John Adams - Other Worlds Than These

The dread returned, clenched tighter than ever. “Oh.”

“You can go if you wish ,” said Naamen, almost as if he could see what she was feeling. “The choice to stay or go is always yours. You know you would be welcome if you chose to remain.”

“The Passage Star will only burn for three hours,” said Crystal slowly, arguing a side she wasn’t sure that she believed in. “After that…”

“After that, it will go out, but it will light again once a fortnight until a year has gone without someone passing from our world to yours. You would still have the opportunity to change your mind.”

Crystal took a shaky breath, forcing her first answer aside. Naamen always asked if she would stay, and every time, it got a little bit harder to tell him no. How was she supposed to focus on school and chores and picking the right colleges to apply to when she was the champion of Otherways, the hero of the Endless Fields, and the savior of the Caverns of Time? The world she’d been born in seemed more like a dream every time she came to the Otherways, and this world—this strange, beautiful, terrible world, with its talking spiders and its deadly, scheming roses—seemed more like the reality.

Naamen and Chester looked at her hopefully. They’d been her best friends and sworn companions since she was just a little girl. Chester was barely more than a bunny when they first met. Now she was almost a woman, and Chester was… Chester. Naamen had been slightly smaller in those days, but no less ancient, and no less wise. Just the thought of leaving them made her heart break a little.

Hearts can heal , she thought, remembering something Naamen once told her, after they saved the Princess of Thorns from her mother, the wicked Rose Queen. Crystal took another, steadier breath, and gave the answer she’d been giving since her twelfth birthday, when the great spider first asked if she would stay: “Not yet. My parents would miss me too much. Let me turn eighteen. That’s when they expect to lose me to college anyway. They can lose me to Otherways instead.”

Naamen shifted his pedipalps in the gesture she had come to recognize as his equivalent of a nod. “If that is your wish, Crystal Halloway, it will be honored. We will count the hours until you return to us.”

“Don’t stay gone too long, okay, Crystal?” asked Chester.

“I never do, do I?” Crystal leaned over and hugged him hard. He was her best friend and her first love; he’d been her first kiss, the year she turned fourteen and saved the Meadows of Mourning from the machinations of the Timeless Child. “I miss you too much when I’m gone.”

“Please, then. Take this, to remember us by.” Naamen reached out one long black leg. A dreamcatcher dangled from his foot, the strands woven from silk so fine that it seemed almost like light held captive in a circle of willow wood and twine. “Hang it above your bed, and only good dreams will come to visit you.”

Crystal knew the dreamcatcher would do nothing against her nightmares; Naamen had been giving her the same tokens since the first time he asked her to stay, and they hadn’t stopped a single bad dream. Still, making the dreamcatchers seemed to soothe him in some way she couldn’t quite understand, and so she reached out and took it, feeling the weight of it settle in her palm, simultaneously feather-light and heavy as a stone. Naamen returned his foot to the cavern floor.

“Thank you, my friend,” she said, as she tucked the dreamcatcher into her pocket. “I’ll hang it in a place of honor.”

“See that you do.” Naamen waved his pedipalps again, this time in the motion that denoted concern. “I wish you would reconsider, Crystal. I wish that you would stay.”

Crystal paused, frowning. Naamen always asked her not to go. He’d never tried to change her mind before. “Naamen? What’s wrong?”

“It’s just that you are growing up, Crystal, and I worry for your safety.” The great spider stilled, looking at her gravely. “The choice, as always, is yours.”

“Oh, my friend.” Crystal moved almost without thinking, stepping forward and wrapping her arms around the body of the spider, just behind the smallest of his eyes. Naamen leaned into her embrace, but only enough to show that he welcomed it; not enough for his greater size to knock her off her feet, as had happened so often in her younger days. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll always make it back to you. Always.”

Naamen stroked her back with the tip of one foreleg, faceted eyes focused on the endless black in front of him, and said nothing. There was nothing left that he could say.

Crystal approached the Welcome Stone slowly, alone, as she always did. The dread was still there in the pit of her stomach, tangled with warring desires. She wanted to go home, to sleep in her own bed and hug her parents in the morning. She wanted to stay—always—to sleep in the cobweb-decked bedroom Naamen had spun for her in the brambles that ringed the Endless Fields. She wanted to graduate from high school. She wanted to kiss Chester again and again, forever. Most of all, she wanted to be there when the next child stumbled into the light of the Passage Star. She never wanted to be one of the children Naamen refused to name.

She wanted to stay.

But she couldn’t.

The passage back to her own world only took a few seconds. She stepped into the light of the Passage Star—which always shone in a perfect circle, right at the center of the Welcome Stone—blinked, and was back in the world in which she’d been born, standing in the tiny room housing the magic telescope that let her travel into Otherways. She closed the telescope lens quickly, before something unpleasant could find a way to follow her, and turned to head down the narrow stone passageway that connected to the secret door at the back of her closet.

She’d found the secret door and the room beyond by accident when she was six, playing at seeking Narnia. Now she couldn’t imagine a world where she didn’t have the route to Otherways etched deep into her heart, like an ache that never quite went away.

The passage was tighter than it used to be. She had to stoop a little to keep her head from knocking against the ceiling, and there were places where she had to turn and scoot along sideways in order to avoid getting stuck. One more growth spurt and she’d wind up staying in Otherways because she couldn’t make it back to her bedroom… or she’d wind up trapped in the world where she was born without ever once choosing to stay.

She couldn’t keep going back and forth forever. She knew that; she’d known for a long time. Somehow, the feel of the walls pressing against her back and chest as she inched through the tighter spaces just made that fact more real. Soon, she would have to decide.

The passage widened as it came to an end, letting her into an antechamber almost as large as the telescope room. She walked the last few steps to the door with her head high, and placed her hand upon the doorknob. “My name is Crystal Halloway,” she said, “and I am coming back from the most incredible adventure…”

The doorknob turned under her hand of its own accord, and the door of her closet swung open. Crystal pushed her way through the hanging coats—which were more window-dressing than anything else; she would never dream of using her closet to store clothing when she might need to rush to Otherways at a moment’s notice—and she was back in the familiar bedroom that had been hers practically since she was born.

Moving more on autopilot than anything else, she walked to the bed, where she removed her dagger and shoved it under her pillow. It was unlikely to be seen by prying parental eyes while it was there, and she slept better knowing it was close at hand. She yawned vastly, suddenly aware of how tired she was, and how hungry she was, and how much her battle with the dire bats had left her in need of a shower.