AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the longest chapter I have ever written, and it has taken me a long time to write it. It is also the last chapter, and I hope you like it. If not, that's your problem. There is another story that I have been wanting to write for about a month now, but I promised myself that I would finish this one first. My new story is called Graymere. The only problem is that it's not technically a fanfiction because I used original characters. I might submit it to Inkitt. I might alter it a bit and post it here. We'll see. First I have to write it. Also, you probably already know this, but nothing after the season 4 finale is canon in my story. So all that season 5 stuff, it never happened.

The first thing you need to know is that there are two worlds. What you know as your world, Earth, and my home. Just like your world, my world has many names, but I will refer to it as Gael. Earth and Gael are similar enough that they are often referred to as twins. Perhaps their similarity allows easy travel between the two. More likely, the easy travel causes the similarity. Whatever the case, travel between the two is remarkably simple for my sister and me, and possible for even simple humans such as yourself.

Each world has its own rules. What is only fiction in your world exists in mine. Fiction. Only Earth would devise a word to describe both the wondrous world of impossibility and a cruel lie.

Many things in Gael you would describe as fiction. What you call magic being the foremost of them. Magic. That's from Gael. It's a way of accepting what we cannot understand. It doesn't make sense on Earth, I understand. You have your science. But whether magic is primitive science or whether science is primitive magic is a topic for debate.

Each world has its own advantages. Perhaps what is most important is not Gael or Earth, but the link between them.

Not that there is a big shiny portal in the sky or anything. But travel is possible. I spent a lot of time in your world and I learned that, on Earth, travel is quite easy for young children. Imagination. Pretend. Minds traveling between worlds. Sometimes beyond both Earth and Gael (but I won't go into that right now). When you mature, you are forced to give up on stories (or face an asylum). Your imagination begins to fade (slowly at first) the moment you accept the word impossible. Soon you reach a point where travel between worlds only happens while you are asleep.

Even then, the memory of your journey fades quickly when faced with the rationality of Earth.

The memories live in your subconscious. Sometimes they come back, during times when they would be accepted without tearing down the constructed rules of your reality. Fiction. Imagination. What is literature but a window to another world? What is a story but a memory?

Early on, in Gael, a queen cast a curse, transporting people not only to Earth, but to many years in the future. You already know that. The area in Gael known as the Enchanted Forest has seen many travelers from Earth over the years. Its inhabitants have been immortalized in Earth stories, and you may be familiar with many of them.

You probably have some questions.

First, who am I?

You might call me child that never grew up. Who never accepted the word "impossible." You might call me a scientist who spent a good portion of his immortal life researching travel between worlds. You might even call me a sorcerer. My life is certainly filled with many things that your mind will only accept as magic.

Second, what happened to all of the children at my school?

Back in my homeland on Gael, I befriended a marvelous young boy. He was called Wart, but his name was Arthur Pendragon. His heart was kind and I believed that I could make him like me, a true believer and traveler between worlds. I loved him. I grew distracted by Nimue and he was left with no one to guide him, no one to warn him about his half-sister Morgause's plots or the closeness growing between his best friend Lancelot and his wife Guinevere. I didn't see him again, but he saw me.

How does that work exactly? Well, I am not just a traveler between Gael and Earth. I also travel through time. (One of my favorite Earth writers T. H. White believed incorrectly that I was aging backwards. Apart from that, his story is pretty accurate, though he did have some help from me. Few Earth stories exist in Gael, but I brought that book, among my other favorite stories to my world.) It was a younger version of myself that met with Arthur before he died. I hardly knew him then. I wish I savored that moment more.

We were promised that Arthur would come again. For a long time, I thought the son of the evil queen and Snow White's daughter was the boy I was looking for. Henry Mills believed in these stories more fiercely than many other Earth children. But when surrounded by characters, how could he not? I wanted to get close to him while he was on Earth, but my sister wouldn't let me. She had been playing along with the queen's curse, pretending to be a mindwiped nun, but she retained her power. She could easily travel back to Gael, but she stayed to protect and watch over the others. She kept me from entering the town, and I could only watch from afar.

She promised that she would watch over the boy for me, but was afraid that I would corrupt him. Me!? Saying that we don't always see eye to eye would be the understatement of the century, but we work together when necessity demands it.

She always believed in helping those she deemed "innocent." I warned her about the rules a time traveler must obey. She never listened to me. She always seemed to help those in need.

"I'm not you," she had said to me. "I can't just stand by and watch innocent people suffer."

"There is no such thing as an innocent person. It is our duty as travelers to maintain the proper order of things," I reminded her.

"And who decides what is proper?" She asked. "Is suffering proper? I denying help to those in need proper?"

"All that lives must die, passing from nature into eternity," I quoted. "Everything suffers. We should leave well enough alone."

"You are such a hypocrite!" She never yelled. "What about Art? How can you help that boy and then deny me the same right?"

I had no answer. I loved Art. No. Love. He's not gone.

"Everything that lives must die," she quoted back to me.

No, I thought. Not him. Never him.

"Sounds a whole lot crueler now, doesn't it?" she asked.

I fought back a tear, knowing she had won. I gave in.

I mentioned before that my sister and I can work together. Our combined powers can accomplish amazing things. The world we created isn't necessarily an afterlife, but close to it. My sister nearly made herself into a goddess, rewarding the worthy and punishing the wicked in our new land.

It's not a new land exactly. I told you that Storybrooke existed on Earth in the future relative to the enchanted forest. Many Earth stories come from Gael's distant past, for good reason. What you don't know it that there was a war in Gael. A great war. So many stories about the apocalypse were based on the war. So many were killed, but it was a fixed point in time, and for once, my sister and I were powerless to stop it. It was horrible, but I accepted it. She didn't.

Not much survived the war. We were left with an empty world. A new land. We set up borders, creating our very own Storybrooke. We drew in people from different points in their life (I didn't reverse anyone's death. I just suspended the inevitable.). From there, I wanted to make them young children, but the spell only went so far. Their memories were gone, of course. Travel between worlds does that to people, as I explained before, about the dreams. We may have helped with the memory erase. My sister didn't want them left with anything that might cause them unnecessary pain.

My sister could never resist helping children. It was probably as penance, because she abandoned her own child. She brought him here to, to give him a chance now that he was no longer the dark one.

Henry saw my world as a curse. My sister saw it as a blessing, perhaps even a paradise. I saw it as an experiment, an opportunity to study the responses of my subjects when faced with different obstacles and stimuli.

I prefer watching my subjects to interacting with them. I have spoken to very few, only when it was necessary. Prentiss acted as my vice principal. He dealt with my students and teachers.

When Henry got all riled up about wanting to find out the truth, I had to erase his memories. He would ruin not only the experiment but my sister's paradise. That was the only time I interfered directly.

The nature of the spell draws in important characters, those written about in Earth legends and fables. Because of my own involvement in Arthur's life and timeline, I was not able to bring him here. I had hoped that I would be able to create something like him, or perhaps draw in his prophesied reincarnation. It's not Henry.


I knew what the evil queen and Rumpelstiltskin were up to, distracting me with a destructive senior prank so that they could break into my office and steal the dark one's dagger. Prentiss was in for a shock when they tied him up, though (I had hoped he would put up more of a fight). I added an extra challenge by creating a barrier spell that denied them both access, and they countered with the knave of hearts. They impressed me.

It is the real dagger. I wondered what they would do with it, now that they had it. I wonder what they planned to do, before discovering that Emma was the new dark one.

Now the two of them simply stand before me with the weapon drawn, as if spilling my blood would end what they call a "horrible curse."

"Do you really believe you can harm me with that?" I asked, playing the part of the villain they expected me to be. "I doubt that wavey knife holds as much power as you think it does."

"Nice try, sorcerer," Rumpelstiltskin replied. "This is the dark one's dagger."

"And you are not the dark one," I reminded him. My nephew glared at me with hatred, and I knew that discovery had been hard for him. Without his power, the deal making imp was just a younger version of the crippled old man with a silly name.

"No," came a voice from behind me. Emma Swan, making a dramatic entrance. "But I am." She grabbed the dagger away from him and turned to face me. Her blonde hair glistened in the moonlight and I found myself staring at it with curiosity. This is the girl who was born on Gael but grew up on Earth, who fancies herself a savior because she broke the queen's curse with a true love's kiss.

Her left hand held the dagger as her right hand moved towards her chest. Regina screamed and tried to rush towards her dear friend, but I held up my hand and froze the queen, her wide eyes still filled with terror and her mouth miming a scream. Emma's face contorted with pain as she pulled out her own heart with a defiant squish.

It takes a lot to surprise me, but that was one of the few moments in my life that I did not anticipate.

Emma's heart was neither the pure red of an innocent child, nor the filthy black of a dark one. It was even a mixture of the two.

Her heart glowed with golden light the color of her hair, and in that moment, I realized why I was staring at her hair earlier. Why it had been so important to me that her fake blonde hair be made real in my world.

I released the queen and she rushed forward, grabbing Arthur's heart and trying to push it back into Emma's chest. It didn't work. The force knocked Emma to the ground and Regina knelt over her, tears in her eyes as she tried in vain to put Emma's heart back.

Rumpelstiltskin watched the scene in confusion. To him, it looked like Regina was giving the other girl some strange version of CPR. My sister appeared and placed her hand on the boy's shoulder. She knocked him out with a wave of her hand and cradled him in her arms.

"I'm sorry," she mouthed to me, before the two of them disappeared.

Finally Emma placed her hands on Regina's shoulders and told her that everything was going to be fine, that they would break this curse and all return home.

"Not without you," Regina was able to choke through sobs. The sight nearly brought tears to my own eyes.

Emma smiled at Regina and stood up. She gripped Regina's hand which held Arthur's heart, raising the dagger to stab it, and I did the only thing I could think to do.

"Wait!" I yelled, in the guise of Henry. Both of his moms turned to look at me.

Emma dropped the dagger in shock, and I ran to her.

"Mom, you don't have to do this." I allowed myself to cry. I embraced my friend and kicked the dagger away with my foot.

Regina doubted that I was the real Henry. She wondered what happened to the sorcerer, but she didn't voice her suspicion out loud. Emma was safe, and that was what mattered. My sister once asked me why I changed Regina's memory of Daniel and made Robin a female. I thought it was an interesting variable to throw into the mix. I didn't actually change her sexuality, just her memories of Daniel. I wanted to see if how she perceived her emotions and attraction would have any effect on them. I wanted to see if she would fall for a female Robin. I did not anticipate her feelings for Snow White's daughter.

I wanted to snap my fingers and cause both of them to fall unconscious so that I could wipe their memories and replace Arthur's heart, but I wasn't sure if my powers would work on the dark one. It took both my sister and me to erase her memories the first time, and now my sister was gone. She would be back eventually, and I just had to stall until then. I had to convince Emma that I was her son, and that there was another way to end the curse without sacrificing herself. It would be easy as long as Emma didn't start to remember her past. Regina would help me, though. Anything to keep Emma alive.

"I'm doing this for you," she said, touching the hand that once held the dagger to my cheek. Her other hand still gripped the heart in Regina's hand. "This is the only way to break the curse."

"No," I commanded, with the all the force the twelve year old boy could muster. "It isn't." I had to talk her down from the ledge. "I'll get the book. It will tell us what to do." My voice was laced with magic and I saw her grip loosen as she blinked in confusion.

"You're not…" her voice trailed off and she glanced around the room. "Where's the sorcerer?"

I snapped my fingers, but only managed to knock out Regina, who let go of the heart as she fell to the floor unconscious. Emma looked at me and her grip tightened.

"Sweetheart," I tried, in the guise of Snow White. "Don't hurt yourself."

"You're not my mother!" She screamed. I tried again and again to knock her out, but her grip only tightened more and she fell to her knees in pain.

I locked eyes with my sister, who had finally decided to show up, and knocked out Emma Swan. I picked up the golden heart and held it out to my sister.

"Is that…" she didn't need to finish the question.

"You knew, didn't you?"

"I-" she tried to finish, but I cut her off.

"It wasn't just Henry that you were keeping me away from."

"I'm sorry, but-" I didn't hear what she said next, because I waved my hand and vanished, taking the heart with me. I needed to keep it safe, and I was the only one I could trust to do that.

And then I went back to Earth, leaving my sister to clean up the mess.