“I don’t have an Instagram,” Rodan said, sidestepping the man. “But thank you.”
The whole thing amused him. The complete self-obsession with getting these virtual likes and watches. Rodan played the video of when he approached Maeve the day before on Twitter. It also went up on some forums he kept an eye on. Already, people wondered who he was and where to find his accounts.
For all that he enjoyed the instant communication and connection of this world, he felt uncomfortable delving too deep into it.
Today’s panel, titled, ‘Fantasy Meets Reality: What Our Favorite Stories Tell Us About Ourselves,’ attracted a decent sized crowd. He settled himself in the middle section, close to the front, as he did every other time Maeve came out to speak. On stage before the rest of the guests, shuffling some note cards in her hands and taking a swig of the water bottle that sat at her feet, he was able to observe her for several long moments before the event started.
“Wonderful costume,” someone whispered from behind him, and he turned to flash a quick smile. The lady behind him gave him a thumbs-up, and he repeated the gesture.
The other panelists funneled out onto the stage, and the talks began. Rodan settled back in his seat, watching and listening.
“For a genre that is supposed to take us out of our world, fantasy echoes what is happening in our society. It shows us what we care about. The obvious is good versus evil. We all hope to be noble and conquer the darkness within or without. What we hope for is that through the reading of our favorite fantasy heroes, we can be inspired to find our own strength.”
As she spoke, her amber eyes shone, and her body came alive with the telling. Rodan leaned forward, noting how her shoulders straightened, and her pulse jumped in her throat while she debated with one of the other authors on stage.
She’s enjoying this, he thought. She likes a challenge.
The conversation continued, touching on societal and political issues that Rodan grasped only a little, the politics of this world unimportant to him. Maeve was important. Finding out if still, at her core, the woman he needed by his side thrived within.
When the time came for questions from the audience, Rodan raised a hand for the microphone. The moderator spotted him in an instant, and the metal device slipped into his grasp.
“This question is for Maeve Almeida,” he said, his deep voice reverberating through the auditorium. He noted that Maeve straightened, her eyes a little wide as they searched the audience for him. “If fantasy heroes and their struggles tell us the truth about ourselves and our society, what do the villains represent?”
He handed the microphone back to the moderator and leaned back in his chair, his eyes fixated on her. Her chest rose and fell as she leaned forward into the microphone. “Villains are as much a part of our struggle as the heroes. They show us what we desire. In essence, a villain is our needs boiled down to their simplest forms. The desire for what we cannot possess. To take what is not ours to take. We sometimes cheer for the villain because of their courage and audacity to stare the world in the face and say ‘I will conquer you.” She swallowed hard, eyes still roaming the shadowed auditorium. “Often, the villains represent what we’re most afraid to face. Our darkest impulses.”
And what about me were you afraid to face? Rodan wondered.
For all that Maeve painted him as the villain in her stories, she softened the edges of her narrative a little at the end. The Restless King glossed over some crucial parts of the final battle between him and Sebastian and the events leading up to it. Yet, she gentled her depiction of the evil King Rodan. Almost as though she sympathized with him.
Rodan wished, not for the first time, that she took him up on his offer. An offer he gave to no other woman. An offer that others would fight for. Die for.
Join me, and I will give you everything you have ever desired.
He meant it, back then.
Rodan stood and left the auditorium before the question and answer session ended.
The last day of the convention, Rodan noted people packing up and selling off their wares at discounted rates. Tomorrow, Maeve would be traveling home. Through some careful study, and bribing people far more tech-savvy than himself, he now knew the exact location of that home.
Yesterday had been but a taste. Tomorrow would be the true reunion.
CHAPTER THREE
Maeve
MAEVE POURED BOILING WATER OVER the tea infuser and breathed in the aromatic steam which rose from her mug. Her favorite, a bulbous light blue cup stamped with ‘Keep Calm and Write a Book.’
She never envisioned herself as a writer until she became one, quite by accident. Years after her last foray into the Five Realms, she started a blog to record the stories of her travels there. She’d made up a nom de plume, writing as Jessica Lambert.
Then the blog got popular. So popular that it ended up featured in several online publications and even a few quick news clips. Jen reached out to her soon after stories of her blog went viral, and the rest was history.
In her living room, poster-sized prints of her book covers fixed to the wall next to smaller framed photos of the international versions. It struck her as narcissistic, sometimes, to display these talismans to her craft in such prominent view. But she was proud. Proud of the work she poured into the stories.
Taking her mug of tea in hand, Maeve moved into the living room and the little writing station she made in the corner, where floor to ceiling windows showed off an excellent view of her back yard.
Her home, small compared to most in these mountains, felt perfect to her. The two bedrooms A-frame stayed warm in the winter, and let in fresh air during the summer months. She rarely, if ever, entertained.
Soaring foxtail, low mountain hemlock, clusters of lodgepole pine and Douglas fir, among so many others, took up her backyard and blended into the wilderness beyond. She would not put up fences or barriers of any kind. Maeve believed part of the beauty of living in the mountains meant embracing all that Mother Nature offered.
Once, in a moment she would never forget, she witnessed a lone mountain lion pick its way along the edge of her property. It stopped, panting and looking around, fifty feet from where she sat at her writing table. Then it moved away.
More often, she observed small black bears—some of them with their cubs trailing behind. The creatures, accustomed to humans, became opportunistic eaters. She owned special trash barrels outside with locking lids so that the bears couldn’t come through and steal food instead of foraging for it.
She watched the animals one could find in most cities and suburbs: foxes, raccoons, ravens, squirrels, blue jays, and others. Maeve spent many an hour on her balcony with a pair of binoculars watching one creature or another making its way through her yard.
At her table, Maeve blew off the steam coming up from her mug and propped her feet up on the desk. Outside, birds called to one another, swooping in and out of the tree branches like acrobats at a circus. She smiled to herself and took a sip of her tea.
She loved her life. The peace. The solitude. Here, at long last, no one tried to hurt her.
She shuddered at the brush of memories. The Realms were dangerous, but the worst experiences of her life fell in the lap of the people from her own world. Shunted from person to person, foster home to foster home, for the majority of her young life, she grew used to the abuses endured by the most vulnerable segment of the populace. Maeve considered herself lucky, to have made it through her childhood alive. If not for the Realms, she did not believe she would.