excerpt

The man you met on the other side of the door tried as he might to help, but you both were too late. Maybe you should have been glad they held on long enough to see the new world. But it wasn’t good enough for you, no. Perhaps it was seeing the life leave your sister’s eyes as you held her in your arms that delivered the crushing blow. Maybe it was seeing your mom, insisting she was fine, smirking cockily like she always did, before collapsing on the ground in front of you. Or maybe it was witnessing your ma, once the strongest, toughest woman you knew, slip into eternal sleep while you begged for someone, anyone to hold on while you tried to get more help.

Whatever it was, you couldn’t stand to see this new world. Not when it cost the blood of your family.

So you asked the man for help. You asked him, while the door was still open, to help you bring some… personal things through.

The tower your land held came through first. At the top, he fused your old house. Soon after, he brought swaths of the four lands of yours, your sister’s and your parents’ themselves through, and stitched them together into a single landmass, with the tower in the center. He opened a rift, which you hid away with time powers, and crammed it inside. After that, he took an entire, very large swath of land from the planet it was on, the one you were standing on, and put that in its own rift. He incorporated more sects from your lands in it. Plains from your ma’s. A crystal field from your mom’s. A dark forest from your sister’s. Mountains from your own. And it was just in time, for after finally bringing the rest of the deceased through, the door slammed closed, never to open again.

When the meteor struck with that blasted temple, though, you knew right away what you needed to do to prevent this anguish from happening to anyone else in this universe.

You, in the spirit of your beloved ma, blew that shit up.

The ruins were unrecognizable when you finished, the various symbols of that… thing, gone. On the floor, you hastily carved away one of those French flower things, and the man who had been aiding you quickly inlaid eight symbols into that and onto the walls. And in a hidden away nook, you crammed some personal items. Your vest. Your sister’s well-loved scarf. Your mom’s sunglasses. Your ma’s favorite pair of panties.

It was a bit of a long walk to your next destination, but when you entered the cave, you had him carve out a hallway with his supposed powers, and you took the bodies of all then of the others with you. You made sure that if anyone got lost, they would loop back to the beginning. You buried them in a large room deep under the mountain you had chosen. Where each was laid to rest, a statue of them rose up from out of the rock. There were eleven statues of course… ten for them, one for you. It was here again that the two of you would tear open the rift right inbetween the statues of you and your sister. And you and him ensured that if anyone were to ever need to enter that rift, they would have to match the possessions to the four of them.

You made him promise that he would not tell a soul where she was unless the situation was dire. But, as you didn’t want to be forgotten, you told him your story. You told him to ensure it was written in books, but to ensure that the books were just rare enough that it would be a special tale.