The road ran out, crumbling into a dead end in a heap of upturned stones. The chaise came to a stop in a town Nicholas couldn't name, and the driver held out his hand for a tip with a disinterested curl to his lip, like, I don't know why you'd willingly come here and I don't care to.

Nicholas was having trouble remembering himself. The town was an abandoned urban plan, overtaken by foliage but hardly scenic. What buildings still stood were dilapidated. The people sitting around them, too. They looked hungry. As Nicholas rose, the weight of his work bag dragged his shoulder downward. Or maybe that was just guilt, because he had jammed it full of as much food as it could fit on Cairo's dime back in South Simona. He would need it, he knew that, but he had never been comfortable with excess.

He handed the driver a couple extra malon. His parents smiled at him from the ID slot of his wallet, the kind of smiles that scrunched their cheeks and noses and nearly closed their eyes. His father used to remind him to look to his ancestors for guidance, but Nicholas had never bought that a bunch of Brazilian spirits could help him through twenty-first century American growing pains from across the Atlantic. He wondered if he would be able to ask his father for answers now, had he tried harder to understand back then. There was much more than an ocean in the way now, though.

He can still help me, Nicholas thought. He always has.

The driver cleared his throat. Nicholas muttered an apology, half-standing in the chaise, and climbed out.

"Excuse me," he said to a man slouched against a sagging wall. "Which way is the frontier?"

Though Nicholas did not know the town, he had an idea of where he was. The last two towns before it had been much the same. Some centuries ago, long before Caldora and Interra, the land had probably been lush. But overfarming had sapped the soil, and before the land could recover, cities had cropped up where farmland once stood. Or, they had tried to, but as one kingdom split into two and the new nation of Caldora shifted inward, these towns had sunk, forgotten, to the outskirts. They fell under a common name, the Borderturf.

The man raised his jutting chin. His tongue poked heavily between his remaining teeth. "No one ever tell ya knowledge got a price?" he said, looking Nicholas up and down. Nicholas doubted this knowledge was particularly valuable, but he procured another few bills for times' sake - and to make his bag feel a little lighter. The man grinned, gummy and sly, and pointed straight down the deteriorated street. Well played.

Picking between the overturned stones, Nicholas avoided eye contact with the scarce townspeople eyeing his bag. They were all sitting outside, soaking in the sun. Or rotting in it. He opened his journal to Rayan's page. Distant. Detached from his people.

Nicholas walked for miles. The road eventually faded to nothing; the buildings grew sparse, then disappeared. The land turned bright green beneath his feet. He continued on, waiting for some landmark or sign to tell him he was crossing the border onto the frontier. It wasn't until he checked behind him and found himself nowhere that he realized he was already there.

All around him were shallow hills dotted with low trees. Clutching the compass he'd purchased the evening before, he swiveled this way and that until his body pointed south. Nicholas sat, ate an apple and a chunk of bread, and watched the clouds roll above him. They were long, thin, and slow. Stratus, he guessed. He studied his map of Caldora, but there wasn't much it could do for him now. There was South Simona, then the Borderturf south of it, then the frontier: a wide channel of land that hadn't been lived on for centuries. Nicholas could make out the remains of a countryside. Scattered gravel, mounds of mossy stone that might have once been walls - this was all that remained of the Kingdom of Maesia.

It looked the same in every direction. Nicholas could only rely on his compass and his intuition.

His dad had always been unrelentingly clever. It used to frustrate Nicholas to no end, how Bruno would find the best hiding places and Nicholas would have to either search for hours, or let go of his young pride to accept an assist; how the classroom letters Nicholas wrote to his mom would never measure up to Bruno's love poems. He tried to channel his dad's shrewdness now, surrounded for miles by lonely land.

He did not rest long. He didn't want to find out how a magicless twenty-something would fare in these open fields after dark.

For hours he walked due south beneath the unforgiving sun. He stripped to his undershirt and tied the button-up around his waist to feel less like he was melting, with the trade-off of feeling like he was burning instead. He did not burn easily, but Caldoran July was no joke.

When he thought he wouldn't make it any further, the dips of a valley came into view. In a misguided surge of triumph, Nicholas kicked into a run.

He regretted it immensely as he slumped down in a clump of shrubs, hacking for breath, trickling water from his canteen from several inches above his mouth for fear that he would suck it dry if he got his lips on it. His ankle hurt for the first time in days. He had forgotten himself for a second there. He'd almost believed he could be the kind of whimsical, tireless character he so loved to write about. But that was fiction for a reason. Nicholas was unathletic and difficult to excite, and when he tried to rise to someone else's energy level, he fell. That was how it had been for as long as he could remember.

He pushed onto wobbling legs and started east on an inflated hunch. He didn't have any real way of knowing where he was in relation to Halcifer, but he did have a loose idea of his position relative to the ocean, a drawing of the valley, and enough desperation to drive him onward. He tried to match the shape of the river at the base of the valley to the line snaking through his sketch and felt like a delusional fool.

"Starvation. Dehydration," Nicholas muttered beneath his breath as he pushed forward on aching feet. The sun was beginning to dip alarmingly low. "Predation. Territorial magic beast attack. Pecking viper bite." He tripped over a rock. "Several-hundred-foot-tumble-"

Something with teeth clamped down around his left foot and pulled, because one bad ankle wasn't enough. He went feet-first over the ridge thrashing and yelling. In a tragic but typical turn of events, he fumbled for his new pocketknife, cracked his knuckles painfully against a rock, and lost his grip as his fingers went numb. Nicholas didn't know what was pulling him. He didn't keep his eyes open long enough to find out. Thanks to the river, the valley walls were lusher than the land above, so he had plenty of trees to crash against as he was dragged down the slope. Clutching his bag to his chest with one arm and guarding his head with another, he gave in to his fate and hoped he had taken after his mom's tough skin, too.

When the dragging stopped, he lay prone in the fetal position with his eyes squeezed shut, and asked whatever saints watched over this land, "Why?"

He managed to pry his eyes open in spite of the layer of dirt caking his lashes together. He checked his bag before he checked himself for injuries, a real modern day materialista.

His laptop was in two separate pieces. He couldn't tell the back of his phone from the front.

"Why," he groaned again, mournful.

Every muscle and bone creaked in protest as he shouldered onto his forearms, but nothing seemed serious. At least, nothing other than the plate-sized venus flytrap secreting enough liquid onto his leg to soak through his sock. His ankle itched.

It wasn't done yet. Its stem recoiled inch by inch, slowly drawing Nicholas another few feet through the brush.

"Hey...hey!" A voice shouted through the trees. "I think she caught something!"

"Oh no," Nicholas mumbled. He pried at the plant's mouth, but it held fast. "Oh no, no, no."

He pounded his busted phone against one of its green lobes until his fist crunched through the cellulose. The plant went limp. He scrabbled to run for it, hands slipping in the dirt.

"Oh...shit," the same voice said, this time much closer. Nicholas looked over his shoulder and stilled, hunched on his hands and knees.

The young man gawking at him stood in a perfect ray of light, as if the trees themselves had parted for him. It made his deep brown skin glow, but maybe that was just him. He had a handsome face that Nicholas knew almost as well as his own, a perfectly proportioned alloy of Filipino and afro-latino features - like Nicholas, if Nicholas was gorgeous. It was a face befitting a king.

Adrian was no king, though.

"Aw, I can't eat you," he lamented. "And you killed my plant! I spent a whole day growing her."

"Guh," Nicholas said to the hero of his story.

Adrian's pout melted into something sheepish. "Oh." He ran one hand over close-cropped hair. A borrowed tunic strained across his broad chest, cut at the sleeves and below the waist to reveal the jewel dangling from his navel and the four golden cuffs on his arms. One around each forearm, one around each bicep, all inlaid with precious stones. It was a wonder they didn't snap when his arm flexed. "Are you alright, though?"

His gentle accent was different from the one Nicholas had grown used to in Caldora. A little curlier, more romantic. It reminded him of Bruno.

"Shit," Adrian said when Nicholas continued to gape at him. "You must have hit your head."

"Uh," said Nicholas. "Nah."

"Must've hit it bad."

Adrain cupped his hands under Nicholas' armpits and lifted him easily to wrap an arm around his waist. Nicholas, still suffering from his fall and probably diagnosable shock, let himself be hauled like lumber along the path carved out by the stem of the venus mantrap.

They came upon a simple house of log and stone. Distantly, Nicholas could hear the river. It would have been an unassuming home if not for the garden that fanned outward from its front wall like something out of Wonderland, growing taller than the building itself. Broad leaves cast umbrella shadows, carrot heads poked like groundhogs from the dirt, and Nicholas couldn't even see the tops of the sunflowers. At the center of it, a leggy man sat on a rocking chair in a patch of sun, hand outstretched to stroke absentmindedly over a rose thorn as big as a knife.

"I thought you were going to catch me a meal," he said.

"Well I didn't exactly anticipate a person taking an evening stroll through uninhabited land."

"We're habitating it."

"Yeah, so, that isn't really what I'm getting at here?"

"And did you, pray tell, ask this person why he might be passing through no man's land near dark?"

"I think he's concussed."

"Have you forgotten what side of the river we're on?"

Nicholas was unceremoniously dropped to the grass. Thick vines crawled out of the dirt to loop around his ankles.

"You've gotten quick with that."

Adrian looked pleased. "Haven't I?"

"Focus."

"Right." Adrian tried to loop another vine around Nicholas' neck, but the instant it touched his skin, its growth ceased. "Uh, Malik? I think he's Interran. And powerful."

Nicholas finally spoke up. "I am neither of those things."

"Hey, don't sell yourself short." Adrian gave him a sympathetic nudge with his foot. Then his eyes hardened. "You are Caldoran, then?"

"Nope, no, just incredibly lost."

Adrian scrunched up his face. "See what I mean? Concussed. I'm going to lay him down inside."

Malik said, "Do not just-"

"He is hurt. And it's my fault. I am taking him inside."

They stared each other down. For someone who had run away from his throne, Adrian sure held his head like a king. The look in his eyes invited a challenge, but in the same breath warned that it would be swiftly trampled. It was just as Nicholas had imagined, and even more potent off the page. Malik eased back into his seat, conceding.

"Do not forget whose house this is," he said as Adrian freed Nicholas and helped him inside.

"You remind me every day," sneered Adrian.

The house's interior was hot and snug. The largest window was lined with flower pots, and though the plants within were normal-sized, their assortment was just as unusual. Nicholas recoiled as a venus flytrap closed its maw around an errant fruit fly. The furnishings carried the air of something crafted by hand, a spectrum of mismatched shades of wood and carving styles that traversed half a century. Here were three generations of homemade effects, each reflecting the maker's style.

"Easy does it," murmured Adrian as he lowered Nicholas onto a yellow sofa with fraying edges. Instead of standing, he knelt at Nicholas' eye level and lowered his voice conspiratorially. "You can tell me, now. I know Malik seems frightening, but he has yet to harm me. Aside from when he tried to stab me in my sleep, but that was a whole week ago- water under the bridge, really. I think...he is probably kind. He is..." Adrian pouted, considering. "He is Caldoran, but he isn't like his people. He does not wish to be. That is why he's here."

Nicholas, of course, knew all of this. He knew that Malik was not nearly as uncaring as he liked to portray, that he had simply been lonely for so long he'd forgotten how to be around people. In many ways, he'd never learned. More than once, Cici had written next to his dialogue, Estás proyectando. Which, rude.

"But why are you here?" asked Adrian. "From which part of Interra do you hail? How did you come to wield crescia and vidia that way, too? I only just learned it was possible myself, and I-"

"You made that trap," Nicholas realized. He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes. His head had started pounding, and it had nothing to do with the summer sun or his slide down the valley wall.

"Does it hurt? Do you need anything? I'm hopeless at this. I'll be right back."

Nicholas was in the same position when he returned minutes later. "Some water, and berries if you're hungry," Adrian said. "You really don't know who I am, do you? Saints, how hard did you hit your head?"

"I know you very well," said Nicholas.

"Oh. People normally bow, you know?" Adrian gave a halfhearted laugh. "You haven't asked. About my coronation. Surely the entire kingdom must've heard by now. Unless...how long have you been out here?"

"I know that, too. I know everything about that."

"Hold on, you should-"

But Nicholas was already pushing himself upright. He heaved a tremulous breath. "I know so much."

"Alright, you're starting to scare me."

"I'm a writer. Fiction."

"Er, cheers?"

"I wrote a story. About a prince who hid away in the forest to run from his coronation, and didn't stop running until he stumbled across a house on the frontier where a man from his rival kingdom lived alone."

Adrian squinted. "Oddly familiar."

"Where I came from, it was a fantasy. Every last second of it was utterly impossible. I named my hero Adrian and wrote this- this journey where he finds himself and falls in love and learns what it means to be a king, and- and-"

Nicholas had started slowly, but his tongue was running away from him now. Relief hammered his chest open; his lungs swelled to fill the space. Because Adrian was good, and brave, and warm, and finally, Nicholas could talk about this. He could come clean and stop driving himself insane. He could ask for help.

"I put it in a journal." He grabbed the book, shaking it. "This journal. And then there was this- sucking feeling, into the journal, then I was hurtling through I don't even know what, and then it spat me out in the capital of Caldora and I have had, just, a historically terrible time ever since. And this whole time I just assumed I had somehow been sucked into the world I created, but now you're here, exactly where you should be, so I'm- I'm in the middle of the story itself. I'm talking fully fucking submerged in the plot, like, post-inciting-incident but pre-rising-action-"

"Oh, so you're fully mad," said Adrian. "Or severely concussed."

"No!" Nicholas heard the frantic cry in his own voice and took a deep breath. Pick your words carefully, don't say too much. Talk for too long and they'll stop listening. He was breaking all of his own rules. "No. I know it sounds crazy. But I'm from this place called Earth where there's no magic, no Interra or Caldora. I don't know how, but this book brought me here. Look."

He opened to an early page. Adrian's face drew inward angrily. "Have you been stalking me?"

Malik entered. He paused in the doorway, looking between Adrian's scowl and Nicholas' too-bright eyes with one raised eyebrow. He continued past them to the kitchen.

And paused again. Malik turned around and, with a subtle beckon, yanked Nicholas' bag toward himself. The pull forced Nicholas off the sofa in a squawking heap, and would have towed him across the floor had the strap not come loose from his shoulder. Malik caught the bag with one hand and ripped something from its front.

"You should be more selective with your friendship," he said to Adrian, turning something over in his palm. He held up a small shiny rectangle, one of the buckles that held the bag closed. "I have half a mind to cut you open for letting a mole into my home."

Oh, Nicholas thought, you can't be serious.