Chapter 98: The Threshold Between Worlds

　　The cold, spectral woods of Tirisfal Glades and the sterile, bright hospital room existed in a dizzying, overlapping dance. Kaelen was the still point at their center, his consciousness a raft tossed between two shores. The rhythmic beep of the heart monitor became the drumbeat of a Horde war party; the cool touch of a washcloth was the splash of a mountain stream. His father’s low, steady murmurs wove themselves into the whispered lore of a tauren elder.

　　He was no longer walking the path of the chronicler. He was lying in a bed, and the journey was collapsing inward. The vast, open landscapes of Kalimdor compressed into fleeting, vivid images projected against the backs of his eyelids. The Barrens’ sun was the fever burning in his veins. The chill of Winterspring was the ice pack on his forehead.

　　A new sensation began to pierce the chaos—a hand holding his. It was small, its grip firm and warm. It was his younger sister’s. She was talking to him, her voice a determined, youthful counterpoint to his parents’ weary hope. She wasn’t reciting ancient prophecies or battle strategies; she was telling him about her day at school, about a funny video she’d seen, about the dog that kept waiting for him by the front door.

　　These simple, mundane details were alien in the epic tapestry of his dream. They were anchors, small, heavy weights of reality that slowly dragged him back from the brink. The fate of Azeroth began to feel like a story he had been reading, engrossing and real, but a story nonetheless. The hand in his was the truth.

　　He tried to squeeze back. The effort was Herculean, a command sent from a brain re-learning its connection to a body. A faint, almost imperceptible twitch of his finger.

　　A sharp, joyful gasp from his sister. "Mom! Dad! He moved his hand!"

　　The sound of her voice, so close and real, shattered the image of a kaldorei Sentinel standing watch. The sterile smell of antiseptic overpowered the scent of pine and damp earth. The weight of the dream began to lift, not with a sudden snap, but like a fog slowly burning away under a rising sun.

　　He could feel the IV needle in his arm, the stiff sheets, the dull, persistent ache that was his own, true body. The chronicle of Azeroth was receding, its colors fading, its sounds growing distant. It was no longer a world he inhabited, but a memory of a place he had visited in the deepest recesses of his mind. The grief of leaving it was tempered by the dawning recognition of the love that surrounded him, a love more real and powerful than any magic he had witnessed.

　　He was on the threshold. The epic was giving way to the ordinary. The hero’s journey was ending, and the boy’s recovery was beginning. He took a slow, shallow breath—his own breath, in a real room—and hovered there, poised between the dream and the waking world.