I groaned in my sleep, unconsciously reaching out in front of me to hold my sister closer.

  My arms swiped across nothing, the empty sensation waking me up.

  Oh. Right.

  We weren’t sleeping together anymore.

  I opened my eyes and got up.

  I was neither sleepy nor energetic.

  I was just matter-of-factly awake, like I would have been at midday.

  My head turned around the room, surveilling my new living quarters.

  It was a drab room. Most probably would have called it ‘sterile’ and ‘spartan’. Calling it a bedroom would have been generous.

  The witch did not care to decorate the room of a ‘test subject’, and I did not care to make it my home either.

  I hoped my sister was sleeping in a comfortable room though. At least the bed in my room was nice, hopefully the same could be said for hers.

  I hadn’t seen her in a while; the witch had split us up after we finished dinner.

  I walked robotically towards the singular closet and pulled it open.

  A row of plain, uniform hospital gowns greeted me. I took one off the rack and swapped out the one I was wearing for a clean one, before folding the bland dress I was wearing and setting it off to the side for collection later.

  I pulled the door open.

  The sight of the workshop that was quickly growing familiar greeted me.

  The witch slouched over at her desk, huddling over a thick book. She heard the sound of the door opening behind her and lazily raised her arm to wave at her with the back of her hand in greeting, not even bothering to look up.

  I turned around and closed the door behind me.

  Again, calling it a bedroom would have been generous. It wasn’t a place that was intended for anyone to actually live in; it was just a storage closet that the witch had quickly cleared out and thrown me into.

  Calling me a ‘human being’ was probably overstating my current treatment; I was more of a lab rat for a scientist.

  As I made my way over to her, the witch pushed herself away from her desk, launching herself on her swivel chair across the room to a chalkboard that was just recently wiped clean.

  She picked up a piece of chalk and started absentmindedly scrawling onto it, her eyes still glued to the pages of whatever she was reading.

  “Ugh, let’s see, azybantum frequency… if that’s the wavelength it naturally emits, if it’s launched into hyperspace from a velocity of zero, it should travel about… this… far? That could be right, but… ah, fuck, where the hell’s my atlas?”

  She mumbled about something incomprehensible as I approached.

  I glanced over at the other chalkboards littered around her.

  Most of them contained what seemed to be the same mathematical formula, simply with the variables changed.

  “Eh, that’s close enough. I’ll add it to the list, it could be… wait, no, I need to check for its decay and quantum entanglement first, don’t I? Ah, shit.”

  She pushed herself back to her desk, pulling out a separate book and quickly flipping through its pages.

  I wordlessly made my way over to the cluttered chalkboards and took them from where they hung, gathering as many as I could hold in my growing arms.

  “Oi, girl,” the witch called up to me without looking up from her book.

  I paused, turning to face her.

  “Yes, Miss Symphonia?”

  “While you’re back there cleaning those boards, mind getting something for me? The specimen cabinet, should be… eighth row down, sixth from the left, box labelled ‘Azybantum’.”

  “Alright, miss.”

  I sighed, groaning as I lifted the heavy boards over to the opposite end of the workshop.

  The witch couldn’t focus solely on me all the time. She had other, more important projects to be working on. When she wasn’t poking and prodding me with weird apparatus, she often called for me to run small errands for her around the workshop.

  It had become a common enough occurrence to the point where I would just start cleaning the place without her saying anything.

  When she was done using the machines, grinding away and shaping metals and rocks, I would just pick up the dustpan and brush and clear up the floor and wipe down the machines.

  When she finished playing around with chemical agents and liquids, I would have to carefully carry them over to the disposal sink and pour it down while trying not to horrifically scar myself with acid.

  It didn’t really match my expectation of what it would have been like living as a witch’s test subject.

  I was more expecting a lot of hexing or cursing, maybe poisons or something. There should have been a cauldron, right? It should have been bubbling with all sorts of weird mushrooms and herbs. I thought I would have found myself being a sacrifice for some voodoo rituals or something.

  Was that offensive? Did witches in this world find that kind of notion distasteful? Did those stereotypes even exist in this place?

  Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the word ‘witch’ just referred to something different in this world.

  I mean, there really wasn’t any reason why the word had to mean the same thing across both worlds.

  I was just expecting something worse to happen to me.

  The witch, or Miss Symphonia as I had started to address her as recently, had made herself out as some great terror I didn’t want to indebt myself to. When she said that my life would be hers, I was expecting something malevolent or evil, I guess, at the very least, I expected to live in pain.

  Instead, I had found that she was practically just a scientist. She spent her time at her desk, writing and reading papers, going over theoretical equations, coming up with esoteric experiments, and collecting data.

  It had made the whole ‘magic’ thing seem quite mundane, honestly. It made it feel like magic was just a thing that existed in this world, just a natural part of it like anything else, not any more unique, divine or mysterious than something like the weather.

  I suppose, from the perspective of a native, it would just be natural.

  It only disconcerted me because I wasn’t from this world. If anything, I was the unnatural thing here. I was alone.

  …

  I missed my sister.

  It had only been a week or two, but I missed her.

  I wondered if she enjoyed her new home. What did she have to say about the food? About her bed? What she spend her time all day doing?

  I didn’t know.

  I was confined to the workshop. The witch didn’t let me leave. I was just a ‘specimen’, after all, locked inside a cabinet.

  At the very least, even if she didn’t spend much time with her, instead staying with me in her workshop all day and night, I knew that she was fed well.

  Miss Symphonia always left near noon and sunset to make food, and when she did, she came back with an extra bowl of it that she gave to me.

  The food was good. It was comfortable, familiar, warm. It was a strange, almost stereotypical spread of mostly French cuisine.

  It was still unbelievably strange to me that I just straight-up recognised most of what I was eating, recipe and all. I would have thought that being in another world would have introduced me to more novel cuisines, filled with unfamiliar techniques and ingredients, but I was not going to complain about the fact that the food was familiar.

  It gave me solace in this desolate, soulless and sterile environment. It comforted me with memories of the past.

  I would take that small bit of reprieve, and I would not take it for granted.

  I finished cleaning the chalkboards.

  Before returning them to their rightful place, I followed the witch’s instructions and searched through the cabinets, finding the object she was looking for.

  It was a pitch black rock.

  It was eerie.

  I couldn’t quite describe why, hell I couldn’t even focus on the rock that much. I couldn’t quite make out what exactly it looked like or how it felt on my fingers.

  I felt my eyes glaze over as I held it in my hands.

  Something was… distracting… me.

  I heard my heart beat in an erratic rhythm, sounding almost like it was trying to whisper something to me.

  Why did my eyes feel itchy, all of a sudden?

  “Don’t hold it for too long!” I heard the witch shout behind me, “Thing might decay on you, maybe.”

  I flinched in panic, and immediately dropped it to the floor.

  The witch strolled over and snatched it from me, inspecting the ethereal object in her hands.

  “I-Is that radioactive!?” I screamed in fright.

  She just raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Why the hell does a kid like you know that word?”

  She looked at me with strange eyes.

  “The hell did your parents teach you, girl?”

  “I-I-” I continued to sputter, almost tripping over myself.

  Well, as it turned out, I guess I still did have some fear of death in me.

  Death by starvation or illness, I could wave those away if it meant providing for my sister. Even being sacrificed to some witch voodoo ritual would have been fine, since that simply would have been part of the promise I made with the witch.

  But death by radiation poisoning?

  There wasn’t much I was doing for my sister if I just died because I held onto a rock for too long.

  “Eh, anyways, no, it’s not radioactive. Not usually, anyways,” the witch shrugged, tossing the rock around in her hands as she walked back.

  I quickly took the chalkboards and followed her, puzzled.

  “Then what did you mean by decay?”

  The witch placed the rock down at the centre of a series of freshly drawn rings of chalk, each successive ring growing further apart from one another as the circle expanded outwards.

  “Thing’s a byproduct of cross-planar collisions, reacts strangely to all sorts of phenomena.”

  I blinked.

  “Cross-planar collisions?” I repeated the strange series of words.

  The witch sighed.

  “You uh, you know fairy tales?” She furrowed her brow as she slowly filled in the gaps between the rings with complex arrangements of runes, “like the ones about Calybcor and stuff, the Seven Legions?”

  “Mm.”

  “Then you know the ‘Hellgates’, right? Stuff like that. Bridges two worlds together. Collision of two separate worlds breaks apart the overlapping matter, that matter is lost in hyperdimensional space, reacts strangely there, then gets deposited into our world as weird shit, like this rock.”

  She shrugged.

  “Well, in theory, anyways. No one’s ever found a Hellgate or its remains. Who knows if they exist or not. Would be nice if they did, would give my research some fucking validation and get a few eyes on my papers. Would be nice to have some citations to my name.”

  She clicked her tongue and mumbled beneath her breath.

  “Ah, shit, need some cleaning agent and a dabbing towel, wrote the wrong function.”

  I didn’t have to move much to grab a towel. I had already started to get used to being on call to clean everything up.

  “Anyways, it’s usually just a normal piece of rock, but when it comes into contact with extraplanar anomalies, sometimes it reacts.”

  I held out the towel to her, minding my step so I didn’t smudge the chalk.

  She took it from me and then flicked my forehead.

  “Extraplanar anomalies like you.”

  She rubbed away at the mistake in her writing before handing the towel back to me.

  I nervously took it back.

  I went about cleaning the rest of the workshop as the witch finished whatever she was doing.

  After I finished cleaning all the chalkboards, I moved on clearing the metal shavings that remained near the machinery from her work last night.

  “Mind your step,” the witch absentmindedly called out to me as I crossed over to the other half of the room.

  Around a few hours of intricate setup later, she had finished with her ritual.

  “Oi, girl, get over here,” the witch called out to me, drawing my attention to a smaller circle of magic she had drawn by the side of the larger one.

  I held back a sigh as I stepped to where she gestured.

  The chalk at my feet lit up, momentarily blinding me.

  I felt something almost electric dance through my nerves up my spine.

  I shivered, clutching myself as the tingling faded.

  It was uncomfortable. It wasn’t painful, per say, but it definitely felt invasive, whatever that was.

  “W-what was that?” I shook my hands to fight away the last of the tingles.

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  “Just a preliminary diagnostic scan. Need to take one before I fire this thing up, gonna have to take one afterwards as well to make sure nothing inside you is acting up.”

  She flipped through the tome in her hands before settling on a specific page.

  A frown marred her face.

  “Right, forgot the base version of this spell comes with health diagnostics.”

  She blinked.

  A weird look was sent my way.

  “You’re nine?”

  I blinked back.

  I was?

  The physical age of my new body didn’t cross my mind before. I didn’t have much reason to care about it.

  That was nice to know though. That probably made me four years older than my sister.

  “Is something wrong with that?” I asked.

  Her face bent into a scowl.

  “You look six or seven at best. The fuck have you been eating, kid?”

  “...” I looked towards my feet wordlessly.

  I needed to keep my sister fed, so I ate less. Or well, I tried to, whenever my sister didn’t notice and forcefully give me more to eat. It might not have been the best for my health, but it was what it was.

  But I wasn’t going to tell her that.

  Miss Symphonia acted all sorts of strange when I talked about my sister.

  Drawing her ire was pointless.

  She sighed, scratching her hair in annoyance.

  “Remind me to put more food in your bowl next time.”

  She grabbed my wrist and pulled me back.

  I had nothing else to do, so I sat nearby and watched as she did her literal magic.

  The massive circle of chalk lit up with that strange, arcane light.

  Something flitted through my veins, making me shiver.

  I felt cold, for some reason.

  The air started to twist and distort, that same tiny black dot from before appearing in the middle of the room.

  I stared into it.

  For some reason, I couldn’t stop looking at it, just like the indescribable rock from before.

  I didn’t feel this when I first saw the black hole before we teleported across the world, so why-...

  I felt the thought disappear from my head as it crossed my mind, the ability to think draining from me.

  What was I-...

  …

  “Oi.”

  A pair of fingers snapped in front of me.

  I jolted upwards, waking up from my strange trance.

  I-...

  I felt like someone was whispering something to me. What were they saying?

  I felt a bit tired.

  My hands lifted themselves towards my face. My fingers curled underneath my eyes, wiping away the mistiness and clearing the irritation.

  Ugh, my eyes were itchy too.

  I looked around with my now-clear vision.

  Miss Symphonia was standing in front of me again, a worried frown on her face as she clicked her fingers to get my attention.

  I looked behind her.

  The black hole was gone. The weird rock had disappeared from the circle, appearing right in the centre of the workshop.

  I missed what happened.

  …Did I doze off?

  Maybe I was still a bit sleepy. I thought I got a decent night’s sleep but it seemed like that wasn’t the case after all.

  “Oi, girl, you there?”

  “Huh?” I blinked up at the woman, remembering where I was.

  “Oh… right, sorry, Miss Symphonia.”

  My voice was a bit listless.

  “Sorry, I-... I think I still might be a bit tired.”

  She sighed, pulling herself away from me and standing to her full height.

  “Well, I did make you stay up rather late last night. Come on, get up, need to get you checked again. Need to make sure this extraplanar anomaly didn’t react strangely with the other one.”

  I nodded wearily.

  I trudged over to the small circle again and let the magic invade my body again.

  “Hm, that’s strange,” the witch frowned, resting the tip of a quill pen on her lip, “I guess I don’t have this thing calibrated to the right data points. There’s definitely something here, but this spell isn’t equipped to actually detect what it is.”

  She flipped the page.

  Her frown deepened further.

  Her eyes flicked over to me.

  I just shivered lightly, holding my arms to my chest.

  It was summer in this part of the world, right? It didn’t feel like it right now.

  Miss Symphonia marched over to me, placing her fingers on my wrist.

  “Your temperature is lower. Not an amount that can be attributed to random variance, either. Something in you definitely reacted.”

  I squirmed, my arms lowering to wrap around my stomach.

  Something in me st-...

  Well, no, stir was probably not the right word. That would imply there was a presence there that was waking up.

  No, rather, it felt like quite the opposite, really. Something that should have been there just wasn’t.

  I felt… empty.

  My stomach growled.

  Maybe it was just the hunger that I was feeling.

  “Right, it’s probably around noon,” the witch groaned as she stretched herself, “stay here, I’ll go make food now.”

  I smiled.

  Or, well, I tried to.

  But the thought of filling my stomach with good, delicious food didn’t satiate the sudden emptiness inside me.

  I found myself unable to smile.

  My expression fell.

  Why didn’t the thought of lunch rouse anything inside of me?

  There was nothing wrong with the food, right? It was far better than what I was feeding my sister or myself.

  “I miss my sister,” I found myself mumbling.

  The witch froze, hearing my whispers.

  She looked back towards me.

  I met her gaze.

  I continued speaking in that flat, listless tone.

  “Can you let me see my sister?”

  I stared at her emptily.

  She just sighed in aggrievance, having dealt with my pestering before.

  “No, I can’t just let you out of the workshop. There’s a lot of warding and security stuff I have set up, and I need to keep all extraplanar anomalies conta-”

  “I’ll bite my tongue.”

  My random blurting silenced her.

  The witch stared at me with wide eyes, filled with hurt and confusion.

  “Why-...” she stumbled over her words.

  A complicated, pained expression spread on her face.

  “Why does a kid like you know those words?”

  Her face scrunched up miserably.

  “I-...” she scowled, before letting the complicated emotions fall from her face as she looked away.

  A heavy exhale left her mouth.

  “Yeah, okay, fine, you can come with me and eat with your sister. Just-...”

  She looked back at me with painful eyes.

  I just blinked at her.

  “Just don’t say stuff like that again, okay?”

  I think I nodded. I wasn’t too sure. I just remembered that the next time I blinked, I was in the dining room again.

  The door on the other side of the room opened.

  “Sister!”

  The light of my life appeared on the other end of it, running through the hallway and jumping towards me, tackling me with a hug.

  I smiled. Properly, this time.

  Her tiny arms wrapped around my chest, dispelling the strange emptiness inside of me.

  I guess I really did just miss my sister.

  I let the warmth of another human body envelop me, as I closed my eyes and let myself be comforted by her embrace.

  “I missed you!” she shouted.

  I let my arms wrap themselves around her, reciprocating her hug.

  “I missed you too,” I whispered as I patted her on the back.

  I almost felt sad when she eventually broke off the hug. Luckily, the emptiness didn’t return.

  “Have you been doing well?” I smiled softly towards her.

  “Mm!” She nodded rapidly, “This place is amazing! I even learned how to read on my own!”

  “Oh, really? That’s very good, you’re very smart,” I ruffled her hair, congratulating her.

  “Yup! Miss Symphonia gave me a bunch of easy books to learn from. Now I can go to the library by myself and read all I want! The library is huge!”

  Did she now?

  I glanced towards her without moving my head.

  I vaguely made out her figure squirming lightly as she lit the stove.

  “You should come with me…” my sister fidgeted nervously, looking down as a blush came to her cheeks, “w-we can read together in bed, l-like we used to…”

  My smile became tinted by reluctance and sadness.

  “Maybe, but that’s not for me to decide.”

  My sister’s face fell into despondence.

  “W-why not?”

  Her head turned downwards.

  “Why can’t you come with me? W-where have you been, Sister? Why can’t I see you more…”

  She continued to mumble sadly.

  “Y-you don’t have to go out for food anymore, Miss Symphonia has a lot of it. You don’t need to work so hard to find us clothes and stuff or to fix our house… why-...”

  She started to tremble.

  “Why do you still have to be away?”

  “...”

  I reached out to her trembling hands folded in her lap, covering them with my own.

  How could I gently tell my sister about the deal we had made?

  “Sister, do you like this place?”

  She nodded silently.

  “It’s better than our old one, right?”

  She nodded again.

  “You know how much I had to work even for that place, right?”

  Her nod was much slower, much more shaky the third time around.

  “You should be thankful to Miss Symphonia. She had to work very hard to get a place like this, it must have cost her a lot. She’s very busy, spending all day in her workshop. I’m her… assistant… she can’t do everything by herself, so I have to help her out. It’s the least I can do for letting us stay with her.”

  I heard the sound of a knife hitting a cutting board slow down behind us.

  “B-but…” my sister’s voice started to shake, “why don’t you sleep with me? Even when she finishes working, why are you still gone?”

  The sound of the knife stopped completely.

  I smiled bitterly.

  “I have to sleep in the workshop. She leaves a lot of mess around, I have to clean it up even after she leaves.”

  My sister flinched, hurriedly taking a grip of my hands, running her fingers up and down to survey them.

  It was a habit she had built from when I was still taking my axe and hammer around to the old houses on the street, where I would sometimes injure myself with scratches or cuts, or sometimes splinters would get lodged in my hands.

  Her fingers ran over a rough, red patch of skin.

  I reflexively winced and tensed as she brushed past it.

  “Y-you… Sister…” she gasped in horror.

  It was a chemical burn I had gotten from the first time I was tasked with cleaning her experiment up.

  I shamefully withdrew my hand and covered it from view.

  “You don’t need to worry about me,” I ruffled her hair again, “it’s not that dangerous, actually. That was just on the first day I was helping her, I didn’t know what I was doing then. I’m a lot more careful now.”

  “B-but…” the grip of her remaining hand started to tighten.

  I gently pushed it away, placing her hands back onto her lap.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get better. Who knows, if I improve enough, maybe I’ll clean up fast enough to play and read with you again?”

  I caressed her hand lightly to comfort and distract her.

  “Enough about me, though. Why don’t you tell me about what you’ve been reading?”

  “W-well…”

  My sister was hesitant at first, clearly still distracted by the thought of what was happening to me, but eventually, she lost herself in the flow of conversation, the excited light of curiosity returning to her eyes as the smile on her face bloomed.

  She went on and on, telling me about all the things she had read. She had just picked up an encyclopedia on animals, and was describing with wondrous eyes all the strange creatures she had seen inside, from giant worms with gaping maws that dived and swam across sandy dunes, to giant, two-legged lizards with bat-like arms and wings, flying across the sky like miniature dragons.

  After some time passed, Miss Symphonia finished cooking lunch, and placed a large baking dish in front of us, before carving out the food and placing it into our bowls.

  It was a relatively simple thing, just a gratin; small pasta noodles covered in bechamel sauce combined with melted cheese and lardons, topped with a brown, crispy crust of breadcrumbs and grated parmesan.

  My sister and I ate in silence, entranced by the food like we always were.

  I noticed in the corner of my vision that Miss Symphonia didn’t eat much. She simply stared at the two of us as we ate greedily.

  After lunch was finished, I waved goodbye to my sister with a saddened smile on my face, watching as she hesitantly waddled out of view, sending a hopeful look back my way before she fully disappeared.

  It was good to see that she was doing well.

  Hearing that Miss Symphonia was taking care of her, providing her books to learn from, did wonders for my heart.

  I wore a bright smile on my face as we walked back to the laboratory in silence, thinking about what my sister must have looked like while she was in the library, engrossed in her reading.

  I wasn’t sure if we would read together again, but it was nice knowing that she did not need to be by my side to find joy.

  Memories of those cold winter nights, from only a few weeks ago, flashed through my mind; the two of us huddling close together beneath thin, worn blankets as we flipped through the pages of that thick fable.

  A thought crossed my mind as I reminisced on those nights, just as the witch placed her hand on the door to the laboratory.

  “Miss Symphonia, would you mind listening to a request?”

  She paused, leaving her hand on the doorknob.

  She did not turn back to look at me.

  I smiled fondly, remembering the look on my sister’s face when we read about the Boy in White.

  “There’s a book I’d like you to find for my sister. Sorry if it’s a bit of trouble… It was Anterius Bellium’s memoir, I believe. It held a collection of stories about the Calybcor Kingdom. She was quite fond of the stories inside that book. It might be a bit too much of me to ask, but… it would be nice if she could finish reading it.”

  The witch’s grip on the doorknob tightened.

  I could hear the wood strain in her hands.

  She sighed, before letting the tension fade from her body.

  “Go read it to her yourself,” she stated boredly, still not looking at me.

  I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, her face and expression shadowed by her hair and large hat.

  “I need to focus for a bit. I need to mess with the Azybantum. There’s surely a better way to identify and track whatever that anomaly I’ve been searching for is than just crosschecking its movement patterns with everything I’ve already studied. You’ll just distract me.”

  She grabbed the doorknob again and pushed it open, never once looking behind herself.

  “Leave me alone. Go play with your sister or whatever. I’ll find you if I need anything. And take care of that burn.”

  She bristly walked through the door and shut it behind her before I could get a word in.

  I blinked, not thinking much of her actions, too focused on and excited by the prospect of finally getting to spend time with my sister again.

  I didn’t need to be told twice.

  I spun around without thinking

  I ran back to the dining room, and then I ran past it, following the trail my sister left in my memory. I remember hearing the sound of a staircase, so I had to look for that.

  I turned around the corner I saw my sister disappear around, and followed the staircase upwards that appeared behind it.

  I looked left and right.

  At the far end of the corridor, there was a large set of grand double doors, left slightly ajar.

  That had to be it, right?

  I approached it warily, feeling my heart beat in excitement.

  I pushed it open.

  There was a small overlook in front of me, extending out to the sides, but I couldn’t see much more from outside.

  I crept forwards, placing my hands against the railing in front of me.

  I looked outwards.

  There were two floors to the area. I was on the upper floor, situated on a small catwalk that overlooked the place.

  A large library appeared before me, shelves lining all of the walls, filled to the brim with endless volumes of lore and accumulated knowledge.

  I was not anywhere near as bookish as my sister, but the sheer magnitude of the place still had me awestruck.

  My eyes flicked from side to side, scrambling to make out the figure out of my sister, lost between the giant shelves.

  I heard the distant sound of two pages rubbing against each other as someone flipped through a book.

  My ears twitched, my head snapping towards where I heard the sound come from.

  I made my way across the catwalk, down a set of spiral stairs, and let the forest of books shadow me as I touched down on the lower floor.

  I could see the afternoon sunlight from here, streaming from outside.

  I hadn’t actually seen the sun in a long time – the workshop was trapped deep inside the building, and the storage closet had no windows to speak of.

  I walked over, almost forgetting that I was looking for my sister, entranced by the clearing sight of what laid beyond the windows.

  I froze.

  My sister sat high up on one of the large windowsills, curled up against the blinders as the sun streamed down on her face, shining further on her bright smile. She sat against the frame, her knees pressed tightly against her chest as she held a thick encyclopedia in front of her, her eyes lost in its pages.

  And just beyond her, outside the window, was a vibrant forest of green. Tall, ancient trees that curved upwards into the sky, branches and leaves swaying gentle in the summer breeze as small threads of light danced through the gaps, piercing through the thick forest and touching on the window.

  I smiled and stepped forward, trying to be as quiet as possible, not wanting to disturb my sister too much.

  But it didn’t take much sound at all to break through the peaceful silence in the library.

  My sister flinched upon hearing a set of footsteps, wide eyes breaking from their lock on the book in her hands.

  Her grip on the encyclopedia suddenly loosened, the book sliding down her hands and leaving a small thud behind as it hit the windowsill.

  She gasped, jumping up from the window.

  “Sister!”

  She smiled as brightly as ever.

  “You came!”

  She ran forwards into my arms, embracing me with even more joy than she showed during our reunion at lunch.

  “Yeah,” I let her joy infect me as I wrapped my arms around her, relishing in her warmth.

  It was a different kind of smile that rose on my face.

  There was none of the earlier melancholy; I did not have to ponder sadly upon the fact I did not get to see her much, that I would continue to be separated from her. I did not have to muster the strength to smile in front of her as I excused my absence from her life.

  I did not need to provide her comfort as she cried for her sister, wondering why they had to be parted even when they finally weren’t struggling to just live.

  I didn’t need to resign myself to being treated like a servant or a guinea pig, locked away in that tiny lab as the witch poked and prodded at me with tools and spells, wondering how long it would be until I could see my sister again.

  I didn’t have to wistfully imagine what my sister was feeling or doing, forcing myself through the lonely times by smiling through envisioning her life.

  I could just be happy, here and now, in the present, with my sister in front of me in the flesh.

  It really was so much better seeing her be happy in front of me, rather than just having to wrestle with the fact that she was doing well out of sight, using that hope to carry me through the days and nights.

  “I’m back.”

  I held her tighter to my chest.

  And I hoped I would not need to let her or this moment go.

  Not now, not ever.

  There was supposed to be a bit of extra stuff at the end of this chapter, but it was too awkward to actually find a way to fit together after the library scene, and the transition to that was already awkward enough.

  There would have been a flash-forward to night, after a small scene describing the time Estelle and Luna spent together. They go to the kitchen and wait for dinner, but Belle doesn’t come down, so Estelle just cooks something for the two of them, except it actually looks like real food this time.

  After dinner, Estelle goes down to the workshop, and knocks on the door. Belle peeks through, and tells her that the storage closet is gonna be in use again soon, and tells Estelle that she should sleep with her sister.

  Estelle then walks back again, finding Luna’s bedroom, and surprises her again.

  This was all a bit too awkward and repetitive, but I figured I should let you know how the chapter was supposed to end originally.