My body had been a coiled spring, poised for action as the ball of magical potential rounded the corner and came into sight. I was expecting a mage or witch or specter of some sort… instead I saw McKinley Parish, my mortal lover.

The woman had always been slender, but now she looked skinny, starved of both nutrition and sleep judging by the dark circles beneath her eyes. Her hair was wet as though she’d recently bathed, and the shirt she wore hung across her shoulders like a bent tree branch. My mouth opened, but at first no words came out.

Kinley could not have changed so much in a single night… her body showed a year of neglect and abuse… perhaps two. And… the same was true of the land. There was no way that so much wreckage had rained down on all of Corone in the space of a few hours.

“Kinley…” I took a half-step forward and she flinched away. Everything I had seen and heard since returning to the realm of mortals came crashing down in a single thought, a memory of Am’aleh’s voice before she had taken me to Phantaria.

Time passes differently in the Realm of the Thaynes… I had known the risk, but I had not truly understood it. I thought at most that time there might be different by a matter of hours, days at most. Not years… by Trisgen’s wrath, years.

As the realization washed over me, my attention turned back to the hard facts before me. Kinley’s energy signature felt and looked completely different. She had become a being of great magical potential… and I knew only too well the trials that could come with power.

“McKinley,” I tried again, “I… what has happened? I know not how long I have been away. I was caught… trapped, until now, in the Realm of the Thayne. Believe this, Kinley, if nothing else… the moment I returned to this world, I came for you.

“But what has happened? Tell me, McKinely… tell me everything.” I could not share my worries with her… but I felt certain I saw the horror of death and destruction reflected in those eyes.