The moment my mind entered that space, everything was white.
Not empty — white. There's a difference. Empty is what a room feels like when someone has left it. This felt like a place that had been waiting.
Then I heard them. Voices, layered over each other, too many to count and none of them strange to me, though I'd never heard a single one before.
"You can do it, Arjun. All of us — we're giving you our power. It will help you face what's coming. Don't think about it too much. Just do it. We're here."
Lights answered them. Dozens of them, then hundreds, blooming into the white in every colour I knew and several I didn't have names for. They hung there, patient, waiting for something.
Then a different voice cut through — harder than the others, with none of their warmth.
"You can't be good to everyone. Not every time. Sometimes you have to use your head, and do the thing your knowledge tells you is right — even when it isn't kind."
And black poured in behind it.
When I looked at the whole of it — really looked — it had a shape. White and black together at the centre, holding each other in place, and every other colour circling them in a slow, endless ring.
I reached out and touched one.
Everything moved.
The colours scattered and swirled and came rushing back, and I understood, somehow, that they were playing with me. That they were alive. That they'd been alive the entire time and had only been waiting for me to notice.
So I played with them.
I don't know how long. Time didn't work there the way it works here — I couldn't have told you if an hour passed or a year. Sometimes a voice would drift in from somewhere far off, calling something I couldn't quite make out, and the colours would go still for a moment before starting again.
And then, one time, the voice was clear.
"Arjun. Wake up."
My mother.
Every colour in that place turned at once and pushed — not roughly, but with purpose — and I fell backward out of the white and into my own body.
I opened my eyes to a ceiling I didn't recognize.
Someone was crying, softly, to my right.
I turned my head. My mother was there, asleep with her head resting on the edge of my bed, her face streaked and swollen, one hand still holding mine even in sleep. She looked like someone who had fallen asleep in that exact position many, many times.
"Mom," I said. My voice came out small and cracked and strange to me. "Mom."
She was awake before I finished the second word.
I've never seen anyone move so fast. She had me in her arms so tightly it hurt, and she was crying harder now, not quiet at all, and through all of it she kept saying the same thing into my hair, over and over:
"Finally. You're awake, my dear son. Finally."
That was the first voice I heard in the waking world.
The second was the sound of something ceramic hitting the floor, somewhere down the hall.
My father had been carrying something. He didn't finish carrying it. I heard running, and then the door came open so hard it banged against the wall, and he was standing there in the doorway with his hands empty and his face already breaking.
"Arjun," he said. "My son."
After that, the room filled. I don't know where they all came from — apprentices, neighbours, people I'd never met — crowding the doorway all at once to see it for themselves.
My mother threw every single one of them out. My father included.
It took her about four seconds.
Then she sat me up, gave me holy water to drink, and fed me warm soup a spoonful at a time, and she didn't let go of my hand once while she did it.
That evening, they celebrated my birthday. September 7th.
My fifth.
That was the moment I learned I'd been gone more than four years.
After that day, my mother gave me holy water every morning and every evening without fail. Not once did she forget. Not once did she let anyone else do it.
A few days later, the King, the Queen, and the guild master came to our house to see me.
My mother didn't let them in.
I remember the silence that followed — three of the most powerful people in the kingdom standing at our door, and my mother standing in it.
"When the day comes," she told them, "I will bring him to you myself, my Queen."
None of them had an answer for that. They went home.
Days passed.
One afternoon I was playing alone in my room when I heard my mother's voice drifting up from the workshop below. I got up and started walking toward it without really thinking about what I was doing — and only realized what I'd done when I was already standing in the workshop doorway.
The whole room stopped.
My mother and father reached me at the same time. She lifted me up into the air, laughing, and I saw the tears on her face even while she was smiling.
I have never forgotten that moment. I don't think I ever will.
Some days after that, I met the other children.
We'd play in the street and wander the town in a loose, noisy group, exploring wherever we were allowed and several places we weren't. I noticed, on those walks, that the house right next to ours had always been empty — for as long as I could remember, no lights, no sounds, nobody coming or going.
One day we ended up at the adventurers' guild, crowding around the mission board like we belonged there.
That's when I saw her.
A girl about my age, standing in front of a monster-hunt poster, reading it with a seriousness none of the rest of us could have managed. Long brown hair. Adventurer's clothes that actually fit her, which was more than most of us could say. A small knife at her wrist.
Something about her pulled at me. I couldn't have explained it then and I'm not sure I can now.
Before I could decide whether to say anything, she'd already crossed the room, taken my hand, and started walking — out the side door, around to the back of the guild, where the yard was empty and no one could see us.
And that was when I saw it. On her hand.
A ring. My ring. The same ring.
"Is that—" I started.
She checked over both shoulders first. Twice. Then she reached for my hand to touch it, and I pulled back before she could.
"That's the same as mine, isn't it?"
"Yes," she said. "And no. I don't know where it came from. But they came for a reason." She looked down at her own hand. "I don't know what it is yet. One day I'll find out."
"Then show me how to turn it into a sword."
"I don't know how." She looked up at me, and her voice changed — not scared exactly, but urgent. "Keep it a secret. From everyone. Only you and me."
I shrugged. "Okay. So you don't know anything about it." I nodded back toward the street. "Come on, then. Come play with my friends."
She let out a breath — half a laugh, half a sigh, like she'd been braced for something much worse than an invitation.
"Fuu. Fine. I'll come."
The others were waiting when we came back around the building.
"Everyone, this is my new friend," I announced, and then realized, far too late, that I had absolutely no idea what her name was. "And her name is… is…"
She stepped in smoothly, like she'd been rescuing people from themselves her whole life.
"Hello. I'm Maya. I hope we're going to have fun."
By evening it was time to go home.
Maya and I ended up walking the same road. Then the same turn. Then the same street.
"Why are you following me?" I asked.
"I'm not — you're following me, okay!"
"Fine. Then I'll show you my house. Come on."
"Hmm. Okay. I'll come."
I stopped at the front gate and pointed. "This is my house. And that's my father's workshop — he's famous, you know."
Maya didn't look at my house. She was pointing past me, at the one beside it.
"And that," she said, "is mine. Right there."
We both stood there staring at each other.
That house had been empty my entire life. Every single day I could remember. And now it wasn't.
Through the open door of my own house, I could hear my mother's voice — and my father's — and a third voice I didn't recognize. A woman's.
"That's my mom," Maya said. "It's just the two of us."
"What?"
I was already running. Through the gate, through the door, into the front room where three adults turned to look at me at once.
"Mom," I said, breathing hard. "You know Maya's mother? How?"
To be continued...