lane.

    This time, Eli followed without hesitation.

    The further they went, the more the air changed. The sharp scent of frying food faded, replaced by cool stone and distant rain, even though the sky above remained clear. The cobbles under his shoes were damp and old, moss peeking between them. The buildings on either side leaned inward like they were listening in.

    Doors lined the alley. Some were plain wood. Others had carvings: waves, leaves, stars, symbols Eli couldn’t name. A few were cracked open, warm light seeping through.

    They passed one doorway where voices murmured, fragments of words curling out into the lane.

    “…thought I’d lost it all, but then…”

    “…found my way back…”

    “…a lantern, like a fox’s tail, of all things…”

    Eli slowed, peering through the thin gap. For a heartbeat he saw a room that could have been in any storybook tavern: low beams, a stone hearth with fire painting the room in amber, people in travelling cloaks and modern jackets both, gathered around chipped mugs. A sign hung over the hearth, emblazoned with the stylized outline of a fox wrapped around a lantern.

    His heart gave a little jump of recognition, though he couldn’t have said why.

    The fox brushed against his leg, drawing him on. When he looked back at the doorway, the crack had closed. The sign over the hearth was gone, as if it had never been.

    “Was that… a pub?” he asked, reflexively. “Like in old movies?”

    The fox didn’t answer, but the lantern’s glow shivered with something like amusement.

    They walked on until the alley opened up into a small square.

    It wasn’t big—more like the space in the middle of four old houses that had agreed to share a backyard. A dry fountain stood at its center, stone basin carved with little foxes chasing one another’s tails. The world beyond the square was a haze, as if someone had forgotten to finish painting it.

    The lantern fox padded to the fountain and hopped gracefully onto its rim. It turned to face Eli and lowered its tail so the lantern hung just above the basin.

    Light spilled down like liquid.

    Water rose to meet it.

    At first it was empty, clear. Then shapes surfaced beneath the glow: waves of colour, fragments of moving scenes.

    He saw himself, only minutes ago, standing by the wooden dragon, map in hand. He watched as a knot of teenagers pushed past, watched his parents carried away on the tide of bodies, unaware he had stopped. He saw his own face, a little stubborn, a little curious, as he stepped toward the dragon instead of clinging to Mum’s sleeve.

    “It’s my fault,” he whispered.

    The fox’s ears flicked. The light in the lantern dimmed, and the image shifted.

    Now he saw his parents. Not from his eyes this time—from somewhere above. His mother’s face was pale, lips pressed tight as she scanned the crowd, calling his name. His father spoke to the nearest staff member, gesturing sharply, trying very hard not to look as scared as he was.

    They circled the fair, again and again, their paths looping, almost touching the spot where Eli had stood and then missing it by a single step, a single breath, as if the fairground itself were twisting to keep them apart.

    He watched his mother’s shoulders shake once when she thought his father wasn’t looking, saw his father’s jaw clench as he pretended not to notice.

    The knot in Eli’s throat loosened into something else entirely.

    “They’re… they’re looking so hard,” he said. “I thought…”

    He had thought, in a small, secret part of himself, that maybe if he disappeared they would shrug eventually and keep going, like when a toy broke and no one had time to fix it. But this—this frantic searching, this fear—this was something else.

    The lantern fox lifted its head slightly. The scenes in the water folded and collapsed like pages turning.

    Eli saw flashes of other people then, only glimpses: a figure on a cliff-edge, staring into fog; a woman in a starship corridor with panels flickering; a scholar surrounded by books and yet completely lost. In each picture, the fox’s lantern light gleamed somewhere close, never forcing, only offering.

    Then the fountain went still. The water lay flat as glass, reflecting only the lantern above.

    Eli stepped closer until he could see his own face in the surface. Freckles, wide eyes, hair sticking up in three directions. He looked small. He also looked… present. Solid. Like he belonged here, in this strange in-between square, at least for a moment.

    “I don’t want to disappear,” he said quietly, more to himself than to the fox. “I want to go home. Even when it’s noisy. Even when they’re tired. I want to be where they are.”

    The fox hopped down from the fountain. The lantern swung close to Eli’s chest, brightening until he had to squint. Warmth wrapped around his ribs, his heart, like someone was fastening a button deep inside him that had come undone.

    He felt, clearly and simply, a sense of agreement.

    Then the world tilted.

    The square, the fountain, the doors around it—all stretched away like reflections sliding off glass. Lantern light became the sharp glare of the fairground bulbs. The damp cobbles under his shoes turned back into gravel dusted with dropped popcorn.

    He staggered, catching his balance.

    He stood exactly where he’d first realized he was alone: between the game booth and the carousel. The dragon still circled, its emerald eye shining. The map in his hand was just a map again, crumpled and slightly sweaty.

    But the warmth in his chest remained.

    “Eli!”

    His mother’s voice cracked over the noise, raw and sharp. He spun.

    She shoved through the crowd, hair a mess, jacket half-zipped, Dad close behind her. The moment she saw him, she broke into a run. He thought he’d be in trouble, or at least scolded, but instead she crashed into him in a hug that knocked the breath out of his lungs.

    “Oh thank God,” she whispered against his hair. “Oh, Eli, we couldn’t find you, everything kept looking the same, I thought—”

    His father’s hand landed on his shoulder, squeezing hard enough to hurt in a good way. “You alright, kiddo?” His voice was rough. “You hurt? You scared us half to death.”

    “I’m okay,” Eli said, the words muffled by his mother’s jacket. He swallowed. “I was… lost. Really lost. But…”

    He hesitated. How did you explain cobbled alleys and silent tavern doors and a fox made of lantern light?

    He pulled back enough to look up at them. “I’m sorry,” he said instead. “For the joke earlier. I don’t want to get lost on purpose. I want to stay with you. Even when everything’s… kinda loud.”

    His mother’s eyes filled, a complicated mix of relief and guilt and love. His father ruffled his hair, too hard, the way he always did when he didn’t know what else to do.

    “We’re going home,” his dad said. “Fair’s over for us tonight.”

    Eli nodded, slipping one hand into his mother’s and one into his father’s, anchoring himself left and right. For a moment, walking between them felt like the safest place in the universe.

    As they headed toward the exit, he glanced back over his shoulder.

    Between two stalls, where the shadows pooled thickest, a small shape moved. A tail tipped with light curled briefly into view, the lantern swinging in a slow arc. The fox’s eyes met his across the distance—warm, watchful, amused.

    Eli smiled, a quick, fierce little smile that felt too old for his face and exactly right at the same time.

    “Thank you,” he whispered.

    The fox dipped its head once. Behind it, for the barest heartbeat, he thought he saw a door outlined in warm gold, and beyond it the glow of firelight on old beams and the suggestion of a sign shaped like a fox coiled around a lantern.

    Then the crowd shifted. A man walked between them, pushing a stroller. When he passed, the door and the fox were gone. Only the ordinary dark remained.

    Except, of course, it wasn’t entirely ordinary anymore.

    Eli walked out of the fairground holding his parents’ hands, the warmth of lantern light still tucked under his ribs like a secret. The world felt a little bigger than it had that morning—stranger, maybe—but also kinder.

    Somewhere, not yet fixed in any one place, a tavern waited to be fully real, its hearth ready, its doors not quite settled on which street they belonged to. For now, it lived in glimpses and echoes and the paths the lantern fox walked.

    Eli didn’t know that. Not yet.

    He only knew that when he closed his eyes on the backseat ride home, the darkness wasn’t empty. It was filled with the soft glow of a lantern swinging in time with his breath, keeping pace with the beat of his heart, leading on—quietly, patiently—whenever he felt lost.

  • Chapter 4 – The Scholar Who Forgot the Question

    Chapter 4 – The Scholar Who Forgot the Question

    Serin did not notice the sun had gone down again.

    The light in the tower study was always the same now: tired candles guttering in iron brackets, the faint amber glow of charmed globes long past their prime, the grey smear of evening through the narrow window slit. Day and night had blurred into one long, ink-stained hour.

    Pages covered the desk. Pages covered the chair beside the desk. Pages had colonized the floor, spilling in drifts around the legs of shelves that were themselves sagging under the weight of more pages.

    Serin stared at the latest sheet, the ink still damp.

    The Convergence of Liminal Topographies: A Taxonomy.

    It said nothing else. No text, no argument, no spark. Just another impressive-sounding title, written in neat, controlled hand.

    Serin set the quill down and realized, with a sudden hollow swing in their chest, that they did not know what they had meant to write under it.

    The word “Convergence” had once meant something exciting. It had tasted like thunder on their tongue, like the edge of a discovered map. Now it was just one more stone in a long wall of words they no longer believed.

    They dragged both hands over their face. Their fingers smelled of old ink and tallow.

    “What was the question?” Serin whispered to the empty room.

    The tower answered with creaks and the muffled sigh of the wind between stones.

    Somewhere above, a book shifted on a shelf with a soft scrape. Dust sifted down in lazy spirals.

    Serin ignored it. They forced their gaze back to the page and tried to drag up the thread of thought.

    Thin places. Crossroads that didn’t fit on maps. Doors that only opened once.

    They’d chased those ideas for years. Collected stories of vanishing roads and wayhouses that appeared only in storms. Interviewed travelers who swore they had drunk with strangers from other eras. Wound those accounts into theories fine enough to impress committees.

    In all that time, with all those treatises and lectures and citations, the feeling underneath—the aching, childlike certainty that there had to be a place where lost people could go and rest—had been buried under footnotes.

    “What did I want to know?” Serin asked the air, and this time their voice cracked.

    A candle near the window guttered, flared—then went out completely.

    The brief darkness that followed was deeper than it had any right to be.

    Serin blinked, waiting for their eyes to adjust. The other candles still burned, but their light felt narrow and thin, as if something just beyond the circle of illumination had thickened.

    Another sound from higher up in the room. A slow, grinding shift, as if a shelf that had not moved in years was suddenly reminded that gravity existed.

    Serin frowned and half-rose from the chair.

    “Not now,” they muttered, to the shelf or the tower or themselves, they weren’t sure. Fatigue hung from their limbs like chains. “Tomorrow. I’ll… I’ll fix it tomorrow.”

    Something fell.

    It was not the soft flutter of a single volume slipping from its place. It was the heavy, meaty thump of a book that had no business coming down from that height unless pushed by a determined hand.

    It landed near Serin’s boots, rebounded once, and lay splayed open on the floor.

    Serin stared at it for a few seconds, brain sluggish. Then they sighed.

    “All right,” they said, and pushed themselves to their feet.

    Their knees complained. Their spine popped. They shuffled around the desk, avoiding teetering stacks of paper with the unconscious grace of long practice.

    The book that had fallen was an ugly thing: a bound miscellany of old lectures and committee notes, thick with marginalia. Its spine was cracked, its corners chewed. It lay open on a page that held nothing but an ink blot and the faint, ghostly impression of erased writing.

    Beyond it, in the shadow beneath the nearest shelf, something watched Serin.

    At first they thought it was just the way the candlelight hit the darkness—two glints like coins or drops of dew. Then the glints blinked.

    Serin went very still.

    From the deeper dark, a shape stepped forward: small, low to the ground, the size of a fox. Its fur was the color of autumn leaves and cinders, except that no fur should catch the light like that. It shimmered faintly, as if lit from within by a hidden lantern.

    Long ears pricked forward. A fine-boned muzzle, whiskers catching light in silver filaments. A tail, full and sleek, the tip glowing brighter than the rest, like a coal banked in ash.

    Serin’s breath hitched. Their mind went scrambling uselessly through catalogues of known spirits and illusions.

    The creature tilted its head. In the reflected candlelight of its eyes, Serin saw their desk: papers, abandoned quill, cold tea, and—jutting out from a precarious stack—a battered little notebook with a cracked leather cover.

    The fox’s gaze lingered on the notebook.

    It did not speak. It did not make a sound at all. Its tail tip brightened, just enough to draw Serin’s eye, then dimmed.

    Serin swallowed.

    “You shouldn’t be here,” they said, more to see what the creature would do than from any belief that it would listen. “This tower is warded. The library—”

    The fox stepped daintily over the fallen book, ignoring it completely. Its paws disturbed no dust. It walked right past Serin, crossing the floor with the casual, unhurried confidence of something that had been here before and would, with or without permission, be here again.

    It leapt lightly onto the chair beside the desk, then onto the desk itself, where it threaded its way between stacks of pages without so much as stirring a crumb.

    Serin’s heart pattered against their ribs. They followed on stiff legs.

    “Careful,” they blurted, as the creature passed near a tower of notes balanced on the edge of the inkstand. “Those are— I mean, I spent—”

    The fox ignored the warning. Of course it did. It had never asked to be included in Serin’s priorities.

    It reached the battered notebook and paused. For a moment, its outline blurred; the inner light pulsed gently, like someone cupping a lamp and then slowly revealing it again.

    Serin stood on the other side of the desk, pulse thudding, hands pressed flat to the wood as if to steady them.

    The fox lowered its head and nudged the notebook. Not enough to send it flying—just enough to shift it by a finger-width, to make it undeniably the center of the scene.

    Then it looked up at Serin.

    Those eyes were not human. They were too clear, too old. But in them Serin saw a reflection that hurt: a younger version of themselves, ink-smudged and bright-eyed, clutching that very notebook like a treasure.

    Serin let out a shaky breath and reached.

    The leather was dry and cracked under their fingers. The little tie strap broke as soon as they pulled, but the book opened willingly.

    The first page held a title written in an untidy hand that had never imagined a committee’s red ink:

    Questions No One Has Answered Yet.

    Serin’s throat tightened.

    The pages beyond were full of scrawls and sketches. No elegant structure, no polished thesis. Just bursts:

    • Why do the same stories appear in different lands?
    • Where do lost roads go when they vanish?
    • Is there a place where people who don’t fit anywhere else can rest?
    • A drawing of a tavern at a crossroads, lanterns hanging from its eaves, tiny foxes playing in the yard. Above the door, something like a signboard, left unfinished, as if the younger Serin hadn’t decided what to call it yet.

    The memory hit like sunlight through a long-shuttered window.

    They had been young when they wrote these. An apprentice in a drafty dormitory, half-frozen fingers gripping a cheap quill, staying up by contraband candlelight to record every question that wouldn’t leave them alone. The world had felt wide and strange, full of holes where impossible light leaked through.

    They had not been interested in tenure or reputation then. Only in finding that place—the one from the stories. The welcoming room between storms.

    Now they were here, in a tower filled with proofs and procedures, and they could not even remember why the word “Convergence” had once made their heart race.

    Serin’s eyes stung. They blinked hard, breath coming short.

    “You…” They looked up at the fox. “Did you bring this? Did you—”

    The fox had not moved. It sat with its front paws neatly together, tail wrapped around them, ears forward. The light inside it burned soft and steady.

    It blinked once, slowly. Then it turned its head toward the shelves.

    When Serin did not move, the fox hopped down, its paws silent on the desk, and—without knocking over a single page—leapt to the floor. It trotted toward the nearest aisle between towering bookcases, its glowing tail trailing a faint afterimage.

    At the threshold of the aisle, it looked back over its shoulder.

    Serin felt the invitation as clearly as if it had spoken.

    Their gaze flicked back to the notebook. They hesitated only a moment before tucking it into the inside pocket of their robe, close to their chest.

    Then, heart pounding in a way that had nothing to do with deadlines or appointments, they followed.

    The aisle between the shelves was not especially long. It had never been especially long.

    Now it stretched.

    The further Serin walked, the more the world narrowed to the smell of parchment and ink, to the soft gleam of fox-light ahead. The tower walls fell away; the ceiling climbed until the shelves vanished into shadow.

    They looked back once.

    The study was still there, a warm square of light and cluttered safety. But it seemed small now, like a painting on distant stone, not a place one could easily step back into.

    The fox trotted on.

    Shelves loomed higher. Some of the books here were familiar: monographs Serin had read or cited, treatises that had occupied whole seasons of their life. Others were strange, bound in materials they did not recognize, titles in scripts that pricked at the edges of their memory.

    They reached a junction where the aisle split in two.

    Without slowing, the fox veered left.

    Serin started after it—then stopped, struck by a peculiar detail on the right-hand path.

    There, row upon row, were identical books. Same color, same size, same stamped lettering on every spine. Only the titles shifted:

    The Convergence of Liminal Topographies: A Taxonomy.
    The Convergence of Liminal Topographies: A Reappraisal.
    The Convergence of Liminal Topographies: Collected Lectures.
    Supplemental Addenda to the Convergence of Liminal Topographies.

    And on, and on, and on.

    Each spine bore Serin’s name, growing larger with each new variant, while the subtitles shrank into cramped, illegible script.

    The nearest copy shuddered. Without any visible force, it slid from its place and fell at Serin’s feet, bouncing once on the floorboards that should have been stone.

    The cover snapped open.

    There was nothing inside.

    Blank pages, edge to edge. Not even a publisher’s mark.

    Serin felt sudden nausea. They backed away a step.

    The fox had paused at the corner, looking back. The light in its fur dimmed, as if they had turned down the wick of an unseen lamp. It stood there, watching, until Serin tore their gaze from the empty book and stumbled after it.

    The aisle twisted.

    They passed another run of shelves, these labeled in a script that seemed to shift whenever Serin tried to read it: Impact Metrics, Committee Minutes, Grant Justifications. The books here were heavy as bricks. Some bore chains instead of titles.

    Serin’s shoulders hunched.

    They had thought they were walking away from that burden.

    The fox’s path turned again, and suddenly the narrow corridor opened into a circular room Serin had never seen before.

    It should not have existed inside the tower. The dimensions were wrong; the proportions made their skin prickle.

    A round reading table stood in the middle, surrounded by shelves rising like the walls of a well. High above, no ceiling—just a dim haze.

    Six chairs ringed the table.

    Five of them were occupied.

    Serin froze on the threshold, breath catching in their throat.

    They were all Serin.

    Nearest on the left sat a child, legs too short to comfortably reach the floor, boots scuffed and ink on their nose. Their hair stuck up in an unruly mess; their eyes burned with a feverish brightness. The battered notebook lay open in front of them, half full of sketches of crossroads and a tavern under strange stars, its name left blank.

    Next to the child, an older apprentice version hunched over field notes, cloak still dusted with road grit, fingers tapping eagerly as if they could barely keep up with the stories spilling from their memory. A little wooden fox charm dangled from their belt.

    Beside them, a young scholar in fresh robes argued with someone invisible across the table, hands slicing the air, eyes hard with the sharp-edged certainty of the newly published.

    The fourth Serin was middle-aged, shoulders starting to stoop, ink stains ground into their cuffs, lips pressed thin. Letters of refusal and “regrets to inform” surrounded them like fallen leaves.

    The fifth was the one Serin recognized too well: present-day, hollow-eyed, a smear of candle soot on one cheek, staring at a blank page under a title that had lost its meaning.

    The sixth chair stood empty.

    The fox walked into the room, paws soundless on the floor. It hopped onto the table with an ease that paid no mind to the ghost-selves seated there.

    None of the other Serins looked up. They flickered, slightly transparent, like reflections in disturbed water.

    The fox moved slowly around the circle.

    It passed the older scholar, whose fingers trembled from too much coffee and too little sleep. The light under its fur dimmed as it went by, the air seeming to grow colder.

    When it reached the youngest Serin—the child with the notebook—it paused.

    The little Serin’s hand, holding a stub of a quill, hovered over the page. Their lips moved as they whispered words only they could hear. The notebook lay open to a drawing: a door with a lantern above it, and beside the door, the outline of a fox, hastily sketched but unmistakable.

    The fox lowered its head and touched the drawn fox with the tip of its nose.

    For a heartbeat, the ink lines glowed.

    The child Serin looked up, eyes wide. For the first time, one of the echoes saw something beyond its own memory. Their gaze met the real Serin standing in the doorway.

    Accusation. Longing. Disbelief. All of it flickered there at once.

    Serin’s chest felt too small.

    “I didn’t—” they rasped, though there was no breath to carry those words across time. “I just… I thought I had to… I had to make it respectable. Serious. No one listens if—”

    The child’s mouth moved. Their voice did not reach Serin’s ears, but the shape of the words did.

    Then why did you stop asking?

    The air shuddered.

    One by one, the other echoes blurred. The field scholar dissolved into a flurry of leaves, the ambitious lecturer into drifting pages, the middle-aged worrier into thin smoke. The present-day echo lingered longest, a hollow specter at the sixth chair, then folded inward and vanished.

    The chairs sat empty.

    Only the fox remained on the table, tail curled around its paws.

    It looked at Serin.

    For a long, ringing moment, nothing moved.

    Then the shelves around the room shifted.

    Labels seared themselves into being along their edges, changing even as Serin watched:

    Published Works became Proof I Deserve to Exist.

    Committee Decisions became Fear of Being Cast Out.

    Field Notes became Lives I Chose Not to Stay With.

    Questions became Why I Started.

    Serin swayed where they stood. The notebook in their pocket felt like it weighed as much as the tower.

    “I don’t want to be here anymore,” they whispered. “Not like this.”

    The fox stood.

    It padded to the edge of the table and leapt down, landing without a sound. As it walked toward Serin, its fur brightened, until the room seemed lit mostly by that inner glow. It brushed against Serin’s leg, the touch warm through the fabric of their robe.

    For the first time in years, Serin felt something inside them loosen. Not entirely—there were still knots, still grief—but something gave.

    The fox turned away and walked to the far side of the round room, where there had been only more shelves.

    Now there was a doorway.

    No—two.

    The first stood to the left: a stout, perfectly ordinary door of dark wood, brass handle polished by imaginary hands. Above it, neatly carved, was a plaque:

    TENURE & SECURITY.

    Behind its frosted panes Serin saw the suggestion of a tidy office: a desk, a window, the vague movement of people who would ask the same questions, year after year. Everything was softened, safe, slightly blurred, as if the world beyond were wrapped in cotton.

    The second “door” was nothing but a simple wooden frame standing alone. Beyond its threshold, there was no wall—only darkness pricked by a low, reddish light. The smell of woodsmoke drifted through, threaded with the savour of something cooking and the faint brightness of citrus and spice.

    Somewhere in that unseen space, voices rose and fell. Laughter here, a murmur there—never quite distinct, as if heard through a wall of rain or across a long, echoing hall. It felt like overhearing a life Serin had not yet lived, stories circling a place their research had tried to describe but never quite reached.

    The fox padded up to the plaque over the left-hand door.

    It stretched, set one delicate forepaw on the word SECURITY, and dragged its claws across the carved letters.

    They blackened at once. Cracked. Flaked away like burnt paper. The frosted glass behind them clouded, whatever lay beyond sinking into a dull, undifferentiated grey.

    The fox dropped back to the floor and shook its paw once, as if flicking away ash.

    Then it walked to the bare wooden frame and sat just inside the threshold, half its body swallowed by shadow, half outlined in that warm, unseen glow. Its tail-tip burned brighter, a small, steady star.

    Serin let out a breath that bordered on a laugh and a sob at once.

    “I’ve spent fifteen years chasing the safest answer to every question,” they said hoarsely. “And now you want me to walk into a door with no name.”

    The fox did not nod. It did not speak.

    It simply watched them and gave one slow, deliberate sweep of its tail against the frame, the gentle tap as clear as any answer.

    Serin slid a hand into their robe and drew out the battered little notebook.

    It felt smaller here. More honest.

    They flipped to the last blank page.

    The words came easier than they had on any title page in years:

    Proposal: To find the place where lost paths meet, and to listen.

    No methods. No committee-friendly phrasing. Just the old question, put back in its proper place.

    They tore the page out and folded it once, twice, until it fit neatly in their palm. Then they tucked it into their inner pocket alongside all the earlier, messier questions.

    The paper crinkled against their chest.

    “All right,” Serin whispered. “No plaque. No guarantees.”

    They stepped past the door marked TENURE & SECURITY without touching its handle.

    The closer they came to the empty frame, the clearer the other scents became: damp stone after rain; smoke curling from some great unseen hearth; yeast and spice; metal and leather; a faint bite of something like apple and something like pine. It smelled like stories. It smelled, absurdly, like the little drawing in the notebook had been trying to remember.

    On the very edge of the threshold, fear tightened around Serin’s ribs.

    “What if I’m nothing, out there?” they asked the space between. “What if all I am without these books is… no one at all?”

    The fox stood.

    It pressed its shoulder firmly against Serin’s leg, not pushing, only grounding. The warmth of it bled through fabric and skin. For a moment, Serin could feel its heartbeat—a quick, sure rhythm, utterly unconcerned with committees or titles.

    Then the fox stepped forward and passed through the frame.

    For a heartbeat, the light inside its fur flared, filling the doorway with a glow like lanterns seen through mist. Shadows of beams, tables, hanging shapes—bottles, charms, a signboard with some small fox-shaped emblem—sketched themselves in the brightness and vanished again before they resolved.

    Serin took a breath that tasted of smoke and unknown places, and followed.

    The tower, the shelves, the circular room, the safe door with its half-burnt plaque—they did not fall away so much as fold, like pages closing. For an instant, Serin walked between one step and the next, between inhale and exhale, balanced on the thin edge of choice.

    Their foot came down on something that was not the library floor.

    Stone, perhaps. Or worn wood. The surface was solid under their boot.

    Warmth washed over them. Voices swelled, still indistinct but closer now. Light—not the steady, sour light of study lamps, but something softer, alive with flicker and movement—pressed against their closed eyelids.

    Serin did not open their eyes yet.

    They rested a hand over the pocket where the folded page lay and, for the first time since they could remember, allowed themselves to stand in the not-knowing without flinching.

    The fox’s presence brushed against their awareness like the lift of a tail around their ankles. An invitation. A promise.

    Somewhere ahead, just beyond the reach of their senses, a room waited that countless stories had circled around but never quite named.

    “Where lost paths meet,” Serin murmured.

    The words slipped into the warm air and vanished.

    When they opened their eyes, whatever lay beyond the frame belonged to another story—and another chapter.

    Behind them, the tower of empty titles and forgotten questions was gone.

    Ahead, in the unseen place the fox had led them to, the next lost path was already on its way.

  • Chapter 3 – The Disillusioned Captain

    Chapter 3 – The Disillusioned Captain

    The stars had never looked so empty.

    Captain Kael Arden sat alone on the bridge of the Vigilant Dawn, chin resting on his fist, while the forward viewport showed a slow drift of distant suns. To anyone else, it would have been a beautiful sight: a silver warship adrift in a sea of light.

    To Kael, it felt like being trapped in an old photograph—frozen, hollow, and a little bit wrong.

    The ship thrummed softly around him. Consoles glowed on standby. No crew on shift; he’d sent them all to rest. The patrol was over, the convoy safely escorted, the pirates driven off. By any metric in the Fleet logs, it had been a success.

    Except for the refugee ship.

    He closed his eyes, but that only made the memory sharper.

    The civilian transport, battered and burning, had appeared at the edge of the system just as the pirate raiders struck the corporate freighters. His comms officer’s voice had been tight, almost pleading.

    “Captain, the transport is broadcasting distress. Life support failing. They’re asking for immediate assistance.”

    At the same time, Command’s orders had come through, crisp and impersonal.

    “Priority Alpha: Protect assets of the Marrowline Convoy at all costs. Do not deviate.”

    Assets. Not people. Not lives. Assets.

    He’d hesitated. For three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough for the choice to carve itself into him like a brand.

    “Helm,” he’d said at last, voice steady by sheer force of habit, “hold course. Protect the convoy.”

    They’d done it. Driven off the pirates. Saved every last crate of mineral ore and corporate tech.

    By the time the battle ended, the refugee ship’s signal had gone silent.

    He’d ordered a course to their last known position anyway. They found only drifting debris and a hazy cloud of frozen air where the hull had finally split.

    There had been no survivors.

    A soft chime drew him back to the present. The ship’s chronometer ticked over another hour. Patrol route complete, course auto-plotted back toward the inner trade lanes. Toward more convoys. More orders.

    More assets.

    Kael stood up, pushing away from the captain’s chair like it had grown thorns.

    “Computer,” he said, “cancel return course.”

    A pause. Then the calm, obedient voice of the ship’s systems:

    “Please state new destination.”

    He looked at the map hovering in the air—systems and hyperlanes glowing in a web of cold light. Everything organised. Everything efficient.

    He wanted to punch his fist through it.

    Instead, he exhaled slowly. “No new destination. Hold position. Drift.”

    “Confirmed. Engines to idle. Holding position.”

    The stars stopped sliding. The bridge fell fully quiet, as if the ship itself were holding its breath.

    Kael paced to the viewport, resting his palm against the transparent alloy. The cold seeped into his skin.

    “You were supposed to be different,” he muttered to the universe at large. “We were supposed to be explorers. Pathfinders.”

    That had been the dream when he was a wide-eyed academy recruit. Find new worlds. Chart the unknown. Help.

    Somewhere along the way, the maps had all been filled in, and the unknowns replaced with quarterly reports.

    His reflection looked back at him in the dark glass—a man in his late thirties, uniform neat, captain’s bars gleaming. A successful officer by every external measure.

    Inside, he felt like the hull of that refugee ship—cracked, air bleeding out, seconds from rupture.

    His hand slid down the viewport, fingers leaving a faint smear. He almost laughed; even his despair was tidy.

    The laugh died before it formed.

    There, on the edge of his vision, something moved.

    Kael straightened, squinting into the starfield. The Vigilant Dawn was far from any beacon. There shouldn’t be anything out here but dust and distant suns.

    And yet—

    A faint pulse of light blinked in the dark. Then again. Not the regular rhythm of a standard nav buoy, but softer, almost… breathing.

    “Computer, magnify sector 12 by 30,” Kael ordered.

    The viewport obeyed, stars stretching, one patch of space zooming in until the source of the light shimmered into focus.

    It was not a beacon.

    Floating alone in the void was… a lantern.

    Not a proper piece of ship tech, not in any database Kael knew. It looked like something pulled from an old story—a small iron-framed lantern with frosted panes, burning with a steady, warm golden flame inside. No visible power source. No thrusters. Just hanging there in the vacuum, where it absolutely shouldn’t be.

    The light inside flickered, and for just a moment the shape of the glow shifted.

    It became the outline of a fox—slender, four-tailed, eyes like twin embers—before flickering back to simple fire.

    “What in all the hells…” Kael whispered.

    His hand went to the nearest console, instinct kicking in. “Computer, scan that object. Full spectrum.”

    “Analyzing,” the ship replied. “No mass signature detected. No energy signature consistent with known technology. Distance: one thousand meters off port bow. Relative velocity: zero.”

    “So it’s just… there,” Kael said. “In vacuum. Glowing. With no fuel. And physics just took the night off.”

    “Statement cannot be confirmed,” the computer replied, unhelpful.

    The lantern pulsed again. Brighter this time.

    It felt like a gaze.

    He scrubbed a hand over his face. Stress. Guilt. Maybe he needed sleep.

    The lantern flared, and suddenly the bridge lights dimmed, consoles flickering as if their power had been drained. The ship groaned like a living thing in discomfort.

    “Warning,” the computer said, voice stuttering. “Unidentified interference impacting—”

    The audio cut out.

    The lantern’s glow intensified until it washed across the viewport, golden light bleeding through the alloy as though it weren’t there at all. Kael staggered back, blinking against the radiance.

    “Enough!” he shouted, throwing an arm over his eyes. “If this is some kind of pirate trick—”

    The world fell away.

    For a heartbeat, he felt weightless, falling sideways through his own skin. Then his boots found ground again—not the metal deck of the bridge, but something rougher, older.

    He opened his eyes.

    He was standing on a dirt road beneath a sky he didn’t recognise.

    The stars were there, but closer, sharper, as if the universe had leaned down to listen. A cool wind slid past, carrying the smells of pine and distant smoke. The hum of engines and reactors was gone; in its place came the chorus of night insects and the far-off hoot of some unseen bird.

    The bridge, the ship, the viewport—gone.

    In front of him, a short distance down the road, stood the lantern.

    It hovered at about chest height, its metal frame unchanged, the warm flame inside steady. Now, in the open air, he could see clearly that the flame wasn’t quite a flame. It was a shape moving within the glass—a little fox wrought entirely of light, its tails flowing like sparks in a gentle breeze.

    The fox tilted its head, regarding him.

    Kael stared back, mouth slightly open. “Right. Definitely asleep,” he said. “Or concussed. Or dead. Or all three.”

    The fox’s mouth opened in what might have been a silent yip. The lantern swayed, then drifted backwards down the road, its light spilling over the packed earth.

    “Wait,” Kael said, taking an involuntary step forward. “What are you? Where am I?”

    The lantern paused.

    Warmth brushed against his thoughts, like the feeling of standing too close to a hearth after coming in from the cold. Along with it came a sense of gentle urgency, a tug—not on his body, but on something deeper, drawing him forward.

    No words. Just invitation.

    He understood it anyway.

    “You want me to follow,” he said slowly.

    The lantern brightened, as if in answer, then began drifting away again, further down the road.

    He hesitated. “And if I don’t?”

    The warmth faded for a heartbeat, replaced by a hollow ache in his chest, sharp enough to make him grimace. Then the ache shifted into a weight—his captain’s bars, heavy on his shoulders, the sound of Command’s orders replaying in his mind. The memory of twisted metal and frozen air.

    He didn’t hear a voice. But the meaning was clear enough:

    if you do nothing, you go back exactly as you are.

    He swallowed, throat tight.

    “Fine,” he said. “Lead on. But if you’re my conscience, this is a very dramatic way to say ‘we need to talk.’”

    He followed.

    The road wound gently through trees, their branches arching overhead. Starlight and lantern-light wove together into strange patterns on the ground. As they walked, the world shifted in subtle ways.

    At first, it was only small things—the smell of the air, the texture of the earth. Then the trees thinned, and the road spilled out onto a familiar metal gangway.

    Kael stopped dead.

    They were aboard a ship. Not the Vigilant Dawn, but a smaller vessel from years ago—the Pioneer’s Dream, his first posting out of the academy. The hull walls gleamed with scuffs and patches, the kind that came from real exploration, not polished patrol routes. Laughter echoed faintly down the corridor.

    “This is…” He reached out, fingertips brushing the bulkhead. “This was my first assignment.”

    The lantern hovered at his side, casting a warm circle of light on the worn metal. The warmth against his thoughts shifted—lighter now, tinged with a kind of quiet curiosity, as if asking: remember?

    He did.

    They moved on, the gangway stretching, folding, changing beneath their feet as if time had become a hallway they could walk down.

    He saw himself at twenty, eyes bright, talking passionately about mapping unknown systems and helping outer colonies. He saw the moment he’d volunteered for a humanitarian mission during a plague outbreak, spending sleepless nights in makeshift wards because “they needed every pair of hands.”

    He felt again the raw, simple conviction that had driven him: we’re here to help.

    The lantern’s presence swelled with warmth at that memory, like a hand pressed briefly over his heart in agreement.

    Then the scenes shifted.

    He saw the first time he’d been commended not for saving lives, but for safeguarding a shipment of experimental weapons.

    “Efficient use of resources, Arden,” the admiral had said. “You made the hard call.”

    The warmth thinned, cooling to something like distant starlight. Not condemnation—just contrast. A gentle, painful comparison between who he had been and who he’d become.

    Scene after scene unfolded—a living archive of choices. None of them outright monstrous. Just small compromises. Orders followed without question. Tiny shifts in language: “civilians” becoming “variables,” “colonies” becoming “assets.”

    With each memory, the road beneath his feet felt narrower.

    Eventually, they stopped before a set of blast doors.

    Kael knew these doors. He didn’t need the lantern to show him what lay beyond.

    The designation engraved above them—the coordinates of the refugee ship’s last known position—might as well have been burned into the back of his eyelids.

    “I know what I did,” he said quietly. “I don’t need to see it again.”

    The light within the lantern dimmed, turning soft and steady, like banked coals. A weight settled on him—not crushing, but insistent. It felt like standing at the edge of a decision all over again.

    He felt a nudge of emotion, not his own: reluctant courage. The feeling of opening an old wound to clean it properly, knowing it would hurt but heal cleaner.

    He drew a shaky breath. “You want me to stand where I stood,” he murmured, “and actually look at it.”

    The warmth pulsed once. Yes, without saying it.

    “Fine,” he whispered. “Open it.”

    The blast doors slid apart without a sound.

    Instead of space debris and corpses, the scene beyond was frozen at the moment of his original hesitation. The Vigilant Dawn sat at the centre of the projection, under attack, pirate fire streaking past. The convoy freighters huddled behind her. And out at the edge of the system, the refugee ship burned, its distress beacon pulsing weakly.

    Two course projections hung in the air—one toward the convoy, one toward the refugees.

    Kael watched his own recorded self, jaw clenched, eyes on the convoy. Watched his hand lift. Heard his own voice echo through the stillness.

    “Helm, hold course. Protect the convoy.”

    The words stabbed through him like shrapnel.

    The lantern’s glow cooled, and with it came a tightening in his chest that wasn’t quite guilt and wasn’t quite grief, but something knotted out of both. The sensation held for a moment, then shifted.

    The scene blurred. The map lines rearranged themselves.

    Now he saw the Vigilant Dawn darting toward the refugees instead, shields straining to hold off pirate fire while the convoy took damage but mostly escaped. The cost was higher. More wreckage, more scars. But the refugee ship stayed intact long enough to evacuate.

    Another rearrangement: fighters peeled off to shield the convoy while the Vigilant Dawn itself broke toward the refugee ship, threading a narrow channel of risk between both responsibilities. Messy. Risky. Not certain. But human.

    None of these had happened. The records would never show them. They were might-have-beens, not second chances.

    But Kael could feel, very clearly, what the lantern was showing him: you had options. More than one. You chose the one that betrayed your own vow.

    “I had other ways,” he said hoarsely. “I just… didn’t take them.”

    The emotion pressing against his thoughts changed again—less sharp now, more like the ache after a long cry. Beneath it, a quiet, stubborn ember of something.

    Possibility.

    The visions dissolved. The blast doors faded back into the dirt road. Only Kael, the lantern, and the night remained.

    He stared at the ground. “What do I do now?” he asked, voice raw. “I’m one captain. One ship. Command gives the orders. The corporations hold the leash.”

    The lantern drifted closer. Warmth spread through his chest, not soft this time, but steady and firm, like the feeling of standing at attention for an oath. A memory rose, unbidden:

    Himself, younger, on the observation deck of the Pioneer’s Dream, hand against the glass, whispering to the stars, If I ever have to choose between profit and people, I choose people. Every time.

    The warmth flared in answer, locking that memory in place.

    He didn’t hear a sentence. He didn’t have to. The meaning pressed into him as clear as any spoken phrase:

    start there.

    He let out a long breath.

    “Start with why I took the captain’s chair,” he said slowly. “Not why they gave it to me. Why I wanted it.”

    The lantern’s light danced, almost playful, and a flicker of amusement brushed his thoughts—like someone arching a brow at him for asking a question he already knew the answer to.

    He barked a short, humorless laugh. “You’re saying the question isn’t ‘what can I do under their orders?’ It’s ‘what can I do with this ship and crew if I remember who I am.’”

    The warmth pulsed once in agreement.

    Images rose at the edge of his mind—not shown to him exactly, more like ideas nudged to the surface.

    His ship refitted not as an escort for corporate convoys, but as a responder. Running rescue operations on the fringe. Smuggling food and medicine past blockades. Using every trick he’d learned protecting assets to protect lives instead.

    Each image came with both a thrill and a stab of fear. Disobeying orders. Burning bridges. Maybe never seeing the inner worlds again as a free man.

    The fear was his. The small, stubborn spark that flared beside it—the one that said, this is what you wanted to be—felt like it came from the lantern’s glow, fanned gently into flame.

    “Why me?” he asked quietly. “Out of all the captains, all the ships. Why find me in the dark?”

    The lantern’s light softened. For a moment, Kael felt a rushing impression: rows of cold, dark viewports across a thousand ships, countless faces reflected there. Some hard. Some bored. Some satisfied.

    And then, his own reflection—eyes tired, jaw clenched, but with a question burning behind his gaze: What have I become?

    The feeling settled around him like a cloak: because you still cared enough to ask. Because it still hurt. Because you hadn’t gone numb.

    He swallowed. “So this is it,” he murmured. “You drag me out here to a road that doesn’t exist, show me every mistake, and then what? Send me back and hope I don’t fall into the same rut?”

    The sensation that brushed his thoughts now was neither comfort nor scolding, but something else: a quiet hand letting go. A crossroads. A palm opening to show him that nothing was being pushed into it.

    The choice, very clearly, was his.

    The road beneath his feet shifted one last time. The trees and doors and corridors blurred into a wash of gold, and beyond that he thought he saw the hint of starlines again—his own stars, waiting.

    He squared his shoulders.

    “When I wake up,” he said, more to himself than to the lantern, “I’m changing course. I don’t know how long I’ll get away with it. I don’t know how badly it’ll go. But I’m done pretending cargo matters more than the people holding the crates.”

    The lantern flared, bright and clean, like fire catching new kindling.

    The warmth that flowed through him now wasn’t instruction or judgment. It felt like acknowledgement. Like someone—something—bowing in return.

    Then the world tilted, gently this time, like a ship rolling on calm seas. The dirt road, the trees, the night sky—all dissolved into golden light.

    The last thing he saw before everything went white was the fox of light curling its four tails around itself, ember-eyes watching him with quiet satisfaction.

    He woke in his chair on the bridge of the Vigilant Dawn.

    The consoles hummed. The viewport showed the same stretch of stars. The chronometer had advanced barely a minute.

    The strange lantern outside was gone.

    “Computer,” he said, heart still pounding, “status report.”

    “All systems nominal,” the ship replied. “Awaiting navigation input.”

    On the edge of the sensor display, a small icon blinked. Kael frowned and tapped it open.

    A distress signal, weak but clear. A mining outpost on a barely charted world, broadcasting a plea for medical aid after a reactor leak. The coordinates were off the established trade routes—far from any convoy route, far from Command’s priorities.

    He almost laughed. “Of course.”

    The orders on his console were clear: hold position and await the next convoy assignment. He could follow them. Ignore the call. Let someone else deal with it—someone slower, someone less suited, some theoretical ship that might never come.

    Or—

    His hand moved before he’d fully thought it through.

    “Computer,” he said, “set course for these coordinates.” He sent the distress call’s location to navigation. “Maximum safe burn. Inform Command we are… responding to emergency humanitarian needs.”

    There would be questions. Maybe worse than questions. Court-martial threats. Loss of rank. Loss of everything he’d built in the comfortable, suffocating world of asset protection.

    His heart hammered. Underneath the fear, something else stirred.

    Relief.

    “Confirmed,” the computer said. “Course laid in. Time to destination: twelve hours, thirty-one minutes.”

    “Engage.”

    The stars on the viewport stretched as the Vigilant Dawn swung about and leapt forward, engines flaring.

    Kael sank back into his chair, eyes fixed on the streaking starlines. His hand, without thinking, went to his chest, as if expecting to feel the weight and warmth of a lantern there.

    He found only fabric and the steady thrum of his own heartbeat.

    Still, for a moment, he thought he saw a faint reflection in the viewport—four flickering tails of light, watching from the dark, before vanishing into the rushing stars.

    “People before profit,” he murmured. “Let’s see if I can remember how to be that kind of captain.”

    The Vigilant Dawn surged on into the unknown.

    Somewhere, between the stars and the spaces between, a small, impossible fox-shaped light slipped quietly along the edges of reality, padding ahead on unseen paths, marking the way for those who had finally chosen to look up and change course.