They flew on in silence for a moment, Aeron savoring his position. "Aren't you going to magic us back to the palace?" Alyss eventually asked grumpily. "What's the point of having all this power and not being able to use it and make your life more convenient?" she added. "It's a complete waste if the best you can do is make androids that don't need recharging." He looked at her sidelong, as if to question whether she really wanted to risk going there and starting a fight when her life depended on him continuing to keep hold of her so high in the air. Alyss wasn't fazed by the scrutiny. "This is so inefficient; it feels like a waste," she complained.
"We can only go through the barrier if we are near a portal," he responded calmly. "I can move wherever I want to in my own world, and I can manage it decently here as well, but I couldn't guarantee how well you'd do if I just randomly took you across far from one of the decent dimensional gates," Aeron said.
Alyss scrunched up her nose. "A portal? To where?" she asked.
"We can't fly through dimensions by ourselves," Aeron laughed at her. "This is how we plan to get you home." They traveled on for a few miles more.
"Are you really taking me home?" she asked quietly. "This isn't a setup? You really mean it," Alyss said.
He pondered that for a minute. "Yes," he said. "We`re going straight to the palace, and that is your home for now," Aeron said.
She kicked him angrily. Though the action lacked any real effect with his arm still grasping her firmly so she was sitting more in a chair-like position than a kicking stance. "That. Is. Not. What. I. Meant! You jerk!" Alyss screeched at him. "You know what, you`re such a jerk. I absolutely hate you," Alyss said. She worked herself all out, finally hanging limply in his arms. "I just want to go home," she whispered quietly, brokenly.
He listened impassively. "Someday you will be happy for all of this," he said calmly. "You'll appreciate being kept safe from all of this. From war, from your family..."
"What does my family have to do with any of this? You aren't going to do something to them, too, are you?" Alyss gasped.
He shook his head. "That's not what I meant at all. Your family there has issues, but your other family," he paused. "Well, when you are feeling more yourself, you'll know what I'm talking about. I promised not to tell you unless you came back to your memories on your own, though, so I'll leave it at that for now," Aeron said.
She punched him. "Stop trying to be so mysterious! You aren't cool like that. Or at all, really. And I really do hate you," Alyss said. "Besides, more like myself! What do you mean? I am myself," she exclaimed. "I'm not some sort of amnesiac; I remember everything about my life," Alyss said. She was beet red in the face and obviously ready to try to punch him again without any concern to the risk that it might pose to herself. Her anger had burned away at any practical restraint she may have once shown.
"It doesn't matter now," Aeron said. "Look down." She immediately complied, regretting it when she saw green fields cut into squares and clouds shielding a sleepy farm community.
"We're above clouds," she gasped. "Get us down from here," she growled.
He chuckled. "I only mentioned it because you can see now that we're near a portal to the Shadeworld," he chuckled. This time he spoke words in some arcane tongue. There was a blue column of fire surrounding them, heightening, breaking through the sky. And then a sheer blue disk came into being in the air in front of them.
The disk began to pulse in and out of existence. Strands of sky and cloud formed in front of the portal, and tangled rips tore through the portal itself. Aeron growled, low and guttural. He made a false start, then inched forward a few more inches. He braced himself, clasping her body even closer to him. Then, in a great burst of energy, he flew through the portal and broke past the filmy gauze obscuring it.
They lay in a muddled heap on the other side. There were trees and grass, and no conspicuous tall buildings. The palace was nowhere to be seen. Alyss sniffed in exasperation. "If you are going to go through so much work in the first place, I wish you could at least have gotten us to the right place," she humphed. "It also looked like you had to try way too hard to do that."
He shrugged. "It's easy to transport within the Shadeworld," Aeron said. "It's not too hard to move people who have some of their magical essence left behind their either," he said. He didn't mention that her magical essence had been locked away years ago and had made the journey just as difficult as it would have been if he'd had a Mundane human in tow. The Shadeworld was a purely magical construct and made moving magical things easy. Every rock and river might have had a twin in the original planet Earth's past, but their shadows in this world were made completely out of magic. That meant that spaces and distances were magical, not physical. As such, the transportation spell was actually more of a magic-moving spell than a caster-moving spell. Its real action was pushing magic out of the caster's area and replacing that with the magic of the destination. The person casting the spell didn't actually move an inch during the process. With the total lack
