Not So Crazy After All
by Sauron Gorthaur

Sooz coughed, still trying to orient herself after her sudden fall. The air smelt faintly like ash, and there was dusty, barren dirt under her feet.

Wait… dirt? What the-?

She should be standing in the schoolyard! On the grass! She had been a moment ago.

Sooz looked slowly up and around.

Nope, this definitely wasn't the schoolyard. This wasn't even Whiteshields.

With a shudder that shook her from her shoulders to her black, buckled Goth boots, she realized this wasn't even Earth.

Her first shocked thought was along the lines of: By the Nine Netherworlds, it's the Darklands! It's real! It was exactly how Dirk had been describing it to her and Chris for the last few months. There was no way that this bleak, desert-like land couldn't be the realm of the Dark Lord. Not to mention that she'd just suddenly dropped here when moments ago she'd been standing back on Earth with her friends, watching Dirk perform a ritual that she'd assumed was just another one of his weird, little games.

But it hadn't been a game. Not this. And not anything else.

A second thought rushed in to overwhelm the first. He's been telling the truth. All this time, Dirk was always telling the truth.

And none of us believed him.

If the Darklands were real, it meant that Dirk really was a Dark Lord. It meant that all his talk of powers and spells and wizards and vampires was true. Despite the fact that she knew she should be feeling terrified (What if one of those monsters Dirk was always talking about attacked her? How was she ever going to get home? Her mother was so going to ground her for this!), despite the fact that she knew she should probably be panicking, that was not what she felt.

Instead, she could not shake off the sudden itching sensation of guilt.

All this time, he was completely right, and I thought he was crazy!

Of course, she had. They all had. She and Chris had been nicer to him about it than the other kids who called him names or even the adults who scolded him for his strange behavior or treated him like a curious psychiatric specimen. But she'd still thought those things about him, even if she'd also thought the whole "Dark Lord" thing was cool at the same time. Privately, she'd thought – she'd known – he was loony, that everything he said was just in his imagination, that nothing he claimed could really, truly, actually be real.

But it had been.

What must that have been like for him? Knowing you're right but having everyone treat you like you're a crazy little kid? How awful has it been for him all these months? How awful must it be for your own best friends to think you're crazy, too?

There'd been a time when she was little that she'd gone into the woods behind Whiteshields after school to collect a bouquet of flowers for her mother on Mother's Day. She hadn't meant to go so far, but she had to admit she'd gotten a bit lost and maybe even a little scared. In the end, there was no harm done – she'd found her way out, but by that time, her mother had called the police and they were searching for her. They'd taken her back home, and Mrs. Black had given her a thorough scolding. Sooz had tried to explain her intentions, but Mrs. Black hadn't believed her. Don't give me that, Susan Black, she'd said. The only Mother's Day present you gave me today was a near heart-attack because you wanted to play around in the woods. You should know better, young lady. Don't you ever think about consequences? And Sooz had spent the rest of the day in her room with tears dripping down her face.

It hadn't been so much the humiliation of being brought home by the police or even the punishment of being sent to her room that hurt. It had been that her mother hadn't believed her. Her mother had thought she'd done it on purpose, that she'd been a misbehaving, little brat, instead of the truth that she'd just been trying to do something nice.

If it had hurt that much to be disbelieved in one single thing, how much more would it hurt for everyone to believe her whole life was a lie?

And how much more humiliating and hurtful would it be if she had been a Dark Lord?

Oh Dirk, I'm so sorry.

Sooz decided something. She couldn't change anything that had happened in the past, but now she knew beyond a doubt that Dirk had been telling her the truth. She was going to be OK, she was going to get back home to Earth somehow, and then she'd be able to apologize to Dirk. He'd be all smug about it, the way he always was when he was right about something, but she didn't think she'd mind even that. Not if she had the chance to tell him she'd seen the Darklands for herself. Not if she had the chance to heal some of the hurt that her own disbelief must have caused Dirk all this time.

Not if she had the chance to tell him she believed in him now.

But even if she hadn't believed him, she had listened to him. All that information he'd told her about his world was going to come in handy now. When she got back, maybe she'd have an adventure or two to tell him.

I'm going to get home and when I do, I'll never disbelieve you again, Dirk.

Not now that I know you've been telling me the truth.