Can set the suitcases down. Slow, like putting them down too fast might startle the thing.

"Son."

"Yeah."

"That’s a wolf."

"That’s Rury. She lives here." Eren kept scratching behind her ear, mostly because the second he stopped she’d remember she was curious about the new people, and a curious Rury liked to put her nose places. "She cares about the chickens and the eggs and not a lot else. Think of her like a cat that weighs a bit more."

Can looked at the wolf. The wolf, sensing she was being discussed, sat down and looked back at Can with her tongue out.

"Cats don’t weigh as much as a motorbike, Eren."

"The ones in Kadıköy are catching up." He gave Rury a last pat and a small shove on the flank to send her off. She huffed at him, clearly feeling the conversation wasn’t finished, but she trotted back toward the chicken fence anyway.

Can watched her go, then noticed the other one. Fury was lying on the hill above the cow field with his chin on his paws, watching the new humans the way an old man watches a street from a balcony. When he saw he’d been spotted he didn’t move a muscle. Just kept watching.

"There’s two of them."

"Brother and sister." Eren picked up one of the suitcases his father had put down, because his father wasn’t going to carry them while there was a wolf to keep an eye on. "They’re the alarm system. Nothing gets within a kilometer of this place without them knowing about it first. And they keep the animals calm, weirdly. The cows lose their minds over a stray dog but two giant wolves walk past and they don’t even look up."

"That makes no sense."

"Yeah, I said the same thing for about a month." He nodded at the door. "Cows decided the wolves were here first, so the wolves are allowed. Come on, inside."

..

Sofie hadn’t so much as glanced at the wolf. She’d found the garden beds along the south wall and was leaning over one on her cane, studying it like a coroner.

"This drainage is wrong." She didn’t turn around. She knew he’d followed her. "Water sits at this end. You’ll rot every root in here by midsummer."

Twenty minutes. She’s been here twenty minutes and the flowers are already on trial.

"I’ll fix the drainage, grandma."

"You’ll fix it." She crouched, which she shouldn’t have been able to do, and pressed her thumb into the soil and rubbed it against her fingers like she was checking the price of cloth. "Hm. The soil’s not the problem. The slope is. Whoever dug these did it drunk."

That was Toris, actually, but Eren kept that to himself.

He told them after lunch.

Selena had cooked for fifteen because that was what she did when her hands needed somewhere to put the nerves, and she’d been carrying those nerves around all week. The table disappeared under plates. Sun came in sideways through the windows. Across from Eren, his mother and Emily had their heads bent together over a bowl of pickled peppers, deep in a conversation he couldn’t have joined with a translator, the two of them passing the bowl back and forth and tasting and arguing in a friendly way about vinegar. His mother and his wife had found each other inside a kitchen and the speed of it was honestly a little frightening to watch.

He put his fork down and pushed his chair back.

"I need to show you all something. Outside."

He didn’t dress it up. He’d thought of a hundred openings and they all sounded like a man losing his mind, because there’s no calm sentence that prepares a retired bank manager for a hole in the air. So he walked out to the worn patch of grass behind the house, the family trailing after him still half-holding their napkins, and pulled the mana up out of his chest.

The door tore open.

Green forest through it. Birds. Warm air carrying that wet-earth smell and the sweet thing underneath it he’d never managed to name. Aradne in spring, the light coming through softer and greener than Turkish light, pooling out onto the gravel at their feet.

Jane’s eyes rolled white and her knees folded. Emily was already there. She’d seen it coming a second before it happened and caught her mother-in-law under the arms before the woman folded all the way down.

"She’s alright," Emily said, going down with her, easing her onto the grass. "She just needs a minute. Lyra, water."

The ears, Jane had survived. The wolf, she’d survived. A kitchen of tall women butchering her language, she’d survived all morning. A doorway with another planet behind it was simply where her body decided it had done enough for one day and switched her off.

Can hadn’t moved to help. Eren noticed that and understood it. His father wasn’t cold; he just dealt with shock by going very still and very quiet, the way he did the year the branch got robbed and he was the only one in the room not shouting. He took a step toward the door instead. Looked at the forest. Looked at his son. Looked back at the forest. His jaw was working slightly, side to side, which meant numbers were happening behind it that he didn’t like.

"Does this have taxes."

Eren let out a breath that was half a laugh. "No, dad. The door to the other world doesn’t have taxes."

"Everything has taxes." But he was moving. He stopped a careful step short of the opening, lifted his hand and pushed it through, into the warm spring air on the far side, and held it there in another world for a long moment. He brought it back. Turned it over. Looked at his own fingers like he half expected them to come back wrong.

They hadn’t. So he put the hand through again, slower, like he wanted to be sure the first time hadn’t been a trick.

"Your grandfather," he said. Quiet. To his hand, more than to Eren. "He wasn’t crazy."

"He wasn’t crazy, dad."

Can took his hand back. He nodded, once, the way he signed off on a thing he’d decided was true, and then he knelt by his wife, who was already blinking her way back, Emily’s hand flat between her shoulder blades.

Sofie went to the door. She didn’t faint and she didn’t reach for it. She put her face near the opening and looked through with the same flat, pricing stare she’d given the flower bed.

"That dirt’s dark," she said. "Volcanic. Tomatoes would love that."

"Grandma. It’s a door. To another planet."

"I have eyes, boy." She slid the tip of her cane through the threshold, into Aradne soil, drew it back and studied the dirt clinging to the metal. "Your grandfather drew this in his notebook. Pages of it. I burned the whole thing the year he died because the priest and the doctor both told me it was the ravings of a sick man and I was tired and I believed them." She scraped the soil off with a thumbnail and watched it fall. "Hm. Waste of a notebook. When do I get to put something in over there?"

He sent them through one at a time.

Can first, because Can wouldn’t panic, and if the universe decided to do something clever on the far side, Eren wanted his father’s flat calm waiting there and not his mother’s nerves. The clearing was clean; he’d cleared it himself weeks back. The most dangerous thing inside two hundred meters was a mushroom that would give you a bad afternoon.

Jane went second, on Emily’s arm, walking like the ground might not hold. She came out the other side and stopped dead with one hand over her mouth, taking in the blue that was the wrong blue, the trees that ran too tall, the two pale little moons sitting up there in broad daylight. The tears came without a single sound. Eren didn’t try to fix it or talk over it. Some things you just let a person have.

Then Sofie. She stepped through like she was stepping down off a tram. Cane planted, one long breath in. And the breath went deeper than he’d heard her manage in a year, all the way down, the rattle in it gone soft at the edges. The air over here did things to a human body that no doctor in Izmir or Istanbul could put on a chart. He’d given up needing to know how. It just did.

"Warmer," she said. "And thick. Heavy in the chest, but the good kind of heavy."

"It’s full of energy. It is called mana. The whole world runs on it like there is extra electricity on air."

He went down on his heels, scooped a handful of the dark soil and held it up so she could see the faint shine moving in it under the light. "Everything here grows faster, heals faster, gets stronger over time. It’s what changed grandpa. It’s what’s keeping all of this," he tipped his head back toward the farm, the elves, "alive."

The system caught her the moment her shoes pressed into the grass. His own screen lit, not hers, the same way it lit for every elf he’d ever walked across.

Nobody saw the real system on this world without putting a hand on the Totem, and he’d sooner cut that hand off than walk his grandmother up to that burned thing.

[New Entity Detected: Sofie Teya]

[Species: Human (Unawakened)]

And Eren realized he could see and hear system messages of his parents now.

What the hell is going on..?