The border of dusk
The pendant pulsed like a second heartbeat.
Caelan didn't know where he was walking — only that his feet kept moving. The streets blurred. The air was thick with fog. No sound but the distant hush of rain and the slow, rhythmic beat radiating from the spiral resting against his chest.
It wasn't just glowing anymore.
It was guiding him.
Not dragging. Not commanding.
But pulling — gently, steadily — like a whisper remembered from a dream.
He crossed the edge of campus and climbed the old west hill without even realizing he'd left the paved paths behind.
Then, the pendant flared once — a deep, resonant thrum.
He stopped.
There it was.
---
The Mirror Arch.
An old, half-collapsed stone arch that stood forgotten behind overgrown hedges and a sagging fence. It wasn't marked on any campus map. Most students never noticed it at all. But it had always been there, rising out of the ground like a grave marker that time had chosen to ignore.
Now, in the fog, the spirals etched along its surface shimmered faintly.
And the air beneath the arch rippled.
Caelan stood in front of it, heart racing, breath steaming in the cold.
This was where the pendant had led him.
This was the threshold.
---
The fog thickened behind him.
And from it stepped the emissary.
The same cloaked figure he had seen before — tall, masked, robed in dusk and silver, their voice layered with echo and stillness.
"You have arrived," they said.
Caelan turned slowly to face them, the rain running down his face, his voice tight.
"What is this place?"
"A memory," the emissary said. "A wound between worlds."
"Why me?"
"Because the world has remembered you."
Caelan stepped back. "I didn't ask for this."
"No one does."
"I'm human."
"You were born among humans," the emissary said. "But your blood is older than your bones."
He looked again through the arch. The shimmer grew stronger. He saw flashes of mountains like blades, a sky that churned with broken moons, and trees black as oil.
"This is the other realm," he whispered.
The emissary nodded.
"The Kingdom of Dusk and Fang."
---
Caelan turned toward them, fists clenched.
"What's on the other side?"
"The beginning of truth."
"What will happen to me?"
"You will become what you were meant to be."
"What does that mean?" His voice cracked. "What am I?"
The emissary did not answer.
They only looked at him — or through him — as though waiting for the moment when the question would no longer need to be asked.
Caelan's throat tightened.
"Will I be alone?"
The emissary finally spoke — softer now. "No. But the ones who wait may not be the ones you expect."
Caelan stepped closer to the arch. The pendant hummed warmly, its spiral glowing with purpose.
"What happens if I don't go?"
The emissary's mask tilted slightly. "Then the world you know will crumble — and you will crumble with it. Because it was never meant to hold what you are becoming."
---
He stood in silence for a long moment.
Then he whispered, more to himself than anyone else:
> "I'm afraid."
The emissary answered, not unkindly:
> "Good. So were the kings."
---
The pendant flared one final time — a burst of violet spiraling outward from his chest like a breath.
Caelan looked once more behind him — to the faint glow of campus lights in the mist.
Then forward — into the arch, into the ripple, into the calling.
He stepped through.
And the fog sealed behind him like a door that had waited centuries to close.