Ach, sit down. I'll tell y'how it began.

  Or...no. That's not quite right, is it? The beginning is always the hard part to find, with stories like this one. Y'pull on one thread and y'find it's attached to another, and that one to another still, going back and back until y'are standing in a darkness older than the oldest thing y'thought y'knew. The beginning, if there is one, is somewhere in that darkness. I won't pretend to have found it.

  What I can tell y'is how it came to me.

  There is a land…

  It has always been there...patient as stone, as old as the idea of elsewhere...sitting alongside this one in the way that two flames sit in the same room without being the same flame. It has its own weather. Its own quality of light in the afternoon. Its own mud on its own roads, which I mention because mud is important. Mud is the thing that tells y'a land is real, and not a dream, and not a wish. The other land has mud on its roads and opinions in its people and all the rest of it.

  And, most importantly, it’s said that between the two lands, there are doors.

  Now, I am merely a doctor, not a philosopher, and I have strong reservations about mystical explanations for things that ought to have practical ones. But I have heard about those doors long enough to have a theory. My theory is that they do not open by accident. That they open...when they open, which is not always when y'd like...for the right person, at the right moment. And that right and moment are not y'rs to define.

  The Power of Dara knows what they decide on the basis of. The rest of us can only observe the results.

  Once...in the way that once means when something is half-remembered even by the people who lived through it...there was a ruler in this world.

  She had been there so long that no one alive when she ended could remember a land without her. She had made things of great power. She had shaped things to her will, and the things had, largely, complied, because she was old enough to be patient and powerful enough not to need to hurry. She was not good, in the simple way. She was not wicked, in the simple way. She was something older than both, something that had been in the world long enough to be past the point where those words fit cleanly.

  Something ended her reign. The accounts do not agree on the details. Most say she fell in combat against a great warrior. A few say she was undone. And some…a very, very few…say only that she left.

  Left is a very different word from the others.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Left means the door opened. Left means something continued, somewhere, in a world that does not know about this one. What it continued as...what it became, in the long quiet years of elsewhere...I will not say. Some things are better arrived at than announced.

  In the old places of these lands, something has been building.

  Slowly. In the dark. In the spaces between what is remembered and what has been let go. It has been building in the way that very patient things build when no one is watching: with great care, and great persistence, and an intention that only becomes visible when enough of it has gathered that it is too late to be merely inconvenient.

  Something is nearly ready.

  It wants something that cannot simply be taken. Something that must, in its nature, be given...or made to seem given, which is not the same, but which, to a patience five centuries old, has come to seem close enough.

  It knows where to look.

  Far away...across the long distance between the land, in a land that has no mud on its roads, or mud of a very different kind...there is a house.

  The house sits at the end of a long drive. The woman who lives in it has white hair and the posture of someone who has been many things and has chosen, with great deliberateness, the thing she is now. She has a garden. She has a kitchen that smells of something warm. She has a barn.

  The barn is where the door is.

  Somewhere else entirely...in a city of lights and noise and ten thousand ordinary lives...a child is sleeping.

  Something comes for the child in the night.

  The door does not need to be opened. What comes through has its own means. The child is taken...not through the barn, not through the door the woman in the house knows about...but through a wound in the world, a forced crossing, which is a different and uglier thing entirely, and which sets everything else in motion.

  A frightened man, following instructions that were not his, opens a second door.

  A woman comes through it.

  She arrives here with no knowledge of here, no map, no authority, no reason this land should concern her beyond the single professional obligation she has decided to honor, regardless of the circumstances.

  She arrives in my surgery.

  Nearly every rib broken. No identification that makes sense. And a quality about her...the purposeful kind, the kind I have learned over thirty-seven years to recognize...that tells me, before she has opened her eyes, that this is not an ordinary arrival.

  I told my associate...a large and skeptical man who I consider a good friend, and who brought her to my surgery...that things like this are generally portents of great change. He gave me the look he always gives when he thinks I am being dramatic. He has not yet been proved right.

  I patched her up. I gave her what she needed to be on her way. And when she left, I said to her: “When y'find the lad, let us know. I hate not knowing how the story ends…”

  …and this is how it went.