Thirtyx's heart raced with the thrill of being handed a juicy secret on a silver platter. Rhea rose from Benn's trunk and approached the door with unusual hesitation. She pressed her shoulder against it as if ensuring it was closed properly. Her eyes darted around the room to double check that no sinister forces had snuck in to watch. Then, she pressed her index finger against the middle of the door.

She began to draw a sigil the way Thirtyx had watched her do countless times before, but something about her actions struck a chord of uneasiness that traveled like a ripple down his spine. Thirtyx flinched away, but he didn’t understand why until he forced the uncanny feeling down and made his eyes focus on the expanding sigil.

A sigil that did not glow the familiar, warm purple of normal magic but a brilliant, almost blinding gold instead.

One final stroke brought Rhea's finger to the door frame. Thirtyx watched in awe as she traced her finger up, standing on her tiptoes to reach the top beam before continuing across and then down the hinges. When she completed the circuit, the whole door glowed gold for a moment. Then, the sigil vanished, and the light disappeared.

Benn wore an expression of mingled pride and amusement. "You're just going to launch into it like that?"

"Well I didn't want anyone to be able to break the spell and overhear us." She didn't bother with the trunk this time, instead flopping onto her brother's bed. Benn rolled his eyes and settled beside Thirtyx’s feet.

Thirtyx blinked back and forth between them. "The gold is… new."

"Well isn't that the understatement of the epoch?" Rhea rolled onto her stomach and propped her chin on her hands. "Tell me, Thirtyx, have you ever seen anyone do golden magic?"

Aside from spells designed to change something's color or appearance, magic was purple, and that was that. Thirtyx shook his head slowly. "I... didn't know it was a thing."

"It's not a thing," Benn said seriously. "Not on Lamiakk, anyway. But we didn't spend our whole break on Lamiakk."

As tempting as it was to picture them frolicking through some crossroads dimension vacation resort, Thirtyx had to remind himself that they looked like they'd been to the twin hells and back and barely lived to tell the tale. Nevertheless, portals on Lamiakk were few and far between, and most of them did lead to crossroads dimensions. "So you learned golden magic from a waiter or a barkeep or...?"

Another uneasy glance did nothing to soothe Thirtyx's nerves. Benn heaved a heavy sigh. "There are a surprising number of portals hidden in the palace, actually. A lot of them lead to very full, very tangible worlds—not just crossroads dimensions."

It felt like they were trying to get Thirtyx to a conclusion he was nowhere near. "So you learned golden magic on a world no one's ever heard of?"

Rhea snorted. "Oh, you've heard of it. Everyone has heard of it."

"Guys, I’m going to need a little more context—"

Benn held out his hands, and his eyes glowed with a flurry of golden sparks. Thirtyx recoiled against his headboard. Golden wisps solidified into two spheres that hovered above Benn's hands—one a purplish grey, the other a misty champagne—slowly rotating around one another. Two twin worlds, tethered by a complex exchange of energy that left their fates inextricably intertwined: their beautiful haven of Lamiakk and the uptight dystopia of Iwabo Pfah.

Understanding surged into Thirtyx's brain, but what Benn was suggesting was impossible. Iwabo Pfah wasn't a place one could go. It was like a heaven—or more aptly, a hell—separated by insurmountable time and space. "No... only energy and magic can pass between us and Iwabo Pfah,” Thirtyx said. “People... people can't do that!"

"People from Lamiakk can't do that," Rhea corrected. "And neither can people from Iwabo Pfah. But it turns out, if you weren’t born on either, you can go back and forth at will."

Thirtyx swallowed hard as if physically struggling to ingest this knowledge. The unknown heritage of the royal family was as controversial as it was genius. The twins had been adopted from off-world as infants, in an exchange so secret Thirtyx wasn’t even sure they’d been told where they came from. Grimmary had figured the best way to maintain the balance was to keep the throne out of the hands of any one tribe, as it had been under his own rule. While Rhea and Benn had no blood connections to any species living on Lamiakk, Grimmary somehow had traits reminiscent of all five, plus an amalgamation of other species no one recognized. And he was even more tight-lipped about his own origins than he was about those of his children.

So had he, too, been passing between worlds all this time?