Me, Malikah of the Ring, a peace maker?

There just wasn't any wrapping my head around the idea.

Why couldn't I be something cooler? Like a war mind? Had Tonyedda told me that was my stone, I'd have been a lot closer to believing it. That's what I'm good at. I can look at a person and within five seconds tops of watching that person, I can pick up on ques in their body language to determine how best to beat that person if it came to hand to hand.

The big guy on the end of the group with the mass of black curls around his shoulders, muscles everywhere you look, and the red stone glowing brightly for example. He stands firmly planted in the ground, definitely too solid to try to take out by running at center mass like is best on most tall people, with him you have to be quick. He's big, which makes him slower and less agile than me. It'll take me longer, but in a fight against him, I'd antagonize, get him coming for me, then be swift on my feet, staying just out of his grasp, wearing him down until my opening arrives, then leap onto the back and put him in a chock hold. Sure, I'm likely to get the air knocked slap out of me when he attempts to get me off by slamming himself down on the ground and squishing me between his mass and the ground, but I won't let go.

A war mind, yes.

Peace maker? I'm going with no.

I've started way more fights than the ones I've ended.

"Come with us." Tonyedda says gently, having given me a few minutes to try to swallow the information I've just been given. "

"How did you even know how to find me?" I ask, ignoring her request. "And how long have you been watching me?"

"We've only been here a short time." She tells me, the group around her getting antsy, shifting their weight uncomfortably back and forth while I still lounge on the dirt. Either they think they're too good to get down in the wet dirt, or they don't trust me either. If it's the latter, I like them a little bit more, but if it's the former, it makes me not like them so much.

I've dealt with enough stuck up, better than you, holy are we, attitudes to last me a life cycle. I don't need to get mixed up with some group of random supremists just because they say I belong with them.

"When your necklace activated, basically when it found you and your soul connected with it, we follow the sense to where the person is." Tonyedda continues. "We can't stay long though. We've got many things to attend to back home, and it isn't good for us to dwell in another realm too long. It's dangerous even. Although the Gods created the Demi, and the Demi created us, The Six don't like us meddling in their realms and taking people back to the seventh with us. We must hurry back." She reiterates. "Come with us."

Again, this isn't worded as a request.

I should be turned off to all of this. I should wave them on their way, return the necklace, and go back to the wallows, but I can't walk away. I don't even feel the need to stand.

"I can't just up and leave." I say after a beat, and it's true.

Do I want to? If I'm being honest with myself, kind of? I don't know what drinkers and faes and whatever else means, but...Well, the idea of leaving the Ring and all of its sickness, death, and misery is tempting.

"I have people who count on me here." I explain all about the kids in the wallow who need my coin I earn, and about Mags and Mr. Mags who reply on my coin to pay for the apothecary. "I can't leave them, even for my own destiny."

I suddenly resign myself to this truth. I am needed. I'd like to think anyone in the Ring who is offered a way out would jump at the opportunity, and maybe under different circumstances, I would too, but I can't just desert the people who have always been there for me.

How would Tawny manage the wallows without me? How would Mags and Mr. Mags afford to keep the pain away?

"Didn't the pits where you usually fought get shut down today?" Oliver finally speaks for the first time in a long while. Everyone turns to look at him as he steps out from the group and moves towards me. "How were you going to be helpful to those people anymore without being able to earn the coin they rely on you for?"

A thought I hadn't had yet, but still, doesn't change anything. "Yeah, I'm going to have to get creative on how to earn the coins now, but just because my old way won't work anymore doesn't mean I should just git and forget about them. They're my friends...my family."

Tonyedda smiles thoughtfully, then turns her back on me, a pretty risky maneuver, but it means she doesn't see me as a threat either. The others move in to her, leaning their heads in and nodding to whatever she says to them quietly. I glance nervously back and forth between where the group is huddled back over to Oliver and he shrugs, giving me a quick smile.

The group reforms their half circle, weirdly guilty smiles on some of their faces. "Malikah, each of us has had to walk away from our families and friends before too, and we understand how difficult that can be." Tonyedda's even formal tone gives nothing away to why the others are all grinning at me.

"Hi," A girl in the line steps out, a blue stone on her bracelet like mine, and she looks almost familiar. Not like I know her, but still something about her stands out to me. "I'm Opall," She says, taking another step forward. "I know what it's like, living here in the Ring. I only had to live here for a couple dozen sun cycles before the Custodes found me, but I understand." So maybe that's why she looks familiar to me, of all the people standing before me, she's the one who looks most like a Utopian. Like me. "I can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like for you, growing up here. And I know the bonds you build here strong, because they have to be." Her face splits into a grin as she looks back at her new friends and family. "For that reason, we will help you. We can get more than enough coin to take care of your friends in your absence, as long as it means you'll come with us."

I stand up slowly, taken back by a gesture I was certainly not expecting, especially not from a bunch of strangers. "You-you'd do that for them?"

"We'd do it for you." Tonyedda nods. "You're one of us, and we look out for our own."

Opall smiles again. "I'm telling you, Malikah, your mind can't even begin to come up with the wonders that the other realms hold. The best decision I ever made was putting the Ring in my past and following Tonyedda."

Enough coin to take care of the wallows, and Mr. Mags, plus wonders beyond my wildest imaginations? I think I'd have to have a bag of rocks in my head to not see that this is something I should at least look into. I mean, if it turns out to be worse than the Ring, which honestly how could it, I could always just quit and come back, right?

"How does it work?" I ask nervously, wringing out my hands in front of me. "Going there?" I feel self-aware again, noticing that I'm a filthy pile of dirt while the rest of them look so nice. Can I look like them? What do I even look like clean? Even when I bathe it's in muddy water.

"It's fairly simple." Tonyedda shrugs one dark shoulder. "We gather as one, pulling on the magic from our stone, we go as a group back to where we come from. All Custodes live together, in different countries-."

"What are countries?" I interrupt and Tonyedda smiles and then covers her mouth with a hand and sighs.

"Well, that will be easier to explain with a map, but in the seventh realm, there are different land masses and each one has a host of Custodes." I nod along as if I totally get where she is going, but I don't stop her to point out I'm not sure what a map is either or why it'll be easier to understand countries with one. "You're a part of my group, and we are a group of fifteen that reside in the Americas. You'll stay with us there, where you'll meet the others, learn about the realm and it's people, study them, and learn to utilize your stone to your fullest potential."

"Americas?" I ask with an open handed shrug and Tonyedda and the others laugh.

"I promise you, it will make more sense when we are there." Tonyedda assured.

Oliver draws a line in the dirt with his heavy shoe and shrugs, looking down at it. "Once you've left here, and seen that the things we are talking about are real, your mind will have an easier time wrapping around the things you need to learn." His tone is matter of fact, disinterested, and almost bored.

I find myself uneasy again, wondering if the others are feeling the same way as him, like I should just shut up and come on already. They told me they'd been through this themselves before. Did they not have any questions or concerns before they just decided to join up with the loons and realm hop?

Am I taking too long to decide? Do they think I'm a slow Ring dweller?

"Don't worry." Opall soothes, smiling over at me. "I ran two different times they tried to talk to me and when they did corner me finally, I through a bucket of hot mud stones at them."

I can't help but laugh at this. Mud stones are basically rocks made of dried mud, but if you heat them up in the sun, they are nice to lay on pains to help soothe the aches of a Ring dweller's body, but I don't think they'd soothe too much flying at your face.

"Those aren't light." I point out, thinking of the time I tried to steal a bucket of them myself from the market when I was little. I'd barely made it around the corner before I had to ditch the whole effort because it was too heavy to run with.

"No they aren't, but I'm not weak." Opall smiles, circling her hand around the blue stone bracelet. "Just because you are a peace maker doesn't mean you are frail or less of a fighter than the rest of the other virtues." She almost giggles and turn her head down the line to the big brawny guy with the curls. "Isn't that right, Maxum?" Opall folds her thin arms over her chest.

Maxum scoff at first, but then laughs it off as he rubs a spot on his face. "Yeah, a hot mud stone to the nose doesn't feel very good, even to a war mind."

I laugh at the two of them, the way they look at each other is like Tawny and I do.

They genuinely love each other, and that makes saying what I say next even easier.

"Ok, I'll come with you." I tell them and the group collectively smiles, even Oliver, that lightness back in his expression again.

They erupt with "Yes's" "Alright" and other celebratory exclamations until I put up a hand.

"But...." I add and everyone stops to listen again. "I can't leave without saying goodbye."

"Of course not." Tonyedda agrees, as if it was silly of me to think I was expected to. "We can give you one hour to say your goodbyes, while we gather the coin you need to transfer to someone here you trust. Then someone will come find you, and lead you back to us. We will all go home together."

My stomach twists like it does when you eat fish that's sat out in the sun for too long, and I hide my shaking fingers inside of my fists. I'm terrified, that's true, but I'm also shaking a bit with excitement.

"One hour?" I ask, trying to calculate in my head how long that would give me with Tawny if I ran all the way back to the wallows as fast as I can. Not long was the answer.

"I'm sorry," Tonyedda smiles regretfully. "We really do need to go, I told you, in can be dangerous for us to linger."

I nod in understanding. "Ok, I'll make it work."

"We are so excited to have you, Malikah." She says over my shoulder, but I barely hear her in the whir of the wind in my ears as I break off into a full sprint run back towards the wallows. Towards the one true friend I've ever had that I have less than an hour to say goodbye to.

That hour ran by faster than any hour in all of my life.

With tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, I follow behind Opall as she leads me back to the group and away from my old life and the friends I'd made here.

As I see them materialize before me, and the big star moves lower and lower in our skies, I make a promise to myself. I know this is scary. I know this is crazy. But I've never been afraid of anything before, and I'm not going to start now. I will take this new adventure, and I will give it everything I've got.

No looking back.

The group circles around me and my breath comes in quick short heaves, betraying the nerves and the fear in me I'm trying to pretend doesn't exist.

"Tonyedda?" I squeak, shivering hard as when the cool winds come.

She puts a hand lightly onto my shoulder. "Yes?"

"The seventh realm," I try to calm myself. "What's it called?"

"Earth." She whispers into my ear.

With a swirl in my stomach and a feeling like I've just been pushed, I flinch my eyes open to find myself in a whole new world. A place like I've never imagined.

Opall had been right.

I couldn't have come up with this if I tried.

Earth.