The Seam, Day 1
ISEN
I stopped.
Everything in me simply went still at once, the way it did when some small wrongness in the grove demanded more attention and less movement.
The path ahead of me had changed.
No. Not the path. The air.
A narrow place in it had gone amber-colored and wrong, the world thinned enough to show me something that did not belong behind it: pale ground, thin unfamiliar trees, hard bright daylight… and a woman seated in the middle of it with food halfway to her mouth.
My hand lowered rather than reaching for a weapon.
First the breach.
Its edges did not behave like mist. No scent of ordinary spellwork reached me. No breeze moved through it. The plants nearest it had gone subtly wrong in their stillness, leaves holding where they should have moved. I listened past even my own breathing. Birds. Wind. The low living noise of the grove.
Everything still there. But now there was more.
Bird voices I didn’t know. A foreign insect hum layered with mine. One call rose above the others, a short, falling note unlike anything that nested along this boundary. My attention followed it instinctively, searching the branches before I caught myself.
The bird was not in my trees.
It was somewhere beyond that clear wrongness, where I could see the sunlight but could not tell whether the sound came from ten strides away or a hundred.
Then the woman.
She had frozen as completely as I had. No running, no casting, no lunging. No hand reaching for a blade. Surprise had caught her mid-bite and held her there.
I took one step nearer. One only.
Close enough to see her better. Far enough that if the thing decided it didn't like me closer, I had room enough to react.
She appeared small in height. Even seated I could see that much. Smaller than any elf I knew by enough that the old stories stirred in memory before I invited them. Old children’s tales. She had tiny, rounded ears, so far as I could see. Strange clothing in bright woven cloth and blue trousers of some heavy canvas-like material. Nothing about her fit my grove. Nothing about the place behind her fit it either.
Beautiful, too. I noted, but was more concerned with watching her hands until I knew more.
The Ursan had no use for pretty. The
The breach was inside our boundary. That was enough.
If she had made it, I would learn that soon enough.
I watched her face for pain, enchantment, fear. Her green eyes. Her breath. Her hands. Her posture. Then checked the seam again.
Break.
A choice. Not yet the right one.
She moved.
She came to her feet quickly and stepped back a pace. My weight settled without thought, readiness sharpening through my shoulders and legs.
Fear? Preparation?
Then she lifted one hand in a painfully awkward little gesture, and said, “Hi.”
Ah.
Not a spell. Not a warning. A greeting.
I found myself answering the gesture as I might have answered someone encountered on a narrow forest path. I raised my hand, palm open, careful to make the motion slow enough for her to follow, and inclined my head.
She kept her own hand lifted a moment longer, as though uncertain what to do now that I had responded.
The simple exchange eased some of the tension in me.
I looked her over again. No blood, no obvious injury. No distortion of her body where the strange air held between us. Confused, certainly, and frightened now, but whole.
The breach should not have been there. If she could see me this clearly, whatever separated our places was thinner than I liked.
“Are you harmed?”
Her free hand flew to her mouth and she took another step back.
“I can hear you! You can… hear me?!”
I stilled again.
Useful. She had not expected that.
So she had not opened a known doorway and waited for someone to answer from the other side. Whatever this was, she understood no more of it than I did. I risked a glance around my perimeter, was anyone else nearby?
“Yes,” I said. “I can hear you.”
I kept both hands visible and empty.
Her eyes were wide, but they were no longer fixed on me. They were moving back to the warped air between us, then to my face when I spoke, then back to the seam.
“And you can hear me.”
Sound crossed cleanly. More than sight, then. Not an image laid over another place.
I had begun to wonder what else would cross when she beat me to it.
“Okay, wait. So sound goes through.” She looked along the blurred edge of the distortion. “Can you see me clearly? Like, all of me? Does my voice sound normal? Can you feel anything from it? Air, heat, anything?”
She paused only long enough to look at the space between us more closely.
“Does it look the same from your side? Is there actually something there, or does it just look like there is? Can you see an edge?”
The questions came faster than I could answer, and I too wanted the answers to nearly all of them.
She was frightened. I could see it in the way she held posture, one of her feet remained angled toward the path behind her. She had left herself an escape, though the rest of her seemed interested in staying until she understood what was before her.
Sensible, that first part. Curious, too, which was interesting.
I had been trying to decide what I might safely learn about the breach. Apparently, so had she. It was a peculiar relief to have someone asking the same questions, even if I had no idea who or what she was.
Unfortunately, I knew very little more than she did.
“I do not know yet,” I said.
“You need not fear me. I will not come closer.”
Her gaze flicked to the distance I had left between myself and the seam, as if checking the truth of it.
She stopped.
Her attention had finally caught on all of me.
Her hand lowered slowly. Her attention moved over me with new care now that the first shock had loosened its grip. She looked up then farther up, across armor and leather and the weapons at my side. The large scars crossing my brow, one eye, cheek, and mouth. Then the long points of my ears. Her gaze returned to my eyes and held there long enough that I wondered whether golden eyes meant something where she came from. Then she looked over my clothing.
“Why are you… dressed like that?”
I blinked.
Of all the possible questions.
I looked down at myself, because perhaps there was some answer hidden in the familiar garments I had missed. Perhaps she considered my gear too much for the environs.
“Leather where the forest is likely to scratch me. Linen where I would prefer the leather not to. Boots because I have a great deal of ground to cover. How should I be dressed?”
The absurdity caught me off guard. Her breathing was still quick, and her eyes kept straying back to the seam, yet here she was asking me to account for my trousers and boots.
I felt an unwilling smile tug at my mouth. I could not recall another occasion when my choice of clothing had become the subject of such scrutiny in the middle of a possible threat.
I let myself examine her garments in return. The bright fitted wool top. The strange tailoring. Wide-legged blue trousers. Black shoes edged in pale material, too thin for my woods and somehow carefully made despite it.
“You are dressed strangely as well, to my eye.” I added, “Do you know where you are?”
She looked down at herself as if I had made her question it, then around at the trees and sparse brush on her side.
“Of course I know where I am. I eat lunch here damn near everyday.”
Her gaze swept the pale path behind her.
“Where did you come from? There is no path that way.” She gestured through the distortion, behind it, behind me. Her certainty mattered. She was not merely disoriented. She believed herself in a place she knew well enough to have habits in it. Then the questions continued,
“Can you see the path behind me? Does this look like a window from your side too? A shimmery one? With blurred edges? Is it dark out or do you have that many trees?”
Either two real places had been joined, or one of us was seeing the other laid over the world like a glamour. I disliked both possibilities.
I glanced behind me. Game trail. Boundary markers. My trees where they ought to be. Nothing vanished. Nothing displaced.
“I might say the same of you,”
I stepped sideways rather than forward and kept my eyes pinned to the seam. It stayed fixed as my angle changed.
“But yes its day, there is much canopy overhead. There is a game trail behind me. A boundary line. And my foot path before me.”
I looked at her again. The brightness of her garment. The exactness of her strange clothes. The ordinary irritated expression under her confusion. No glamour I knew.
“I came from my own side of that breach. And yes, to much of what you asked. I see a window with a shimmering edge, showing me a desert-like landscape. ” I let my eyes point to the warped air between us. “And unless I am mistaken, there is a woman standing in it. What is your place called?”
Her brow furrowed. She tilted her head, then peered at the seam itself.
“What do you mean ‘whats it called’? You don’t know?”
She either did not understand the question or did not understand what was happening here.
Her hand gestured toward the distortion.
“Are you… Is this you? Did you do this? Did you put this here?” She asked.
“No,”
The answer came before anything else could muddy it.
“I did not make this.”
I moved one pace nearer the breach, slowly.I lifted a hand and held it short of the warped air, close enough to feel for heat, wind, pressure, to feel for anything.
“If I knew how to tear open the world, I would not waste the effort to startle a woman at her meal.”
A thread of dryness escaped despite myself.
The seam did not feel druidic. It did not feel like any fey crossing I knew or like ordinary spellwork at all. Recognition would at least have given me something to anticipate.
“I ask because I do not know this place,” I said. “Not your trees. Not your clothes. Not the path behind you. You are clearly not in my grove, and I am sure I am not in your world.”
I watched that land. Her face shifted from disbelief toward fear. She looked past me into the density of my trees, then back. Her eyes lingered on my ears.
“Tell me what this place is called.” I repeated.
She paused too long. Then came a small nervous laugh. Not amusement. A mind beginning to accept danger without yet knowing where to put it.
“I’m on a like maintenance path, I think, in a public park… in a popular city in the US…Earth? Where the heck are you?”
I knew that name. Earth had lived in the old tales since before I was old enough to question them. The stories seldom agreed. Some were warnings, others fanciful accounts of places and clever creatures their tellers had never seen.
Yet here it was, if she spoke truly.
I looked past her again. Dry ground, pale grasses, narrow trees with leaves too sparse to shield their own trunks from the midday light. How did they endure that sun? Their roots must reach deep, unless this was simply a dry season in a place that knew a wetter one.
The bird called again.
A whole living country lay beyond her, and I knew nothing of it. Not the seasons, nor the creatures that hunted beneath those trees, nor the things that lived unseen in its soil. I wanted to walk that path. I wanted to kneel in the dirt and put my hands to the roots. To learn what grew there and why.
I shifted my weight toward the seam before I realized I had moved.
A foolish impulse. The air between us was not ordinary, and I had no measure of what might happen if I tried to cross it.
Still, the wanting remained.
She was watching me, waiting for an answer.
“I am in a grove,” I said. “My grove, a protected wild. Far from any city or court.”
I chose the words carefully, as she had.
“In my world, this place lies between an outpost den along the territory line and the rest of my grove. Deep forest. Sanctuary. No public road. No settlement close enough to walk to by midday.”
She pondered this.
“My name is Isen,” I added, “And I believe we are looking at one another through a wound between places.”
I lowered my hand completely.
“I would be careful of it.”
Her eyes flicked to me.
“I do not know if it will behave safely.”
“I wasn’t planning on getting closer.” She answered almost defensively.
Her gaze went from me to the seam.
“I um… I don’t know if what you are saying is possible though. I don’t understand how this can be real.”
Of course she did not.
Neither would I have, had someone told me this tale instead of placing it in my grove.
“No,” I said. “I do not imagine you do.”
I looked at the seam, then back to her.
“Nor, if I am honest, did I. A short while ago.”
Some of the strain left her shoulders. Her eyes returned to the boundary, stayed there, then moved back to me.
“You need not decide whether to believe it all at once,” I said. “It is here, whether either of us welcomes it or not.”
I let my gaze pass once over the strange path, the bright woman standing in both familiarity and impossibility.
“For now, it is enough that we both see it. Both hear one another. And neither of us seems harmed.”
A little more of the tension in her posture eased.
“What is your name?” I asked. Not entirely sure she would tell me.
“Danika.” She offered.
I fixed it in my memory.
“Danika” I repeated.
Her attention moved from the seam back up to me. She hesitated. Looked at my face longer than she had before.
“Um, I don’t mean to be rude. Do you, I mean, um what… are you?”
Ah.
I had wondered when we would arrive there, she beat me to it.
“I am not sure if you are asking if I am a man, an elf, or a druid. All are true.”
I watched her closely. She reacted.
“An… elf.” Her eyes traveled up to my ears again. “Like an actual elf Elf? Are there-? Are you-? How-? Sorry, that answer created a mouthful of more questions.”
My hand touched my chest briefly, more habit than ceremony.
Now that I had reason to look with the old tales in mind, she fit them disturbingly well. Small by elven measure. Rounded ears, sturdy build, proportionate, tiny faint dappled spots on her face and arms. Features softened in ways no elf’s were. Human, perhaps. One with fair coloring and golden hair.
The old stories gave me a possibility, nothing more.
“If you are asking whether I am like you… Plainly, not quite.” My thumb hooked into my chest strap.
“What did you take me for?” I asked.
She stepped nearer, looking. I tracked her movement closely.
“To be honest, my very first thought was you are …too big to be a human.”
Human. She knew the word, though she had not yet used it for herself.
Her gaze traveled over me again. She had already examined the sword and the scars. This time her attention lingered briefly at my shoulders before returning to my face.
I knew better than to assume why a stranger looked twice, particularly one who had good reason to fear me.
It pleased me nonetheless.
“And you look… well prepared. It’s actually really intimidating.”
She hesitated, then added, “But I guess I can’t be sure.”
Prepared. A small smile finally escaped me, my eyes fell to the soil.
“That is fair… Prepared.” I repeated.
My arms settled back loose at my sides.
“I am armed, if that is your meaning,” I said. “And armored enough for the wilds.”
Her eyes found the weapons again.
“You may say intimidating. I would not mistake it for an insult.”
I considered her. She was small, impossible, standing beyond the clear wound in the air as though observation might keep the world sensible.
“Were our positions reversed, I might call you unsettling.” I offered.
Her brows lifted.
“What unsettles me is the impossible part. You should not be here, yet there you stand.”
I watched her lips form the word ‘impossible.’
Her attention went to the gear at my side once more.
“Why would you need to be armed? With a… is that a sword?”
That question was stranger to me than nearly anything she had asked or said.
I glanced into my trees.
“Because the wild is not tame,”
Simple enough.
“There are predators. Corruption. Creatures driven from their proper paths. There are those who would harm what lives here, and those who would not think it harm at all.”
My hand shifted near the gear at my side without touching it.
“And yes, I do bring a sword. I do not go armed because I hunger for a fight, if that is your worry. I go armed because I am responsible for what lies within these borders.”
She watched me as though the answer itself had opened another small seam.
“You ask as one who expects the woods to be safe. In your world, are they?”
“Yes,”
Immediate.
“Pretty much anyway, at least near here. We don’t have any bears or lions or wolves, anything like that near here. Small predatory cats and coyotes, but that’s it.”
No bears? Interesting.
She glanced around herself and laughed under her breath.
“There are some dangerous snakes and spiders I should probably be more careful about.”
She put away the remains of her lunch as casually as if we were not discussing predators through a window between worlds.
“What are you protecting yourself from?” She asked.
I looked back into the shadow of the trees again.
“Claws. Teeth. Malice. Folly.” I listed.
“There are beasts large enough to break a body open in moments. Creatures twisted by dark magic, sickness, or old corruption, old rules. There are Ferals, bandits, and worse things besides, if one strays far enough or fails to notice the signs in time.”
My thumb hooked under the strap across my chest, resting my arm.
“And there are times when what I protect against is not a single creature, but an imbalance. Rot spreading where it should not. Anger in the land. A wrongness that draws danger to it.”
Her expression was apprehensive. How much of that sounded like madness to her? I could not know, but her face made my words feel foreign. Her world had safe woods. I had never mistaken the beauty of mine for safety.
“If you wandered far enough into my forest alone,” I said, “I would not like your chances.”
I found myself disliking the image as soon as I formed it.
“And you, if your woods are so safe, what do your people fear instead?” I asked
She considered that.
“As children, the usual stuff. The dark, the dentist, generally monsters, and the unknown.”
Then she looked at me differently. Taking in my posture, my ears. Observing me more directly.
“But, if you are asking what humans fear. Truly fear. We are mortal critters, Isen,almost every single one of us is afraid of our approaching end. So… death, I guess. As stereotypical as that sounds.”
Human.
She had finally used the word for herself.
I looked at her again, and for a moment found myself studying things I had already seen. The rounded ears. The strange proportions. The fair hair and those little scattered marks across her skin.
A human stood on the other side of the seam.
The tales had never agreed on much. Small, clever, dangerous, selfish, hungry for resources and land. Brief-lived and fragile as mayflies, or nearly impossible to kill, depending on who was telling the story and what lesson they wished a child to learn.
Yet here she stood, packing away her lunch and speaking of mortality as casually as she had spoken of the snakes in her woods.
Mortal critters, she’d called them.
I almost smiled at that.
But the part about their approaching end remained with me.
I knew the passing of years in my own body. What three centuries had taught me, what they had taken, and what they had yet to change. I had known people who lived far longer than I had, and buried others who should have had centuries remaining.
What did a lifetime look like to her?
She was plainly grown, yet I had no way of telling how much of that short life she had already lived. How many summers were behind her? How many could reasonably remain?
The old stories had never agreed on how quickly humans aged. I found myself wanting to ask.
“We fear death as well,” I said. “But not, perhaps, in the same way. For my people, death is a touch strange. It is rare, and often cruel. But for humans…”
I stopped there. I could hardly ask a stranger how near she stood to her own death.
“Your years are said to pass swiftly. I imagine knowing that changes how you spend them.”
I watched her face as I spoke.
What had begun as curiosity about an impossible creature now had an uncomfortable immediacy. She was not a story about a brief life. She was alive before me.
“Is that what you fear now?” I asked.
My gaze went to the seam.
“That this will kill you?”
She looked taken aback.
“No,” She shook her head.
“It looks like as long as I stay right here, I’m ok. But no, I had meant, just that our lives are short. We have stories of elves too, isn’t that odd? In our stories, elves don’t die of old age quite like we do.”
Our stories had crossed too. Somewhere, somehow, humans told tales of elves while elves told tales of humans.
Her attention returned to the seam.
“What do you think of this… thing? You got sort of close, could you feel anything?”
That was a question I could answer from evidence. I took half a step nearer and lifted one hand, palm angled toward the clear distortion.
“I did not feel wind,” I said. “Nor heat. Nor cold.”
Nothing moved against my skin.
“It has presence, though. Like standing near a place where the air has gone wrong.” I continued, studying it.
“It does not feel empty. It feels like something is there.”
I shifted my hand through the air near it, then lowered it.
“When I first approached, the plants near it did not behave as they ought. The moment felt too still. The grove noticed it. So then did I.”
I wanted to test it.
A twig. Leaf. Something expendable. Learn one rule without paying a living price for it. But not while she stood so close on the other side.
“I do not think it is only a window,” I said. “If it were, I do not believe we would hear one another so clearly. But, I also do not think it is open. Not in the way of a door.”
A small mercy, I thought of my grove. I studied the seam once more.
“I do not like things that refuse to declare what they are, showing up on my land.”
Danika bent.
My body tightened before I knew what she was reaching for.
A pebble.
“Danika-!”
Too late.
She threw it.
I tracked the stone, and the first thing I saw was how close she stood to the place it would strike. If the breach answered badly, there was nothing my hands could do from this side.
Agitation flashed hot even though some part of me wanted the answer as badly as she did. I understood perfectly why she had thrown it, even as I watched her risk something neither of us understood.
I was already moving nearer when the pebble struck the seam.
It stopped, rebounded from the surface and dropped on her side.
She looked at it, sitting on the ground a few feet from her shoes.
“Huh.” She said.
Huh?!
“It didn’t go through, if anything it kind of bounced off a little. Did anything happen on your side?”
I stared, motionless, at the place of impact, waiting for a delayed reaction.
Nothing.
Only then did I breathe.
“That… was unwise.”
Her eyes came to me.
“And useful,” she added with a grin.
I stepped close enough to examine where it had struck.
“So. It holds.”
My hand hovered near the boundary again.
“Solid to force from your side, at least. Or selective. Which would be worse.”
The clean rejection meant there was a rule. I wanted to test it again.
That knowledge only sharpened my anger. She had learned something worth knowing, and there might have been a price neither of us could afford.
“You are fortunate it answered so mildly.”
Confusion creased her face.
“Answered what? It was just a little rock. What did you think might happen?”
“I did not know. Some workings answer force. Some answer blood, intention, an invitation made in ignorance. I did not think the stone itself mattered. I thought the choice might.”
“The choice?” Her brows drew together. “You mean throwing the rock at it might matter more than the rock hitting it? Like intention? Like it’s going to know if you throw something at it versus something just accidentally hits it? Like it can think?”
“I do not know if it can think. I know it does not belong here, and I know almost nothing about what it will tolerate.”
Her gaze moved back to the place where the stone had fallen. Mine followed.
It was an ordinary pebble again.
“And now we know it rejects a stone cleanly,” I said. “That is worth having learned.”
I looked at her again.
“Next time, warn me before you decide to educate us both.”
She giggled. Actually giggled.
“I’ll warn you the next time I throw things. I can do that.” She agreed with a smile.
“Good. I prefer my revelations with warning.”
She went quiet. Her eyes moved to the seam.
“I wonder if this will still be here tomorrow.”
Tomorrow.
I looked at the boundary too.
“I do not know.”
I could not reassure her with an answer I did not have.
“It may vanish the moment we look away. It may hold until nightfall. Or longer. Things that break the natural order are seldom and rarely predictable.”
“Will you come here tomorrow to see?” She asked, eyes meeting mine.
“If it remains, yes.”
The seam lay inside my boundary. I would be watching it whether she returned or not.
She was already gathering the remains of her lunch.
“I usually eat my lunch here… it has a nice view, it’s secluded, and no one ever comes down here, so I get to be alone for a little while.”
Secluded, habitual, midday, usually alone. Useful things to know if the breach remained.
“So yeah, I’ll be here around lunch tomorrow. Do you live or work nearby?”
The distinction of the two nearly amused me. Life or work.
“Both,”
I looked over one shoulder into my grove.
“This is a little distance from an outpost, but it lies within my grove. I patrol here. Keep watch. Tend what needs tending. And when my duties allow it, I rest here as well.”
Home was near enough to the truth, but not a thing I needed to explain through a rupture in the world.
“I have a den not far from this line.”
I returned my attention to her.
“So yes. I am nearby. If this remains by midday tomorrow, I will come.”
I let my eyes rest on her a moment.
“And if it does not, I will still inspect the ground for signs that it was ever here.”
She smiled then.
“If it is, I look forward to hearing all about it. If it’s not here tomorrow…well, it was nice, a little weird, but nice to meet you, Isen.”
I held her gaze for a breath before answering.
“And you as well, Danika.”
Her face. Her name. Rounded ears and fair hair and the smallness of her body against the bright strange path. I found myself fixing details in memory with the same care I would have given tracks I might need to recognize later.
“A little weird,” I repeated. “That seems a charitable description.”
I untucked my fingers from my chest strap and then laid the palm briefly against my chest. Adding a shallow nod.
“If it is gone tomorrow, then I will count myself fortunate to have met a human woman through it before it closed. And if it remains… then I will see you at midday.”
I did not step away first.
Danika turned and walked back along her path, carrying her lunch and all the impossible evidence of herself away with her.
I watched until the view on her side took her from sight.
Her footsteps faded, but the sounds of her world did not.
The strange bird called again. I could tell it was the same one now; the note rose sharply and fell away at the end. There was pleasure in recognition. Somewhere beyond the impossible boundary, an entirely ordinary creature went about its day.
I looked back at the place where the stone had struck. Tomorrow, if the breach remained, I intended to test it more carefully. There was a good deal I wanted to know, and I had no intention of waiting for her to throw something else before beginning.
For now, I needed to decide where to keep watch.
The seam had not moved during our conversation. It had answered the stone without any visible change. Both observations were useful, though neither told me what it might do when darkness came.
I settled in to watch.
It was going to be a long night.
