k_a_webb | The World Walkers: AU Taithmarin: Anna: Stepping Onto Another World (part 6)

“Why do you stay with us for two weeks?” Conrad asked.

“That is something I’m not entirely sure about, especially as two weeks here is a very long time, but I have a feeling it’s because most humans never get fully comfortable here. Some of us accept what’s happened, the magic, the animal races, the fact we have no way home, while the rest cling onto a life they will never have again. It’s easier for them.” Zoe sighed. “My boyfriend, when we first arrived here, was angry about what had happened and he was taken away by the Stormkin. For a long time I had no idea what had happened to him and, to be honest, once I’d started getting used to Taithmarin I didn’t think about him much at all.

“Our relationship had been falling apart for a long time and I was trying to make things work, even though I didn’t truly think that anything I’d do could really help. We’d both changed, we shouldn’t really have still been together, but I was scared of change, and I think he was too, which was why he never ended things. Then we stepped through a door that brought us here. He blamed me. So Alcaeus took him to the place where the Stormkin help new arrivals to understand why they’re feeling the way they do and how best to deal with that. My boyfriend spent three years there, learning to deal with his anger, because something I’d never known before was that he’d always had problems dealing with that emotion in particular. He’d never wanted me to see that side of him.

“I’d moved into a nice little one bed place by then, Joel and I were still seeing each other at least once a week even though neither of us wanted to admit that we might have feelings for each other, and finding Adam on my doorstep threw me a little. A part of me was certain I’d never see him again, while another was still holding onto the hope that maybe we could work things out, but the moment we looked at each other we knew that our relationship was long over. For the first time we really talked and I realised that being with the Stormkin had changed him, that he was a much better person than he had been than we were together, and that for the first time he actually knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

“He decided he was going to work at one of the Stormkin’s schools, where anyone under the age of eighteen was taken to learn about Taithmarin, until they reached the year of their majority, when they’d be able to chose their first flat. Until he told me about them I didn’t even know somewhere like that existed, because the only new arrivals I’d come across were adults. It wasn’t something Joel had told me about either, but that didn’t bother me the way it might have done before, as I knew he hadn’t kept it from me out of spite – it was just something he hadn’t thought to mention.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.