k_a_webb | The World Walkers: Athare: Leolin: Why

Written for a character adoption.
Sponsored by LJ user ysabetwordsmith (Elizabeth Barrette).

Leolin was twelve when his sister disappeared. There’d been rumours about people going missing, but no one really knew anything for certain. Some said it was the fae, which wasn’t a surprise because no one trusted the fae, while others were certain it was something to do with the doors. Walkers were beginning to travel the worlds, who had a natural ability to use the doors, and the fae were doing their best to be in control of everything, even though some of the Walkers were talking about things they shouldn’t be. One of the oldest rumours had been confirmed by the Walkers, so Leolin was certain that she had walked through one of the natural doors and couldn’t find a way back.

It was that day Leolin became interested in the natural doors, but he was too young to do anything about it… except take the same route he knew his sister had taken every day in the hope he might come across the same door. He had no way of knowing if he even had the ability, even though another rumour that had been confirmed was that if one child had the ability then their siblings often had it too. That was something the Council, who had become the World Walkers Council, didn’t know and were never going to know, if it could be helped. No one wanted the fae to know too much about the races they thought they controlled.

Often it was obvious the fae didn’t really care that much about the races they’d created, even though the Council existed, and Leolin wondered why they’d even bothered. Some did seem different. They wandered through the settlements, stopped to talk to people who didn’t talk back, tried to show their interest, but by then it was far too late. Maybe if they’d put in the effort sooner, rather than dropping the races onto the continents of Athare and leaving them there, things would have been different. Instead they’d focused entirely on creating new worlds, new races who would be treated in the same way the first three were, and didn’t give any help to those who were struggling to survive.

Even with some fae showing their interest they weren’t helping. Someone, smiling, had said that the fae didn’t get involved because it was better that way, and Leolin knew they were lucky to leave the settlement alive. That had been the stupidest thing anyone could have said, making the races trust the fae even less than they had done before, knowing that they thought it was better to leave people who would never have existed without them to deal with everything alone. Nothing was easy about the lives they had been forced into. They had to deal with magic, the fae, the other races, the world, and the majority of the fae had shut themselves away in settlements. If you believed the rumours, and he was beginning to listen more to rumours than he was to the information the fae gave out, they’d shut themselves away because they felt guilty for being selfish.

All the family could do was tell people around them what had happened and hope the word got out, but no one who’d got lost had ever found their way home. It was something Leolin knew was possible that he’d never see his sister again, that his parents would never see their eldest daughter, and that was why he promised himself that he would learn everything he could about the doors. He wanted to understand them and teach others how to understand them, so he could stop other parents from losing their children and other children from losing their siblings.

Maybe that was why the magic chose him. Leolin found his first door not long after his sixteenth birthday, long after he’d given up hope, and it didn’t take him long to realise something the fae never seemed to work out. The magic they used, the world they’d chosen as their home, was sentient, so it was helping them in places it thought they deserved help while putting blocks in their way to stop them from doing things it didn’t like. His first door didn’t take him to another world, the way he was expecting it to, but to another time, to an older Athare, and that changed him.

There were times when Leolin thought about writing about his first journey, but he never did. He knew why Athare had chosen him for the job of teaching everyone he could about the natural doors and the doors the fae had created. It wanted him to understand that most of the doors weren’t sentient, they didn’t chose people to take from one world to another, but that they existed purely because the other worlds did. They were a part of the magic and they were a dangerous part, one that no one could every truly control, even though the fae liked to believe that they had some form of control over them. Of course that could have just been his imagination. When Leolin stepped back through the door, grateful it was still there, he knew he might not have heard the voice of Athare. He wasn’t even certain Athare had a voice, because it was a planet, but he knew that he needed to write about the doors even if he hadn’t been chosen. It was his fear of being ridiculed that stopped him from ever mentioning anything more than the barest details, even though much stranger things had happened.

Knowing the doors would make them safer, although they would always be dangers. The fae would never be happy about not having control over everyone who travelled from one world to another, there would always be unexpected doors that led to strange places, and he was certain that some sentient doors existed, but those dangers were never going to fade away. If there had been a book about the doors he might have been able to stop his sister from disappearing and if he could do that for even one family then the job he did would be worth it.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.