While working at my desk at the guild, one of my fellow scribes handed me a folder with twine wrapped around it. I took it from him.

"Going to Queen's Records... But is there a Queen?" I asked him.

"Well, no," he admitted. "Right now we have a King. But the names just stuck. Anyway, can you take this?"

"Sure! Where am I going?"

I put the folder into my messenger bag, potentially using it for its intended purpose for the first time.

"It's hard to miss," he said with a grin. "Just head toward those giant buildings in the centre of town and look for the sign. Thanks! Besides, you need to go see those buildings." He winked.

I was pretty sure I knew which ones he meant, so I nodded and headed out.

Queen's Records. It was apparently something like a City Hall back on Earth, but mostly the paper filing department.

Once on the right road, Ru Fí-Réalta, the buildings in question were indeed hard to miss, rising up above other buildings in the city from almost any angle. Graceful stone curves, spiral shapes rising high, and what looked like white lacework on the outside, glass filling the spaces between the lace. One fairly normal-looking glass tower was wrapped by a giant stone coral. Another was stacks of cubes in bright primary colours, looking like they'd been carelessly knocked over, like a child left their play set out and it froze into a building. Yet another looked like it was built out of honeycombs curving around in a wobbly shape, and mass amounts of greenery were clearly visible on each level inside.

Starweave architecture, people said, made with magic somehow or other, some sort of magic or skill well beyond that of most people in Fleuve Clair. The buildings were not as tall or imposing as buildings in Vancouver, or elsewhere on Earth, but they had a certain something... I couldn't see people on Earth building these.

As I drew closer, the neighbourhood vibe shifted quickly from commercial and residential to park land, mostly open grass. The roads became meandering stone pathways full of coloured patterns in the surface: curving, spiralling, boxy, and diagonal patterns, two or three shades of something that looked like concrete. I bent down to look at it more closely, and I couldn't see any sign of joins or paint. The stone was simply several colours that felt like growing in that shape, as far as I could tell.

I reached out to touch it gently, and something seemed to shimmer gently, almost like heat waves, and some kind of bell-like tone seemed to sound inside me. I quickly removed my fingers.

Some sort of magic resonance I was able to perceive now that I'd touched Síle's magic?

I stood and walked onward, looking for a sign. After not too long, I found a painted metal sign in dark green, with white Clair lettering, and followed the path.

From a distance, the buildings were interesting. Up close, buildings like one of the colourful cubes that seemed like it had started to fall over but changed its mind mid-fall, were a little bit intimidating.

I followed one last sign toward an overhang carved into that cube building. In spite of the building looking like it might tip over at any moment and spill all of its contents out, it looked fairly normal inside. A glass and metal door like you might find at any office building led into it. I found pretty quickly, looking through the door, that the awkward cube shape was more of a shell, housing a standard building with standard floors. The wild wall shapes were more of an outer facade; that particular cube seemed to be nearly hollow inside, providing a huge atrium.

A large, square-shaped reception desk near the door surrounded a grandmotherly woman, who sat on a chair at one side of it. When I got closer, her eyes lit up, she smiled widely, took a breath, and clapped lightly with her hands.

"Oh! You're finally here."

"I, um," I stuttered, not really understanding the woman's vehemence. Surely these papers from the guild couldn't be that important? "I need to deliver these from Consoeurie Fí-Réalta."

"Of course you do," she said, grinning widely. "Go down that hallway, third door on the right."

"Thanks!" I replied, waving.

She just kept smiling.

Strange. I'd had no idea the guild person had given me something so important to carry over.

Three doors down, I went inside and knocked on the wall briefly, since the clerk inside hadn't noticed me. He looked sharply up at me from his place crouching on the floor, reading files. He did a double-take and tipped over before standing up and walking to the desk.

"I need to deliver these from Consoeurie Fí-Réalta," I repeated from earlier.

"Yes. Yes. I see!"

He lifted his glasses from where they hung on a cord around his neck and placed them over his ears, opening the folder and looking through the papers inside. Occasionally I caught him peeking a glance at me as he read, as if checking that I was still there.

"Is there anything to take back?" I asked him.

"Oh!" he said, looking up. "No, you can go back. Thank you." He took one of my hands in both of his briefly and then went back to reading.

Strange folk. Definitely strange.

By the end of the week, I could feel the appointed time of my return coming with increasing intensity. Somehow, the Earth side of the Gate was still only at the Sunday evening of the same weekend I'd left, but it felt like the number of days I'd spent in Fleuve Clair were at least twice as many as they really were.

I was sitting on a bench in a park near the guild, watching kids and parents play with their dogs, spacing out.

Huh. Dogs! I remembered that swirled-fur squirrel from my time in the Clearing quite well, but these dogs looked pretty normal. I chuckled inside at the ignorance that had made me think I was really in a brand new world of my own, back at the Clearing. Looking around at the park, it was quite well populated already.

In my time in Fleuve Clair, I'd learned the fundamentals of a whole new language, I'd settled into a job that I'd become pretty good at, I'd made some friends. Heck, I'd even formed some attachments to favourite shops and ways to relax in the evenings.

And that was before thinking about knowing and seeing that magic was real.

I still knew hardly anything.

The Alyx from the first arrival felt practically like a different person that I was looking back at. I thought back to the question I'd asked myself, about when it would be okay to leave: Will it ever?

As I'd suspected, it hadn't particularly resolved itself. All I had was a time at which I must go back and figure out what to do, to somehow make an arrangement with my parents that wouldn't leave them frantically filing missing persons reports.

When did this change happen? When did I go from exploring this place in curiosity, to figuring out how to just stay? Would I get tired of it again, yearning for home? I searched inside myself and found, surprisingly, that I wasn't even as homesick as before.

I coughed a couple of times, briefly. I'd had a sore throat the past day or so. I hoped I wasn't picking up new pathogens to take back with me; after all, I didn't have vaccines for the diseases in Shanaclair, and they had none for Earth, a briefly horrifying thought. Anyway...

It wasn't like I could explain a long absence back home by saying, hi Mom, hi Dad, hi friends, I'm moving to a monastery in the Himalayas. In that case, we'd at least be aging at the same pace, we could still write letters and occasionally call each other or internet chat.

I sighed and stood up, walking back toward the guild, where I could study a bit in my room and sleep. Whenever I went back to Vancouver, a week at school or even putting my affairs in order would be multiple months of time in Shanaclair. I wondered if the guild would even let me hold on to my room that long. Would I leave my clothes in that room?

Or I could bring them with me, but that also felt pretty strange, mixing up the worlds like that. If I even could.

I'd been putting it off, but it felt like it might finally be time to start talking with them about my departure.