Chapter 5: Beyond Me, Beyond You

10 Years Ago

Isabella stepped out of the library and into the falling snow. The winter air was like raw ocean water, wet and frigid and overwhelming. Light pollution was trapped beneath a thick layer of dark clouds and muddied by snowfall, while wind carried all the sounds and scents through the city in brutal, rapid lashes. The Boston Public library stood in the night, a tall, rectangular building of pure white stone blending into the pitch darkness. The place had closed twenty minutes prior, and as usual a librarian had had to remind Isabella of that before they could lock up.

11 PM. School started at 7:30 the next morning, and so if she woke up on time she’d be able to shower before that. Then again, she was freezing cold and had had a long day of tests, and she desperately wanted to warm herself and relax before drifting to sleep. But if she did that, her hair would be an absolute horror show the next morning… This had all been much less complicated when her hair was shorter, and she’d been more willing to lie to herself about certain things. Not that she had any desire to regress, though occasionally she had to admit there were some things about being a guy that had been easier.

God, it still felt weird, thinking of herself that way, thinking of herself as a girl, thinking of herself as having once been a boy, of having once been convinced she was a boy… It was all so abstract now, trapped behind layers of glass in her mind, where she herself had once lived. But she was herself now. Things were difficult, things were stressful, but they were okay. She’d stopped by the pharmacy after school that day and picked up a four-months supply of testosterone blockers, and her relief at hearing the pills bounce about inside the bottle in her purse made her squeal with delight.

She strode up the street, cars driving by with reckless aplomb. Maybe if she was lucky, school would be closed tomorrow, and none of this would be an issue.

She twitched, heard a sound down below her. She looked over, then down, and found a small white mass of fur trotting along next to her. It was a fox, no bigger than a bulldog, with a fluffy white winter coat and orange-gold eyes.

Isabella stopped.

The fox stopped.

Isabella looked down at the fox. The fox tilted its head and looked up at her. Isabella opened her mouth, but then decided it wasn’t worth it. It was just a fox, probably broken out of Franklin Park Zoo, easily lost in the blizzard.

Isabella pulled her hood up over her burgundy knit-cap. She shivered inside her black coat, and wished she’d brought her parka with her to school instead. It hadn’t been snowing this morning. It hadn’t even been that cold this morning. During Second Period, she’d looked out the third floor window of her school to find snow escaping from the heavy layer of gray clouds. The forecast hadn’t called for it, and nothing in the air had made it feel like snow was on the horizon.

And yet here we are, she thought.

A glass pyramid came into view a block ahead, and quickly revealed the stairs leading down into the subway station. Isabella stopped at a crosswalk, looking both ways. No cars.

But there was a fox standing next to her.

Isabella did a double-take, then crossed the street. Then she did another double-take when she realized the fox had followed her across said street. What is with this thing? She wondered.

Her pulse climbed, and memories of darkness began to crawl back into her waking mind. Of suffocating, impenetrable nothingness, all around, without beginning and without end. She had to get home, had to get home, had to get home.

Down the stairs, through the ticket-kiosk, through the gate, down the final set of stairs and onto the concrete platform. Nobody else was there with them in the tunnel drenched in harsh orange light between two mouths of pitch black. The other side of the tracks revealed another empty platform, and the kiosk area had been deserted as well. Isabella was tempted to turn around and walk home, but a whip-crack of freezing wind reached in from outside and reminded her she was liable to freeze to death if she tried to leg four miles in this.

The fox sat on the platform, and seemed to smile. Of course it wasn’t truly smiling- it was a fox, how could it do such a thing?

Memories of falling through the black washed over her skin and soaked into her bones. She shook her head. A whistle blew, and the raging thunder of the coming train bounded from the left-hand tunnel. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply- part of her was desperately crying out to turn around, to walk home, to take her chances in the cold. The rational part of her brain, unfortunately, carried her legs into the open door of a train car and sat her down in a seat.

It was only after the doors had closed and the whistle blew and the train departed did Isabella realize that her cart was empty save for herself and the arctic fox.

The fox jumped up onto the seat next to her, curled up into a ball and closed its eyes. Isabella leaned back in her seat and breathed slowly through her nose, closed her own eyes, and before she knew it, jerked back awake.

She rose from her seat and looked out the window, where not a single speck of light was found. She ran up to the front of the cart, looked through the door into the next one, to find that it was empty. She checked the cart to the back, to identical results.

Isabella’s heartbeat spiked, and she reached for the emergency break. She pulled it, and it snapped off.

The cart began to spin, and she sat herself down on the chair. A warm, furry body pressed through her arms. The fox squealed gently and cuddled in her lap. Isabella’s arms flung upwards as she tried to avoid touching the animal with her hands. The fox nuzzled her leg, and Isabella found it difficult not to look at the thing and appreciate how cute it was. It took her mind off the situation for a half moment. She reached down and she stroked the fox’s warm, soft pelt. It was all she could do to keep her mind off of the shrill scream of her own heartbeat.

Eventually, the train slowed to a stop. Isabella allowed herself to look up, away from the floor. She looked outside and was at first relieved at the familiar sight of falling snow. It evaporated as soon as she saw the surrounding forest.

The train pulled to a stop at a station she had never seen before. It was a raised tile platform beneath a small glass overhead. A lamppost sat at the edge, casting a thin swath of light upon a path that led into a coniferous forest of silver-purple bark and dark green needles.

The fox hopped off her lap and scampered out the door. Her heartbeat resonated through her entire body as she rose from her seat and followed it outside. Her ears rang as she stepped into the brutal cold of the night, as wind cracked and snow blew about in massive wet clumps.

In spite of the clouds, in spite of the snow, moonlight filtered through, and Isabella jumped as she realized it had multiple sources: in the sky above, the moon was cleaved into four quarters, rough and jagged divisions that had torn apart from each other unevenly. Clouds gathered around them but did not cover them, and their light revealed something beneath: wreckage. The remnants of buildings, structures, habitats, floated in chunks above and sat stagnant in the moonlight.

A path began at the lamppost and snaked through the woods. It led up a hill, and atop the hill was a black castle. It rose ten feet in height, seemingly carved from a single piece of metal. It dove in and stretched out and rose and fell at bizarre angles, resembling a broken, mangled hand attempting to form a fist. The fox sat on its hindlegs in the pool of lamplight, looking up at Isabella with a quizzical tilt.

A lurching sounded behind her. She pivoted to find the train leaving the makeshift station, retreating into the impenetrable darkness from which she’d rode in.

“NO!” she cried as the train drove away. She ran after it, down the train tracks, into the massive layer of darkness. She followed it down a narrow slope, onto a beach covered in snow. She nearly fell as the ground gave way to an empty pit of pure darkness. She clung to the tracks and hung above endless oblivion.

Eventually, she turned herself around and swung herself onto the ledge. She walked back to the station, to where the fox sat beneath the lamplight on its hindlegs, ready to go. She stood in the cone of white light, and looked up to find an old-fashioned light bulb flickering inside the lamp. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find- a candle, maybe?

The fox nuzzled her ankle and squeaked a few times, then darted off down the path into the woods. Isabella breathed in deep through her nose, slapped herself across the face. She took a look around her, and saw that she was in a place nobody had ever been before, a place that defied description and explanation. She’d fallen into another world.

A smile blossomed on her lips, brief but intense. She had to see this place- she had to know what was here. Besides, if she was here now, then she would need to know how to survive this place. At least until the train came back.

If the train came back.

Best not to think about that right now, she told herself.

She walked.

The path was long and winding, taking her through a wide stretch of forest. The trees were like none she’d ever seen before, with silver-purple bark, leaves throbbing with verdant illumination that refracted off the falling snow and carried in every myriad direction. There was a sterile smell to the place, like everything was in a cryogenic slumber. She heard the sound of running water, but found no river. She followed the path through the forest, illuminated by moonlight and starlight, guided by the arctic fox. Finally, after a long and dark journey, she emerged at the base of a hill. Atop the hill sat the black castle. The fox sat at the base, and then ran up the top and waited for her at the front of the castle. Isabella’s legs were heavy as anvils, and her arms were limp logs at her sides. Still, she carried herself up the hill, shaking as she went, the snow soaking through her shoes and coat. There had better be something to burn in there.

She reached the front, a wooden door painted golden with a black metal wolf’s head knocker. She pushed on it, to no avail. She pulled, to similar results.

She tried knocking. It didn’t work.

Finally, she tried screaming.

That didn’t work either.

Then the fox clawed at the entrance with its front-paws, and the door fell open.

Isabella’s mouth hung open, and her eyes were wide. She exhaled, then stepped inside.

A blissful surge of warmth washed over her. The inside of the castle was a very comfortable temperature, like a late-spring day between the final storms of the equinox and the first of the summer rains. Light stretched over the inside sprawl of the castle, though she saw no sources- no candles, no lightbulbs, no hearth anywhere in sight. Regardless, the place was warm and dry and wonderful.
She looked around, and found the castle was a library. It sprawled out for hundreds and hundreds of yards, and hundreds more in height. Shelves lined up row after row after row, some reaching as high as the ceiling. A stairwell laid at the edge of the first floor, spiraling upwards to a new platform every twenty feet.

Isabella’s eyes went wide as she took in the sight before her. The floor was brick, solid beneath her soaked feet, but she put a hand to it and found it was warm. Her feet, meanwhile, were frigid and beginning to itch inside her wool socks.

She unlaced her shoes and stripped them off with her socks. She pushed them to the side of the door to the library, let her toes wiggle in the warm, dry air and felt the heat of the floor. She took off her damp gloves as well, warmed her fingers on her breath. Finally, she removed her hat and jacket, and let them fall to the floor. She stepped forward into the library.

The books were written in every language she could think of as well as dozens she couldn’t. English and Spanish, the two she could read, were littered throughout the shelves, and through them she recognized Portuguese, French, Latin, and German. After that were so, so many in alphabets she’d never seen before, words she couldn’t even discern the syllables of.

From the titles she recognized, however, she could take a guess at the subject matters. One book was called Necronomicon ex Mortus, volume 1, while volume 3 sat next to it. No sight of volume two, but other titles included the Histories of Magic, Quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, The Complete British Grimoire, and The Compendium of Destiny Stars.

Books of magic. That had some… Astonishing, thrilling, terrifying implications. Part of her thought it sounded utterly preposterous, and yet here she was, having evidently fallen into a proverbial Narnia… Or possibly the Wood Between Worlds.

She searched through the first floor, through the books of magic, in awe of what she saw. The fox stayed at her side the entire time, trotting along happily. She finished searching through the first floor, letting the heat of the place fill her and reawaken her.

Finally, she found herself on the far end, looking at a stone door carved into the black metal, warm to the touch. She opened it, and a fresh wall of heat slammed into her. Stairs carved into the stone floor descended into the ground, a slow descent into warmer temperatures. She followed the steps, and at the bottom she discovered a warm expanse of water that stretched into infinity. The air was rich with salt and brine, and she put a hand into the water and then put a finger to her tongue. This was salt water. An ocean sprawled out into infinity beneath this strange, ruptured castle.

A sphere of red light danced across the ceiling, shedding heat and power as it graced its way through the air. It looked like a tiny little star. She’d seen ribbons of light like it across the library- now she understood. Wandering stars illuminated the inside of the castle.

The water was hot from the star, the temperature of the perfect shower. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed there, but when she was done she was refreshed and revitalized.

She put back on her pants and shirt, and searched the upper levels and found bedrooms, four-poster beds with canopies, wool blankets and wooden wardrobes filled with gowns and dresses- medieval, Elizabethan, Victorian, Edwardian… anything she could ask for. She also found dry towels, much to her relief. She dried herself, and then found she had no strength left in body or mind. She fell asleep beneath the canopy of a four-poster bed, and did not wake for many hours.

When she opened her eyes, she remembered where she was, that she was not dreaming, that she had followed the fox into the castle. The fox slept at the foot of her bed, curled up into a ball. When it saw she was awake, it bounded over to her and licked her hand. Isabella scratched it behind the ears, and it squeaked gently again.

The fox led her through the remaining upper levels, where all the rooms held hordes of treasures: gold and jewels, old scrolls and tapestries, halls of weapons. An entire floor of weapons, in fact. The tenth floor out of who-the-hell-knew-how-many, in which each room was filled with every kind of weapon imaginable: lances, spears, bows, daggers, guns.

Swords.

One in particular stood out to her.

The claymore stood erect in a stone anvil, perfectly straight where it plunged into the rock. Its hilt was a shining silver, while the blade seemed to glow with golden light despite being made of a black metal- presumably the same black metal as the rest of the castle. Isabella walked up to it, past all the other weapons, mesmerized by what she saw. It called to her, and when she laid eyes on it, it was like there was nothing else in the whole of creation save for herself, the weapon, and the empty space between.

She bridged the gap.

She placed a hand on the sword’s hilt.

The sky burned, and the world froze, and she sank beneath an ocean of golden moonlight. The castle was flooded with the illumination as the sword broke free of the stone and all the light it contained was unleashed into the world.

Her arms weren’t strong enough to carry the sword, and her legs weren’t strong enough to support the rest of her body. She bore the weight regardless, even as her arms dragged to the ground, even as her knees buckled, she pushed off the floor and refused to fall. It took her a while to stand upright, but when she did, she knew beyond all doubt that the sword belonged to her now. She knew its name, burning in her mind, etched into the moons: World-Carver.

Helluva name, she thought. I wonder how you wound up with it?

The fox sat behind her, tilting its head and smiling its fox-smile up at her.

***

A day was lost to her beneath the four moons.

She checked later on if the train had returned to the station, venturing out into the cold. There was no sun here, only the moons and the stars, and the ever-falling snow. It fell into the darkness that spread outwards past the island, feeding the bottomless abyss forever. The station was empty, and the lamp was still groaning in the cold.

She turned around and went back to the castle, her stomach rumbling. She spent the afternoon searching the castle for food, until she found a galley filled with dried fruit, nuts, and cured meat. Not the best or the tastiest, but it would do for the time being, and with her stomach as empty as it was, it was practically a feast. The kitchen stores seemed to go on forever.

Another day was lost.

Still no train.

Still no other signs of life.

Still endless snow beneath the endless moonlight.

If there’s no sun here, where’s the moon getting its light? She wondered, lying beneath the blankets of her four poster bed, body wracked with exhaustion and strain.

The fox jumped onto her bed and nipped her hand. She shooed the thing away. How did it survive here? There wasn’t anything for it to hunt.

She spent the rest of the day surveying the castle once more, drawing a map to make sure she knew where everything was. She continued the next day, and the next, and the next.

Soon, a whole week was lost to her.

Then a second.

Then a third.

Each day, the train failed to return. Each day, the sun failed to rise. Each day, the snow failed to stop falling.

The castle, it turned out, was thirty stories total, thirty-one if you counted the ocean underneath. And there was more than one galley, and more than one pantry. There were even various canned foods, fish and beans and tomatoes, as well as matches. There was a whole room filled with practice dummies and wet-stones, wherein she began to swing and sharpen World-Carver. She felt the weight of it in her hands, shifting her body with its movements.

The fox led her to one other room. It was on the twenty-seventh floor, and it was filled with vials and jars, with labels like ‘Truth’, ‘healing of skin afflictions’, and ‘fortification.’ Potions, she realized.

A grimoire sat on a podium at the edge of the room. Its contents revealed what she expected: potion recipes.

One of them was for synthesizing pure estrogen. Another blocked testosterone.

She ran her finger down the list of ingredients, and soon found herself gathering the necessary items from throughout the room. When she was done, she had a full vial, and she downed it one gulp. It worked like a patch, giving her a bit of her supply each day while remaining in her system. She could practically feel it inside her body, changing her, making her who she wanted to be.

She woke up beneath the canopy, and found it growing familiar. She was wrapped in blankets, and the hearth still burned with the previous day’s pyre. She supposed it was morning- without a sun, it was impossible to tell. ‘Night’ was when she fell asleep, morning was when she woke up. The moons never changed location or phase, and the stars never seem to drift. It was like this world didn’t turn. Trapped in a moment, stagnant in the ice and snow evermore.

She clutched her heart and made herself breathe. She would get out of here. She would. Even if she had to teach herself every language in every book in this library, even if she had to chart every inch of this island, she would make it home.

She looked up at the canopy, and remembered another moment in which she’d been frozen. Lying in her bed, shivering and shaking as the thundersnow snapped through the glass of the windows and bounded inside a house empty but for herself. Her parents’ had just gone out running errands. Their bodies were found in the Charles River a week later. Isabella, as she’d just made herself known to her parents, who, bless them, still loved her, wanted her to be their daughter now that they knew she wasn’t their son, had been left alone, and she wanted to lay in bed until they came back. Even as the heat went off, and the lights went out, and the cold crept in. The police found her before she froze to death, though apparently it was a close-call.

Not again, she thought. She forced herself from bed. There was nobody coming to save her this time; she would have to get out by herself. She’d get out of foster care as well, once she was old enough to get emancipated. It would be difficult, but it beat the hell out of the various foster parents she’d been stuck with in the past two years. She landed on the brick floor and did push-ups, then bathed, dressed herself, and began surveying the stacks in the library. She’d start with any and all books in English or Spanish, then work on teaching herself Portuguese and French and take it from there. There had to be something in one of these books, these self-proclaimed compendiums of mystical knowledge.

After an hour of thumbing through a book on the phenomena of falling through the world, into a place of magic and pain, the fox padded up to her and nipped her arm gently.

“What?” she asked.

The fox yelped.

“What?” she repeated. “I’m busy!”

The fox screeched.

Isabella winced and covered her ears. The fox bounded off in the direction it had come from, then stopped at the foot of the spiral staircase.

Isabella sighed, dogeared the book, slammed it shut and put it down. She followed the fox over to and up the stairs, all the way to her bedroom on the nineteenth floor. The fox ran to the side of her bed and grabbed World-Carver in his teeth. Isabella took the hint and grabbed the sword, then followed the fox back up the stairs all the way to the top floor of the castle.

She’d not been on the roof before. It was harsh and exposed, and so far up the air was even colder than it was elsewhere in the castle. The staircase ended at a doorway with another golden knob carved into the shape of a wolf’s head. She turned it and stepped outside, into the evernight.

Four columns of jagged moonlight reached for her from their clearing amidst the cloudy sky. It engulfed her face as the snow kissed her skin and wetted her hair. She pulled up the hood on her fur coat, flexed her fingers inside her gloves. The fox sat next to her and aimed his head directly at the moons.

Isabella looked up.

From the space in between the four moons, a blue star shone. It descended from the night sky, its sapphire light glowing brighter and larger as it closed the gap. It came closer and closer and closer to the top of the castle, until Isabella could reach out and touch it. It was larger than the small red orbs inside the castle, closer in size to a basketball than a baseball.

Her fingers reached the star. Everything burned blue.

She saw a girl, who the world thought was a boy, stumbling through the wilderness. She was short, with pale skin and shaggy brown hair and a tiny frame. She sat between lakes, awaiting her destiny. The girl took the Star, and the world crumbled. The glass between worlds shattered, and hell poured in from beyond. From beyond this place, called the Pale, a name which burned golden inside Isabella’s mind. The girl did not yet know who she truly was, and yet this Star would come for her.

The Star heralded the end of the old world, the crumbling of borders and the arrival of the ones from beyond, from the fields we did not know. To the west, on the other side of the island, from which train tracks shot over the abyss and reached towards another world altogether. A world held in place by a single Star, by a single King anointed by that Star. A world of eight foot beings with long limbs and pointed ears and mouths full of fangs, with white pupils and black sclera. A world of elves waiting for their champion to lead them into the east, to a new world for them to conquer. Her ancestor, the King, waited for her to fulfill her family’s legacy of conquest and ruination and destruction.

But the girl did not take it. She rejected it, and the Star clung instead to the night sky.

The elves were displeased by this.

In spite of everything, in spite of the horrors the vision promised, Isabella wept with joy at the simple sight of her own world, of the reassurance that it was still there, that it had not been a mere dream of warmth and light.

The fox yipped. The vision stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the Star left Isabella behind as it bounded over the abyss, following the tracks across to the earth so that the girl could accept her destiny.

“Hello,” a voice spoke from behind her.

Isabella turned, and found herself in the presence of royalty.

“I’m the Elf-King,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I have a matter I’d like to discuss. A deal we might strike, if you’d like to return home.”

Overwhelmed, confused, exhausted, Isabella nodded and listened as the Elf-King spoke, and found herself agreeing with everything he said, until he vanished, and finally, the familiar lurching of a train pulling into the station reached her ears.

As she boarded the train home, she carried two things with her: World-Carver, and a promise to the Elf-King to kill the aspiring Dark Lord.