As a multiethnic kid, Keon Wesley has always had to straddle two worlds. He just never expected that metaphor to become a literal reality.
Ever since his dad left five weeks ago, he's struggled to adjust to life in a single parent household. When a...
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"Where'd he go bruv?!"
Baris stalked through the grass up towards Aslan, glaring from left to right. Ruslan, silent but shaken, trailed close behind. Most of the apparitions had dispersed, and with them the frost.
"Where'd he go?!"
Aslan sat, propped up on one arm, his legs splayed out before him. His chest rose and fell rhythmically. Droplets of sweat speckled his brow as his grey eyes held fast to an indiscriminate spot on the ground. He didn't even feel them grab him by the arms and hoist him onto shaky feet.
"Aslan!"
He flinched, his face recognising Ruslan.
"You ok bro?"
He moistened his lips.
"He got away..."
"How?!" said Baris.
Aslan shook his head.
None of it made sense. They were taught that the world beyond the Walls was full of deception, clothed in darkness. And yet—in the midst of that darkness he'd seen a light. A glimmer in the dark. And it hadn't come from Almuluk. It hadn't come from his fellow Masabih. It had come from the Torchbearer.
* * *
The instant Keon's back hit the grass, he plunged deep into sapphire waters. Awoken from his stupor, he thrashed wildly beneath the depths. Refracted light shimmered through the surface in a kaleidoscope of colours; most familiar, some beyond reason. Instinctively, he stroked to right himself—and his feet found the floor. His balance gained, he stood, rising towards the surface.
When he broke it, his lungs drank in a cool, crisp breeze that hovered just over the waters. The temperature seemed to shift around him, flowing from comfortably hot to refreshingly cool. He looked up and suddenly all else faded away. For the first time in weeks, he was under a normal sky; no oceans, just endless baby blue, broken by clouds, twinkling stars, and—nestled within the radiant billows of a cosmic nebula—a planet. A single planet, ocean-less; its surface almost entirely covered by desert sands save for the one green continent spanning the length of its face from top to bottom. He'd seen that landmass before, or one like it; he was sure of it. The way it curved like a giant "C," almost like—
"Pangaea..." he gasped.
That could only mean—
He turned. The ripples spread about him a few feet before the ocean absorbed them, flat and undisturbed like a perfect pane of reflective glass. A rush of wooziness suddenly flooded over him. Coupled with the buoyancy of the water, it felt like he was floating at the centre of a giant blue globe. He blinked, shook his head and tore his eyes away, looking for something else to anchor and orient himself to. There!
In the distance, a lush, mountainous island, golden peak soaring from its core, bathed in a warm glow that seemed to fill the horizon. Its gilded slopes ascended the clouds where an orb of light set the sky ablaze. Blinking back the glare, he realised it wasn't a mountain of gold at all, but rather a city that ascended the steep slopes of the island in concentric circles. Emerald grasslands, as far as east was from west, carpeted the city's edge, tapering off into beaches of bronze pearls.
