Gabe studied Victoria for the second time in several minutes. There was something strange in her voice, and the normal brightness in her eyes was… off, somehow.
He opened his mouth to question her about it, but a cry of alarm brought both of their heads whipping around towards the children.
The triplets, so far as he could tell, had been helping each other clean and dry off after their play. Lily had been brushing the water away, Roen removing the dirt and mud, and Ivan had brightened the light and warmth around them to ward off a chill and do the last of the drying.
But now, between the three of them, a blemish in reality hovered, just about waist height.
They all had stepped back with murmurs of alarm. The adults, including the guards, rushed over to put themselves between the royal children and the potential danger.
Victoria grabbed Lily, each of the two guards grabbed one of the boys, and Gabriel put his arm on Victoria's to put both females behind him.
"What is it?" She asked in a much calmer voice than he expected.
It was colorful, with bright white edges, and about the breadth of his spread hand. It appeared like a flat, vertical disk, but looked the same shape from all angles. It was not an entirely unfamiliar sight to him.
"A portal." He replied flatly, realizing too late that maybe he should have kept that information to himself.
He had been to more worlds than most anyone he knew that wasn't Cetoan, and they traveled by Leviathan, not by portal. He stepped closer, squinting into the light.
He was thankful it wasn't darkness. Perhaps…
"Gwen?" He asked aloud.
"Step back!" Came a voice from within the disk. "Do not touch it!"
Gabriel jumped backwards, ushering Victoria and Lily back further as he did. The guards also pushed the boys further away, blocking their view.
That earned a brief frown from Gabriel. It reminded him of when Finn tried to block his view of the pantry they'd been hiding in during the war…
The sight was eerily similar, except this one was much smaller and didn't flicker between sights as that one had. It was steady.
"Gwen, what is it? Why should I not touch the portal?" He called.
Silence met his ears. The disk began to warp and strobe, and then dissipated as if it had never been.
Gabriel blinked several times, wondering briefly if he'd imagined the whole thing. But the way Victoria gripped his arm told him that she very clearly saw it, too.
He put his hand over hers. "It's all right now, I think." He assured her. She loosened her grasp, and he felt a strange sense of loss.
"Are you sure?"
"Not entirely. That was strange, wasn't it?" He asked.
"Was that one of the anomalies Mama and Papa talk about when they think we're not listening?" Ivan asked.
The adults all glanced at each other awkwardly.
"It does match what we've heard about them. This is the first one I've seen," Victoria said. The children began to chatter with each other about the discovery
"We've guessed from the reports that they could be small portals," Gabriel murmured. "I suppose I can confirm that now."
"How had nobody known for sure? The Rhone and Ceto both have used portals before," Victoria whispered back.
"For the Cetoans, I don't know. About the Rhone… it looked different than the portals into the Darkness. Those are black and shadowy, and then coming back to our world is so bright that you can't even directly look at it. I wouldn't blame them for not knowing what it was." He shrugged.
"Then how do you?" Victoria pressed.
He hesitated. For all the years they'd known each other, he'd never shared some parts of his past.
"Because I've been somewhere else." He finally said.
"--Why did you shift the ground like that, Roen? I almost tripped!" Lily was complaining.
"I didn't!" He was protesting.
"Yes, you did! Right before the thing showed up! I nearly fell over!" Ivan joined his sister's side of the argument.
Victoria clapped her hands until the arguing ceased. "Let's go back home. Your parents will want to know about all this."
Lily stuck her tongue out at Roen in a childish display, to which Roen rolled his eyes. The lady was shooting Gabriel a significant look to let him know their conversation wasn't over, and how dare he keep something like that from her!
He sighed, and ushered the children along.
The guards, though they tried to retain emotionless appearances, looked relieved to be headed back into the city. The legend had grown strong about how Klain was protected from harmful magic, and many people trusted in that reputation.
Gabriel didn't. Hadn't the last war been proof enough? But people wanted to believe they were safe, even if they weren't.
He remembered the only places he'd ever felt truly safe: Firstly, his childhood home, until he'd watched it burn to the ground with watering eyes while wolves snapped at his heels. Secondly, Faeland.
The latter was as safe as any place in all the worlds could be, in his opinion. The rest he'd gotten there, even after such a traumatic experience as he'd been through… he wished he could grasp such sleep again.
Glorious, and peaceful, the likes of which he hadn't known since. His days there, missing the first War entirely, were something he called to mind when worried or stressed. His childlike trust in the Fae had been absolute.
It had eroded somewhat over the last years. He was grown. No longer a helpless child, he should be able to take care of himself. And yet, as soon as Gwen's voice had come through the portal, he'd felt small again.
"Are you all right? You're brooding," Victoria whispered as the children and guards walked a little ahead of them back towards the city.
"I don't brood." One corner of his mouth tilted up.
"Sure you do! You used to all the time. Blamed it on poor sleep or bad dreams. No excuse now. So what's the problem you're mulling over?" Her voice was light even though her topic was heavier than she knew.
"It's not anything you need to carry." He said, and she cut her eyes over at him.
"Ah yes, the go-to phrase for adults telling us something was too mature for us to know about. I'm almost eighteen now, Gabriel. You needn't hide anything from me. You never needed to," Her voice softened at the end.
"You were the one who always told me not to grow up too quickly, and enjoy being a child," He said, "Won't you take your own advice?"
"That advice is for children," She replied calmly. "Which we were. We aren't anymore, are we?"
Gabriel chuckled at the way she seamlessly grouped them together so that he couldn't continue claiming that she was a child and he wasn't. Which was fair; he was barely a year older than she was.
"No, we're not children anymore," He conceded.
"No, we're brooding adults now." She affected a somber expression. "I'll have to practice. My grumpy face is a little rusty."
He laughed as she did a mediocre impression of how she viewed his darkened mood. She'd hunched her shoulders slightly, and pulled her eyebrows down as she formed her mouth into an angry frown. She darted her eyes around to glare at random things in their way.
"I'll be more cheerful if you'll stop doing that," He offered.
"I don't need you to be more cheerful. Be yourself," She straightened her shoulders and brightened. "But I would like to know what's bothering you. Letting it out might make you feel a little lighter. For a moment you had that look that you had when we were little. Like you carried the world on your shoulders."
Gabriel eyed his too-perceptive friend.
"Only one?" He joked.
"How many do you carry, then?" She maintained a thoughtful tone.
"Not the worlds, only my own experiences in them." He finally answered honestly.
"Which you'll tell me about later, when the children aren't around to interrupt." She stated this as fact, and he sighed.
"I'm not so sure about that." He said. He was tempted to agree just to placate her for now, but he didn't want to lie.
"I am." She said. "I'm an excellent listener, and it's high time you talked about what you've been carrying alone for far too long."
He considered her words. He'd talked a lot with Gwen in Faeland while he was there. It had helped considerably at the time, though once back in his own world he still had trouble. Particularly at night. For longer than he would admit, he slept with a lamp or candle lit.
His father had never commented on how quickly he used up candles. Perhaps he suspected how hard a toll being in the Darkness took on his son while he was away being forced into war.
Gabriel eyed Victoria, who had never given up what small secrets he'd given her over the years, and had occasionally shared tidbits of her difficult life in the orphanage. Perhaps she would make a decent confidant.