Chapter Fourteen

  The sun was minutes away from setting when Miranda led the way through Trell’s imposing wooden gates and down one of the busy streets as confidently as if she were just out for an evening stroll around the neighborhood.

  Jeremy, on the other hand, couldn’t help but flinch a little every time he came within five feet of one of the townspeople. None of them seemed to pay him even the slightest bit of attention, but he didn’t believe that for a second. Not after how eager everyone had been to kill each other back at the cave.

  Despite the late hour, enough people still filled the streets that he and Miranda had to weave in between them to keep from being swept away by the flow of traffic. Miranda seemed to do so effortlessly, slipping between bodies as easily as a trickle of water making its way down a gravel path. Jeremy had no such luck. For every two townspeople Miranda brushed past, the disgruntled young man seemed to bump into six.

  “Oomph!” he grunted when a particularly unfortunate bump sent another man stumbling into a group of three others. He immediately tensed up, convinced that weapons were about to appear in the hands of all four of them. The first man slowly turned to look at him…

  “They say marshwights are weak to clean water,” he said.

  “I- I’m sorry!” Jeremy exclaimed, backing away until he was pressed up against the wall of a nearby shop. “I didn’t mean to…wait, what?”

  The man stared at him with glassy eyes, neither smiling nor frowning as the other three went on their way as if nothing at all had happened. “You won’t see a dragon anywhere around here. The closest one is up north in Garrow’s Lament, thank the gods!”

  “What are you—”

  Miranda grabbed his hand, towing him down the street.

  “Don’t bother talking to them,” she said over her shoulder. “Getting useful info out of an NPC is tricky.”

  “Out of a what?”

  “I’ll tell you in a little bit. For now, just keep up. We’re almost there.”

  They continued to worm their way through the crowd for a couple more streets, the sky growing darker with each passing minute.

  Thinking back to the man he had bumped into, Jeremy couldn’t help but shiver. There were things out there in the woods that had nearly made him soil himself when he’d seen them, but none of them were as unsettling as the look in that man’s eyes. It had been like talking to a zombie with just enough self-awareness to pretend it wasn’t a zombie. It didn’t do it very convincingly, but somehow that only made the act even creepier. It was…

  Jeremy looked around, and his stomach did a flip.

  …exactly the same way everyone else was looking at him.

  “Uh, Miranda?” he asked as alarm began to rise up inside him.

  “Here we are!” she declared, stopping outside the only two story building that Jeremy could see.Cheerful light spilled from the window, and the breeze carried the sound of conversation. A sign on the door named it the Dancing Dryad. Giving him an encouraging smile, she pushed the door open and ushered him inside.

  The Dancing Dryad was an inn, Jeremy realized, though he wasn’t sure why that surprised him. Rows of long, narrow tables were lined up across the common room, filled with dozens of townspeople as they ate and drank. Voices rang out from every corner as Jeremy followed Miranda through the room, making the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

  The immediate, almost instinctive, sense of dread confused him for a moment, but as he passed the rows of villagers—none of whom so much as glanced in his direction—it suddenly became clear.

  “Good day to make some gold.”

  “Did you hear that titantulas have overrun Rivercross?”

  “Hail, friend. How are you?”

  “You couldn’t pay me to care about something like that."

  “I hear the tomb of Maxardia the Frostforger is hidden somewhere beneath Mt. Pazugog.”

  “I need some good warding charms to keep the caterfae out of my crops.”

  “Until next time.”

  This wasn’t the warm, friendly chatter you would expect to hear in the common room of an inn like this, he realized. It was a dull, monotonous drone, as if the emotions of every single person in the room had been vacuumed right out of their skulls.

  Judging by the vacant looks on their faces, Jeremy guessed that he wasn’t too far off the mark with that assessment.

  Even so, he couldn’t deny that the inn still had a certain air of comfort about it—and as soon as that thought crossed his mind, he found himself fighting back the biggest yawn of his life. How had he not realized how tired he was until just this minute? It wasn’t too surprising, he supposed, given that he’d just gone through the most traumatic day of his life.

  After they had gotten away from the fighting, Miranda had forced him to wade through the creek for another two miles, urging him to go faster every thirty seconds. Finally, when she’d been satisfied that nobody was following them, she had teleported them away from the creek with her magic dagger, and then led the way into the woods for the most intense hike Jeremy had ever been on.

  Nine hours later, they’d arrived here, more exhausted than Jeremy could ever remember being. All he wanted was to crawl into bed, close his eyes, and pray that he would wake up back where he belonged, in a world without giants, tree-men…

  Or whatever Miranda had turned into.

  His eyes flickered toward her as they made for the bar on the other side of the room. How could he be sure this woman—if woman was even the right word to use—was really Miranda? That was the question that he had spent the whole day shoving into the back of his mind, only for it to burrow through his sanity until it reached the front again.

  He wanted it to be her. Desperately so. It…she…certainly looked like Miranda, but at the same time, she didn’t. There was the age difference, for one thing, but it went deeper than that. She still had her gap toothed grin, and the twinkle in her eyes was still there, but there was a darkness behind that gaze now.

  This Miranda had gone through hell, and like rawhide turning into leather, the flames had hardened her into something stronger and tougher than she had ever been before. Looking at her face gave him a strange feeling of double vision, like one of those pictures where someone Photoshopped a second pair of eyes onto somebody’s face. It was Miranda’s face, and it wasn’t Miranda’s face.

  He could already feel the beginnings of a headache forming as he struggled to come to terms with it.

  You’re only focusing so much on her face, he thought to himself wryly, so you don’t have to think about the fact that she has horns and hooves now.

  He couldn’t stop himself from looking down at her feet—or rather, where her feet should have been. Suddenly, every click her hooves made on the wooden floor started to feel like a nail being pounded into his eardrums. His eye twitched, and he had to fight down the urge to giggle like a madman. He must not have fully succeeded, because Miranda turned and raised an eyebrow at him.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “I’m fine,” he whispered. She clearly didn’t believe him, but she let the matter drop anyway.

  “Welcome to the Dancing Dryad,” the innkeeper greeted them from behind the bar. “We have rooms for ten gold a night! Would you like to rent one?”

  He was a short and wide man with a bald head and thick red beard. His belly was round in the way that often came with people who worked around food, and had a stained, but clean looking, white apron draped over it. The first word that might have come to Jeremy’s head looking at him was jolly…if he hadn’t been staring at them with the same expression as the people outside.

  It was like he wasn’t really seeing anything that was in front of him. Even the way he was standing behind the bar struck Jeremy as unnatural in a way he couldn’t quite describe. A box appeared over his head, naming him DUNCAN MILLER, but it didn’t give him a level or class.

  “Too expensive,” Miranda said.

  Without missing a beat, Duncan replied, “We have rooms for one gold a night! Would you like to rent one?”

  “Sure,” Miranda replied, tossing a single gold coin onto the bar.

  “Thank you kindly! We have food for sale. Would you like to—”

  “No,” Miranda said, already making for the stairs.

  “Thank you kindly!”

  Jeremy followed her upstairs and down the hall, to the last room on the left. It was cramped, barely wide enough for him to spread his arms out in, and the only light came from a sputtering little oil lamp that kept more of the room in darkness than it illuminated.

  A bed sat against the wall, and opposite it there was a little end table holding a grimy looking washbasin and mirror. The mattress looked lumpy, and straw was poking holes through the fabric in several places.

  Since this room was on the end of the second floor hallway, the far wall doubled as the ceiling, sloping sharply across the room until it connected with the wall on the other side. There were no windows, making the door Miranda had just locked the only way in or out.

  He got the feeling that was exactly how she wanted it.

  “They’ll never think to look for us here,” Miranda said, taking off her dark blue hat and cloak. First the hat vanished in a flash of light, then the cloak, leaving her in just the short black dress she’d been wearing under them. “Not this close to Sequestrinous. It’s too obvious. They’ll expect us to be camping out somewhere in the wilderness, which means we’ll be safe for a couple days, at least. Are you hungry?”

  Jeremy didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on Miranda’s head—or, more accurately, the pair of bone-white horns that poked up from beneath her hair. Up till now, he had clung to the hope that they had just been a decoration on her hat. Now that she’d taken it off, and there was nothing on her head but hair and horns, he couldn’t deny the obvious truth any longer.

  “Jeremy?” she asked, turning to look at him. When she saw his face, she closed her eyes and sighed. “All right. Let’s get this over with.”

  “What?” he asked, her words jolting him out of his thoughts.

  “Answering your questions. I know you’ve probably got a million of them.” She sat down on the bed, patting the spot next to her. “I know you, Jeremy. It wouldn’t matter if you had one foot in the grave—you’ll never be able to rest until you know exactly what’s going on.”

  Jeremy looked at Miranda, and tentatively sat down next to her. His mind was a tornado of questions, each one fighting to be the first out of his mouth.

  “I…I don’t even know where to begin,” he admitted truthfully.

  Miranda reached out and gently took one of his hands in both of her own. “We’ve got all night.”

  Her hands are like leather, he mused, remembering his thoughts from earlier. She had never had soft skin—too much time spent out in the sun and dirt—but compared to what she had now, it may as well have been silk. What happened to her?

  As if he needed to ask. He had been here less than a day, and someone had already tried to murder him.

  He thought back to Miranda’s fight against Zara. The way she had moved, how she had struck without even a hint of hesitation. Miranda had always been tough, and more than ready to jump to her friends’ defense. He could still remember the time she had punched one of his middle school bullies’ teeth out. But this was something else entirely. This Miranda was a killer. No, it was worse than that.

  She was a killer who had long since come to terms with the fact that she was a killer.

  “I guess the obvious question,” he said, forcing his mind back to the subject at hand, “is, where are we?”

  Miranda smiled at him sadly. “That’s a little harder to answer than you might think. This is Nyr. It’s…both the world you used to live in, and a completely different one at the same time.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Of course you don’t. Nobody does.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “Earth is gone. I guess we just need to get that out of the way first.”

  “Gone?” Jeremy stared at her with horror rising in his chest. “You mean like…”

  “Yes, like the end of the world.”

  Stunned, Jeremy looked down at the floor, suddenly feeling lightheaded. His vision started to grow dark…

  “Take a deep breath, Jeremy,” Miranda said, rubbing her hand in comforting little circles on his back. “Breathe. It’s going to be okay.”

  He forced himself to do what she said, gulping down a hoarse, raspy breath.

  The end of the world. Just thinking about it made him want to push Miranda away, curl up into a ball, and refuse to open his eyes until things went back to normal. Surely this had to be a dream. Just one long, extremely vivid nightmare.

  Deep inside, though, he knew that wasn’t true. As unbelievable as it sounded, everything he had seen today was too real, too lifelike, too terrifying to be a dream. This was his reality now, and denying that wouldn’t make it go away.

  “I remember something,” he said, pushing those feelings deep down inside himself. He could sort all that out later. Turning to look at Miranda, he said, “A flash of light.”

  She nodded. “That was it. The moment our world ended and Nyr took its place. We call it the Remaking. You can probably guess why.”

  “Why, though? How is any of this even possible?”

  “That’s the question we’ve been asking ourselves every day for the past thirteen years,” Miranda whispered. “We don’t know. There are theories, but nothing—”

  “What kind of theories?” Jeremy cut her off.

  She paused. “I won’t pretend like I understand a lot of them, but…some people think Earth merged with another reality. Like, an alternate, parallel dimension or something. Some people say that whatever god was in charge got taken out in some kind of celestial coup, and whoever took his place decided to remake everything in their own image. I’ve even heard some people say that none of this is real, and that we’re all living in a gigantic computer simulation. That’s why ninety nine percent of the people here are NPCs.”

  Jeremy thought back to the innkeeper, with his blank stare and robotic words, and shivered again.

  “And what do you think?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t care why it happened. It did happen, and this is the world we live in now. That’s all I need to know.”

  Jeremy stared at her for a little bit, then found himself nodding. The world may have been completely unrecognizable, but that was exactly what he would have expected Miranda Jackdaw to say.

  Then he froze.

  “Wait,” he said slowly. “How long did you say it had been?”

  Miranda squeezed her eyes shut, and Jeremy almost thought he could hear the curses she was screaming inside her head. His heart sank into his stomach. Miranda had never been someone who minced words. If it was this hard for her to say something, then you could bet that it wasn’t going to be good news.

  “Thirteen years,” she finally said.

  That lightheaded feeling came back, and Miranda’s face began to swim in his vision.

  That was why she looked so much older. This whole time, Jeremy had assumed that since the change had seemed instantaneous for him, that it really had been instantaneous, and that Miranda’s appearance was just another aspect of this place’s seemingly infinite supply of weirdness.

  But in reality…it felt like his brain was physically rejecting that word every time he thought it…he had been in some kind of waking coma for over a decade, completely dead to the world while everything moved on without him.

  Miranda had moved on without him.

  This really wasn’t the fifteen year old girl who had climbed through his bedroom window and kissed him just a few short hours ago. She was…he did the math in his head…twenty eight years old. Almost twice the age she had been the last time they’d met.

  “Jeremy? Jeremy, say something!”

  Something touched his face, and Jeremy’s eyes widened, pulled back into the real world in an instant. Miranda was leaning in close to him, her hands cupping his cheeks, her eyes worried.

  Almost without realizing what he was doing, he brushed her hands away and stood up. His legs felt like overcooked noodles, and he was only able to stay upright by leaning heavily against the slanted wall.

  “Jeremy?” Miranda asked worriedly.

  He stumbled over to the table with the washbasin and the mirror, then paused. Did he really want to do this? Did he really want to know? No, he didn’t. But Miranda had been right: now that the question was in his head, it would never stop buzzing around inside his skull like a mosquito, draining his sanity bit by bit, until he got an answer.

  He looked into the mirror—and found an unfamiliar face staring back at him.

  TO BE CONTINUED: 2/11/2026