Gran was waiting at the door with hugs for us both. “How are my girls doing?”

  “We’ve been better, Gran, but I think we’re okay,” I replied, giving Alessa’s shoulder a squeeze

  She peered around at my shoulder and arm, torn up from being tossed out of the rift. “That’ll feel better once it stops hurting. You should get it cleaned up a little either way.”

  “You should see the other guy,” I said, and she gave me a bit of a glare. “Sure sure, I’ll get it fixed. No worries.”

  She patted my other arm, then looked past me to Alessa. “Welcome home, dear.” Alessa promptly burst into tears, and Gran wrapped her in a big hug. “It’ll be okay. You’re safe now.”

  My hug meter was a little jealous, but Alessa clearly needed it more.

  I left them to their business and wandered down the hall to our only washroom. We were pretty lucky to even have one, considering the state of things. There were parts of the area we lived in where literal streams of waste flowed past the houses. Not that I blamed people, there was only so much one could do with the circumstances they were given. Some well-meaning people had once come by and set up some basic infrastructure, but without anyone to maintain it, it quickly broke back down, and became just another problem.

  Looking at our age-spotted mirror, I could see the gash on my shoulder. It wasn’t too bad, but it was weeping a bit. I grabbed a clean towel, ran some water on it, and then thought better of using it directly on my arm. We did have a small bottle of bleach, so I stopped up the sink and put a little of that in the water to hopefully kill off anything living in it. Then I carefully cleaned the wound, wincing when I hit a few areas. There were some small pebbles and sand embedded in a few places, which were to get out, let me tell you. I may have made some noise for some of them.

  Shame the rift couldn’t have deposited me in a more graceful manner. But I suppose it returning me at all was fortunate. I looked at the mirror once I finished up. Was it just my imagination, or did I look better? I was never much to look at - unlike Alessa - but I was still better than nothing, so to speak. Staring at my features in the mirror now, though, everything looked a little… softer somehow. Like someone had taken an airbrush to the shape of my face and my skin.

  That just left the words the moon lady had said. That something was stealing from the world, or from the history of the world? I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by everything. Or how the hell I was supposed to do anything about it. I was completely normal, or maybe even a little weaker, just a few days ago. I still felt more or less like I was in that state, but I knew that some of the things I did yesterday were impossible if I was the me I had been.

  Or wait, that was earlier today. The time in the rift was kind of screwing with my head, since apparently I’d done the equivalent of a boomerang to everyone else, just all ‘return to sender’ right away, and whatnot.

  I wasn’t sure how to get help with it - ‘Hey, I fell into a rift and wound up somewhere else and met a magical fairy and they said the world is ending’ would just make me sound like I hit my head too hard.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Which I still wasn’t ruling out, by the way. That moth was brutal.

  It wouldn’t hurt to look around a bit. But that’d have to wait until tomorrow. For now I was very tired.

  The next day started too early. Or rather, I’d gotten to bed too late and was overtired. That didn’t mean I got out of going to work. As the last source of income, I couldn’t slack for a second. I sat up and stretched my arms out over my head, before realizing that was a terrible idea with the scrape all down my arm.

  Cursing, I got ready for the day and topped off on hugs from Gran, then left to walk to work. It usually took about half an hour - I wasn’t that far out but not super close either. Luckily, the weather in this part of the world never got too bad, although sometimes the smog did.

  In case you’re wondering, we didn’t report anything, because no one would do anything about it anyway, and sometimes, saying something to the ‘authorities’ brought more harm than good. We’d heard some horror stories, nothing we were able to substantiate but the people telling the tales had no real reason to lie about it.

  The feeling I had in the ‘old world’ - as I had taken to thinking about it as - had really stuck with me. That rich presence of life was nowhere to be found now. It made everything feel kind of hollow. Also, while it might have been my imagination, everything was feeling a little extra today. Like my senses were sharper. Probably the worst was my hearing. I swear I could hear everything. All of it, all of the time.

  Buh, not fun. By the time I got to work, I was passively holding my head a little to stave off the headache I felt like I should be having but hadn’t shown up yet. Getting to my office, I was tempted to rest my head on the desk, but I figured that’d probably get me in trouble with Viktor. I didn’t want that.

  Alex arrived not long after me and walked into my office to say hi. When he caught sight of me, he seemed a little startled. At first, I couldn’t figure out what had him bothered, then I realized that I had a huge scrape all down one side of my arm. Yeah, that’d do it.

  “You doing okay, Charley?” he asked, using my diminutive.

  “Yeah, just a rough evening last night, in more ways than one,” I said. “You would not believe it if I told you.”

  His bright smile lit up the space; I was glad to see that he didn’t just appreciate my humor when he was concussed. My style of sass was definitely an acquired taste.

  “You’ll have to tell me more about it some other time, for now Viktor wants you to go see him… From his expression, it seemed like a good thing! He was scowling less than usual.” He added the latter bits after seeing the abject terror in my eyes. For a moment I thought I was getting fired.

  Well, I wasn’t about to leave him waiting so I scampered my happy ass up the stairs a couple of floors to his office, and managed to get to his office in record time. I’d noticed it on the way up this morning, but I had a pretty easy time going up the stairs, I barely got winded going to my office, and the three flights up to Viktor’s didn’t do anything to me at all.

  “Charlotte, take a seat,” Viktor said, practically before I even entered his office. I did as I was told, the seats in here were quite nice to boot. Viktor was busy writing something when I entered, so there were some moments of downtime while he finished up. Not wanting to seem distracted, I kept my eyes pinned on him. I was surprised when I realized that I could see some form of his power just by looking at him. That had definitely not been the case before.

  It was similar to what happened when I looked at the artifacts István had brought after I ‘ate’ the feather with my hand - I could see the alignment of them as though they were partially transparent. With Viktor, it was the same thing, I could visualize the ‘ember’ that I recalled István mentioning he saw when he awakened his powers. Speaking of István, I should probably run some of these things past him.

  Maybe I could even convince him to treat me to food again.

  “István put in a good word for you, said you were ‘crucial to the operations of the artifact team’, or something fancy like that. Apparently you can sort them really well.” Viktor cut my thoughts of desserts off with his words. At some point in my trance he’d finished and I hadn’t noticed. Nothing new there.

  “So I’m making you István’s personal assistant.”