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k_a_webb“Do you think we’ll ever know?”
“I doubt it.” Tanis didn’t know why Bran was looking to her for answers, but it wasn’t unusual. It happened a lot when she told someone she was a time traveller as well as a natural Walker. “Getting off Kankirin isn’t easy and I don’t know if I’ll be permitted to leave again. You might be.” She studied him. “You said you hadn’t done much travelling before you were arrested. How much is ‘not much’?”
Bran sighed. “I only travelled the worlds when I didn’t have any other choice. When I was eight my brother went missing, so my parents moved miles away from the nearest door. They wanted to be certain the same thing wouldn’t happen to me – only magic doesn’t work like that. The worlds wanted me to know that I was a Walker and that meant they created one just for me. I ended up on Labyrinth, bartering with the races there for help to get back, which took me nearly a year and a half in the end, as getting from Kniroch to Saethera wasn’t as simple as I wanted it to be. Now that I look back at that time I get the feeling that the worlds didn’t want me to, as doors that should have taken me home didn’t.
“When I finally got back my parents were so ecstatic to see me that I promised them I wouldn’t leave Saethera again unless I had no other choice. Fortunately I wasn’t lying to them, but they won’t know that unless I manage to either get back or send them a message. They’re just going to think that I left them again and this time…” He shrugged. “If you’re right I won’t be able to get back, so they’ll have lost both their sons to the magic of the doors.”
Tanis reached out and squeezed his hand. “It’s never easy, Bran. You just have to decide what you’re going to do – are you going to spend the rest of your life trying to get home or are you going to do what needs to be done?”
He studied her. “How did you get back to the Web?”
“Luck.” She shrugged. “I found a charm and I used it. All I knew was that I wanted to get away from this world, away from everything that had reminded me of what I could loose, so when I came across one of the door charms it seemed like a dream come true. When I stepped onto Kniroch I felt so relieved, but now I’m back again, I have no idea how long I’ve been gone, and I know that my departure would have deeply affected a number of people.”
“Don’t tell them about the charm. That way maybe we’ll have a chance of surviving here.”
“Surviving isn’t all that hard, you know.” Tanis smiled. “When you find yourself in another time you start to realise how hard things really can be, but I got through that and I can get through this too, even though I don’t want to be here.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.