“Holy shit, that was cool as fuck!” Carla yelled after Anya had gotten her slightly sarcastic comment out.

“Anya, l from here on out I'll believe literally anything you say,” Sam said in awe.

Anya giggled at her friend’s antics. She quickly deposited the crystal into her pocket, where it continued to be pleasantly warm.

“I’m just glad you didn’t burn yourself. Or my house,” Lily said. Anya jumped up to stand on the bench and pointed at her friend.

“Little do you know I am a pyromaniac now. Nothing will stop me from burning down everything with this newfound power.” Anya laughed, trying to sound as evil as she could. Lily was less than impressed.

“Oh nooo, I’m so scared,” She sarcastically answered and lifted Anya down from the bench with ease. Carla snorted.

“The mighty kingdom has fallen.” Anya said, sticking out her tongue at Carla who returned the favour.

Right then the back door of the house opened revealing a very tired looking Lena Averton, her clothes wrinkly and her black hair still tousled from sleep.

“Come in kiddos, Maria made breakfast,” she said yawning and went back inside, leaving the door open for the kids to get inside.

The group did that, and as they. walked past the couch and kitchen into the joined dining room, the smell of breakfast wafted through the air. It was almost 11am, meaning the breakfast would have most likely been classified as brunch, but everyone was too tired and hungry to complain.

Laid out on the table were a plates of pancakes, fried eggs and bacon, and four different juice cartons to suit everyone’s tastes. The group sat around the table, Lily and Sam closest to their parents and the rest of the group wherever they saw fit. As everyone immediately started filling their plates, Anya realised she hadn’t eaten anything after the bag of liquorice she had consumed the night before.

“Oh, Carla, I can make you some turkey bacon if you’d like?” Maria asked from the end of the table. Carla’s eyes lit up as they started rapidly nodding. Maria laughed and moved to the kitchen to prepare said turkey bacon.

There wasn’t a lot of talking because of everyone practically inhaling the food as their bodies seemed to have realised that eating was something people needed to do in order to stay alive. But the lack of conversation, however, gave Anya time to do something else. She started thinking about her life.

It wasn’t in a negative way, like “what am I doing with my life” or “wow, this is kind of crap”. She was just trying to piece together all the newfound information she had gotten from Cora and her rediscovered memories. Whenever a piece would fit in, such as her mother being responsible for the loss of Anya’s memories and getting her to earth, a new one would appear with an endless string of questions attached to it. Did Anya’s grandma know? Why had Anya needed to leave and forget? What had Cora meant with “you were supposed to arrive earlier”? How did all of this fit in?

Anya decided to focus on Cora’s cryptic message first. The meaning of the words was simple enough to solve: Anya hadn’t been supposed to wait until she was almost 18 to get to Commonia. But why was Anya supposed to arrive to Commonia in the first place?

She sighed in frustration around the pancake in her mouth, deciding to leave that question for when she would meet Cora again. It couldn’t hurt to just ask people for answers. She would have to ask her grandma when she got home about her involvement in the whole deal, too. But currently she had no one to ask for those answers, so she moved on to her other questions.

Why had she needed to leave? Whenever she tried to remember, it seemed like there was a block separating her from those memories. But Anya knew it was something bad. Whenever she got close to the answer, her senses would go on overdrive and she could feel her heart beating in her chest, trying to escape through her throat and slowly suffocating her.

But if she pushed past the tightness and the flashing red anxiety, she could remember heat. Smouldering heat, coming from the sun above and pulsating from something else Anya couldn’t put her finger on. She could remember screaming, banging and explosions going off. She could remember a group of teenagers telling her to run.She could remember running for her life,ut that’s as far as she would get. Her palms would start sweating and her breathing would get erratic and she would have to stop.

Anya looked up around the table, sighing in relief as no one seemed to be staring at her. Her friends were still eating, and that was when she came to a realisation. She had friends here, smart friends, and they could probably figure out what exactly had happened, even if the information Anya had was like a pile of puzzle pieces from three different puzzles.

But she knew this for sure: whatever happened, whatever had caused it, her parents were dead and her home was most likely in ruins.

---

The group decided to stay at the table even after Lily and Sam’s moms had left the house to go grocery shopping. They spent the rest of the morning playing Animal Crossing and trying to make each other bankrupt by making fancy couches and selling them to each other, except for Felicity who was the only one playing fair.

Anya contemplated how to ask her friends for help as she crafted a couch she knew Lily would want in order to get more bells. Anya already felt as if she had overstepped her boundaries and asked for too much trust and help, and she wasn’t sure if her friends wanted to deal with even more of her problems. The knowledge that magic was real had most likely already been a big enough shock, she thought. What if they uncovered something even more earth shattering? Anya didn’t want that.

But she had to figure out what was going on. Flicking her bangs out of her face, she took a deep breath and looked up from her game.

“I need your guys’ help in something.”

“Like taking down Lily and her camp? I agree, let’s band together.” Sam said with slight irritation in his voice.

“Hey!” Lily immediately protested.

“No- well yes actually that would be very nice.” Anya stopped talking for a second as Lily hit her arm. “But I need your help in figuring something out.”

“Yes?” Felicity said.

“I need to figure out why my mom made me come here as a kid.” Anya said as quickly as she could, feeling like she had just ripped off a band-aid. She wasn’t sure why this particular request made her so anxious, but it did, and she was downright scared of what her friends would reply.

“Oh yeah sure.” Sam replied.

“Yeah, makes sense, I’d want to know too if I were you,” Carla replied.

“What do you have so far?” Lily asked, closing her game and turning to Anya.

Anya stared at the group with her mouth agape for a few moments before shaking her head and focusing again. At least as much as she could, considering the circumstances.

“Well uh. I know my mom specifically made me leave and forget my memories and that I was supposed to come back earlier than I actually did.” Anya started wiggling her fingers like she usually did when she needed to concentrate on a task at hand.

"Come back?" Felicity asked

"Oh, my cousin said that when I went to Commonia at 5am today through the portal in the shack"

“And all of this you have neglected to mention. You went to… whatever you said?” Carla made a good point. Whoops.

“Yes, that’s why my face looks like,” Anya gestured to her face, “this.”

“Okay so now that we’re all vaguely on the same page, is there something else you remember?” Lily pulled up her phone’s notepad, like the note taking nerd she was. Anya looked at her fondly.

“I uh. I remember hiding.”

Lily nodded in response. Anya grimaced and started thinking. Heat. Screaming. Running. All of this she told to the group, who nodded more and more seriously with each new thing. Anya remembered goodbyes, people helping her hide, and losing some of her friends in the confusion. She couldn’t remember the friends’ names, but she remembered that one of them was blonde and another one was a brunet.

Anya hoped they were okay.

“And I know for sure whatever happened, my parents are dead,” Anya finished her small info dump.

“Okay so something bad with people dying. Sounds like a war to me.” Carla shrugged.

“But with who? What would even attack?” Anya countered.

“Fuck if I know I didn’t live in Com- I still don’t remember the name.”

“Commonia,” Lily helped.

“Yeah, that. You’re the only one of us who knows literally anything, Anya.” Carla looked right at her, and she knew they were right. If only she could remember more.

Just then something popped in her mind, just for a moment, but long enough that she could get a partial hold of it.

“Aland. There is another place in the pocket universe whatever called Aland.”

Her friends kept talking, balling around ideas. What if this, what if that. Anya wasn’t sure if any of those ideas were right. If she could only remember. She knew there had to be some small detail she was missing. Some small, stupid detail that had managed to escape her mind.

“Do you remember what attacked? Like if it was humans?” Sam asked and snapped Anya out of her thinking bubble.

“Uh…”

“Sam, what do you mean ‘what attacked’?” Carla asked.

“I don’t know! There is magic and stuff so maybe there are creatures too!”

“Shadows. I remember one of them slamming to a window right before a door to somewhere closed.” Anya replied before Carla could continue.

“Shadows usually follow people, you know.” Carla helpfully added.

“Magic,” Anya countered as she did jazz hands to emphasise what she was saying.

“My point exactly!” Sam exclaimed.

“Okay so we’ve figured out what attacked, but why? I feel like we need a motive.” Lily put down her phone and leaned her head on her hands.

“Yeah I got nothing,” Anya confessed.

The group sat in silence. All around were confused faces, trying to figure out something they had barely any connection to.

“What if they hate magic?” Felicity of all people was the first to guess. The group responded with confused faces needing an explanation.

“I mean, it’s a pretty usual trope in literature, and if it’s a completely different country then they might have some heavy propaganda going on.”

“That… would make a lot of sense actually.” Anya piped up after some contemplation. “I mean, I was about 5 so they probably wouldn’t have told me, and if they hated magic enough the attack would make sense.”

“Okay so what we have is probably a war started by some guys who really hate magic?” Carla asked, taking their girlfriend’s hand and squeezing it.

“Yeah,” Anya said, rubbing her arm.

“Well. Let’s go back to the Com place and get confirmation,” Carla said.

“What?”

“I agree with Anya, what?” Sam looked at Carla, who really didn’t look like they were joking.

“Anya clearly wants to! And it’s the weekend so like, what do we have to lose?” they continued.

“Yeah we have nothing to lose except possibly our lives.” Sam looked rightfully concerned.

“I’m going,” Lily said, determined.

“If Carla goes, I’ll join you,” Felicity added, looking at Carla.

“I proposed the idea, so I’ll go. Anya?” Carla looked across the table towards her.

Anya stared at the group for a moment, in shock because of the goodness of her friends. She really didn’t deserve them, she thought. Wiping away the tears threatening to slip out of her eyes, she nodded.

“Yeah, if you guys are sure. Let’s go get solid answers.”

The group’s stares promptly turned to Sam, who threw his hands up in defeat.

“Fine! I’ll join you all. If we die, I’m blaming you, Carla.”