The Traveler stepped through the door in one world and stepped out of it into another. The cheerful tea shop he had been leaving became a bright convenience store that he entered. The Asian-themed decor dissolved into walls of chilled glass doors beaded with condensation and rows of shelves loaded with junk food and necessities. The quiet patrons enjoying morning cups of white tea, green tea, chai and more exotic blends morphed into busy commuters who didn’t smile or look at each other, who put travel lids on their cups of coffee and left as quickly as they could.

One of the cashiers behind the counter looked up as he walked in. “Good morning,” she said, then shifted her attention back to the man across from her.

The Traveler looked at the woman. Her black hair no longer framed her face or bounced as she moved. In this world, she kept it pulled back in a loose ponytail under a ballcap that sported the convenience store’s logo. He also knew that, unlike her counterpart in the other world, this woman didn’t really care if he had a good morning. She only wanted him to know she had seen him enter the store, and would notice if he tried to steal anything.

“That’ll be eight fifty-nine,” the woman told the man at the front of the check out line.

The Traveler sighed. Here? Again?

Not caring if they thought he was stealing something, the Traveler turned around and walked out of the store again. The Way he had come through seconds before was gone already, so he didn’t return to the tea shop. Instead, he stepped out into the hot sun of the suburban summer.

Cars pulled into narrow parking spots or beside a line of pumps. People jumped out of the cars, walked past him into the store or pushed plastic cards into the pumps. The smells of gasoline and exhaust mixed with deep fried donuts and scrambled eggs and wave after wave of colognes and perfumes punctuated by blasts of air conditioning as the doors behind him opened and closed.

The Traveler’s nose stung and his eyes watered under the assault of morning in the modern world.

Casting about with his mind, the Traveler felt for the subtle indications of the nearest Way.

“Cut the daydreaming, buddy,” a man’s voice said just before someone pushed the Traveler out of the way. “I’m already late,” the man continued as he walked away.

The Traveler moved down the sidewalk in front of the convenience store, still trying to find a Way. A Way out.

How many worlds had he seen? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? He didn’t remember them all. Their infinite variety of people, cultures, architecture, conveyances, technologies and magics thrilled him, entertained him. Such worlds were why he Traveled, why he had left–wherever he had left–in the first place. Those worlds and their people had called to him and he taken the first step.

Through thousands of visits, sojourns, passings through, he had never seen the same world twice. Some worlds he hated to leave. Some he had stayed in for years, exploring their wonders, but always he had moved on, moved forward, never back.

He could think of five hundred worlds right now that he wouldn’t mind seeing again.

But this was the world, this mashed-together pastiche of a world with its multitude of conflicting technologies, its weakening pulse of magic, its confused, unhappy people rushing through their lives, this world he kept stepping into. Stepping in.

The first few times, he hadn’t noticed. Not right away. There had been some tugging familiarities, a sense of having been there before. Still, there had been an innocence then, beauties to behold in both man and nature.

He had been surprised when he finally realized he had been here before. He couldn’t remember how long he had been a Traveler, but he knew that he had never, intentionally or unintentionally, re-visited any world. And yet, here he was.

Still, one Traveler could never see all there was to see of any world, no matter how long he stayed. So he had explored this world again. And then again. And then again.

And again.

He didn’t know how many times he had been here. One Traveler could never see all there was to see of any world, but he had seen enough of this world. More than enough. He didn’t want to be here. Maybe it scared him. He wasn’t sure. He just knew that there was something wrong here and he didn’t want to be here.

So he looked for the nearest Way, any Way, just so long as it would take him out of here.

He found the Way, meaningless miles distant, and in an instant he stood before it.

He stood in the middle of a busy sidewalk now, pedestrians walking around him and past him in two directions. Despite having appeared out of nowhere, into a press of hundreds of people, no one seemed to notice him, except to jostle him out of the way, or to damn him and otherwise curse him in a strangely impersonal manner. They were in too much of a hurry to waste more than the smallest amounts of either their curiosity or their wrath on him.

The Traveler spotted the Way. It took up half of the doorway up to an apartment above a storefront. He took his first step across the heavy foot traffic and the whole world seemed to stop in its tracks.

She was walking towards him, or maybe flowing was a better word, though like the rest of the world she seemed paused in mid-step. Her long hair created a nimbus around her face and body, like visible electricity.

Their eyes met. She saw him. He saw her see him.

If his heart hadn’t already been between beats, it might have stopped altogether. He smiled before he knew what he was doing. He thought he saw a smile begin to form on her lips, but with the whole world in slow motion, he couldn’t be sure.

Then the world kicked into full speed once more. He felt an odd shock through the concrete sidewalk. He didn’t have time to look around, though, to see what it was, not even to see the woman again–he was surprised to discover that he wanted to see her again–before he had stepped through the Way.

His surroundings changed.
He had been in a large city before, with skyscrapers making steel and concrete canyons out of the sidewalks and streets between them. He stood on a sidewalk again, beside a busy street, and he was still in an urban area, a city of some size, but much less developed.

And, frustratingly, in the same world that he was trying to leave.

“Damn it,” he said to no one, then cast about for another Way.

He blinked, startled for the second time in as many seconds, as he realized he was looking at a Way already. This Way overlayed a pane of glass, a store’s display. The bright daylight reflected the clear sky and a stunted skyline of multistory office buildings and antennas, preventing the Traveler from seeing inside.

As he looked into the Way, the Traveler saw a dragon, dark red scales glittering like precious gems, its leather-like wings spread wide as it clawed at the air for elevation, on its back a figure in flowing white robes. Other dragons followed the first, a rainbow of dangerous reptilian colors, all with people mounted on their backs, at the point where the powerful shoulders became long sinewy necks.

The Traveler smiled. Any world with such beauty …

His smile faltered as the lead dragon opened its mouth, setting free a firestorm that engulfed the top of one of the office buildings. The Traveler spun around.

He hadn’t been looking through the Way. He had still been seeing the reflection in the window.

The dragons circled the collection of office buildings, swooping down to unleash a variety of hells: fire and ice and lightning and gases. On their backs, the mounted figures swung staves and struck out with magics of their own, energies that the Traveler didn’t immediately recognize. Windows shattered, steel melted, concrete burned. Roars and screams drifted on the wind with the smoke.

Other people stood near the Traveler, also staring. Cars in the streets stopped, drivers getting out to see what was happening. Nearby a storm siren sounded.

The Traveler realized his mouth hung open. He snapped it closed, hard enough to hurt.

Dragons didn’t belong here. Not in this world. And these dragons …

Had he seen these dragons before? Maybe the huge lead dragon? Impossible.

He and the other spectators saw the fighter planes pass overhead an instant before the sonic booms of their engines drowned out all other sound.

“No!” the Traveler shouted as the first missiles exploded against the flanks of a dragon, a pretty green. Other missile trails arched across the sky, coming from all directions now.

The Traveler turned away from the carnage. He couldn’t watch. “Dragons don’t belong here,” he whispered, his throat clenched as tight as fists. And he didn’t belong here either. But he could–

What?

What could he do?

There was nothing he could do.

The Way still stood in front of him, but it no longer showed him the dragons. Smoke and fire roiled in the reflection now. The Traveler stepped through the Way, felt it close behind him.

He stood in a park now, nature tamed and contained within the bounds of a shining city. The smells of the world he had left still hovered around the Traveler. He willed a breeze to wrap itself around him, to clean up the fumes.

Men and women and children and a surprisingly wide variety of small animals talked and laughed and played around a fountain nearby. He moved to an unoccupied bench near the fountain and sat down.

He looked around him, took in a deep breath and let it out slow. He could smell this new world now. Smells of grass and flowers and small animals and man–many, many men and women and children, all living within the city. Clean smells, dirty smells, organic smells, new smells.

In some ways, this world resembled the one he had just left. But here it seemed right, not broken. Whatever threat that other world represented to him, he was safe from it here. At least for a while.

He tried not to worry that the next Way might take him back there.

A trio of small furry creatures, blue and green and white, little bundles of back legs, long ears and wiggling noses, bounded up to him. One of them leaped into his lap while the other two hung back.

The Traveler laughed. The blue creature in his lap flexed its back legs and shot almost straight up and over his head. The other two creatures followed it. He wondered what the creatures were called.

This was a new world, a world he had never visited before. This was why he Traveled.