The Forest of the Forgotten

The Hole looked exactly the same as it always had—cluttered, chaotic, and filled with treasures from a dozen different worlds. But as Ellie stood in the doorway, taking in the familiar chaos with new eyes, she began to see patterns she'd never noticed before.

The shelves that lined every wall from floor to ceiling weren't just randomly crammed with objects—they were organized by world of origin. The eastern wall held items with the sharp, geometric aesthetic of the Crystal Cities: prisms that split light into impossible colors, metal tools that hummed with their own energy, bottles filled with liquid that moved like living mercury. The western shelves displayed softer treasures—silk scarves that changed color with the wearer's mood, wooden instruments that played melodies when the wind touched them, jars of spices that smelled like homesickness and distant rain.

And there, on the north wall behind Eleazar's workbench, were the objects that made her breath catch. Things that looked almost familiar, almost ordinary, but slightly wrong in ways that made her newly awakened memories stir uneasily. A coffee mug with a logo she almost recognized. A magazine with text in a language that felt like it should make sense. A small snow globe containing a miniature cityscape that looked disturbingly like the place she and Amnity had just escaped from.

This was where she'd grown up, in the spaces between Eleazar's collections from other worlds. Where she'd learned to read by deciphering labels on bottles filled with sand from distant beaches, where she'd practiced her first magic by helping to seal the spontaneous portals that opened during Nova's storm seasons. She'd crawled through these aisles as a toddler, played hide-and-seek among artifacts that could have filled museums in a dozen different realities.

But she'd never questioned where any of it came from. Never wondered why Eleazar, supposedly a simple hermit living in the deep forest, had access to treasures from so many different worlds. She'd accepted his explanations about "trading" and "finding things" the same way children accept that toys appear under trees at winter festivals—as magic that didn't require deeper investigation.

Now, with the bitter taste of stolen coffee still lingering on her tongue and the memory of her own skilled fingers emptying a stranger's pocket, she was beginning to understand what kind of "trading" Eleazar really did.

But today, walking through the familiar chaos, Ellie felt like an intruder.

Eleazar was hunched over his workbench in the back corner, carefully cataloging what looked like a handful of smooth river stones that glowed with their own inner light. The stones were arranged in a precise pattern on a piece of dark cloth, and he was making notes in one of his endless journals using a quill that wrote in silver ink.

He looked older than she remembered, Ellie realized with a start. When had the lines around his eyes deepened so much? When had his hair become more white than gray? She'd always thought of him as timeless, as permanent as the ancient trees of Nova, but now she could see the weight of years—and perhaps secrets—etched into his weathered features.

He looked up when her footsteps announced her arrival, and his weathered face broke into the warm smile she'd known since childhood. It was the same expression he'd worn when she'd taken her first successful steps, when she'd sealed her first portal, when she'd mastered the complex mirror-walking techniques he'd taught her. The smile of a proud father watching his daughter grow up.

But today, it made her feel hollow inside.

"Ellie! Back so soon? I thought you and Amnity would be gone until—" He stopped mid-sentence, his eyes narrowing as he took in her appearance. Something in her posture, the way she held herself, made his smile falter. "You look different."

"Do I?" Ellie's voice was flat, controlled. She moved closer to his workbench, her eyes scanning the familiar tools and half-finished projects. There was the set of enchanted chisels he used to carve focusing crystals, the collection of measuring devices calibrated for different magical frequencies, the neat rows of glass vials filled with substances that glowed, swirled, or occasionally tried to escape their cork stoppers.

And there, tucked behind a stack of leather-bound journals, was something that made her steps falter. A child's drawing, crude and faded with age, showing two stick figures standing in front of what was unmistakably The Hole. One tall figure with wild hair and a pointed hat, one small figure with a gap-toothed smile. At the bottom, in the uncertain letters of someone just learning to write, were the words "Me and Papa Eleazar."

She'd drawn that when she was six years old, she remembered suddenly. It had been a gift for his birthday—or what he claimed was his birthday, anyway. He'd made such a fuss over it, tacking it up on the wall above his workbench where he could see it while he worked. She'd felt so proud, so loved, so grateful to this wonderful man who'd taken in a lost little girl and given her a home.

Looking at it now, with the taste of bitter truth in her mouth, she wondered if he'd kept it as a reminder of how easy it had been to win her trust. "Maybe that's because I've been remembering things, Eleazar. Things you told me I'd forgotten."

The old man went very still. The glowing stones in his hands seemed to pulse brighter, as if responding to the sudden tension in the room. Around them, The Hole seemed to grow quieter—even the self-winding clocks stopped their ticking, as if the very air was holding its breath.

"What kind of things?" His voice was careful, measured, but Ellie could hear the underlying current of worry. It was the same tone he'd used when she'd asked too many questions about the locked chest in his bedroom, or wondered aloud why some of his "trading partners" only visited in the dead of night.

"Coffee shops. Cars. The taste of tap water and the sound of sirens." Ellie picked up a small mirror from his workbench—one of his ordinary scrying glasses, nothing like her traveling mirrors. Her reflection looked back at her, but somehow wrong, like seeing a stranger wearing her face. The girl in the mirror had sharper eyes than she remembered, a harder set to her mouth. "I remember the smell of exhaust and the way sunlight looks when it hits concrete. I remember being small and scared and hungry, and I remember—"

She stopped, because the memory that had just surfaced was too big, too painful to voice aloud. She remembered crying. Crying for someone who wasn't there, calling out a name that wasn't Eleazar's, reaching for arms that would never hold her again.

"Where did you go, Ellie?" Eleazar's interruption was sharp, almost urgent. He'd set down the glowing stones entirely now, his full attention fixed on her face with an intensity that made her skin prickle. "Where did these memories come from? What happened to you?" "Where did these memories come from?"

She set the mirror down carefully, not breaking eye contact. "You know where. You know exactly where, don't you? The question is why you never told me I could go back."

She set the mirror down carefully, not breaking eye contact. "You know where. You know exactly where, don't you? The question is why you never told me I could go back."

"Go back?" Eleazar's laugh was strained, too loud in the cluttered space. "Ellie, you were barely more than a baby when I found you. There's nothing for you to go back to. No family, no home, no life that you could possibly remember with any accuracy—"

"Found me." Ellie repeated the words slowly, as if tasting them. "That's always been your story, hasn't it? That you found me wandering in the forest, alone and lost. A convenient little orphan who needed rescuing."

She moved to one of the shelves, running her fingers along the spine of a book written in a language that looked almost familiar. "Tell me, Eleazar, in all these years of 'finding' and 'trading,' have you ever brought back a person before? Or was I your first?"

The question hung in the air like smoke from a snuffed candle. Eleazar's face had gone pale, and she could see a muscle jumping in his jaw as he struggled to find words.

"That's what happened," he said finally, but his voice lacked conviction. "You don't remember because you were so young, so traumatized by whatever happened to your... to your original family. The mind protects itself from trauma, Ellie. It buries memories too painful to carry."

"I fell through a mirror." Ellie's statement cut through his explanation like a blade. "Amnity and I, we were gathering Glowing Imp Root in the deep forest, and a mirror opened up. We fell through. Landed in the middle of a city that felt like..." She paused, watching his face carefully. "Like coming home."

Eleazar had gone very pale. "A spontaneous portal. Those are dangerous, Ellie, you know that. The weather patterns this season have been unstable—"

"Don't." The word came out sharper than Ellie had intended. "Don't you dare try to explain this away as some random magical accident. You trained me to seal those portals, remember? You taught me to recognize the signs, to feel when the barriers between worlds are weakening. I know what a weather-driven portal feels like."

She moved closer to the workbench, her hands braced against the scarred wood. "This wasn't weather magic, Eleazar. This was deliberate. Controlled. Someone opened that portal on purpose."

"Who would do such a thing?" But even as he asked the question, Eleazar's eyes were darting toward a particular section of his shelves—the one where he kept his most sensitive materials, the things he'd never let her touch as a child.

"That's what I'm here to find out." Ellie followed his gaze to the forbidden shelves. "Funny thing about that mirror we fell through. It felt familiar. The magic signature, the way it resonated. Like something I'd encountered before, but couldn't quite place."

Eleazar stood up abruptly, moving to position himself between Ellie and the shelves. "Ellie, you're talking about very dangerous magic. Controlled portal creation, cross-dimensional travel—these aren't things that amateurs dabble in."

"No," she agreed quietly. "They're things that professionals use. People who make their living moving between worlds. People who might need to... acquire things... from places they're not supposed to be."

The silence stretched between them, heavy with implications. Eleazar's workshop suddenly felt smaller, more cramped, as if the walls were closing in. All those shelves full of impossible objects, things that couldn't possibly exist in Nova naturally. Things that someone would have had to bring back from other worlds.

Things that someone would have had to steal.

"The mirror I fell through," Ellie said softly, her voice carrying a new edge of understanding. "It wasn't the first time I've been through it, was it?"

Eleazar's face crumpled slightly, aging years in the span of a heartbeat. "Ellie—"

"Was it?"

"You don't understand how complicated—"

"Was it the first time?" Her voice was harder now, demanding.

Eleazar looked at her for a long moment, this girl he'd raised and trained and loved, who was now looking at him with the eyes of a stranger. Finally, almost inaudibly, he whispered, "No."

The admission hung in the air between them like smoke from a dying fire. Around them, the treasures of a dozen worlds seemed to press closer, each object a silent witness to secrets that had been buried for far too long.

Ellie nodded slowly, as if confirming something she'd already known. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet but steady, carrying the weight of newfound understanding.

"I want you to know," she said, still not looking at him, "that I loved you. For fifteen years, I loved you like a father. I trusted you completely. I would have done anything for you."

She finally turned to face him, and Eleazar flinched at the expression in her eyes.

"But I'm not a child anymore, Eleazar. And I'm not the lost little girl you could protect with gentle lies and half-truths." She straightened her shoulders, and for a moment she looked less like the gentle forest dweller she'd been that morning and more like someone who'd learned to survive in harder places. "I think you and I need to have a very long conversation about what really happened the day you 'found' me. And this time, I want the truth. All of it."

The silence that followed was broken only by the soft ticking of the many clocks scattered throughout The Hole, each one keeping time for a different world, a different reality. But in this moment, suspended between past lies and future truths, time itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting to see which version of Ellie's story would finally be told.