Realm Keepers 01 - Realm Keepers

time you told us what’s going on,” I said to Greystone.
    He shook his head firmly. “We don’t have time yet. There is one more thing—”
    I stood up, shook my head even more firmly, and folded my arms. “No. Make the time.”
    The old man glowered at me, his fingers twitching on his staff. But I wasn’t having it. I’d been kidnapped to who knows where, thrown into the middle of a battle in which I couldn’t even defend myself, nearly killed, and then thrown through an apparently magical portal to yet another who-knows where. We must have been in the middle of some national park or something, since I didn’t see a city or even buildings around for miles, and I had no idea how we were supposed to get home. My glare back at Greystone was just as firm as his, and twice as nasty.
    Finally he broke the staring contest, looked uneasily at the horizon, and reached into his robe. “Very well. Make the time, you say?”
    He produced a crystal globe. It was nearly see-through, but had a purple tinge and twisted the image you saw through it due to its shape. It was small, only a couple of inches wide. Greystone dropped it on the grass, then smashed it to pieces with his staff.
    There was a fwoomp noise, like someone had thrown a blanket across a pair of speakers. Suddenly, the air around us was shimmering. Greystone, the others and I were inside the shimmer, but looking off to my right I saw that Cara and her men were not. They were outside our globe, and they were frozen in place. At first I thought they were holding still, until I realized one of the men was mid-step and couldn’t possibly hold that position.
    “Whoah,” said Raven beside me. “What did you do?”
    Greystone plopped down, sitting as though on an invisible chair, ripped a tobacco pipe from his pocket and lit it with a snap of his fingers. “I made the time.”

With time stopped all around us, I had the chance to really look at our surroundings for the first time. We were on a hill in the middle of nowhere. There was a stone platform on the top of the hill, with a low roof held up by marble columns. On one side of the platform, six stone pillars not unlike the ones with the colored stones from earlier were arranged in a row.
    Far off in the distance—I thought it might be south, since the sun was setting to my right—there was a range of mountains, their snow-capped peaks tickling the sky. In the opposite direction, there was a column of black smoke rising from beyond the horizon. If I had to guess, I would have bet that smoke was from the battle we’d just teleported away from. If I was right about my directions, then far to the east of us there was a great forest that looked like it had to stretch for hundreds of miles, and to the west, it was only grasslands until a faint glint on the far horizon that might have been the ocean, or just a really, really big lake. The only sign of life that I could see were birds wheeling far above us in the sky. They, like Cara and her soldiers, were frozen in place.
    “Dude, if you can do this,” Calvin said, gesturing to the bubble of time that surrounded us, “Why don’t you just do it all the time? Stopping time is like the best super power ever. You can get out of anything. You could have won the whole battle back there, just stop everything, run up and down and taken everyone out.”
    Greystone’s eyes grew wide with shock as he coughed out a cloud of smoke from his pipe. “Oh my goodness, you’re right! I never, ever thought about that in all of my nine hundred years of being a wizard.”
    “You’re nine hundred years old?” I asked, flabbergasted.
    “Older,” he said. “I’ve just been a wizard for nine hundred years. Before that, I was a bookkeeper.”
    “Wow, you look amazing,” said Blade. “I mean, before, I thought you looked terrible, but considering your age and all…” I shot Blade a nasty look. How could he be making jokes right now? This wasn’t some game; we’d just seen people killing and being killed. Calvin, I kind of understood. This was his dream world, and he probably still didn’t even really believe it was all real. But I did. I still felt the sting on my shoulder where that creature had touched me—the same sting I was sure Blade was suffering from his blackened, cracked knuckles.
    Greystone looked at me and pointed at Blade again. “I have decided that I will be ignoring this one.” He turned to Calvin once again. “And as to your half-witted