Fiction Friday Three

So, guardians: you’re probably wondering about that. We’re to be found in every corner of the globe, in every walk of like. Keeping these two worlds as they are means we don’t talk about what we do, though, so you’re unlikely to know if you’ve met one or not. I figure your chances are fifty-fifty. I myself don’t know the exact number, and while we are aware of – and use – more doors than the one we guard we don’t even know how many of those there are, or where all of the ones we do know about are hidden.

Being a guardian isn’t something you ask to do. It isn’t an inherited position either, although there have been crews with siblings or cousins working together. I’ve even met a father and son who were on different crews but worked the same ring of doors. That’s how it works: one crew per door, several doors per ring and all the rings together is the Protective Company of Guardians. Hey, I didn’t name the thing; the company’s been around since, well, ever. No one really even knows when it got a name, story goes that there was a time when the gateways were open and well used and there was no need to keep flesh and blood humans out of their world and nightmares from there out of our world. That sure must have been something.



I became a Guardian the day my brother (also a guardian at the time, although I had no idea) decided that things were better on the other side of the gate and that guarding it wasn’t what he wanted in life. He’d guessed I might be guardian material (hey, I had to have one person I could talk to about my “true” dreams without being laughed at, and he was it, alright?) so before he went through the door for the last time he wrote one note for his crew, and a more detailed one for the ring leader. Yes, that’s where that expression comes from. There are a lot of things in this hidden life that aren’t so hidden.

Seventeen years old, grieving for a brother who had just died, a mess in more ways than one and into my life walks a total stranger who - one nine word sentence – turned my world inside-out and upside down.

“Your dreams are real, and your brother isn’t dead”.