The next time he opened his eyes, Nicholas was looking at a girl.

She appeared in bits and pieces as his vision came into focus: olive skin over a strict face framed by straight sheets of wine-red hair, nearly black eyes narrowed at him. His view shifted as something turned his head side to side.

"Yasmin," Nicholas murmured. He sagged with relief; he was dreaming.

He'd never felt pain in a dream, though.

"How do you know my name?" demanded the girl. Yasmin. His Yasmin. Her voice was deeper than he'd imagined and carried a slight accent he hadn't anticipated, gently semitic. The rest of the scene came to him slowly. Nicholas was in a small wooden room dimly lit by mounted candles. There were no windows and one door. He was sitting in a chair while Yasmin stood between him and a table, leaning down to his eye level.

He was hurting in a lot of places. His entire torso felt tender and hot, like he had been burned from his hips to his chest. There was a stabbing pang in his right ankle. He tried to wiggle it and gasped out, folding forward to cradle it. His shoulder jerked uncomfortably - his wrists were bound behind the chair.

"I asked you a question," said Yasmin. There were pinpricks of pain on his chin, too, where her nails dug into his skin. "Who are you, why are you here, and how do you know who I am?"

Nicholas hadn't known a lucid dream could be so vivid. He squeezed his eyes tight and willed himself to wake up before it became a nightmare.

He felt a frustrated huff of air against his cheek. The touch on his chin disappeared, and his head drooped for just a second before whipping to the side with a sound like a cracking whip. Nicholas' eyes flew open as he sucked a haggard breath, spitting blood where he'd bitten his tongue. Heaving, he lifted his head. His cheek burned. He could feel four gashes in his skin like claw marks. Yasmin made a show of turning her four rings around so the fat jewels and filigree were facing the inside. A droplet of blood trickled down her palm, the same color as the polish on her long, pointed nails.

"So you can open your mouth," she sneered. "Tight lips will cost you."

"I- I don't..." Nicholas gaped up at her. He felt like his skull was still rattling. "I don't know what's happening."

Bearing down on him was a woman who did not exist. Yasmin, former military captain turned no-nonsense bodyguard to the king. The king of Caldora. Every line of her, from the hair to the nails to the military badges on her tailcoat, had lived for years in his head, then in the journal. She was a fictional character from a fictional land. There was no feasible way she could stand before him in the flesh. But that slap had felt very, very real, and if the shock of it hadn't woken him up, then-

Then he wasn't dreaming.

"You've been arrested under suspicion of espionage," Yasmin said simply. "Your turn. Or are you going to make me ask again?"

His next breath came shallower than the last. "My name is Nicholas," he hurried. "Nicholas Lao Batista. I don't know how I got here, I don't know how it's possible, I-"

Yasmin grabbed his chin again, yanking his head as far as his neck would allow. "Two options, Nicholas. You can make this easier for both of us- tell me who sent you and what you're meant to report. Or you can resist and force me to waste my time here with you. Take your pick. Quickly."

"I'm not trying to resist!" Nicholas managed around the rapid rise and fall of his chest. "Please, I'm not- I'm not supposed to be here- I'm not a spy."

What's happening? he thought, over and over, faster with every uptick of his racing pulse. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening?

With her thumb, Yasmin swiveled the ring on her little finger, twisting it all the way around. "I'll ask you one more time. Who sent you?"

"No one! No one, I swear-"

She slapped him so hard his neck cracked. The gemstones tore into his flesh, leaving a ravaged mess behind.

"Please." His blood rushed in his ears. "Whoever you're looking for, it's not me."

He was already gasping for breath when her fist slammed into his gut. Nicholas coughed, wetting his chin, sucking in air just to retch it back out.

"That's enough."

It was a new voice, and it came from behind him. Yasmin looked over Nicholas' shoulder, an irritated twitch to her lips, then straightened, dropping her head in a bow and edging away from the table. "As you wish."

If Nicholas wasn't seeing spots and on the verge of hyperventilating, he might have put the pieces together at the first click of a heeled boot behind him. He might have remembered that there was only one person Yasmin deferred to before the first pant leg came into view, hugging a slender, impossibly long limb. Nicholas looked up and saw a coat that swept down to the knees, glimmering with shining embroidery where the light hit it, pulled over silk gloves and a matching vest. All of it black, save for silver buttons and five gemstone rings.

It clicked just before Nicholas arrived at a pale face. Half of it was cut with shadows, turning sharp features severe, but Nicholas knew him.

Nicholas choked out a delirious laugh. Just his luck - King Rayan, the ruler of Caldora and the villain of his story.

"Is something funny?" asked the king, towering over him. He had it too, that unexpected accent.

"No," Nicholas rasped. "Sir."

Rayan didn't respond. He didn't say anything at all. The room would have been quiet if not for Nicholas' panting. With every passing minute, it evened, until he was breathing shallow but steady. The panic ebbed and flowed before slowly draining away, leaving behind wintry dread. Nicholas shuddered.

"Let me explain the situation to you, since you don't seem to understand."

You've got that right, thought Nicholas, mildly hysterical. Rayan crouched, and Nicholas saw close up the ashen circles under his eyes, the slight hook to his nose that Nicholas and his eraser had agonized over for hours.

"A stranger in unfamiliar garb appears out of nowhere carrying foreign objects and leaves a crater in my city square. Nothing on his person suggests Caldoran birth, and the only sign that he has ties to us at all is his diary." Rayan reached behind himself onto the table. Nicholas watched, horrified, as his journal came into view, held loftily in spidery fingers. "In which I meet my gruesome end. Thanks for that, by the way. I have to ask: if you're as innocent as you claim, how did you depict me so well?"

He opened his other hand face up as if to ask for something. A small flame appeared, floating above his palm, expanding and shrinking with every inhale and exhale. On the hand holding the book, the ring on his middle finger flickered with a faint spark, a power that came from deep within the crimson gem at its center.

Vigalis - energy ore. Nicholas was probably losing his mind, because his first thought was, I never thought of making it glow. That's a good idea.

His next thought was: fucking hell, he's going to burn me.

Rayan held his palm up and toyed with the flame, twirling it between his fingers. It dwindled to the size of a penny and rolled to the tip of his index finger. He pointed it at Nicholas, then flicked it back toward his palm and opened his hand. The flame grew as big as his head in an instant, just shy of licking Nicholas' nose.

Rayan shrank it down to the size of a ping pong ball and bounced it from finger to finger. "Ten. Nine. Eight..." he muttered with each exchange, like he was tallying his movements instead of counting down the seconds until his patience ran out.

Seven left. Nicholas used five of them to run through his options and their outcomes.

He could keep telling the truth and get a ball of fire to the face. Or he could tell a bigger truth, the whole truth: that he was a writer from another world who had somehow gotten transported into his own book. And then what? Rayan would call him a liar or call him insane. Or maybe, somehow, he'd believe it, and he'd have the man who wrote his death at his mercy.

"Four. Three."

The heat of the flame stung his cheek.

Nicholas' sixth second was wasted by crippling fear, the kind that slammed his whole body and filled his head with fog. He'd felt this once before, in the fraction of a second before the crash that killed his parents. It was the specific feeling of seeing immense pain coming and being helpless to stop it.

He braced for it in the seventh second, shutting his eyes tight. Fat, mortifying tears squeezed out. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, to buy himself some time.

The heat disappeared.

Nicholas canted forward with the force of the breath he'd been holding. Through misty eyes, he saw the king stand. The fire was gone.

"Ray- Your Majesty," said Yasmin.

"Quiet," commanded the king. Then, to Nicholas, "Twelve hours. Decide in that time where your priorities lie."

He swept two fingers. Every candle in the room went out except for the one by the exit. Yasmin made a lazy flicking motion with her hand and the door swung open. Two men in gray uniforms stood outside.

"Take him downstairs," said Rayan. He left with his bodyguard in tow. It would have been a very cool dramatic exit if not for what sounded like an angry whisper from Yasmin and an answering grumble from the king. Nicholas couldn't make out the words. Their bickering receded down the hall.

Downstairs, it turned out, was a jail.

He got a cell all to himself, in a corner next to a man whose tattooed skin hung off his bones like baggy clothing and across from a woman engrossed in heated discussion with an albino rat. They both turned their heads as Nicholas was ushered, limping, into his cell. The woman and the rat, that is.

"What did you do?" she asked, leering at him with big glassy eyes as he settled gingerly onto the cot in the corner. Mousy brown hair fell in strings down to her hips. Her age was impossible to guess.

"Nothing," he said miserably.

She gave a scraping laugh and tipped backward onto the floor. Her rat friend scurried onto her chest. Throwing her hands above her head, she cried, "Do you want to know what I did?"

Nicholas turned his back to her. Facing the wall, he took stock of himself and his surroundings.

"It was her! It was her, but I'm here, and isn't that fucked?"

The cell offered maybe forty square feet of space, most of it taken up by the cot and the ominous hole in the corner. The air was dim and wet and cold and carried a stale smell like damp earth, without any of the nostalgia of summer evenings spent hopping from puddle to puddle. Still, it was familiar somehow, like he'd been here before.

"She asked me for love!" the woman professed to the ceiling. "Love, love - what a pure thing to ask for, love!"

He was still in his work clothes, except for the shoes he had left in the front hall of his apartment. He was sure he'd had his work bag with him when he...well, he still didn't know what he'd done. But his bag was missing and his pockets were empty. He patted them down feverishly, like his wallet may somehow appear. It was gone, which meant the picture of his parents in the front sleeve was gone, too.

"So I gave it to her! Love in a bottle, how precious! I gave it to her and he drank it and she couldn't handle the way he loved her, and do you know what she did?"

Nicholas' lips were cracked and crusted in the corners with dried blood. The entire left side of his face was sore, warm around the gashes in his cheeks. Wincing, he stretched out his right leg. His ankle had swollen so badly he couldn't move his foot at all. It throbbed with a deep, measured ache. But what hurt the worst and scared him the most was the mysterious pain at his abdomen.

"You'll never believe it. Really, you won't! I still don't believe it! Are you listening?"

He untucked his shirt from his slacks and started on the buttons. After the fourth, he could make out blistered skin. Just narrow strips at first, then broader pink bands that clawed up from his hips. He hissed every time his shirt brushed against them. Heat radiated from the wound, enough to feel on his fingers even though he avoided touching it.

He didn't know where it had come from. That was the part that scared him.

"I hate men who don't listen! I hate them, I hate them, I hate them I hate them I hate you! Oh, but I love telling stories, and you love listening. I can sense that in you. Okay, okay, I'l tell you!"

Well, that and the fact that he was currently behind bars in a made-up world, held captive by a villain that he had described in his spreadsheet with words like cold and ruthless.

"She called me a witch!" the woman shrieked. "Not to my face, oh no, she could never be so bold. She called me a witch to the graymen and they- they- they took me! And you know the fate of a woman called a witch. You know, I know you know. God, say something. Don't you feel sorry for me?"

Nicholas finally glanced over his shoulder and found her holding the bars of her cell, pouting ghoulishly at his inattention. "I'm sorry," he said. Satisfied, she flopped back down.

Graymen. The Caldoran police, the same people who had dumped Nicholas in his cell. He had designed their uniforms painstakingly, down to the steel tips of their boots and the scrunch lines of the pants tucked into them. He knew them well.

A witch, though. That was new to him. In all of his spreadsheets and documents and drawings, he had never mentioned witchcraft. As far as he knew, the world he created didn't have things like love potions.

He'd never written anything about a jail, either. He looked down at the red marks on his wrists where the rope had pulled too tight and tried to process that there was much more to this world than what he'd put down. Considering he was still struggling to process that he was here to begin with, it went okay.

It helped that he didn't have a choice. Whether he'd been transported to another world or trapped in a vivid dream, either way, some sort of magic was at play. There was no use denying it.

So. Magic was real.

"Okay," he mumbled. "Okay."

"What?" shouted the woman.

Magic was real, and he was inside it. It was any fantasy lover's dream come true. His dreams had never looked quite like this, though. You need to get closer, mijo, Cici had said, but this felt a bit on the nose.

In all of this, that was the hardest to wrap his head around. Not that Cici owned a powerful ancient journal that could swallow people into their own stories; if anyone on Earth was going to have magic like that, it would be her. The part that was hard to swallow was that she would betray him like this.

He'd thought of her as his friend. His only friend. But she'd gone and given him that stupid fucking book knowing what it would get him into - and she must have known, he was sure of that much. No warning, no asking if it was what he wanted. She had tricked him with a leathery smile on her face, and for what? Why would she send him here? What if he died here? Could he die here? It sure felt like he could.

Would she even care?

He had no idea how big this world really was, or how to get out of this situation. He had no idea how to get home.

Nicholas tried to hug his legs close and hissed from the pain. Everything hurt. He settled for scooting carefully into the corner to lean his temple against the cool wall. That was where he stayed as the other inmates filed down the cell block for dinner. It was so quiet when they left, he could hear the drip, drip, drip of leaking water.

Twelve hours, the king had said.

Nicholas' best imaginings couldn't have conjured up Rayan's voice. He'd envisioned something molasses-smooth, and he hadn't been wrong, but it was coarse around the edges, too. A broken piece of ice, the sort of penetrating cold that you flinched away from after one touch but felt in your fingertips for minutes after. Nicholas was still shivering, and it had been...

How long had it been?

He had to somehow convince a merciless king to pity him, and he didn't even know how much time he had left.

Just come up with something, he urged himself. You're a writer, you can do this.

Nicholas could not do this.

His best bet was to deny all responsibility. This freak journal just wound up in my hands and brought me here. I'm as lost as you are! No, I don't know why my name is written inside the front cover. Seriously, I'm so so boring and standard. Substandard, even. I could never be a spy! I wouldn't kill you like that, really sir, you don't deserve it, there must be someone extremely evil and lame behind this. Now that we've cleared that up, could you please help me get home to another world?

Mediocre probability of overall success. Low probability of ensuring his safe return home. Zero probability of relinquishment of the journal, which in turn brought the chance of safe return to zero. If the journal had sucked him in, it had to be his way out, too. He needed a way to leave and take it with him. He needed a plan, and fast.

The thing was, Nicholas was the kind of writer who took two months just to outline a getaway scene. He didn't do fast plans. He didn't know how much time he had left, just that the only noises along the cell block were the snores of his neighbors and the albino rat's fevered scuttling.

Maybe he could charm the king into setting him free. Nicholas laughed out loud. The rat's glowing red eyes snapped to him and he shut up. He felt the urge to cry again. He was definitely losing his mind.

The rat scurried under the woman's bed at a distant popping sound. Somewhere Nicholas couldn't see, a door scraped open. After a beat of silence, there were footsteps; sharp, hurried, and quickly drawing near. Nicholas went rigid. It couldn't have been twelve hours yet. A silhouette appeared at the end of the block, casting a tall, feminine shadow nearly to his cell. Bile surged in his throat. He would've been sick if he'd eaten.

"Is," His voice failed him. It was probably drowning in all the bile. He tried again. "Is it time?"

On the other side of the bars, Yasmin looked like she wanted to smite him. Her left eye was twitching. "Not quite," she said through her teeth. "There's been a change of plans."