What now? Galen thought when he first saw the mists. Unusual circumstances weren't unusual to him, but he had honestly been hoping for maybe a few days of calm before anything eventful happened. It was probably a futile hope where there were more and more signs of a coming apocalypse, but he and his friends had kind of been through a lot lately. Could a guy really be blamed for taking a day or two to actually enjoy being able to actually be with his soulmate?
The mists were impossible to see through and Galen reached out with his other senses to try and navigate his way through them. He pulled on the silver cord within him, reaching for Keller, but he didn't get an immediate answer. This mist wasn't like anything he'd ever seen before; he certainly didn't know of any being who could create it, witch or otherwise, but that didn't mean it was out of the question that this was The Night World. The fact that Keller hadn't answered when she should have easily been close enough to get his silent call was worrying, though.
It felt like he'd been walking for hours before the thicker mist seemed to thin, allowing him to see clearly at last as he arrived on what seemed to be the outskirts of a town. It wasn't any place he recognized, no place he'd ever been before, which only raised more questions. Where was he? How had he gotten here? If he turned around and walked back into the mists, would he find his way back home? Curiosity about all of that led him to stick around, at least for a few moments. Right now, he didn't have any answers and he was anxious to find them. Reaching for the silver cord again, he tried once more to reach out for his soulmate, although he wasn't sure yet if he wanted to hope she was a part of whatever this was or not.
Keller realized that there must have been a few changes to Atlantis's intake department since the destruction and subsequent rebuilding. There was also the fact that she had never experienced the return trip before, but she had pictured it differently from this pervasive mist. The thought occurred to her as she walked that Atlantis might have nothing to do with this. What if some remnant of COS had escaped? Or, worse, what if she was home, and the Apocalypse had begun in her absence?
That wasn't how it was supposed to work, Keller knew. She was supposed to return to the moment she'd found the coin, barely seventeen again, just a few weeks after the Solstice and applying to be Iliana's Last Resort. She shouldn't even remember COS or Atlantis, at all. Something had to be wrong. Panicking was not useful. As the fog thinned, revealing the outlines of buildings like an emerging ghost town, Keller reached out, listening for others with keener senses than sight. The last thing she expected to feel was -
Galen?!
The occasionally embarrassing thing about the soulmate bond was how hard it was to hide anything. After more than a year and a half of missing him, the explosion of joy Keller felt was almost worthy of Iliana at the latter's giddiest, and it rushed right back along the connection between them along with an overpowering relief. A moment later she saw him, and her usually stoic expression showed every bit of her feelings (thank goodness no one else was around to see it). Whatever had happened to it, this had to be home.
Galen’s relief at both feeling and seeing his soulmate was almost palpable. He didn't know yet what they were doing here in this strange place, but he had the sense that whatever it was, they could handle it as long as they faced it together.
For Galen, it had been mere moments since he'd seen her. They'd just been together when the mists had led him to wherever this was, but that didn't make him any less glad to find Keller here. He moved quickly toward her, a little surprised by some of the feelings he'd caught through the soulmate bond, but nonetheless pleased to sense them.
“Are you alright?” he asked her. “Do you know where we are?”
She answered the second question first. "I have no idea." The frustration in her voice and the revived worry through the bond took care of the first question, but she answered aloud anyway. "I'm all right. I was-" How to explain Atlantis? "Somewhere else, but I was supposed to be coming home." She looked back over her shoulder in the direction of the grey mists.
"It could be a concealment spell." They were used for some Night World enclaves. Keller stretched out her senses again, listening for other people. "Have you seen anyone else?"
Galen shook his head. “No,” he admitted. “I don’t think there’s anyone else nearby, at least for the moment.” He suspected that would change eventually. They couldn’t be left here alone for very long. Well, they could, but he didn't think it seemed likely.
“What do you mean ‘somewhere else?’” Galen’s brow lifted in confusion. “I was with you just a moment ago.” There wasn’t time for her to have been somewhere else, not in the mere moments since he’d last seen her.
Keller would not admit it aloud on her deathbed, but she found that puzzled expression painfully endearing. It had been so long. "It was magic," she said. "More than any Wild Power, even Iliana. They took people out of - time, I guess, to fight a war." As much as Keller was aware of the truth of the supernatural, she'd never had much time for fictional representations of it before finding so many come to life in Atlantis.
"If Circle Daybreak could recruit anyone, living or dead or even fictional, to help fight the Apocalypse - raise an army of heroes against the dragons and then send them back to their own times without remembering, so it didn't change anything-" Perhaps she'd learned a bit, especially in the last few months of the war. "-wouldn't we do it?" If Iliana could channel Hecate, it wasn't so out of the realm of comprehension, was it? "It was like that."
It didn't cross Keller's mind that she had, by implication, included herself among those heroes. She'd been a soldier, just as she'd always been. "We fought, and I was coming home."
With the last word, she reached, slightly self-consciously, for his hand. The impressions - if not the details of the year and more she'd spent on the island - flowed through the soulmate bond.
Even without the details of her everyday life in Atlantis, it was still a lot to take in. The thought that she could have been somewhere else for so long while having never disappeared for Galen at home was hard to wrap his head around, but it was difficult to deny the truth of it, however bizarre, when those images came to him through the bond they shared.
He had to admit, too, that she wasn’t wrong about Circle Daybreak. They would absolutely do something like this if they had the ability. “You thought you were coming home,” he corrected her with a soft chuckle. “I don’t know where we are, but I don’t think it’s home, for either of us.”
The city revealed by the mists certainly did not resemble any of the American cities Keller had known growing up, nor did look like Atlantis - although there was something similar about it. Catching a glimpse of movement between the buildings, she let go of Galen's hand and braced herself. It appeared they were about to meet one of this world's inhabitants. As to whether they were enemies or friends... "I think we're going to find out."