Short Story: Ghosts

[kasihya]

I said I'd type this up ages ago, but it's only in the past two days that I made headway and completed its typing. This is completely unedited. It actually sucks a lot more than I thought it did, which I'm going to attribute to massive leaps and bounds in my abilities as a writer and not the fact that I haven't looked at it in months.

It's also missing most of its italics, because I'm too lazy to go through and reformat this entire thing from Word.

Ghosts

Once upon a time, there was a flat world with seven continents of varying shapes, sizes, and climates: seven small pieces of seven different versions of Earth, guarded and monitored by a race of sea people native to that world. Avvya, part of a world still mired in heavy industry; Naien, from the shape-changing world of Siberia; Vheɧnesɧ, a world whose timeline was not so much a straight line as an overlapping scribble; Yyeørel, an antiquated archipelago and center of most magic; Othiamba, a North America that had never met sailors from other continents on Earth; Trezam, a small country extrapolated from an Earth that was destroyed four centuries ago; and Vespucci, a place taken from our own North America. This world was not the only one of its kind. Existing in a sort of side universe apart from the universes proper, these Rift Worlds acted as points of convergence for all of the various alternative worlds where life has arisen.

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Nicholas Hendrickson walked down the badly paved road, ducking out of the way as the occasional car drove past. The sky was overcast, threatening rain, and he hoped to reach his destination before that happened. It would be a pity for his books to get wet after all the care he had put into them thus far.

The road was long and winding, and the surrounding trees precluded any possibility of seeing very far ahead. Nevertheless, Nicholas continued his trip down the road, until at last he reached a gravel driveway with a wooden sign off to one side. Recently reapplied yellow paint spelled out the words 'YGGDRASIL HOUSE', with an arrow underneath, pointing down the driveway. As Nicholas read this, he felt a drop of rain on his nose. Hitching his backpack higher onto his shoulders, he turned into the driveway and hurried down its length before the rain could begin in earnest.

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Felix was lying on the couch with a geometry textbook open facedown on his stomach, watching a wrestling match on television (poor man's gay porn, as he called it) when the doorbell rang. The sound echoed throughout the enormous house. 'I'll get it,' he called to the house at large, which was for once mostly empty. 'It's probably Ricardo.' He shut off the television and hauled open the oversized wooden door. To his dismay, it did not reveal his friend. Instead, a scrawny boy of no more than twelve, with tan skin and bare feet, stood on the porch.

'Hello. Is this Yggdrasil House?'

Felix made a face: of course they would get a new boarder when the only adult at home was Carmichael. 'Yeah,' he said without enthusiasm.

'Could I speak to whoever is in charge? I'm looking for someone who might have come here before me.' The boy spoke evenly, and he also spoke English with only a vague accent, much to Felix's surprise. It was impossible to understand most of the immigrants who came through.

Felix huffed. He shouldn't have to do this; he was just a freeloader here too, although only until he turned eighteen. 'What's your name?'

'Nicholas Hendrickson.' Felix cocked an eyebrow and looked down at the boy's very obviously foreign clothing, which included decorative metal cuffs and a dress that came down to mid-shin. 'It's easier to have a native name that people will recognize than to always be the one with the unpronounceable name.' He smiled.

'I'm Felix,' he said. 'Uh … my aunt and uncle aren't here right now … or my other uncle … but you can come in and wait for one of them to get back, I guess.' Felix stepped to the side to allow the boy through. 'I'll go get Carmichael, he knows what he's doing.'

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Nicholas had not expected anything particularly grandiose in the appearance of Yggdrasil House — at least, not on the outside. But there it stood, a sprawling log cabin punctured by large glass windows. And as he followed Felix through the door, he saw that the inside was more of the same: a high-ceilinged main room with a set of stairs running up the right-hand wall to a more moderately-sized second floor overlooking the first. The furniture, though not shabby by any means, was old and rather plain. Nicholas stood on the welcome mat just inside the door and stared around, a slow smile spreading across his face.

'So, uh, where are you from originally?' asked the boy named Felix. It was obvious that he felt a duty to make conversation, although possibly he also needed the information for the purpose of government funding. For all the reading that he had done, Nicholas still didn't understand everything there was to know about the place.

'Othiamba,' he said. 'In the — in Kasihya Territory.' He couldn't remember the name all of the time, and things kept changing, so he had a sudden flash of fear that he'd given the name of a country that no longer existed.

'Huh.' Felix didn't seem to notice anything, but he also didn't seem to be entirely paying attention in the first place. 'Okay. Hang on a second. You can, uh, sit down if you want.' He waved a hand at the couches arranged off to one side in a shape that was more or less a circle. 'I'm going to get Carmichael.'

'All right. Thank you.' Nicholas seated himself on a love seat facing the stairs and pulled his backpack onto his legs. From within, he removed a very thick book bound in leather with rippling pages, and flipped to the first blank pages about three quarters of the way through. He did so carefully, for the book was very old. The first pages had been written upon in blotchy quill pen made even more illegible by the unsteady hand that had wielded the instrument. As the book went on, the handwriting improved and became more uniform, while the writing implements became steadily more advanced. Nicholas pulled out a ball point pen from inside the bag as well, noted the date and time underneath the last entry, and began to write while he waited for Felix to return. Outside, the rain began to pour in earnest. Nicholas looked up and smiled at the ceiling which now shielded him from the elements. This is a good place, I think, he wrote of the house. It appears to be calm, and it feels old, secure. I think I may have reached my final destination, but we shall see if I am able to set up here and stay after all.

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'This is impressive.' Nicholas looked down at the oversized book, an antiquated account-keeping ledger that was lying on the dining room table. Columns ran down every page, filled with names, dates, and locations.

'This is the column for guests' names,' said Mrs. Xanatos, the current owner of Yggdrasil House. 'Or transcribed as best we could.'

'These are the dates of arrival?' asked Nicholas.

'And departure,' she indicated, moving on to the next column. And this is where they were from, and notes on why they ended up here. There are maps in the back, but most of them are quite outdated by now.' Mrs. Xanatos flipped to the back of the book, where several dozen maps — most hand-drawn — had been added.

Nicholas lifted up the pages with care to peer at the first few entries, head on the table. 'These only go back to seventeen sixty.'

'Yes, the house was only completed the year before,' Mrs. Xanatos explained. 'Though the portals existed long before that, of course.

'Thank you,' said Nicholas. 'Do you mind if I look through this, and see if my brother is listed?'

'We have a study, if you'd like to take it in there. It might be quieter.' Mrs. Xanatos looked over her shoulder at the boisterous card game taking place on the living room floor, played by three human teenagers, one human-dinosaur ɧaskagi, a foreign princess with an ornate beaded headdress, and two vivid green, highly excitable dragons. Nicholas followed her gaze; as he did so, the ɧaskagi stretched his bony face into a smile and motioned for him to join them.

'Perhaps … perhaps I could wait until later. It's been years since I played a game of Jack Sevens.' He pushed his chair back and stood up.

'Nicholas,' Mrs. Xanatos asked, and hesitated. 'Only seventeen sixty? How old are you?'

He looked down and offered her a small bow. 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to alarm you. I'll try to sound more like a normal person and less like a snob. I was told I sound like one whenever I make comments like that , and that was by a Yyeørel prince.'

Within ten minutes, he had wedged himself on the floor between the Avvyan princess and the ɧaskagi, laughing and throwing down cards with the same fervor as any of them. Mrs. Xanatos sighed, shook her head, and walked into the kitchen to help a pirate from another Rift World prepare dinner.

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At nightfall, one of Felix's seemingly endless string of cousins escorted him up the stairs, down the hall, and then up another, shorter flight that led to the fourth floor.

'We're a little crowded right now, so our mom said to put you upstairs,' said Emily. 'But all of our rooms are downstairs, and they're labeled, so you should be able to find me if you need anything during the night,' she added, in a tone implying that interruptions to her sleep cycle would be wholly unwelcome. She turned in the hall lights and walked him to a door halfway down the hallway. Inside lay a small, sparsely-decorated room lit by what moonlight came in the bay window occupying most of the far wall. There was a bed, a desk, a dresser, and a closet door, all in the same dark wood as the walls, but that was all.

'You can have this room, Just put your bag anywhere and make yourself at home,' Emily told him.

'Thank you.' Nicholas sat down on the four-poster bed and swung his legs, looking around without aim until Emily had turned on the bedside lamp and left the room. He cleared off the pillows at the head and placed the guestbook in their stead, lay flat on his stomach, and began to flip through the columns, noting the locations in particular. Whatever changes time may have wrought, he felt sure that his brother's national pride would lead him to put down their country of origin, outdated though it might be, rather than forge a new identity as Nicholas had over the years. With this in mind, he looked for the various titles under which their native land had existed. Though he was eager to begin, and to feel as though something was being accomplished, he was under no time constraints, and thus began his perusal with care to avoid mistakes.

The attention to detail simply for the sake of not missing important information soon turned to attention due to outright curiosity. It would have been difficult for him not to marvel at the volume of people who had come through this house in the relatively short amount of time it had been in existence. He recognized many of the place names — had, indeed, been to most of them while they were in one form or the other — but there were others that he didn't recognize: a country whose name was transcribed as Sv!shmalthy^, another claiming to be the Illuminated Kingdoms, which he was sure didn't exist in the universe he knew. And when he looked them up in the back of the book, the sketchy, sparsely-populated maps of these worlds was unlike any place he had seen before in his long life. He thought it at once breathtaking and frustrating. It forced him to consider a new possibility, that his brother might have left their universe entirely.

On page thirty, he paused his examination of countries of origin as a familiar name caught his eye on the left-hand side of the page. 'Leandai!' he said aloud, startled. She had been his friend during the time he lived in Avvya, during their Industrial Revolution. For a few minutes, he looked away from the book and lost himself in memories of running through streets filled with garbage in clothing smudged with coal and dirt, working in a linen factory for fourteen hours a day because, well, why not? He'd been experiencing a revival of life, a determination to make the most of his time — to do everything even as he wandered. That was back in the year 1789, 5735 by the calendar he had used when he was much, much younger. The Idomehr Calendar had replaced that one over two hundred years ago.

Leandai had worked at the station next o his; he used to give her most of his wages every week, because she had a family to help support, while he had only himself and had already discovered that he was incapable of starving to death. He checked the dates: she had come here two years after Nicholas left, fallen through a sewage hole in the street and woken up on the front porch of Yggdrasil House. According to the notes made by one James Xanatos III, she went on to become a prominent Vespuccian abolitionist, and founded a grammar school for children of color.

Nicholas smiled as he thought of the shy girl who skulked around the city streets and had once saved him from losing a finger to the spooling machines. He would have to go to the library he had passed earlier today, and see if he could find out more about his long-lost friend.

At this point, his eyes fell on the clock sitting on the dresser, and he realized that it was late. Nicholas closed the book and turned off the light, to continue his journey tomorrow.

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The following day, Nicholas was shepherded outside after a loud breakfast at the long table in the dining room. He quickly gathered that breakfast operated in such a way that every person was left to fend for themselves over the course of an hour or so in the early morning, and after Emily showed him how to operate the toaster, sat back in quiet delight as he witnessed the thirty-odd residents and visitors of Yggdrasil House wander in and out that morning/ In addition to the card players of the night before, he met a trio of small people a foot tall, with wings like bats' instead of arms; a nearly blind komodo dragon who held its conversations in dizzying flurries of thought-images; and a wild array of humans who wore the clothing of Vespucci like costumes: people with oddly-colored eyes and pale wrinkled skin and skin that was not any shade of brown, but the purple-black of licorice. Nicholas sat down beside a middle-aged woman whose face was lined with raised white scar patterns and ate his toast while she read from a textbook on experimental psychology.

After breakfast, he was taken aside by Mr. Xanatos, along with a tall teenage boy who had the whitest hair and skin of anyone Nicholas had ever met — and he had met many people.

'Nicholas, this is Čhatma. He's an exchange student from Naien. Čhatma, Nicholas, our newest guest, from Kasihya Territories.'

That explains the coloring, thought Nicholas. 'Would that actually be Ħaǂma?' he asked. 'Where are you from? I lived in Naien for a while.'

'Czattim,' said Čhatma, his long face breaking into a grin. 'Where did you stay? What'd you do?'

'You're serious.' Nicholas felt an answering smile spread across his own face. It never failed to please him, after close to six hundred years, to find someone who had travelled to the same places as he, and he had lived not twenty miles from Czattim. 'I was a — well, I taught. At the university in Czetchmet.'

Čhatma looked him up and down. 'You taught?'

'An ethics class. Es necessario que ayudamos los más pequeños, porque es la verdad que después de esta vida todos son igual,' said Nicholas, quoting a well-known Naien philosopher.

'No shit! So are you voɧsat mahesh, or zamczi?'

'A bit of both, but effectively a non-religious, nonfunctional zamczi.' Nicholas had liked Czetchmet, for all of its oddities and frequent shape shifting: they had accepted him without question, their history being populated by voɧsat mahesh who remembered their past lives with perfect clarity, and zamczi monks who, instead of dying, grew younger every year. But they were the Ananin, the human dragons and dragon humans, and he had become dissatisfied with only being able to participate in half of their lives.

Mr. Xanatos cleared his throat. They both pause their conversation to pay attention to him; a blush rose to Čhatma's pale cheeks. 'I'm glad you two get along,' he said. 'I'm here to take you shopping. You, Nicholas, because your clothing …' His eyes wandered down to Nicholas' dress: a ceremonial piece of Shanri clothing, made to resemble his original uniform as closely as he could remember.

'You make a good point,' said Nicholas, remember the stares he had gotten as he made his way through town to the house.

'And you for the cultural experience,' he told Čhatma, who snickered and rubbed his hands together with glee.

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That night, dressed in a new pair of basketball shorts and a t-shirt with a logo on the chest that had made Mr. Xanatos laugh, Nicholas curled up in a living room armchair, Čhatma in dragon form resting half in his lap. Along with a dozen other members of the household, they watched the Lord of the Rings on the Xanatos' old television. Nicholas was enchanted; he had read the books the last time that he visited Vespucci, but that had been shortly before color television. For a few hours, he allowed himself the pleasure of forgetting himself and his own problems, and became absorbed in the epic struggles of another world.

When he retreated to his room that night, it was not to sleep, but to continue making his way through the ledger and the records of visitors to Yggdrasil House. As the pages turned, the familiar labels and places changed, documenting larger events in world histories as well as personal ones. Visitors from the Shanri Empire became visitors from the Hiyuuya Emirates, Yasa, and the Shanri-Tsunyata Confederation, who in turn became Uzomanri and Dantaidanri, which eventually stretched to include Kasihya Territory. And still, none of these visitors bore any name resembling that of his brother. Nicholas doubted that he would change his name either, without significant cause. He was more stubborn and proud than that, at least as Nicholas remembered him. When he looked up at the clock and realized he had been there for over two hours, he gave up for the night and went to sleep.


The days passed. The people at Yggdrasil House were quick to establish routines, and so after the first few hectic days, Nicholas discovered that the time passed by rather quickly. As an apparent preteen in Vespuccian society, he was frustratingly powerless outside of the house; so to earn his keep, he made himself useful around it. Mrs. Xanatos showed him how to clean and dust, and so he went about doing just that. The house was large, and he made sure to be as thorough as possible. Even barring the private, occupied bedrooms, it still took him the better part of two weeks to complete the task. Once he had, he went on to learn how to shop for groceries and do laundry, taking on some of those responsibilities as well.

In between, Nicholas read. He had spent the vast majority of his life getting places by walking, and although the pace of life around him continued at the same bustling pace it always did, his own pace had slowed down a considerable time ago. It was no hardship to walk three miles to the library for reading materials, for he was in no hurry. He took out a card and brought back history books, and yes, there was Leandai, with a whole book written about her life. It contained old photographs, and though she had cut off her long Avvyan braids, he could still see in her the same girl he had known years ago. She was the Harriet Tubman of Vespucci, said the book, and he swelled with pride as he read about her various accomplishments.

'You knew her?' asked Felix, when on one occasion Nicholas was sufficiently thrilled with his former friend to go inform the nearest available Xanatos of his findings. As it was the middle of a week day and school had not yet let out for the summer, he had to actually leave the confines of the house and walk out onto the porch, where Felix had somehow contrived to avoid going to school.

'Only for two years, but for that time, she was my closest friend. That was before she came here.'

'So you're like … three hundred years old? That must suck.' Felix, Nicholas realized, was in the hazy, relaxed mood in which he sometimes came home when he had been out with his friends, smelling like a shaman from the lands west of Nicholas' original home.

'What must … suck,' he asked.

Felix sat up, having previously been lying in the swinging futon that hung from the porch roof. 'I mean, you're an old geezer, but you look like you should be in Boy Scouts. No girl's gonna let a twelve year old screw her. Probably.' He looked thoughtful. 'There are some pretty fucked up people out there …'

Nicholas stared. He opened his mouth, started to say something, and found that he had no reply prepared which was in any way relevant to the words that had just left Felix's mouth. He wasn't really sure he wanted to follow that particular train of thought. 'Five hundred seventy five,' he managed, after a long pause. 'Or seventy six, I've never been too sure when we were born.'

'Huh. So, what? You know what you need? You need another one of those what do you call it', those zam-cheese. You should put an ad out in the personals section.'

Nicholas perched on the railing by Felix's head. Despite the boy lacking the experience that most of his family has concerning their business — from what he is given to understand, Felix was himself a drifter of sorts — he found his crude, often nonsensical company more interesting. 'I'd sooner find my brother than any other zamczi.'
'
Kinky.' Felix dug into his pockets, found a lighter and cigarettes, offered one to Nicholas. He took it and examined it for a moment before handing it back.

'That wasn't the implication I meant,' he said. 'I'm not … interested. I just want him back.'

Felix shrugged and lit up, taking a long drag and blowing smoke into the humid air. 'So go on. You want an excuse to tell your story; I'll bite. Nothing better to do.'

Irritated by the remark, Nicholas gripped the railing tightly and leaned back as far as he could without falling into the grass. 'There isn't a great deal to tell. We were separated in the year …' He did some mental calculations. 'Fourteen forty-eight by your calendar. Ever since then, I haven't aged, and I cannot die. I'm working under the assumption that the same is true of him, and that he's still out there somewhere. It's just taking … longer than I expected … to find him.'

'So you've spent six hundred years looking, and you still haven't found him? Come on.'

'The universe is a big place to get lost in,' Nicholas murmured.

'Maybe he's dead. Maybe it's just you.' Felix rocked himself by pushing off with his foot against the floor, causing the hinges near the roof to creak.

'If he's been dead for all this time, and left me alive to stew, his afterlife will be a place of pain and torment the likes of which the living world cannot comprehend, once I get a hold of him,' Nicholas decreed, with a scowl on his face better suited to a little boy than an old man. Felix patted his foot, which was the nearest available body part.

'You go, old man.'

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'Nicholas, I have a question,' announced Emery. She was Emily's younger sister by nine years, with twice the enthusiasm for new people.

Nicholas continued to remove pieces from the china cabinet, setting them aside to be attacked with a wet rag at some point in the course of the afternoon. 'Yes?' A china doll wearing a many-layered lace skirt; a pitted wooden statue of two lizard-human Vheɧtˀ kneeling over a cauldron; a framed black and white photograph of a skull-faced old man, the brass plate on the bottom of the frame reading 'James Xanatos'; among many others, uniformly covered in what must have been years of dust. Mrs. Xanatos had been reluctant to let him near the cabinet to clean until he had proven that he wouldn't smash anything by accident, but he had been looking forward to this for some time now. He became so engrossed in the removal of objects from the shelves that he missed Emery's question entirely. 'I'm sorry, what?'

'Felix said you told him you were in the Great Schism War in Trezam,' she said.

'The what? When was this Great Schism War?' Nicholas asked, frowning at a silver sugar bowl from the seventeenth century engraved with what appeared to be symbols cribbed from the Mayan calendar. What on earth had Mayans been doing in colonial Vespucci?

'Sixteen thirty, so … three hundred eighty years ago? My teacher wants us all to interview someone who's been in a war. That's supposed to be like World War I or the Russo-Japanese war, but I thought it'd be cool to have a war that no one else has done. We study those two to death,' Emery explained. Nicholas didn't have to turn around to feel the excitement radiating off of her as she perched on a chair at the dining room table.

'Oh. Well …' He liked Emery well enough, for all that she was over-enthusiastic and energetic in a way that still made him think painfully of his brother.

'It won't take long. Here, I have the list of questions right now. You can answer them while you're doing that.'

Nicholas thought for a moment. 'It isn't called the Great Schism War in Trezam, you know, just like you call the Seven Years' War the French and Indian War. You can write that into your report.'

Emery hissed in triumph; behind him, Nicholas heard the scratching of pencil on paper. 'What's it called then?'

'Phobos' War. That was the name of the asteroid that hit that version of Earth and started that period in Trezam.'

'And … 'What role did you play in this war, and how did you get involved?''

The shelves themselves were also dusty, but it was nothing that a good spray with Mrs. Xanatos' miraculous cleaning products couldn't get rid of. Nicholas allowed his mind to drift back to that time, that world at the opposite end of the ocean. 'Did you learn about the spirits in Trezam, the ones who give magic to the people they inhabit? One stayed with me for a while. It gave me the ability to change my appearance.'

'Really? Can you still do that?' asked Emery.

Nicholas swiped the shelf with the rag, which came away grey with filth. It wouldn't be difficult to assume that the china cabinet hadn't been cleaned since the house was built, he thought. 'The spirit got bored with me because I didn't do anything exceptional with its gifts, and after a while, I wanted to leave. But before that, I could pass myself off as an adult native, so when the civil war broke out, I was able to enlist …'

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Two weeks later, Nicholas sits in a classroom with Emery and Mrs. Xanatos, while Emery's history teacher pages through the very old leather book in which Nicholas has kept a journal since he was eighteen years old.

'What language is this?' asks the history teacher, who sounds to Nicholas as though he isn't sure whether to be delighted or irritated.

'Kasihdai — Middle Kasihdai by this point, but we never had a written language. I used the Anaganti alphabets. See, it's all the same handwriting, all me, all the way through. Please don't hold Emery accountable.' A small, irate part of his mind laughs at the words coming out of his own mouth. When he was her age, he had been more worried about whether he would starve to death before he could get his next meal; why should he exert himself over this girl's higher education? He quashes this, reminding himself that that had been another time, another world entirely, and one he wouldn't wish on anyone here.

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It is Maria, the pirate cook, who first suggests that Nicholas translate his journal into English. 'It'd probably be a historical artifact,' she says, while juggling a frying pan and two eggs in one hand, and giving him a plate of pancakes with the other. 'I had a ship's boy who kept a diary of our path — a personal ships' log, for his family, you see — no one thought anything of it, but you come back a hundred years later and you're suddenly famous because of it!' Maria throws up her hands and turns on the stove with a flourish that barely saves her billowing sleeves from snagging on the heating coils.

'A hundred years?' Nicholas asks. He glances sideways at her from under his arm as he stands on his toes to reach the syrup. She doesn't look any older than thirty to him, and that on the outside, but he knows better than anyone that appearances mean nothing.

'You know there's a door around here that leads straight back to my world? But I had to be the one to walk a hundred years into the future when I came here. There's no point in going back now; I'm out of my time. Pass me the coarse-ground pepper while you're over there, it's in the bottom cabinet.'

Nicholas locates the pepper and tosses it to her. 'How long have you been here, then?'

Maria cracks the eggs over the pan and pours liberal amounts of pepper into the liquid yolks. 'Three of your years. The hundred years are in my own time.'

'I'm sorry. I understand.' She gives no indication that she has heard him, her back turned. He walks out of the kitchen with his plate of pancakes, stabbing at them absently with his fork. Putting his days into English … that's an idea. It would certainly help him with his vocabulary; though more than sufficient for communication, he isn't quite fluent anymore.

In the dining room, absorbed in thought, he trips unexpectedly and is rewarded by a baleful look from the komodo dragon.

'Sorry,' says Nicholas. The komodo gives a mental shrug and resettles itself in the patch of sunlight that falls from the far window onto the floor in front of the doorway. Nicholas sighs. Really, he thinks, it's its own fault if someone trips over it every now and then.

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And meanwhile, there is the sugar bowl that he cleaned the day Emery asked to interview him, which he still wonders about idly whenever he sits down to dinner with the china cabinet in view. Nicholas doesn't think it appropriate to ask the Xanatos if he could bring their family heirlooms down to the library. Instead, he copies the designs inlaid upon it as neatly as he is able, with pencil and two sheets of paper.

The library is a deceptively small, two-story building whose second floor still houses an old couple and some local college students. However, it has an extensive basement that goes down for two levels, tripling the initial size. Nicholas smiles at the librarian in the front before proceeding to the back rooms. In a small former bedroom, the reference librarian's enormous desk is housed; and behind this desk sits the librarian himself, and elderly man overly fond of a hearty meal, but with bright eyes and a stead grip on both pen and memory.

To this man Nicholas goes, his drawing and his diary in hand. He places both on the librarian's desk, atop a large thesaurus. The librarian glances up and over his spectacles.

'How may I help you, young man?'

Nicholas is long accustomed to the title, and to the fact that he will never grow out of it. 'I was polishing silver a few weeks ago,' he begins, smoothing out the drawings. 'They're from a sugar bowl. It was from the middle of the seventeenth century, but it had the Mayan calendar on it. I copied down the writing. I was wondering. How did that happen?'

The reference librarian takes the paper and examines the painstaking scribbles and lines. A smile appears on his wrinkled face, crinkling his eyes further. 'Do you know where the bowl came from?' he asks.

'No, but here.' Nicholas turned the paper over. 'I copied the mark on the bottom, too.'

The reference librarian chuckled. 'God bless. Here.' He heaved himself upright in the direction of a filing cabinet, one of many which lined the wall. 'That, my boy, appears to be the work of the Mayan Pilgrim, as he was nicknamed, or less commonly by his full name: Juan de Sayil. More of a legend than anything else, although of course the real man did exist.' Nicholas waited while the librarian fished in a file set, finally retrieving three index cards with faded type. 'Here are a few books which include information on him; they should be on the first basement level.'

'Thank you.' said Nicholas. 'I had another question, too. Do you have a language dictionary?'

'A few. What language?'

Nicholas thought. 'You wouldn't have one of Old Anangios, would you?' There was no point trying to ask for his own language, which had no written variant until after it had become unrecognizable.

There was. 'It's new,' said the librarian. 'Compiled by Julianna Eloren, if you're interested in more of her translations. Nah, of course you're not. Lovely woman though, I met her at a convention in St. Anselm in the nineties …' The librarian acquired a faraway look in his eyes as he leaned on the desk, depositing himself heavily back into his seat. Nicholas thanked him, took the cards, and left the room.

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Following this trip to the library, Nicholas' days fell into a slower routine. He had arrived at the house in the middle of May; and as it drew closer to the end of June, the household around him changed as well. In the morning, he woke at the same time the younger members of the Xanatos family (and a few of their more capable residents) went off to school. He cleaned the house in the morning, helped Mrs. Xanatos and Maria to do dishes. Many of the older family members went to jobs around this time as well, but about half of the residents stayed behind. Nicholas came down to breakfast carrying his backpack, laden with library books and usually, if he had no plans to leave the house, wearing his blue dress. At Mr. Xanatos' insistence, however, he only wore the belt and knife when he was about to go out into the secluded backyard to practice. In this he was joined by Leandai, who wielded a hooked ornamental blade that was far more practical than it first appeared. Nicholas enjoyed these sessions; while he might be an ancient at heart, as long as he didn't have the body of one he had no excuse to be out of practice.

When he wasn't occupied with helping Mrs. Xanatos around the house, Nicholas busied himself with the Anangios dictionary. There were a few odd characters that had been invented or which varied from region to region, but it was a minor frustration to overcome, and he had all the time in the world. Anything was worth it, to feel connected to his home as he had not been for many years. And once he had accomplished that, he could begin to translate his diary. He explained his goal to Mrs. Xanatos, careful to give credit to Maria for the idea. She found him a mostly blank notebook, spiral-bound and filled with thin, lined sheets of paper. Privately, Nicholas thought that it paled in comparison to the books he had seen made in Avvya, although these were probably much less expensive. Within a week, many of its pages had been covered in uneven English letters and many crossed-out scribbles.

Juan de Sayil also occupied a large portion of his waking thoughts. The legends.

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His library books shed interesting light on the maker of the Mayan sugar bowl. Nicholas read through all three books within the week; immediately thereupon, he sat in the window seat set halfway up the stairs, waiting for Felix to come home.

The front door swung open in the middle of the afternoon, admitting seven students, Chatma, and the great golden cat who had arrived from Yyeorel last week in search of a cure for his forced shape-change.

'Felix,' shouted Nicholas, over the sudden din and clatter of shoes and bags being removed and tossed onto the floor.

Below him, the boy dumped his books carelessly at the bottom of the stairs and redid his knotty ponytail. 'Yeah. What's up, old man?'

Nicholas beckoned, waiting until Felix had his elbows resting on the ledge beside him before he spoke. 'Do you remember when you told me that I ought to find another zamoczi?'

'Hey hey!' Felix grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. 'Nice. You found someone, eh?'

'I think. There's this person I read about - the Mayan Pilgrim. He was - is - originally an Mayan, but apparently he became immortal. He went through history as many different men, but always left Mayan imagery wherever he went.' Nicholas patted one of his books and held it up for Felix, a rare smile of delight crossing his face.

Felix bit his lip thoughtfully, looking past Nicholas out the window at the bright, hot light coming through the glass. 'You know there's not a hell of a lot of honest-to-god evidence for him, right?' he said. 'It's only the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that have that sort of metal-smithing with Mayan calendar shit. Probably just a long-lived lone fanatic. Actually, evidence suggests it was a three-generation family business. What?' For Nicholas was looking at him with an expression of naked surprise.

Nicholas licked his lips. 'That was … an unexpected burst of historical information,' he said, after a moment's careful consideration. Emily thundered up the stairs past Felix, who scowled.

'You … think I'm stupid. Just like everyone else. No, no, I mean it's true, but it doesn't mean I can't have interests that aren't stupid.'

Nicholas nodded, admitting that this was true. 'Do you know anything else about Juan de Sayil?' he asked.

Felix pushed himself up onto his arms and swung himself into the window seat, legs dangling over the edge onto the stairs and back against the wall opposite Nicholas. 'Nah. Aunt Miriam's china cabinet isn't my area of expertise, it's Matt's and he won't let me go near it. I just picked up on it from him babbling at me all the time.' A fond smile, unexpectedly pleasant on an otherwise unassuming face, appeared.

Nicholas ran through his mental list of everyone he knew who occupied some place in Yggdrasil house, but drew a blank. 'Matt?'

'You haven't met him - he's been away all semester. He did an exchange program: he went to Naien, and we got Chatma. Not a bad trade, if you ask me.' Felix grinned at some private joke with himself.

Nicholas felt a bubble of hope. 'When will he be home?'

Felix turned around to face into the living room. 'Hey, Aunt Miriam!' he shouted. (Nicholas jumped, covering his ears.)

Mrs. Xanatos appeared out of the dining room, pen in one hand and a pencil behind her ear. 'Yes?'

'When's Matt coming home again?'

She sighed. 'It's on the calendar, honey, go look. I'm busy.'

'Chatma!'

'The twenty-ninth,' he sang, voice floating down from the upstairs hallway.

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Matt returned home via translocation, his one claim to magical ability (and then only with the assistance of another wizard). He and his luggage arrived on the front porch with a puff of purple smoke at twelve noon on June twenty-ninth. When the smoke cleared, he discovered that he was not alone; Emery had gathered a quartet of friends, two girls and two boys, all of whom where in the process of braiding the mane on a creature resembling a horse crossed with a cougar. All five looked up when he arrived.

'Matt!' screamed Emery, abandoning her braid to throw herself upon him.

'Hello.' He picked her up and put her down on his suitcase. 'Emery! What did you do to your hair?'

'I cut it!' Emery leaped down and climbed through the open window into the living room. 'Matt's home!' she shouted, her voice echoing off the high ceiling.

Matt groaned. 'She's just left you, huh?' he said to Emery's circle of friends. 'That's friendly.'

'You're Matt Xanatos. Felix's cousin,' said one of them, a sharp-faced, dark-skinned boy. He stroked the head of the cat-horse.

'Yes, I am, I suppose. Oh, you're new, aren't you.' Matt felt a momentary combination of homesickness and stress, both as a result of returning to the role of host rather than hosted. 'Where are you from?'

The boy's answer was drowned out by a yodeling cry from within Yggdrasil House as a gangly blonde teenager fell through one of the double doors, stumbled, and leaped neatly over the luggage to attack his cousin. The next moment, matt became too busy fending off Felix's enthusiastic clinging to pay further attention to Emery's abandoned friends. And after that, there was shepherding inside, and greetings for all of his family and their long-term guests. And after greetings, there came unpacking upstairs, in his room, while Felix and Emily hovered and made a mess of everything. Matt tolerated it for half an hour before he threw them both out of his room, laughing.

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It wasn't for another few days that things calmed down in the house enough for Nicholas to approach him. The owner of the odd creature that Emery had named Veep turned up the next day, expressing his gratitude in the form of several thousand singing flowers that floated gently around the perimeter of the house.

And so it happened that the first three days of summer vacation were spent planting flowers in various locations around the Xanatos' expansive yard. Once in the ground, the flowers ceased their singing, but in the meantime, Mrs. Xanatos noted, it was fortunate that their nearest neighbors lived at least a quarter mile away on either side.

('Where did they come from?' Nicholas asked her, as he herded a cluster of pink-and-yellow lilies through the air to a bed under the dining room window.

'I haven't the faintest idea. I thought we'd catalogued all of the alternate-earth worlds,' she responded with a frown.)

Eventually, however, life returned to more routine levels of strangeness. Once the yard was silent again, and once dirt-free fingernails had become the norm in the house, Nicholas had no more excuses to put off speaking to Matt about the Mayan Pilgrim. He caught him early in the morning, before he went tearing out of the house with the little blonde winged human in tow.

'Oh, that! Yeah, sure. I can give you a book - remind me tonight. Just be nice to it, it's old.'

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To Nicholas' disappointment, the book that Matt gave to him was merely a reiteration of what Felix had already told him. It spoke of imitators, throughout the decades, in other worlds: a chakram in Avvya with a finely detailed replica of the cyclical Mayan calendar, in the year 1800, but closer inspection had revealed a number of errors, and differences in style. A small cult found to exist among the Dumisani tribes in northern Othiamba, involved in the worship of a snake with a feathered head, going by the name of Quetzalcoatl, which appeared to have originated in the years directly after the chakram.

And after that, nothing. The last piece that could be attributed to either Juan de Sayil or his admirers was discovered in Sargassian Russia, 1837. Nicholas sighed and banged his head back against the wall of his window seat.

'Anticlimax,' he said to the empty room.

Then a thought occurred to him, and he sat up straight. The book was old, Matt had said … He found the copyright date and sighed again. He tended to dismiss others' assertions that things were 'old', unless they were in a museum; in nearly all cases 'old' was anything not made in the last twenty years. This, however … eighteen ninety five, over a century ago. (There were many old things in Yggdrasil House; Nicholas wondered whether there was some property of the house that encouraged the migration of the old to itself, because he was fairly certain this wasn't the usual way of things in Vespucci.) That was plenty of time for new discoveries to be made. Why on earth hadn't Matt updated his sources? Sloppy, Nicholas thought. Anyone pursuing a passion ought to pursue it properly.

And now he had a new mission. The resources at the local library had been exhausted; but there were cities still in Vespucci …

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A frustrated Nicholas discovered that while the nearest city was only an hour away by car, that city was located in the counterpart world. As such, it would be useless, since Juan de Sayil had clear ties to Heimar (as the Vespuccians called the Rift World). 'You'd be very uncomfortable in Albany,' confided Mrs. Xanatos. 'But Seneca should be more than fine.'

Which was how, three weeks later, Nicholas found himself at a train station in the next town south, boarding a train that would deposit him in two hours and forty-seven minutes in the streets of Seneca City. Mr. Xanatos had expressed some doubts about allowing him to wander the city alone, until Nicholas gently reminded him that despite appearances, he was old enough to have been the grandfather of Christopher Columbus, had hitched rides on Avvyan cargo trains back when they were still perfecting the science of air travel, and would be taking along his knife for protection. 'In my backpack, of course. I'm not looking to start a fight. Thank you.'

Seneca itself, he found to be equally unimpressive. It did, however, serve to bring back sharp memories of what he sometimes thought of as his 'first life' - the one he had shared with his brother, living on the fringes of a city that shut out anyone whose ancestors didn't come from the right part of the Empire. He passed a run-down old house, its doors and window boarded by bright new wood, and wondered if a similar fate had befallen his old home. Then he snorted at his own nostalgia and quickened his pace. Their home was in all likelihood long since demolished, either on purpose or through simple neglect. It hadn't been a proper house anyway, just a shack built up against another building where there had been room, so there was no reason for it to have been preserved.

The city library was a two-mile walk from the train station, in a better neighborhood. Nicholas received a few odd glances as he went along, but none that singled him out; they were simply people-watching people. Definitely none of the life-threatening things going on that Mr. Xanatos had so feared. Once inside, however, a feeling of relief washed over him, and he headed straight for the desk of the reference librarian.

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That evening, Nicholas returned to Yggdrasil House with a curious feeling in his chest. He had in his backpack a nine-hundred page textbook concerning what the author termed 'lost immortals', in addition to a thesis paper entirely concerned with the role of Juan de Sayil in the dissemination of Postclassic Mayan culture throughout Heimar. Nicholas didn't know what 'Postclassic Mayan culture' meant, precisely, but the librarian had assured him it had to do with his research topic. Armed with these tools, Nicholas felt … peace. Here, at last, he hoped to have found a definitive resource upon which he could rely. He retired to his preferred window seat on the stairs and began to read.

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'How's the research going?' asked Matt as he passed Nicholas on the stairs, Felix at his side and Ria perched on his shoulder.

'Slowly.' Nicholas had made himself a nest there, over the last few days: he had dragged the pillows and comforter down from his bed for lining, and curled up there at every opportunity with three books, his journal, and a dictionary when he wasn't otherwise occupied around the house. 'I think that I found myself in this book.' He held up the thicker of the two books, entitled Lost Immortals and World-Walkers: Origins of the Zamczi.

Matt paused in his dash up the stairs. 'No way! Let me see.'

Nicholas opened to the page he had bookmarked with his finger, headed by bold type that read 'Czattim Néhng.' 'I shouldn't have stayed so long in Czattim, but it was a good place to be zemczi. Nearly half of these people's stories start in Naien.' His face lit up with amused laughter.

'Got to Sayil yet?' Matt asked, ignoring his cousin's tugging on his arm for the moment.

'I was distracted,' Nicholas admitted with a sigh. 'Even if I am only worth writing about by virtue of not being dead on schedule, it's still an event.'

'Good for you, old man. Look, not to trivialize - I'll come and admire you later, I swear - but this is urgent, Matt, can we get a move on?' said Felix. Matt flashed Nicholas an apologetic smile, and allowed himself to be dragged up the stairs to help Felix prepare himself for a date in ten minutes with Jaime Bonaparte.

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When the doorbell rang ten minutes later, Felix flew down the stairs in such a rush, arms flapping, that he knocked Nicholas off-balance and the book out of his hands. Coming out of a trans of information consumption - he had finally arrived at Juan de Sayil - he hopped out of the window seat to retrieve the fallen book. Below him, Felix was trying to usher a broad-shouldered boy out of the house before he could see the dinosaur-human hybrids playing cards in the dining room. On any other day, it would have been a point of interest and amusement for Nicholas, but he was too preoccupied finding his page. He flipped the book open to the first few pages, glanced at the dedication page, and paused.

To Brianna, for never allowing me to quit because she knew I was never as ahead as I thought;
And many thanks to contributors Uedau, Aiden, Masipotornu, Juan, and Czetchmet. May you all find what you seek.

Nicholas looked at the names, mind whirling quite quickly as it worked to put chapter titles to the names in the dedication. Uedau Eé, Aiden Krikorian, Masipotornu an Dantaidas Kouras, Kayett Czetchmet .. and Juan de Sayil. The Mayan Pilgrim, and four other zamczi, alive, like Nicholas.

He wondered if his brother would be in this. he wondered if he would recognize his biography, if he was known by a different title, as some were.

The door swung shut behind Felix and his guest, and Nicholas felt a surge of life, of urgency, such as he had not felt in many years. He leaped off of his seat and down the stairs, out the door, and jumped onto Felix's back.

Unprepared for the weight, his gangly form reeled forwards, and he gave a shout of dismay. 'What the hell?'

Nicholas dropped down to his feet again. 'I found him! I found Juan de Sayiul. He's still alive! There are other zamczi out there!' He hugged Felix, unable to contain his excitement.

Felix returned his embrace gingerly. 'Uh, great! No, I'm really happy for you. But, um, busy.'

Nicholas stepped back and gave the other boy a once-over, as though sizing him up for battle. 'Ah.' And then he beamed again. 'Don't let me interfere with your youthful activities. Enjoy!' With a bow to them both, he departed and returned to the house.

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The very next day, displaying haste unusual and out of character, Nicholas sat by the mailbox at the end of the Xanatos' driveway with a letter in hand, awaiting the noon arrival of the mailman. Out of all the advances in technology that had been made since the days of his childhood, Nicholas trusted the Federal Postal Service the least, closely followed by roller coasters. (But you'll trust trains that run on nonexistent tracks ten stories in the air?' asked Felix, one eyebrow raised to extraordinary heights. 'That's ambient magic. That just makes sense.')

To Madame Muñoz, he wrote, and then a long, overelegant letter that explained his predicament. He described his brother in the even that she, in her extensive studies, had come across information which concerned him, and in either case, would she be able to put him into contact with Juan de Sayil? In return, he could give her as much information as she would like concerning his own life, Sincerely, and then a list of the various names under which he had gone throughout his life: Nicholas Hendrickson, Nero Steele, Czattim Néhng, and Nyali and Hiyuuya.

And then he waited.

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The summer was hot, unusually so for Gallows Hill, but Nicholas had dealt with weather of this type many times before. Besides, he was not permitted to shut himself in his stuffy Spartan room to update and translate his massive journal. There was ice cream to discover and eat with Emery's friends and Emery herself, who did not seem to grasp the oddity involved in continually including an old man in her outings with her middle-school friends. Although amusing in their own way, accompanying Emery made Nicholas feel increasingly old and out of his time. He began making excuses to her, begging previous housekeeping and errand-running commitments.

Then there was the matter of the komodo dragon, who had grown to dislike him with an intensity disproportionate to the amount of time they had ever spent together. Nicholas suspected it had to do with age: the komodo was old even for its species, and had not aged well. For the lizard, this meant dulled senses, near-blindness, and arthritic joints. In the meantime, Nicholas remained at the height of physical health, and would presumably remain there for the foreseeable future. He thought he could understand its irritation, and attempted to avoid being very energetic in its presence.

A reply letter came back in late July, from Croaton, written on a typewriter whose 'n' was missing its serifs. It was far less formal than Nicholas' had been, but he supposed it was a product of culture, and reserved judgment.

Mr. Hendrickson,

I was delighted to hear from you. I truly was and still am. The delay in my response to your letter was due to a series of events which I will relate later.

To address your first request, I am no longer in contact with Juan. I regret it, for he was an extraordinary man. However, he and I lost contact because he has passed on from this world. His search for religious conviction, which I reference repeatedly in his biography, was finally ended, and I am told that he died happily, in peace.

At the time I received your letter, I was also in contact with another contributor to my book, Masipotornu of Dantaidas. When I mentioned that I had received a letter from the elusive Czattim Néhng, he expressed an interest in meeting you. The cause of my delay in replying to your letter was to arrange matters with Masipotornu, who currently resides in Arasia, Yyeorel. He plans on visitng me - has, by this time, set sail already - and wondered if you would be willing to meet him at that time, understanding that you may have prior commitments.

Please direct contact information and reply to me, and I will see that it reaches him upon his arrival.

Yours sincerely,

Maggie Muñoz.

Nicholas read the letter through very fast, then forced himself to slow down and peruse it more carefully. He thought it anticlimactic, to have gone to the trouble and have spent so muich time to find someone, only for him to be both real and recently deceased. Still, in the grand scheme of things, two months of effort was hardly worth considering.

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Masipotornu an Dantaidas Kouras, born in 5201 in the Hiyuuya Emirates, Shanrien by birth. Spent time in Vheknesk and apparently raised a pterodactyl from egg to grave before moving on. Nicholas wondered if he would still remember Anangios, and if they could converse in it. He thought it would be exhilarating, to talk to someone as an equal, without the politics of age adding an edge to every interaction.

However, all speculation couldn't be done in isolation; the occupants of the house still ate, still needed dishes washed and dinner prepared, still needed laundry done in such a way that everyone still had clothing to wear - a difficult task, since most of them had small wardrobes and frequently traded clothing.

And is it was that Nicholas was down in the basement, trying to sort through a pile of wet clothing to find the cotton items, when Emery banged down the stairs, pigtails bouncing.

'Nicky! Nick, you're -- what are you doing with Emily's bras?'

'Oh, these are hers. Thank you.' Nicholas set them aside onto the pile of her clothing. 'Did you need something?'

Emery jumped up and down behind him. 'You're upstairs, in the living room! Carmichael told me to come tell you.'

'I am?' he asked, bemused.

'Your person. Ma-si-po-TOR-nu,' she pronounces.

Nicholas dropped the shirt he had just picked up. Everything seemed distant to him; he felt the dampness left over from the laundry, and the cold tiles under his feet; but he stopped seeing and taking in all the information around him. His mind went blank.

'Nick!'

He turned around in a daze. 'Slap me across the face. Please.'

She did, with a small snicker. He shook himself. 'Did it work?' she asks.

'Yes, thank you. I'll go upstairs now.' Nicholas brushed past her, stepping forward on the balls of his feet. His eyes focused on nothing in particular as he ascended the stairs, heart beating hard with anticipation. As he walked down the hallway, he heard the full-loud laughter of Mrs. Xanatos coming from the living room.

The living room was occupied by half a dozen people, collected by the circle of couches. In the loveseat, Hekt' the lizard-woman sat with the dragon girl resting her head and front feet on her lap. Mrs. Xanatos stood by the television; Felix and Matt piled onto the smaller couch opposite Hekt'; and on the largest couch sat a short, dark-haired figure with his back to Nicholas.

'Hello?' Nicholas said, by way of introduction. Everyone present turned to look at him; the figure on the couch stood and turned around, and Nicholas' stomach dropped.

'Hi,' he said, scratching under the collar of his t-shirt. 'I'm Masipotornu an Dantaidas Kaphras.' He said this, not in English, or even Anangios, but a lilting version of Nicholas' own Kasihdai.

Nicholas crossed over to the couch. He wanted to laugh, wanted to jump and shout, something, he felt that the occasion warranted it, but instead realized that he was very calm. Possibly in shock. So he said, 'What happened to your accent, brother?'

'You should hear yourself. You should like Madame Muñoz when I tried to teach her.' But he grinned, a huge smile that stretched across his entire face. Nicholas couldn't help but return it, so that for a few seconds they merely stood several feet apart, looking at each other in delight.

'So this is your brother, isn't it?' Felix asked, hanging over the arm of the couch.

'Yes,' said Nicholas, eyes still on his brother. 'This is Tsuya.'

'Nicholas and Tsuya, huh?'

'Nyali, what crap have you been feeding them?' asked Tsuya, with a snort.

'You're one to talk, Masipotornu.'

'Yeah, well … 'Tsuya looked uncomfortable for a moment, but shrugged it aside. 'Get over here, daanye.'

Nicholas felt his cheek muscles beginning to cramp from the strength of his smile. He bounded across the gap between them, over the arm of the couch, and threw himself on his brother with such force that they both stumbled backwards. A flood of old, old memories rushed back as they embraced, still the same as if they had never left: their early days on the streets of Dantaidas, days when they had been at each other's side very nearly constantly. The stealing of a silver bowl that had ended in a life sentence of slavery at the age of twelve. And the moment in which, he knew now, their mutual will to reunite had been so strong, it had frozen them in time until this moment. He pressed his face into Tsuya's shoulder and shut his eyes, content at last.

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Later that evening, they sat on the couch in the living room, talking. More accurately, Nicholas sat at one end, while Tsuya lay across the rest, head in his brother's lap, eyes scrunched shut against the setting sun streaming in through the windows. Nicholas ran his hands through his hair, as though he was an oversized cat, smiling uncontrollably.

'I've been helping Mrs. Muñoz for years now - her and anyone who was interested in people like us,' said Tsuya.

'And you didn't know I was Néhng?' asked Nicholas.

Tsuya shielded his eyes with one hand so that he could open them and glare. 'Yeah, what was that? You kept changing your name. She had this file going on someone zemczi teaching in Czattim, and I said, 'That's got Nyali written all over it.' Then you took off.'

'I felt left out, so I went back to Avvya until I heard of this place,' said Nicholas. 'I expected to stay for years, not a few months.' He tugged a lock of Tsuya's hair. 'Now it's your turn to explain yourself. Masipotornu?'

'You don't remember him? You don't! I remembered someone you didn't, that's probably a first.' Tsuya raised a fist in celebration. 'He was the official who brought you and me to court. I took his name after the Kasihya War of Independence.'

'You stayed in Dantaidas that long?' Nicholas laughed. 'Go on. Why did you change it?' He said this with a teasing air of indulgence, calling out his brother on his conceits and accepting them all at once. Tsuya picked up on this, and stuck out his tongue as though he truly were a child.

'I got famous. There was this man I met, Sambiya - hell, he was the first friend I outlived, but that was because he wound up going off the deep end - I learned some tricks about people from him. So I helped lead that. I put a mask on my face that would make my voice come out lower, and told people I'd gotten a horrible face injury so they wouldn't notice I didn't get older.

'But then all of a sudden they invented writing, and everyone knew about this short kasihya named Tsuya. So I hid for a while, and then I renamed myself, pretended to be Shanrien.'

'That's a good idea. I'm impressed. Wish I'd thought of that,' Nicholas admitted.

They talked some more, quietly, while the house moved around them. As Carmichael and Emily left the house that night, the two on the couch bid them farewell and reminisced about the various places they had visited throughout the years. While Mrs. Xanatos and Maria cleaned the plates and dinner dishes, they were busy talking about the other 'Lost Immortals', many of whom, to Nicholas' envy, Tsuya had met.

'Juan de Sayil wasn't actually Mayan, you know,' he said, rolling his head back. 'Let me know if your legs fall asleep. He was just a crazy Spaniard who became obsessed with them.'

'How old was he then?' said Nicholas, settling down lower on the couch.

'Older than us. Oh, you mean - thirty-eight was when he had his crisis.'

By eleven o'clock that night, the brothers had fallen silent, content to be in the same space, looking out the windows into middle distance. The residents who remained in the house had left for their rooms, and Nicholas had wished them all a good night as they passed. As always, Maria was the last to go upstairs; as she passed the couch, Nicholas broke the trance.

'Maria, a question for you.'

'What ho?' She leaned against the back of the couch, dish towel still draped over her arm.

'You said there was a way to get back to your home world here, but you just never took it,' said Nicholas. Tsuya sighed and pushed himself upright.

'Yes …' Her voice was filled with skepticism. 'Little man, I wouldn't recommend going through there. I'm human here, because not to be offensive, but I would literally blow your mind if I didn't adjust for your world. And I mean literally.' Maria bared her teeth in a fierce grin.

'So you're talking about a dimensional problem, not a hotness problem,' Tsuya said. 'That sounds all right to me. What do you think, Nyali?'

Nyali nodded. 'Where is this gateway?'

Maria shifted her position to better bestow upon them both a blank look.

'Maria … we've both found what we were looking for. When we go to sleep tonight, I doubt we'll wake up. I'm not interested in repaying the Xanatos family by giving them two corpses on the fourth floor to dispose of in the morning.'

Maria pursed her lips and stared for a moment. Nicholas tilted his head down and met her gaze without blinking. 'Please,' he said.

Her expression failed to change. 'I'll do it,' she said. 'You go to sleep, and I'll go in in the morning before anyone else is awake. Just in case you're wrong, I don't want to go explaining to Miriam that you went and walked off into an eight-dimensional piece of space origami. No. I'll check in on you, and if you're right, I'll toss you in myself. Give my grandchildren something to feed on.'

Nyali leaned his head back, shutting his eyes. 'Thank you,' he murmured. 'You do too much.'

'Yeah, I know.' Maria pushed off against the couch, hovering over them for a moment. 'It's been good knowing you.'

'And you also.'

'And I've never really talked to you, but Nyali says you're good, so I'll thank you too,' added Tsuya.

'Good night.'

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'This is your room.' Tsuya gazed around. Apart from the addition of the small stack of books on the dresser, and the blue robe hanging on the open closet, Nyali had added little in the way of personal touches.
'Yes.' Nyali dropped Tsuya's hand and walked straight over to his journal. He stacked it with the dictionary and the notebook of translations, then tore out a page and began writing. Curious, Tsuya came up to lean on his back, reading over his shoulder.

'It's a will,' Nyali explained. 'Maria will explain, but I'd like them to hear it from me, too. And I'd like to make sure that Madam Muñoz receives these. And the dress. She'll have use for them,' --

-- 'Or know someone who does,' --

'And things here … tend to stay here. This house likes old things.' Nyali placed the paper atop the stack of books and signed it.

'Must be why I like it so much, if it likes me,' said Tsuya.

They looked at each other.

'Are you ready?' asked Nyali.

'I am if you are,' Tsuya said. He waited for Nyali to climb into bed and hold open the covers before approaching, a little awkwardly. 'I haven't slept on a bed like this in ever,' he explained.

'You always think you're going to die, it's just going to sneak up on you,' Nyali said, once they were both settled.

'That's a load of crap and you know it, brother. You just want to have philosophical last words.' Tsuya grinned.

'Maybe I do. Turn off the light.'

Tsuya filled his lungs as deeply as he could, and exchaled. The air hung around them thick and still, the bed was soft enough that he could feel the comforting tilt of the mattress created by Nyali's weight beside him. For the first time in his life, he felt a tension unknot in his chest. He reached over to the bedside table and pulled the cord, plunging the room into near-darkness. 'Love you, brother,' he said.

Nyali's hand found his shoulder. 'Love you too.'

In that darkness, the two lost immortals found their home at last; and when Maria opened the door in the morning, she saw two still, ancient children, curled together with their hands clasped, and shook her head.

The End.

So the ending is super-cheesy and stupid, and I'm definitely going to rewrite it., and possibly just kill it and end it differently. I had the new experience of reading this as I'm typing it, and, having forgotten what I wrote or how it was going to end, thinking, 'Wow, I hope he doesn't choose that, that'd be really stupid and unrealistic ... oh, no, he wrote it like that. What an idiot.' Gonna change that.