Uncertainty flickered across Reynolds’ face. Melvin leaned forward a little.
“Mostly the Twilight Realm,” he said. “Different lines of elves, shadow-born things, travelers who cross over and stay. Some move back and forth. Some don’t.”
He took another sip of coffee, choosing words that didn’t make it sound stranger than it already was.
“That’s the one people run into the most, but it isn’t the only one. There are crossings tied to older places too. Asgard lines. Alfheim lines. Some of those families have been here so long they pass for native.”
Reynolds stared. “Asgard. Like the stories?”
Melvin gave a small shrug. “Stories come from somewhere.”
Mac nodded once. “Most of what people call mythology is just history that stopped being understood.”
Reynolds leaned back, resetting his sense of what counted as possible. “So elves are real.”
“Not the storybook kind,” Melvin said.
Mac added, “And not something you want to assume you understand.”
Reynolds exhaled. “So how many?”
Mac answered without hesitation. “Council estimates run about one in a hundred worldwide.”
Reynolds blinked. “One in a hundred?”
Melvin nodded. “Some places more than others, but that’s close enough.”
Reynolds did the math in his head and didn’t like where it landed. “That’s tens of millions.”
“About eighty million,” Mac said.
“And nobody notices?”
“People notice things all the time,” Melvin said. “They just don’t believe what they’re seeing.”
Mac nodded slightly. “And when belief gets too close to certainty, there are ways of keeping things quiet.”
Reynolds looked at him. “Ways?”
“Spells,” Melvin said. “Glamours. Memory work.” He shrugged lightly. “Things that blur what people remember. Sometimes they forget entirely. Sometimes the story changes into something easier to accept.”
Mac gave a small nod. “Most of the time people do half the work themselves.” He paused a moment. “And the Council has a few methods you wouldn’t believe.”
Reynolds looked around the room again, and Melvin could almost see the scale of it settling into him, the facility no longer a strange isolated place but part of something much larger.
“So this place,” Reynolds said, “it’s just one of them.”
Melvin nodded. “One of many.”
Reynolds’s eyes came back to them. “And being born this way, that’s most of them?”
Mac gave a short nod. “Most. Turning someone’s regulated for a reason.”
Reynolds nodded slowly. “Because of what happens if it goes wrong.”
Melvin nodded once. “Because of what you saw that first week.”
Reynolds sat with that, then asked, “What about regular people? Humans who know about all this?”
