There had been no sign of the exiled prince and his entourage during our march through the Lux Republic. We had assumed he had been eliminated alongside the fairies outside the capital. Before leaving the Kingdom, I’d asked Kol about her brother. I’d needed to know whether the Republic would still stand by him now that Kol had already become queen, and if he would stand in the way of our mission or if he would come to our side in exchange for concessions, like clemency for the prince and his collaborators. Kol told me her brother probably did not have a lot of leverage with the Republic. Although he was being supported by them initially, it was only a marriage of convenience. After Kol’s disappearance, Alek had already done many things to distance himself from the Republic in preparation for ascending to the throne, which had probably burnt a lot of bridges for him. The Senate wouldn’t want him coming to the capital, and he would prefer to stay near the borders as well, perhaps recruiting mercenaries and merchants to try and launch a rebellion or something.

But now here he was. A smirk on his face, relaxed, and coming up with a steady gait. The demon prince was escorted on all sides by an army that was not his, all controlled by a power that was not his, but from the look on his face you’d almost think the guy had conquered the world in his sleep. Unlike Bain Rusta, who only had the red glow in his eyes, Alek Izlandi had a thick crimson glow highlighting his body in a surreal way. The prince locked gazes with Noel, completely ignoring me for the moment.

I used the opportunity to cast a bunch of first aid magic. With a few sanitized threads, I managed to make some makeshift stitches, treated my wound the best I could to prevent infection, and began regulating my breath to recover energy. I kept low to the ground, since I didn’t want to get involved in what was about to happen.

Alek stepped forward. Two columns of armored fairies flanked him from either side. Noel frowned. She stood up to face the Immortal of Evil’s Ikon, silver bubble at the ready. Alek stared at the silver bubble floating in front of Noel’s hands, and smiled. Two wispy tendrils of red light stretched out from his shoulders, their edges pointy like a scorpion’s tail. These tendrils swayed in the still air.

Thunder roared overhead. The rain began to pour.

The red tendrils leaned back. Noel summoned a cluster of new bubbles. The humans pointed fireballs at Noel. The demons aimed their spears. The fairies readied their shields. I put a hand on the ground and prepared to flip the board if my friends came under attack.

The thunder screeched to a halt. As if paused mid roar.

The pattering of rain froze mid note. Like a half finished tap on a window.

The clanking armor. The swishing spears. The sizzling flames. Everything froze.

Only Noel’s bubbles, Alek’s tendrils, and my wild and panicking eyes seemed unaffected. I had seen this before. This unholy, unnatural, and inexplicable freezing of the world, like a video paused on a three dimensional screen. I craned my neck from side to side, trying to catch a glimpse of who was to blame, but the sky was overcast and I could not see beyond the clouds. Yet, I was sure, if I could see the sky it would be dark despite the hour and the moon or the red star would be glaring down at us mirthlessly.

Alek reacted first. His smirk was wiped off his face, replaced by an anxious expression. The tendrils dissipated as if Alek had completely forgotten about them. Indeed, judging by the way he was refusing to look at Noel, he might very well have forgotten about the enemy standing right in front of him.

Noel reacted a step behind Alek. She also lost the concentration on her face, and her eyebrows went from furrowing solemnly to stretching out to her forehead as an expression of dread was pasted on her face. She also did not look at Alek. Or rather, she glanced in his direction for a moment but did not seem to register that he was there.

Neither of them looked over at me as I stood up. There was no point in trying to avoid an Immortal’s gaze, I reckoned. But I also concluded that neither Alek nor Noel could see anybody else. Perhaps they could not even see the space around them, because they walked right through some frozen droplets of water and began feeling their faces in fright. Watching Noel recoil like a cat when a drop of water went into her nose would have been comical if not for the uncanny circumstances and the fact that she had tried to kill me multiple times just a few minutes ago.

I was not ready to face an Immortal right now. I was badly injured, incredibly tired, and had made no preparations. That said, I had a feeling I could never truly be ready to face an Immortal, so perhaps it did not matter if I was injured or at the top of my game. In fact, I quickly began using this brief respite to gather my strength and treat my injuries some more.

The world remained frozen for a long time.

Alek and Noel were still stumbling around like they had been put inside some sort of dark and dinghy cave. Actually, I was sure their surroundings looked dark to them because Noel kept lighting a fire over her hands before extinguishing it in disappointment and anger.

There was no sign of an Immortal.

I frowned. What was going on?

My sense of reason and time had gotten all wonky. I wasn’t sure how long we had been in here. It felt like a minute, but could have also been a day, or longer. I couldn’t tell. My mind began to feel sluggish. The pain from my injuries began to fade. The burning in my lungs was extinguished. The ache in my chest was gone. My brain, which had been overwhelmed with thoughts and ideas, about how to get out of this situation, how to help my friends survive, how to subdue Noel and show her the mural in the senate, all of those thoughts began to disappear. My emotions, roiling in my heart at seeing Noel again, seeing my human friends under the Immortal of Evil’s control, and feeling like I was going to die, or wouldn’t be able to figure out what was going on with the spirits’ reverence for the elves, or about not being able to find the clues to ‘annihilation’ that would help me find a way back home, all these thoughts and feelings and concerns so long and convoluted I couldn’t even express them properly. All jumbled up. Incoherent. Like language vomiting words in my skull. Everything died a slow and painless death, to make way for a serenity I had not experienced since… forever.

Singing.

Calm. Tranquil. Placid.

Peaceful.

Singing.

No music, no, no dreadful music. I knew what would come with music. The madness, the lunacy, the dancing. No, this was not the music of chaos, it was the singing of order. The singing of kindness, of gentleness, of justice, rationality, and mercy.

This was the song of birds.

No, this was one bird. A familiar one. One whose name I had forgotten. A bird from my old world, my Earth, whose melancholic voice now sang some familiar verses plucked from the corpus of one of my favorite poets:

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, / But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet / Wherewith the seasonable month endows / The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; / White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; / Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; / And mid-May's eldest child, / The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, / The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”

“William Keats,” I said under my breath.

Then the world swirled around me like a whirlpool. Alek and Noel froze in place. Then they began to do a strange dance. A strange but familiar dance. Of crazed stompings and spells and shouts and crazed expressions. Alek’s tendrils reappeared and so did his smirk, Noel’s bubbles reformed, as did her somber expression. The humans began to unsummon their flames. The fairies began to march backwards and the demons followed right behind them. Bain Rusta hopped up at an impossible angle, his eyes reopened but without their reddish glare, which prompted me to check and indeed, neither Noel nor Alek had their glows anymore. Alek stomped his feet and retreated back into the crowd with his eyes to his front. And the army went back inside like a closing up accordion. The rain ran back up the sky. The clouds unfurled. Noel went through some inexplicable motions as she shot bubbles everywhere, although the bubbles popped right as they left her hands. Noel’s robes stitched themselves back together. She skulked back up the road and away from the capital, in a motion that looked comically and uncannily like a dance move made famous by a certain pop star from back on my Earth.

The sun appeared once more, glaring brightly on the open fields where I lay sprawled, confused, dazzled, and with a bizarrely vibrant smile on my face.