Although she wore light clothes, the burning sun of the desert realm of Krokotopia shone upon twelve-year-old Emmaline Insbrooke’s shoulders as heavy as if she were wearing long sleeves. She held onto her mother’s hand. “Do you really have to go with Father?”

“Of course,” her mother, Cassidy Rainwhisper replied gently. “Where we are going is dangerous, and Father may need my magic to help him be safe. The creatures there are magical and it is hard to defeat a magic creature when you don’t have the power.”

“Don’t worry, Em,” James Insbrooke assured her. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

She watched as their ship floated away into the vastness of the Spiral, blown by an invisible wind, perhaps even one created by her mother, a powerful Storm Wizard. Emmaline would stay at an inn until they returned, but who knew when that would happen. At the very least the lizard-like Manders, the native race of Krokotopia, would keep her for as long as needed. Thier hospitality never ended, it often seemed to some. She would be safe in their scaled hands until the Insbrookes returned from their voyage with some cache of treasures for her father’s native realm, Marleybone – or so everyone thought.

A month passed. Then two. Their absence stretched to almost six months; many of her hosts began to worry. Then, disaster struck. A team of Marleybonian archeologists accidentaly awakened the Kroks, the former rulers of Krokotopia. Crocodilian in look, cruel in nature, and possessing very little compassion, they quickly retook Krokotopia and enslaved the peaceful Manders. The bright sun became a little darker in the eyes of it’s inhabitants as an age of freedom ended.

Here, my friends, is where the tale diverges, and the path of Emmaline Insbrooke splits in two very different ways. In one, she takes up the mantle of responsibility that her mother was offered many years before. In the other, however, she begins the spiral into the clutches of darker motives. A single difference in fate determined the paths of two realities. I will begin with the first.