7

The next morning, Alice forced herself to go through the motions as if everything were ordinary.

Coffee. Work. The to-do list she'd never finished writing yesterday. She moved through her usual motions with the determination of someone clinging to a schedule on the one day a schedule feels like the last solid thing left in the world.

In the entryway mirror, she lingered a beat longer than usual, fixing her collar — and in that moment her eyes went silver. Not bright, not alarming; for a split second, her irises lost their normal color and filled with that same quiet, even light that had glowed in the line on her palm two days before.

She blinked.

Her eyes were her own again — dark, a little tired.

Alice grabbed her bag, walked out the door, and decided she'd think about it later. She'd definitely accumulated a whole list of things to think about later by now, and it was growing faster than she could work through it.

She walked right past the coffee shop on the corner — the one where she usually picked up beans for the week — without stopping in: there was still a half-full bag at home, and there was no reasonable excuse to go in without buying anything. The barista spotted her through the glass and gave her a friendly nod; Alice nodded back without breaking stride, thinking that this, of all things, might be the single most normal exchange she'd had in two days.

At the corner, Alice turned around for no reason she could have named — but saw only an ordinary morning street: hurrying pedestrians, a bus slowing at its stop, and the man with the dog, apparently just setting out on his daily route. The world was still faithfully playing its predictable self. Alice just knew now that this was only one of its many roles.

***

Very far from her apartment, in the place where distance stopped meaning what it usually meant, Damian stood on that same shore, looking at water that still held the faint ripple of where Alice had been standing.

Here, it was still night. The moon hung low over the lake, and the silence left behind by her disappearance felt denser than usual, as if the place itself still held the shape of her presence and was in no hurry to let it go.

Far off, past a low ridge of mountains, the sky held a faint glow — not dawn, but the same even, diffuse light that large cities throw against a night sky when you're looking at them from a distance. This stretch of shore was considered remote out here, nearly forgotten — exactly the kind of place Damian came to on purpose, when he wanted to be sure no one would find him. Tonight, apparently, that plan had failed spectacularly.

Arden emerged silently out of the dark — enormous, black, his scales still holding a trace of moonlit silver. He lowered his head beside Damian's shoulder, and Damian rested a hand on his muzzle without thinking, against the warm, rough scales beneath his eye. Arden didn't care for silence that ran on too long, and generally preferred to be the one to break it — even if all it took was one long, pointed look.

"She saw me," Damian said quietly, without taking his eyes off the water.

Arden made a low, barely audible sound — something between a growl and a question.

"Yes," Damian said. "The one."

A faint silver trace still hung over the water, slowly fading, like smoke from a candle just blown out. An ordinary person wouldn't have noticed it even up close, but Damian saw it perfectly clearly: this magic hadn't come from here. The lake hadn't called her. No one on this side had opened a way through.

She'd done it herself — a woman who didn't even know this world existed yet had found her way across a distance that had remained closed for years.

Damian ran his hand slowly along Arden's muzzle.

"She saw me," he said again, quieter this time, and now there was no surprise left in his voice — only recognition.

Alice hadn't just glimpsed another world. She had opened the road to it herself.

The distance between worlds had held for years. That night, Alice crossed it without taking a single step.

The Distance Between Worlds is a bonus novella and prequel to The Moon’s Choice.

Alice’s story continues in The Moon’s Choice, where the mystery of the silver magic, the dragon, and the man by the lake begins to unfold.

The full novel is currently awaiting approval on the platform. Once it is available, a link to the complete story will be added here.

Thank you for reading The Distance Between Worlds.