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THE KEEPER: Tales from the Fringes of Reality. Episode 4 – Reality Walker.

THE KEEPER: How many stories have we gotten through today, Minerva?

MINERVA: (violin plucking)

That many? Wanderer, none of them sounded like you at all? Well… That’s all we have for work today. I know this is slow going, wanderer, and I promise you I’m doing more research outside of the files Minerva receives during the work day. The files we get for work are our most direct way of finding you, slow going as they are, because we already know those people are in the wrong place. Minerva can do precursory scans of the different realities, but there isn’t a file for here, which is where you’ve ended up, so it’s more a matter of finding a place where someone seems to be missing. That’s a lot harder to do given the magic tech we have, but it’s not necessarily impossible. It’ll just take more time is all.

It would take less time if I could actually get through to Guillermo, but our communication system seems to be on the fritz again. Honestly, it’s a miracle that you can understand me at all, wanderer… At least, I’m pretty sure you can still understand me. You’re nodding, okay, we’re still good. Yeah, the comms system has been malfunctioning, I can’t get a single message out to Guillermo to ask about you. He’d be able to get you home no problem, but that’s to be expected. I know I said you can call me the Keeper, and you can, it’s technically not incorrect, but I’m more of the Keeper’s apprentice. Guillermo is the real Keeper of Worlds, he’s m– (soft plucking in the background)

…you ever start a sentence and then immediately lose the end of it while you’re saying it? I honestly have no idea where I was going with that, wanderer. Either way, Guillermo’s whole deal is reality, I think I mentioned that to you before. He is reality, well he is and he isn’t. It’s a touch more complicated than that, but you know how much I love a good oversimplification. But he’s got way more talent at putting people back where they belong since he’s much more connected to reality than I am. He exists here on the fringes with the rest of the Council, but he’s pulled towards reality in a way that I can’t really explain since I don’t understand it. 

Let me see if I can find anything on it in his file. I just… (typing sound) Gods, I forget how many good stories Guillermo has. That’s the thing about being so connected to reality, Guillermo is seen all over the place connecting with the people and racking up the memories to be filed away here on the fringes. Are you up for a little story? Just one, and then I’ll get back to looking for you, Council’s honor. You seemed to enjoy when I told you about Alasdair, and if you liked hearing about that then you’ll definitely like hearing about Guillermo, I promise. Alright, wanderer, settle in. I think we’re going to go with… this one. 

Guillermo adored his parents. He adored living on the fringes with them, spending his youth toddling about after his mother and watching as she created realities or sitting in his parent’s lap as they wrote down detailed records of the lives lived by people who were passing back into the plane of magic. As Guillermo grew, though, he felt the planes of reality calling to him, enticing him to jump into a world– a real world– unlike anything he had ever experienced before in his life on the fringes. 

“You’re going to create incredible things one day, little one,” his mother would whisper to him even as he grew to adulthood. “I just know it.”

She could feel the aptitude for manipulating reality flowing through him, encouraging him to create and– when he was finally confident enough– bestowing the title of Keeper of Worlds onto him. “You’re magnificent, my little Keeper. Your life stretches ahead of you so brilliantly, so perfectly. Whenever you’re ready, I want you to go and find your life where you feel it’s meant to be, okay?”

His calling was not on the fringes. Well it was and it wasn’t. The Keeper loved to create, loved to help his mother bring entire worlds into existence, loved to manipulate the minutiae of the world to allow the little bits of magic to seep in and dictate how the world would form. But there was always part of his heart that was calling him to reality, that was begging for him to actually experience what he had spent so long building. The Keeper expected his mother to refuse, expected her to force him to stay, but she just smiled. “If that’s where your life is calling you, darling, you need to go. You’re my son and I love you, but you’re not captive here. Go, return, do what you must to be happy. That’s what your life is meant to be.”

I call this area the fringes because, fundamentally, we are on the fringes of reality if your definition of fringes is the area where reality fades into… not reality. It… It doesn’t quite work as a title, though, there’s no truly apt title for the space we’re in now. The fringes… There is a precipice, between us and reality. A ledge to stand on top of and look down at the realities swirling below, surrounded by magic and infinite space. We don’t touch reality, we are fully separate from it, and yet it feels more apt to call this place the fringes since we are molding reality, we are shaping it, we are so directly involved that to separate us in title would be wrong. The reason I bring this up now is because Guillermo– back when he was still just called the Keeper– was the first to truly stand on that precipice.

There are more refined ways of reality jumping now– kind of like how there are files for each reality now. Back then, though, the only way to enter reality at all was to leap from the precipice and see where you landed. Once in reality you could move where you needed to, but the initial jump was all guesswork and chance. Alexandria hadn’t been to reality since she and Sparrow had left the first world she built, no reason to go back now that she had her love with her. Even then, the jump was much less of a hurdle as there were so few realities to begin with. The Keeper was seeing millions of realities swirling below him, seeing the worlds he had built, the worlds his mother had built, the worlds that he had been dreaming about for so long now. All of it stretched below him, beckoning him to take the plunge and find the thing that his heart had been looking for for so long.

So he jumped.

I asked Guillermo what the jump was like once. You should’ve seen the look on his face, wanderer, it was like he was feeling the sensation of the jump as he spoke. He told me it was a kind of exhilaration that couldn’t be described, only felt. It was like the floor could never have existed in the first place because he was so far removed from anything. And when he finally hit a reality to enter, it was like being caught in the arms of his mother and gently set to the floor, just like when he was a kid. Whether this is just how it was for Guillermo or how it is for everyone, I don’t really know. The other Council members have made jumps before, but none quite like the one Guillermo made since he refined the system shortly after his first jaunt into reality, well before any of the other Council members were looking to explore the worlds below. 

He told me that he still makes true jumps, jumps where he stands on the edge of the universe looking down into reality and simply steps forward to let reality swallow him whole.

And it did swallow him whole that first time. The thing about existing on the fringes is that you’re not necessarily real, not in the way you are in reality. You still occupy physical space– obviously, I mean, you’re here on the fringes and you’re still a person after all– but the meat of you is different. You’re essentially pure magic on the fringes, magic that takes on a form but is still magic. You could cut me open and I wouldn’t bleed, not the blood you’re used to in your reality. Instead, you would see the golden shimmer of magic leaking out of my body until it patches itself back up. Falling into reality, though, the Keeper was real. He was flesh and bone and blood, all of it encasing the magic at the center of his being. 

The first time he felt pain was when he hit the ground. That’s why he ended up refining the jump process, wanderer, because it hurt to land in reality. Or, at least, it hurt him to do so. He knew his mother had visited the first few realities before, though she was generally jumping from reality to reality rather than from the fringes to reality. Whether or not this had hurt her, he didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to allow it to happen again if it had. 

The Keeper thankfully landed in a place that was secluded, no one seeing his fall or hearing his cry of pain as he got to his feet and shook off the magic that seemed to coat his very being. It shimmered in the air before fading entirely, leaving a slightly hollow feeling in the Keeper’s gut. He had never been to a place where magic was not readily available before, never had to keep his magic concealed as he knew he would here. It was scary, it was worrisome, it was… Exciting. It was new and different and everything that the Keeper had been hoping for when he first asked his mother if he could heed the call and plunge into reality. 

He wandered through the grass that he had landed in– tall, blue, and almost silky to the touch. Despite the absence of magic in people’s day to day lives, the Keeper could still feel it thrumming through his body as he walked through this world and towards… Towards what, he didn’t quite know, but something was calling him here and he was determined to follow it.

You might recall, dear wanderer, that Alasdair pulled his name from his heart, taking the name of his best friend’s child as his own. The rest of the Council also chose names that seemed to call to them for reasons we will get to in the future, I’m certain, but what’s important to know now is that Guillermo didn’t have a reason to pick his name. It wasn’t a person or a flower or the sight of a bird at his window, no it was just a name. A name that he heard being called in the city square when he wandered into town and knew with a sudden certainty that the person was calling to him.

“I wasn’t sure you’d ever actually answer the call,” the person said with a smile that rivaled the brightness of the plane of magic the Keeper had grown up next to. “My name is Luna, and yours is Guillermo.”

“How do you know that?” he asked even though he could feel in his heart that she was right. “I… I didn’t even know that.”

Luna shrugged. “I know it the same way I know that I’m destined to be on the moon: I can just feel it. This… You control all of this, don’t you?”

“Not all of it but… but some of it. My mother is really more in control of everything, but I do have a certain… sway over reality.”

Luna grinned at this, taking Guillermo’s hand and beginning to pull him away from the city and back toward the clearing he had originally landed in. “I have no idea how I knew, but I knew you were coming. I knew you were the one who could help me fulfill my dream.”

“Your dream?”

“You’re going to put me on the moon.”

“You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a touch confused.” Guillermo had never been to reality before, had never been seen by anyone other than the Council, had never even dreamed that people in reality would truly be able to see him. And yet here he was, being cornered in a field of silky blue grass, being asked to put someone on the moon.

Luna, for her part, didn’t seem phased by Guillermo’s hesitation. “You were called here, right? You just felt like you needed to be here?” She was right, of course she was, so Guillermo nodded. “That’s how I feel about the moon. It’s like my heart is being pulled from my chest in two different directions. One of those directions is going towards the moon and the other… Well, I’m not quite sure where that one’s meant to land yet but I think I can figure it out if you just get me up there.”

If Guillermo was anyone other than who he was, he would certainly have found flaws in her logic, but he knew what it was like to be beckoned by forces beyond his own comprehension. “Okay. I’ll get you to the moon.”

There are certain things that exist consistently across reality, or at least across most realities. The moon is one of them. When we get you home and you look up at the moon, know that it’s the same moon being looked at across hundreds if not thousands of realities. …That is, if you remember all of this, of course. It’s… Well, that’s something we can worry about later, for now just know that the moon is pretty much constant which means Lady Luna is pretty much constant. It’s almost its own reality, really, kind of like the plane of magic where it intersects with the rest of reality. I think that was Guillermo’s best solution to give Lady Luna what she was searching for– both the moon and something else that she couldn’t see in her reality. 

I’ll spoil it a little bit for you, wanderer, but I promise I’ll try and dig the file containing that story out eventually if you’re still around. The thing she was searching for was Wind, and he was searching for her too. He’d find her on the moon when Guillermo put her up there.

I’m not one hundred percent certain how Guillermo got Lady Luna to the moon, nor am I sure how he separated the moon into a plane like the plane of magic so that she could intersect with the majority of realities. His powers far outweigh mine and also outweigh my comprehension. I can put people where they’re meant to go, but that’s only because he taught me how to. And, of course, because I have Minerva’s help. The things that Guillermo can do– that all of the Council can do, really– are things that I could only ever wish to do. But wishes work sometimes, I guess, as Guillermo brought Lady Luna to a little house he built for her on the moon, surrounded by a lush garden and with a set up a bit like this one so she could see into the realities that her new domain touched.

“Thank you, Guillermo,” Luna’s voice was soft, almost disbelieving, as she was set down on the surface of the moon that had been calling to her for her whole life. “This… Thank you. I… I feel more grounded than I ever have before.”

“Odd thing, considering we’re on the moon,” Guillermo joked, pulling his friend into a tight hug. “You called me to reality, the least I could do was help you find what was calling you.”

It should be pointed out that Lady Luna isn’t an official Council member– that’s reserved for those created purely by magic– but she’s Guillermo’s best friend which means that she’s around every now and then. I think she would like you, wanderer. After all, you’ve found yourself some place completely new without meaning to. Perhaps you were following after a calling just like she was…

If only there were a way to search for something like that. Unfortunately ‘someone’s calling’ isn’t something we keep files of. Perhaps we should, maybe that would help us put people back more easily… Or perhaps it would just make more people reality jumpers like Luna was. Not that reality jumping is a bad thing, it’s just something we try to keep limited since, well, people aren’t supposed to know about there being multiple realities. You’ll have your scientists– or mages, depending on how magically saturated your reality is– saying that there are multiple realities but none of them have proved it. People randomly disappearing from their reality would certainly prove it and we have no idea how they would react. Best to keep them separated, don’t you think?

That’s why I said you might not remember this when we get you home. People… people aren’t meant for multiple realities. They aren’t meant for the fringes and they certainly aren’t meant for this place. Which is why we’re gonna get you home, because you have a home to return to and you deserve to get back there.

I should get a couple more stories read and people put back into place… You’re welcome to stay just in case one of them happens to be you! But you’re also welcome to leave if you’d like, I know how intense it can be to hear about people’s confusion and fear over waking up where they weren’t meant to be.

…Staying, huh? Alright, wanderer, let’s see what else Minerva can pull up for us.