The Truth About Monsters

"Orion." Cillian's voice, sharp with warning. "You're frightening her. Say what you mean."

"Forgive me." Orion exhaled, some of the stillness draining out of him, though not all of it. "It’s a habit, going quiet when I have a lot to say but don’t know how to word it. Aurora, have you ever heard of Elaria?

"Is that a person?" I asked, confused as hell.

"It’s a place." He said it gently, the way you’d tell a child something that was going to change how they saw every day of their life afterward.

"It is a world, layered over this one. Close enough to touch and far enough that most people who live here never once suspect it exists” He went further to explain.

“ Supernaturals, the things that attacked your house tonight, and others far less monstrous, have lived there for longer than human history has bothered to record." He finished and looked at me, waiting for a response.

"I don’t…..” I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, “I need a second." I stood up and paced in front of the fire place, trying to gather my thoughts.

 "Two hours ago, the biggest mystery in my life was a chipped teacup with the wrong provenance sticker. Now you’re telling me there’s a whole world I’ve never heard of, and apparently I’m tangled up in something old enough to have its own prophecy. Something big enough to get me killed?" I threw my hands up in frustration before running them through my already tangled hair.

"I know," Orion said, and for once there was no dry humor in it at all. "I wish I could give you longer to sit with every single piece of this before handing you the next one. You don’t have that luxury, and unfortunately, neither do I."

"You’re telling me monsters are real."

"I’m telling you the word monster is doing a lot of unfair work for a very large and complicated population." A ghost of dry humor slipped into in his voice but it was gone as fast as it came. "Some of them are monsters, yes. Most of them are just people, the way you and I are people, with a few body alterations or stranger histories."

"And this world, Elaria, is just like sitting on top of May town? On top of everyone?"

"More like just beside it than on top of it. There are places where the boundary between the two worlds thins enough to cross. If you know where to look or if something on the other side badly wants to reach you." Orion stared like he was looking into my soul. "Which, as of tonight, something does."

"How does nobody know about this? An entire second world, and nobody knows? May town is a small town, someone would have seen something and told someone that will tell someone"

"People forget what they’re not equipped to survive believing," Orion said. "It’s not a conspiracy. It’s mostly mercy until it isn’t."

I looked at Cillian. He was watching the table with his jaw tight in a way I was starting to recognize meant there was something he badly wanted to say and wasn't.

"You knew this," I gasped in shock when it finally clicked. "This whole time. Every time we exchanged pleasantries, you knew there was a whole world hiding under this one. You knew things from it were dangerous, and you still moved in across the street from me and said nothing?"

"Yes."

"Were you ever going to tell me?"

The silence that followed lasted just slightly too long.

"I didn’t know it would be you" he said finally. "I knew things. I knew there was a human that belonged in a prophecy in May town but I didn’t know it would be you."

"That feels like a very convenient thing to not know."

"It wasn’t convenient." His voice cracked, just slightly, on the word, and for a second the careful wall behind his eyes wavered. "None of this has been convenient. Least of all tonight."

"Aurora." Orion cut in gently, though I caught the look he shot Cillian, a quick, warning that gone before I could read it properly. "There will be time for this argument. I promise you that. But tonight, I need you to understand what you are, because it is the only thing standing between you and the next attack."

"What do you mean what I am? I don’t know how to be anything else. I am just a girl for fuck’s sake. I sell antique teacups for a living."

"You sold antique teacups yesterday," Orion said, not unkindly. "Tonight you are something Elaria has been waiting on for longer than either of us has been alive. I understand that’s an unfair amount to hear in one sitting. I don’t have the luxury of telling it to you slowly."

"Why? Why does it matter this much that someone broke into my house tonight over some old sigil in a book I didn’t even choose to find?" I could feel my throat starting to close up again but I took a deep breath.

Cillian's hand gripped the edges of the table tightly, I was surprised he didn’t break it in half.

"Because whoever sent them already knows what you are," he said quietly. "And they didn’t send children to do that job. Whatever’s coming next, tonight is just the preamble."

"Then tell me." My voice cracked on it. "Please. Just…… just tell me what I am." I looked between both of them.

Orion looked at the book again, and something in his face went very old and very tired, decades settling into it all at once.

"That sigil," he said slowly, "belongs to a story I was told as a child and hoped, for most of my adult life, was exactly that. A story. Nothing more."

"What story?"

"A prophecy." He said. "A prophecy about the end of the world I just described to you, or its salvation. I never expected to see its sigil outside of the one crumbling text that supposedly first recorded it, let alone find it sitting on a coffee table in a house full of humans who’d never heard of Elaria in their lives."

"And it just happened to end up in the back room of my family’s shop."

"Yes”, he replied cautiously.

"How does a book just end up somewhere on purpose? Books don’t have legs."

"No," Orion agreed, very carefully. "They don’t. Which means someone wanted it there. Someone with either a great deal of foresight or a great deal of magic, and possibly both.”

"That’s not actually reassuring."

"I never said it would be."

"Can you at least tell me what the prophecy actually says? Not the vague version. The words and my part in all of these"

Orion hesitated, and in that hesitation, I learned something else about him. Whatever the actual words were, he didn't want to be the one to say them out loud in that room, not yet, not tonight.

"Soon," he said. "I promise you. Tonight I’d rather you hear the shape of it before the exact words. Words like that have a way of becoming self-fulfilling once they’re spoken aloud, and I’ve seen what that costs people."