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Chapter Text

“The sky is so bright now at night.”

Lirin scanned the thin paper, other hand cradling the amber-fang egg, rubbing its smooth surface as she read. Her handwriting got spidery and weird at the end of each of her lives; it was always a bit difficult to read.

“It reminds me that I am drawing near to the end. The light of the fires reflected against the clouds. I could put them all out, but it wouldn’t do much good; they would only be relit, brighter and stronger than before. My army is doomed.”

Yes, that sounded like her, all right.

“Tomorrow I will fight. Tomorrow I will die. But it’s alright. I’ll be back before too long. I only hope that my army can flee before they are slaughtered by the Crown’s forces. They should not suffer for my failures.”

She vaguely remembered this; she remembered standing at the railing of one of the siege towers, hood up to keep the rain off of her journal, looking out over the fires of the Crown’s army. She remembered what had happened the next day; she remembered venturing out, stripped of her artifacts and bearing only her magic, and being shot out of the sky by a single arrow. She remembered cracking to the ground and feeling her bones break; she remembered feeling herself trampled to nothing by horses, she remembered lightning striking the ground, and she remembered being burned while barely alive in a message to other magic-users.

She remembered.

Lirin sighed. “Not helpful,” she murmured, folding the paper and slipping it back into the disintegrating journal.

This didn’t show her where Brindlethorn was. And she couldn’t do anything until she had her stash back.

Well, it wasn’t impossible to work… but it was difficult. She needed her resources.

No matter. Brindlethorn wasn’t even mentioned in this passage. It was useless, and she had dragged herself halfway across the mountain range to find it. Now she was stuck near a town in the middle of the forest with no better ideas of how to find her greatest ally and asset.

“Damn.”

She slipped the journal into her bag and stood, gently kicking the lid of the wooden chest. It clunked shut and she knocked dirt over it. There was nothing in it now – the journal and some other artifacts had been the only contents - but it could be useful if she failed in this life and had to try again. She locked the chest and smoothed some dirt over its wooden top.

Very well. Perhaps… perhaps… hmm. If she hadn’t written down the secrets she had used to hide Brindlethorn here… where would they be?

Perplexed, Lirin stood and glanced around. She had known where this chest was – before she had died last, she had directed one of her followers to take the journal and hide it – but beyond this… she didn’t know.

Normally, she could feel Brindlethorn’s presence; the dragon usually began to call to her as she regained her memories. But this time, she had remembered herself and her past before Brindlethorn’s call had come.

And it was still missing. For some reason, Brindlethorn’s call was gone.

She needed Brindlethorn, damn it.

Frustrated, Lirin turned and headed down the slope. She only knew where the chest had been because the follower who had hidden it had left the location in a drop zone for notes she had set up much earlier in her life. But it had been useless.

She slipped down the slope and stumbled out onto the road, barely managing to keep her balance. Her cloak swirled around her ankles; she nearly tripped on it and fell into the leaves.

Something caught her ears; she glanced up and reached into the air currents; something was down the road from her. Several somethings.

Uh oh. That didn’t feel good; she could sense air rasping in and out of the lungs of several horses. Six or seven of them. Lirin glanced back and forth and darted off the path to the left, into the ravine nearby. She left a trail of leaves behind her and winced. That was not exactly… sneaky.

She spotted a massive rock and caught it on the way down, sliding behind it, and swept her cloak around her. Hopefully she wouldn’t be spotted…

Hope was not enough. She heard the horses slow as they reached her; and worse, she heard the rapid panting of dogs.

“What’s this?” A voice, low and cautious. “Here. See these marks? Someone was here recently.”

“Do you think it’s her?” A different voice. This one was higher-pitched, and sharply accented. Definitely a northerner.

“Possibly.”

Damn. They must have seen her enter the woods. Lirin wanted to hiss, but the dogs might hear her. Overhead, the clouds began to slowly gather, threatening rain.

“I don’t think she’s much of a threat. Just a bandit. But we were warned…”

“…by other bandits,” a third voice added. “Competition.”

“But they said she was a mage.”

Bandits. Damn. Lirin knew she shouldn’t have been so careless with her magic when she’d fought off the attack the week prior; she’d been jumped on the road, and had panicked and thrown lightning at some of them. They’d backed off quickly and left her alone, but it seemed that they had passed word of her existence on to a Crown patrol.

Very bad. She didn’t want the Crown knowing that she was here. As far as she could tell, the manner of her immortality was still a secret to them; but if she were too careless, they would figure it out. And then they would never stop hunting her.

“Head off. Take a dog,” commanded the first voice. She sounded tired, but wary, and Lirin heard someone dismount.

Time to run.

She tugged on the storm, just a bit, and lightning lanced downwards to crack on the hilltop. She knew it was rocky; it split the rocks and a boulder tumbled down the hill. She couldn’t see the patrol, but she hoped it would draw their attention; she turned and slipped down the hill further, through the undergrowth, eventually moving from a stealthy walk to a full-blown sprint. Branches whipped past her and slashed her across the face; she felt blood trickle down from above one eye as she failed to duck underneath a pine in time.

“Damn,” she muttered. Dogs would smell that.

…but not if it was raining.

She tugged on the clouds again, accelerating their progress, and was rewarded with the sound of fat raindrops hitting the autumn leaves. Her scent would vanish in the downpour; and the scent of her magic would be equally undetectable, blending in with the natural smells of the forest and weather.

But she still ran. Behind her, she could hear dogs barking as they heard her passage and caught whiffs of her blood. They were Crown patrol dogs, she knew, and were larger and stronger and better than ordinary hounds. They were good at finding, good at hunting. Especially good at sniffing out magic.

…but they thought her a mage, not a witch, and would not be expecting the kind of tricks she could pull.

She spotted a large boulder ahead and angled towards it, clambering up its rough surface to leap from the top of it and land against the trunk of a tree, where she hung for a moment, defying gravity.

Then she leaped sideways, to a different tree; and from there, she climbed upwards and hid herself in the canopy, disappearing amongst the leaves. She moved along a few branches and dropped into an oak nearby, but remained motionless, and as the rain fell it obscured her completely.

She heard the dogs lose her scent and whine to their masters, sniffing around the base of the boulder and shaking the rain off their fur.

“Blast,” the patrol captain said, shaking her head. “Lost her.”

“I doubt she’s much trouble,” her second said, searching the lower layer of the forest. “Probably doubled back and went off somewhere. That, or she’s just lucky.”

“Are mages lucky?” snapped the captain. “I doubt it.”

“They said she was young. She can’t be very experienced.”

The captain grumbled something, but subsided, and the patrol searched for several minutes before giving up and retracing their steps back to the road to the horses.

Lirin let out a breath and climbed down from the trees. She did not want to tangle with the Crown, even the weakest groups of them. They could kill her, and then she would waste eighteen or so years growing up again.

No, she couldn’t let herself be caught.

The rain was cold. Even though it was of her making, it still chilled her; and she shivered as the water seeped into her woolen cloak. She had to find somewhere safe to shelter. The evening was drawing near.

She closed her eyes and reached out for any disturbances in the air. Aside from the slowly departing patrol and the bulk of that little town to the north, there wasn’t much – but wait. Lirin frowned, eyes still shut; it was almost hidden underneath the weight of the mountains and the forest and the noise from the north, but she could feel from the south vibrations of sound. Music? A building of some sort, heat and light and sound and smells. It sat alone in the forest, near another road. She turned and made her way towards it, hiking through the uncut undergrowth and the damp.

It was miles away. But if she were lucky, she would reach it before nightfall. It would certainly beat another night in the trees if it were a safe haven.

She’d have to check when she made it in. For now, she set her sights on just getting there.

It was going to be a long walk.

Chapter Text

What a strange dream.

Aleira scrubbed one hand across her face, wincing in the bright light that streamed through her window. Vokun sat on her chest, whining in her face.

“Oh, my god, okay,” she groaned, gently moving the cat to one side. “I’m awake. I’ll feed you. I can’t breathe when you sit there. Please don’t.”

Not fully satisfied with this answer, Vokun remained on her bed, kneading the sheets, until she reluctantly got up and shuffled out of her bedroom into the main area of her apartment. It was little better than a dorm room (not that she’d ever been in a dorm room) and the kitchen was part of the main living area; it contained an electric stove, a microwave, a sink, and the cabinets that held all of her food and the cat food.

Which was, of course, what Vokun was crying about. Aleira rubbed her eyes as she pulled the bin of cat food down and opened it up; both of her cats twined about her ankles, staring upwards with bright orange eyes.

“Calm down,” she muttered, trying not to accidentally kick them as she stepped over to the food dish to drop a scoop of food into each bowl. “Let me work here.”

Vulon and Vokun meowed at her in tandem before going silent, shoving their faces into the bowls. Hungry bastards. She’d give them wet food in the evening; dry food was for the morning time. Wet food all the time was better, but unfortunately she couldn’t quite afford that, and she hadn’t known that wet food alone was better for cats when she’d gotten them. She did the best she could. Aleira put the food bin back up (if she didn’t keep it in a cabinet that needed human strength to open, they’d knock it down and gorge themselves), refilled their water dishes, and headed back to her room.

She stared blearily at the pillows on the bed, the messed-up sheets that probably needed washing. She didn’t have to be at work until the afternoon, but it was 9 AM and she was awake. She could go back to sleep…

…or she could play games for a few hours.

Yeah, that sounded good. She dragged herself over to her computer and flopped down in the chair, wincing as it wobbled, and booted her machine up.

While she waited, she thought about that dream.

Weirdly vivid. She was a random girl running around in the forest. Running from dogs, and from some sort of… guard? Soldier? She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t seen them.

Weird.

She wondered what had spawned that particular brain adventure. It was unusual for her to have such vivid dreams, and to remember them was even stranger. Normally she only got odd, mismatched snippets, like pieces of random TV shows when you flick through all the channels.

And even if they WERE linear, normally dreams didn’t make sense. This one was logical and strange; the only weird part was that she had somehow been affecting the weather in her dreams.

Hey, maybe next time she could lucidly do it. That would be fun. Explore whatever dream world she made up.

Her computer’s loading circle twirled around for a minute, then winked out and was replaced with the startup screen, followed by her desktop. There was no point in having multiple accounts on here, since she was the only person who lived here.

Somewhere in the house, something clattered to the ground. “Vokun,” Aleira shouted, leaning even further back in her chair. “Cut that out!”

A plaintive meow echoed from somewhere, followed by the sound of someone skittering away from the scene of the crime. Aleira sighed, rubbing her forehead, and stood, heading back out to the kitchen.

Vokun had knocked an empty cup off the counter and onto the kitchen floor. Fortunately the thing was plastic; if it hadn’t been, it would have shattered on the tile. Aleira picked it up and stuck it in a cupboard before heading back to her computer. It had booted, but not fully; the loading circle was still spinning gently to itself, and as Aleira watched it blanked out and showed her login screen. She tapped in her password, then plugged in the spare controller and clicked the game client.

She had to work this afternoon, and aside from that, she was free. She could go for a walk, but – she glanced out the window. The sky outside was clear, blue, lit with the morning sun, but a few wisps of white cloud were smeared across the sky. That could mean rain later; no sense in getting caught out in it. She’d play a few rounds, go out, then come back and avoid the showers that were sure to show themselves later towards one or two PM, most likely. That seemed like a good plan; get out in the sun, then hide from the rain.

Nobody wanted to get stuck out in the rain.

Chapter Text

She did not make it to the inn before nightfall.

Through the evening light, Lirin stumbled over the uneven surface of a leaf-strewn road and up the old wooden steps of a two-story building, a sprawling complex nestled between a river, a creek, and a mountain slope. It was much larger than she had expected, and she tried to enter unobtrusively and spot a place to dry off.

No such luck. She was immediately noticed by a plainly dressed girl, who beckoned her to the counter; she obliged, trying to appear casual.

“Hey there,” the girl started, smiling as she folded a clean white dish towel. “Welcome to Babblebrook Inn - …”

Lirin paused.

The girl looked her over, smile fading to a worried frown. “…you must have gotten caught in the storm; you are soaked.”

Lirin glanced down and realized she was dripping on the wood floor. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she began.

“No, it’s okay,” the girl replied, with a concerned but gentle smile. “Why don’t you have a seat by the fire and I’ll grab you a few dry cloths, okay?”

Well, she wasn’t about to refuse such kindnesses. Lirin nodded and clutched her cloak, trying to keep it from dripping, as she stepped over to the fireplace. She wasn’t going to sit on the wet wool, so she took it off and set it gingerly on the flagstones surrounding the hearth before seating herself carefully in a polished wooden chair. Her clothes underneath the cloak were still damp, and she winced at the water immediately soaking into the chair cushions.

The tavern girl disappeared for a few moments, returning with a stack of soft-looking towels. “Okay. So this one here will go on  your shoulders, nice and snug, and then this one… is it okay if I dab off your face? You really are just dripping wet, you must be freezing… and I’ll just dry off your hair, too, so you’re not dripping all over the floor, making anybody slip.”

Lirin nodded, too tired to speak at the moment. The tavern girl gingerly patted some of the water from her skin and hair.

“Alright… oh, and it looks like you have a few… scrapes on your face?” the girl pursed her lips for a moment, glancing down to where one of her previously untainted cloths was now stained with a faint smear of red. “Are those from some branches that got you on your way through the forest?”

If only you knew, Lirin thought, and nodded silently. She wasn’t lying, but she wasn’t going to tell this girl outright that she had been chased by a Crown patrol.

“Okay, well, if you want, I have somewhere over here… some witch-hazel. Would you like me to take care of those for you?”

This girl was awfully nice. Lirin paused.

Seeing her hesitation, the girl continued. “I don’t mean to be insistent, really, but those do look like they hurt…”

“Alright,” Lirin said. “If it’s not too much trouble – “

“No, of course not!” The tavern girl reached up on top of the hearth and took down a dark brown glass bottle, shaking it a few times before uncorking it. “This might sting just a little bit, though. Sorry about that.”

Why are you apologizing? Lirin thought, perplexed. You are doing a strangely kind thing for me, for no reason at all. There’s no need to be sorry about any of it. If anything, I should be sorry for taking up your time and resources…

The tavern girl wet one of the gray towels with a transparent liquid and dabbed it gently on one of the scratches, the one over Lirin’s eye. It did sting, but not much.

She felt obliged to explain, at least a bit. “Pine,” she muttered, trying not to shake her head too much with the wet towel next to her eye.

“Oh?”

“I didn’t duck in time; I was going down a slope.”

“And this one?” the tavern girl swept a bit of dried blood away from a similarly deep scrape on Lirin’s chin.

Lirin winced. “Holly,” she said. “A pure mistake on my part.”

“Ah, I see.” The tavern girl grinned at her. “Didn’t see it was in your way?”

“Mmhm.”

She swept the cloth across a few shallower scrapes and sat back. “Well, now you’re all cleaned up. Um… you must have been in the storm for a while if you managed to get that soaked. Where did you come from?”

Well, there was no need to lie about that. “Grand Fleur,” Lirin told her.

“That’s up north, isn’t it? That’s a long ways away,” the girl murmured, tipping her head to the side and flicking her eyes up. “Did you make the journey in one day?”

“More or less.”

“Goodness. You must be exhausted…. and hungry. Are you hungry?”

That was an easy question to answer. “Oh, yes. I don’t think I’ve eaten since this morning.”

“Well, perfect. We have a fresh batch of bread out – and I’m always happy when customers come in just when there’s fresh bread, ‘cause that’s when it tastes the best! And you’ll know what an awesome cook I am.” She beamed. “I’ll cut you a piece, alright?”

“I – ah, yes, that would be lovely,” Lirin said, momentarily overwhelmed. This place was not like most inns she had ever been to.

The tavern girl set to work cutting up a deep brown round of bread into thick slices that steamed in the air; they really were fresh. Lirin glanced around at the inn itself.

She could see that many of the tables were full across the broad tavern room, and they held a startling variety of guests. At least one table was occupied entirely by slender elves playing some sort of complex dice game with different shapes of dice. Right now, they seemed to be arguing with a smug-looking elf reading out of a book. Lirin caught a few words of what they were talking about; but it was something about a ghost, and she didn’t understand it. Across the room from them, she saw three orcs playing some sort of three-dimensional game similar to chess, with pieces that moved about and floated in the air on their own. Further in the back, there was a party of rowdy humans – or, at least, mostly humans – who appeared to be trying to one-up each other in a story contest. They were definitely causing a ruckus, but the shape of the room prevented their noise from echoing through the area and bothering everyone else.

“What do you like on your bread?” the tavern girl asked.

“Pardon?”

“Well, we have butter, jam, or cheese,” the tavern girl said, laying a slice of bread flat on a white ceramic plate.

Lirin picked one at random. “Cheese,” she said, mentally running a check to make sure this wasn’t one of the lives she’d had where she was unable to eat cheese. Sometimes she got her lives mixed up, but generally she had it right.

“Mmkay,” the tavern girl said, slathering a generous quantity of some type of soft cheese over the bread’s hot surface. “And what would you like to drink?”

“I’m – I’m paying for this, correct?” Lirin said, legitimately worried now.

“…if you want to,” the tavern girl said, after a moment. “It comes with a room if you’re staying the night.”

“Oh!” Lirin nodded. “I – yes, of course. It’s much nicer than the night forest.”

The tavern girl smiled. “We’ll do that later,” she said. “Right now, let’s just get you warm and comfortable. Your drink?”

“What is… available?”

“We have milk, wine, ale, or mead,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers as she listed them. “The milk is fresh from the Belle, who we keep outside, and the wine is elven. They bring it from the coast along the Sun Road, through Harbington, and they always deliver a few casks up here so we can serve it to our guests.” She smiled. “That’s why Harbington even exists, really; the Sun Road runs right past it, so everyone who wants to trade has to come along it. And if they don’t want to stay in the city – and most don’t – they come here instead.”

So that’s what this little place was doing out in the middle of nowhere. Lirin nodded slowly, taking a bite of the bread. It was very high-quality, and the cheese was soft and mild.

“The mead is brewed to the north, way past Grand Fleur, and the ale is local.”

“Just milk will be fine.” Lirin didn’t like alcohol; she didn’t like the idea that it was possible to lose control of oneself, and while it was safer than drinking most water, milk was a good alternative. When someone like her was not fully in control of themselves… it could be very dangerous.

The tavern girl poured milk from a round glass jar into a thick ceramic cup. “So,” she said, eyes gleaming, “tell me about your journey.”

Lirin scrambled for vague yet interesting details about her trip south. She’d come south after remembering the location here as important, and didn’t have any other real reason to be here, so she made something up.

“Ah…”

“How was it?”

“Long,” Lirin said, immediately. The tavern girl laughed; she had a nice laugh, delighted, soft. “But it’s nice to be down where it’s warmer. I didn’t have much in the way of trouble, though I did get into the forest rather late in the day…”

“When you were journeying – ah, recently – did you manage to make it past Ardenoir Bridge before sundown?”

Lirin paused. Memories of shouting, of a flicker of lightning, passed quickly through her mind. She lied. “Yes, why?”

“Oh… it’s just that marauders like to hide under there. You won’t have a problem during daylight just because they’re out harassing people in the nearby towns, but when night comes that’s their little hide-out spot. They wait to jump out and ambush people.”

That sounded just about accurate to what Lirin had experienced. “Ah,” she said, carefully.

“If you want, before you head back, you can stop by the Willow-witch’s shop and she can fix you up a protective charm to keep you safe on your journey.”

Lirin was floored. She stared, aghast, at the girl – was she openly talking about witchcraft? “The… pardon me?”

“The Willow-witch,” the girl said, with a faint smile. “She’s – oh, don’t be nervous! She’s very kind and helpful, and always willing to protect people from the kinds of dangers that roam the mountains day or night. She’s not an evil witch at all.”

Lirin glanced around, back at the room, at the elves and the orcs playing their game. She looked back to the tavern girl.

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” she murmured, rolling her eyes with a smile, “we’re a little looser on magic here than most places are. We tend to utilize it rather than shun it; most of our guests are the same. I got the feeling when you came in that you might be someone who was okay with it.”

Well, I certainly am, Lirin thought, suppressing a smile. “I… see. It caught me by surprise is all.”

“Sorry about that!” The tavern girl laughed softly. “So I take it you haven’t been to the Willow-witch’s shop before?”

“No, I don’t think so.” She couldn’t remember. Perhaps one of her past selves had; the name seemed familiar, but not enough to call up any specific memories.

The tavern girl raised an eyebrow. “Would you like me to draw you a map? It’s not far, but it’s far enough that you could get lost. I do, all the time.”

“If you would be so kind…”

The tavern girl fetched out a piece of paper and a charcoal stick and began to sketch a startlingly accurate map of the land, the river and the mountains nearby and where water cut through the rocks. “It’s pretty straightforward,” she murmured, as she drew. “So first you want to head south along the Fenfoss River. There’s a road that goes along it for quite some time, it shouldn’t be a problem; and at some point you’ll need to cross it, but that shouldn’t be an issue either, as there are plenty of stepping stones that allow for very easy passage.”

If only she could go as the crow flew, but she didn’t know where her raven’s cloak was. Lirin nodded.

“Then it would be nice if you could head through the mountains straight-shot, but many of the roads are not very well kept-up so you should keep following road that was alongside the river. It’ll leave the river behind and wind through the mountains for quite some time; just keep going, even when it seems like you may be getting lost. You’ll loop south around Mount Pinion, but you’ll be north of Kuwa’hi, and I’d make sure you stay north of Kuwa’hi; it can be a really tough climb if you accidentally end up in its foothills. It’s not very dangerous, but it can be exhausting, and you already have quite a ways to go.” She smiled.

The names of the mountains seemed… familiar, but at the same time, just out of reach in Lirin’s memory. She seethed silently that she couldn’t remember.

“The roadway will take you partially up the mountain, which you can’t avoid, but it does split off. Make sure you take the south road, not the west one, because the west one goes up to Kuwa’hi’s peak, and you don’t need to go there. Take the road south and keep on it; during the autumn, when the rocks start to freeze, they can sometimes get a little loose and you have to watch out for rockfalls.”

Rockfalls? Lirin made a mental note to watch the lightning if she were set upon by bandits again.

“So you’ll make your way down the road and eventually you’ll reach a lower valley. The gateway to the valley is very easy to spot; you’ll see a big open meadow that’s often filled with elk, and you can find spotted mushrooms around the edges of it. Green ones, they don’t grow anywhere else. You might want to pick them up if you see them; they go wonderful in soup. Beyond that you’ll be able to see a little river running through this big open set of meadows, and if you look into the treeline beyond that, there’s where you’ll find the Willow-witch’s shop. It might be a bit tricky to find even when you’re there – it’s a little cobblestone cottage, covered in vines, and it’s surrounded by a lot of dense brush and trees. So you might have a tricky time finding it at first. But if you can’t find it, just… follow your nose!”

Lirin pulled her head back for a moment, confused.

“The Willow-witch is always brewing all sorts of potions that have a lovely intoxicating smell, they should draw you right to her. Mhm!” She smiled and tapped on the map. “I know it’s saved me more than once when I’ve gotten lost down that ways.”

The map really wasn’t bad; the tavern girl handed it over with a smile.

“The Willow-witch is very nice. You shouldn’t have any problems with her – oh, do you have anything to pay her with? For the protection spell.”

Right, the protection spell. Lirin had forgotten about it, lost in trying to recall any memories of the Willow-witch from previous lives. “Wh - ? Oh, ah… no, I don’t think so. Let me – “

“No, it’s no problem,” the tavern girl said, holding out one hand to stop her. “She just needs ingredients, usually; plenty of pillow-moss grows all over the stepping stones of the Fenfoss River. If you collect some while you’re crossing it to reach her, she would be happy to provide you with whatever help you need from her; she always needs pillow-moss, and she’s always running out. She uses it in many of her potions and she’ll be more than happy to accept some of that as a trade.  You’ll have to keep it wet on the journey to her, but it shouldn’t be too hard.”

Lirin reached out an accepted the map; the tavern girl instantly caught her arm and turned it.

“Oh, no,” she said, “it looks like your coat got ripped – do you want me to sew that up for you?”

Lirin glanced down. The jacket she wore underneath her cloak had been torn by thorns as she’d fled from the patrol, but she hadn’t even noticed until now. “Oh, ah…”

“It’s no trouble for me, really, I love to sew,” the girl said. “And you know what they say. A stitch in time saves nine, right? Better to do it now than to let it get bigger.”

Fair enough. Lirin shrugged the jacket off and handed it over; the tavern girl pulled out a few spools of thread and set about matching the color to Lirin’s coat.

“So how long have you lived in Grand Fleur?”

“My whole life, though I do get to travel often,” Lirin replied truthfully. “I was born there.”

“Really? Wow! What do you do there?”

While the inn seemed a friendly environment for most casual magic, and talk of witches even seemed to be welcome, Lirin was not sure if she should openly admit to being a witch. “I was raised as a blacksmith,” she said instead. “My parents are smiths in Grand Fleur. I took up their trade; I travel and do horseshoes and weaponry. And nails. And silverware.” She smiled. “There are some silver mines near Grand Fleur, so we sometimes get to do fancy silverware for rich folks.”

“Well, it’s a shame you live so far,” the tavern girl said, pulling a needle from a pincushion she’d fished out from under the counter. “We’re always in need of more silverware at the inn.”

“Oh?”

“Mhm. We have a lot of, um, stronger folks and ogre customers here at the inn, and when the eggs aren’t perfectly to their liking, they tend to let their tempers get the best of them and kind of… crush the silverware.” She laughed, but Lirin could tell that it was frightening when it happened by the tone of her voice. “So we’re always in need of replacements. If you’re ever going to stay with us again, you should bring some by! We would be willing to purchase them from you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Lirin said. “Perhaps next time I am home, I will bring some south with me and visit again.”

“We’d love that!” The tavern girl measured out a length of thread carefully. “So how long have you been a blacksmith for?”

“My whole life. My parents taught me how to hammer steel when I was six.”

“You must be very skilled!”

“No more than any other smith.”

“It’s the same story here,” the tavern girl said. “It’s my parents’ inn, Babblebrook, and I’ve been working here since I could walk.” She laughed. “I love it here. It’s very peaceful – well, except for when some of the guests get a bit rowdy, which happens occasionally.” She cast a glance over to the corner of the room, where the party of humans were laughing uproariously at some joke. “That’s why we like to play music here. It kind of drowns them out, or calms them down.” She stopped for a moment, struggling with the thread on the needle. “Maybe I should have picked a needle with a larger eye – goodness, this is… ah, there we go. So you said you’re staying here; how many nights will you be here for?”

“I’m not sure,” Lirin answered. She was definitely going to see what she could learn from the Willow-witch; she was almost certain now that she had been there at least once before, but she couldn’t remember what for, or why, or anything about the visit. “How much per night is it?”

“Well, that depends on the room. We have several available; the one facing the garden is three silver a night, and the ones facing the mountains or the river are five silver a night each.”

That was ridiculously cheap. Lirin stared at her for a moment, astonished, and had to recover for a moment before saying, “Ah… if I get to choose, perhaps the one facing the mountains…?”

“Of course!” The tavern girl smiled as she stitched carefully. “That one truly does have a lovely view – it faces southwest, but it’s in such a place where you can catch a glimpse of the sunset through the mountain peaks. It really is lovely. Um, I do have a question though.”

“Yes?”

“Were you planning on visiting the Willow-witch tomorrow?”

“Yes, why?”

“I was wondering if you might be able to do me a bit of a favor?”

So hesitant. “Of course,” Lirin said softly. “What do you need?”

“Could you get some mermaid’s bubbles from her? I need them to fetch a lakeweed from the bottom of Briar Lake for a very picky customer that we have staying with us, but I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t had the chance to go and get them. If you’re there, do you mind picking them up for me…?”

“Of course not.” Lirin smiled. “What will she need for them?”

“The pillow-moss trade should be enough, but if she requires any silver for it, I will gladly compensate you for your expense.”

That was a perfectly reasonable request. Lirin dipped her head. “I’d be happy to,” she said.

The tavern girl beamed at her again. “Thank you,” she said. “I really don’t want this guest complaining about me to my parents; I am in your debt.”

“But you’ve been so kind to me; how could I possibly refuse?” Lirin smiled back at her. She laughed in return and tied off the last stitch on Lirin’s coat sleeve.

“I very much do appreciate it.” She reached under the counter and pulled out a silvery key, which she handed over; Lirin over the five silver in return. “Here is your key. Um, I’m afraid I have to take care of a few things now – “

“No, I’ve taken enough of your time, don’t worry.”

“Well, breakfast is at 9 AM in the main room here. If you don’t wake up in time, don’t worry; there’s always plenty of food left over for latecomers, though the choices can get a bit thin if we’re especially busy. And I think you may want to get an early start for the walk to the Willow-witch’s cottage; it will take several hours at least to walk there, and that’s if you don’t get distracted like I do. I often don’t make it there and back in one day.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s why I don’t get to go very often. I can’t be away from the inn for that long.”

“Ah. I see.” Lirin took the key and rubbed the toothed edge with her thumb. “I won’t hold you up any longer.”

“Of course. Good luck on your journey if I don’t get a chance to see you tomorrow. Goodnight!” the girl gave a little curtsey and hurried off to a nearby table. Lirin watched her go, then took the key and headed into the depths of the inn to find her room. The sound of the tavern faded behind her as she stepped through the cool wooden halls, and found the room she was assigned – 217 – on the second floor.

It was a soft, warm room, lit with candles and adorned with a window facing southwest to the mountains. In the evenings, no doubt, she would have a splendid view of the sunset – but for now, it was dark, and she could see stars winking in the deep black above.

Tomorrow she would seek answers from the Willow-witch. Tonight, however, she just wanted to sleep.

Chapter Text

“Please don’t put me on hold,” Aleira sighed, rubbing her forehead.

The hold music greeted her cheerfully. Frustrated, she flopped down into one of the kitchen chairs and stared at the ceiling.

God damn it. It was almost like they were avoiding her.

They actually might be avoiding her, since she had been bothering them for the last two months about this appointment. She needed it to keep getting her therapy; she needed the bloodwork done. If they didn't do the bloodwork, her treatment would be cut off. And she couldn't - she couldn't do that. She couldn't do that.

Frustrating.

After a few minutes, she heard the phone click, and sat up straight.

“Hello?” she said, hesitantly.

“You’ve reached Christie, Dr. Russet’s desk assistant.”

Aleira let out a breath. “Yes, hello. I need to talk to her about making an appointment.”

“An appointment? Hold on, I’ll transfer you over to our booking staff member.”

“No! They sent me to you! Don’t – “

Hold music. Aleira nearly threw her phone across the room.

Vulon hopped up onto the kitchen table and stepped carefully over to her, orange eyes unblinking.

“They’re at it again,” Aleira told him, sighing, and reached out. Vulon sat down and closed his eyes as she stroked his soft black fur.

“Hello, and thank you for calling Gatlinburg Medical Center. Please listen closely as our menu options have changed. If you are a physician’s office, please press zero. If you would like to schedule or cancel an appointment, please press one. To reach Dr. Russet’s medical assistant, please press two. To reach Dr. Stanton’s medical assistant, please press three. To reach – “

They’d sent her back to the main menu? Frustrated, she pushed one and waited. Hold music. Vulon mrrped at her and bumped his head into her hand.

“Why,” Aleira groaned, eyes closed.

Vulon did not answer, but scooted closer to her, a warm and comforting presence. Somewhere else in the apartment Aleira heard something get knocked over. Vokun at work.

“Vokun, no,” she tried, and nothing answered her.

“This is scheduling at Gatlinburg Medical Center.”

“Yes! Thank you! My name is Aleira Frost, and I need to schedule an appointment with Dr. Russet.”

“Mkay.” The person on the other end tapped at a keyboard. “You’re… not coming up in our system.”

“Date of birth is June 21^st, 1995.”

“…and your name is what again?”

Aleira rubbed her forehead. “Sorry. Try last name McConnell, first name Jacob.”

“Uh, okay.” Another pause. “Oh. Oh. Okay. What’s your insurance?”

Aleira fished the card out of her wallet and read off the information, praying that they would cover her, and praying that this would work for as long as she needed it. It wasn’t a guarantee that she would have this forever.

The scheduling clerk on the other end tried his best, though, and Aleira managed to end the hour-long string of phone calls with a definitive date for another appointment with Dr. Russet.

“God in heaven,” she said, dropping her phone back onto the table, and looking up to her cat. “Why is this so hard?!”

Vulon did not answer her. He was loafed in a ray of sunshine.

Aleira shook her head. “That reminds me. You guys need more food, don’t you? We’re nearly out.”

At that, Vulon’s orange eyes slitted open and he looked over. Aleira smiled weakly at him.

“Yeah, that got a reaction, huh. Alright. I’ll go do that.”

She agonized over what to wear to leave the house for twenty minutes before leaving the apartment in a t-shirt and jeans, with a half-hearted “don’t break anything else” to her cats. They, of course, gave absolutely no indication of whether or not they planned on listening to her. The two of them were a nightmare duo, but she loved them more than she loved most humans.

The pet store was a few blocks over, also near the edge of town. Aleira walked – she didn’t have a car – and was glad that she’d left the coat at home; despite it now being autumn, it was still hot out, and the warmth gathered in the valley. The air was still humid, too; Aleira cursed it internally, feeling sweat gather on her sides and forehead. How uncomfortable.

The bell over the pet shop door dinged as she stepped in, avoiding the glances of anybody nearby. She kept her eyes on the ground. If I don’t look at them, they won’t look at me… or, at least, I won’t see them look at me.

She hurried into the pet food and grabbed a brightly colored bag, the same type she always got. Ten bucks; not bad for a bag she had to replace every two weeks.

There was nobody in line at the checkout. Aleira set the bag of cat food on the counter and glanced up at the cashier – and stopped, because it was a girl, probably about her age, with a brightly colored parrot of some type on her shoulder.

“Oh,” Aleira said, staring at it.

The girl scanned the bag and grinned. “This is Len, or Lenny,” she said, holding one hand up to the bird. It nibbled on her finger. “It’s short for Lenjamin.”

“That’s… different.”

“I named him after a character in a show. He knows a lot of names, but not his own.” She laughed. “Hey, what’s your name? He might be able to say it.”

Aleira panicked for a moment. She opened her mouth to say her deadname, but couldn’t make herself do it. “Aleira,” she said, and waited for the inevitable strange look and pause.

“Can you say ‘Aleira,’ Len?” the girl said, looking at her parrot. “Can you say that?”

Len cocked his head to the side. “Lay,” he tried.

“Can you say ‘Aleira’?”

“Leia.”

“Well, close enough,” the cashier said, looking back to Aleira with a grin. “I don’t think that’s one he’s heard before!”

No confusion, no panic? Aleira almost couldn’t believe it. “It’s not very common,” she said.

“Yeah, but Leia is less common. Although it is from Star Wars, so that might be why he knows it. I know I didn’t teach it to him.”

“Leia,” Len squawked, irises expanding.

“Show-off,” the cashier said, rolling her eyes. “How about saying some real people’s names for once?”

Len said nothing, just sidled along her shoulder and bit at her ear.

“Ow!”

Aleira stifled a laugh. She glanced down at the girl’s name tag – Jennie, it read. She raised an eyebrow.

“Jennie and Lenny?”

“I didn’t plan that,” Jennie said, raising her hands. “I swear. And we call him Len most of the time anyways.”

“Uh huh.”

Jennie rolled her eyes and brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “Your total is 10.64,” she said. “Card?”

Oh, no. I offended her. Oh no. This sucks. I suck. I’m terrible.

“Yeah.” Aleira pulled her card out and carefully slid it into the chip reader. It beeped at her.

“Oh, it didn’t recognize it. Try again?”

My card’s broken and it’s not going to work, Aleira thought, swallowing hard. It’s not going to work and it’s going to be so awkward. Oh, no. And then I’m going to have to make a phone call to the company or something. This is terrible. This sucks.

She pulled it out and put it back in. It did not beep at her this time, and after a moment, Jennie tapped something on the console.

“Cash back?”

“No, thanks.”

“Mmkay.” She tapped another thing on the touchscreen. Aleira finished up the transaction and removed her card, sticking it back into the disintegrating leather wallet she’d owned for several years now.

“You want a bag?”

“No, thanks.”

“’Kay. See you later! You have a good day.” Jennie paused, looking over to Len. “Say ‘bye,’ Len!”

“Goodbye!”

Jennie sighed and rolled her eyes. “Well, he knows that one, at least.”

Aleira smiled and gave a tiny wave to the parrot. He turned his head to the side and stared at her as she left.

That could have gone worse. That could have gone a lot worse. Maybe she hadn’t offended the cashier? Maybe she had managed to get out of that without making someone else feel bad. Or herself.

Novel.

If she’d managed it this time, maybe she could manage again. She didn’t have high hopes for herself, but maybe. Just maybe.

Overhead, the skies were clouding a little bit, but it was still splotchy, with sunlight pouring around the clouds overhead. Aleira shifted her grip on the bag of cat food she was carrying and lifted her head a little bit. Maybe it would stay sunny outside.

Maybe the clouds would stay away.

Chapter Text

It did not take more than a few hours to reach the Willow-witch’s cottage, but only because Lirin was capable of leaping from great heights and floating gently down on wind currents to land softly on the ground far below. She wished still that she had her raven’s cloak, but even without it, her journey was much swifter than it otherwise would have been.

She did take the tavern girl’s advice, and stopped along the Fenfoss River to collect the moss that the Willow-witch would apparently need. A surprisingly large quantity of it could fit inside her bag.

It was easy enough to find the Willow-witch’s cottage. It was right where the tavern girl had said it would be, nestled at the edge of the forest. Lirin glanced around – the sky was getting heavy again, as it did whenever she was tired – and she hurried up and knocked on the door.

“Enter,” called a soft voice, barely loud enough to hear as it curled through the air. Lirin opened the door and swept in, then closed it gently behind her.

The Willow-witch was waiting, seated behind a counter. She was strangely muted in appearance, despite the eccentric decorations like the earrings and the permanent, sooty stains around her eyes, and the necklaces draped over her collarbone. Her hair, a half-transparent cream-white, cascaded over her shoulders and down her back, strands of silk that shimmered in the low candle-light. She raised one hand, adorned with a few light chains and rings, and gestured to a chair in front of her counter; she was expecting a guest.

Lirin, not about to pass up this invitation, seated herself.

“Hello, my dear,” the Willow-witch said, with a soft smile. “Welcome back.”

Oh. Well, that was unexpected.

“Back?” Lirin asked, raising her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“You must not remember,” Willow mused, gently tapping the edge of the counter with the fingernails of one hand. They were cut short, but still tapped on the old polished wood. “You’ve been here before.”

“I assure you, I have – “

“Stormbringer.”

Lirin went silent.

Willow smiled again. “Yes, I felt that you were near the instant you entered the mountains. You’ve come to continue your crusade against the Crown, haven’t you?”

“Always.”

“Well, I may be able to help with that. As always, I will not harm anyone, but I do have some items that could be of use to you in your... lifestyle of choice."

“Wonderful.” Lirin leaned forwards. “I was actually wondering… If you’ve lived in these parts for quite some time – “

“I have, dear. You’ve met me many times.”

“Oh.”

“Go on.”

“Do you know where my raven’s cloak is?”

Willow watched her carefully, and Lirin frowned, pausing. Something pricked at the edge of her memory. Hadn’t she... bought that cloak here?

“Tell me, how was your journey?... You came through the mountains? That’s not the safest way, but it isn’t the most dangerous, either. I’m glad you found your way safely here. I’m glad you found your way in before the storm started, as well; I know you love the rain, but I wouldn’t want you to catch a cold.”

Saya paused with a sigh. “I’m here because I was told you are a powerful witch, and I need allies. And I need… artifacts of a certain quality.”

“Artifacts I can help you with,” Willow murmured, tapping one finger on her chin. “And I know just the thing for one such as yourself, Thundersong.”

Saya raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

Willow reached beneath the counter and came up with a mass of glossy black feathers and fabric. “This is a raven’s cloak,” she whispered, running her fingers across its dark surface. “This allows you to shapeshift into a raven for up to three hours. It’s very useful if you need to travel long distances, but don’t have a dragon, and aren’t a natural shapeshifter. Or if you just need to see things from a bird’s eye view… like mountain ranges, or battlefields.” She winked.

Saya leaned forwards. “How many times can it be used?”

“As many as you please. If you go over three hours, there’s a chance that it may lose its magic and force you back to a humanoid form, but overall it’s a very safe item.”

“…I do believe I need that.”

“Saya Thundersong,” Lirin murmured.

“That was your name, the first time,” Willow agreed, nodding. “You remember that much.”

“So I did get my cloak from you.”

“Indeed you did.”

“Did I… return it to you?”

Willow smiled, eyes crinkling around the edges, and reached beneath the counter. She came up with that achingly familiar mess of feathers and fabric – not as glorious as it had once been, but still beautiful. “You left it with me,” she said, smiling. “Or, rather, with an acolyte who brought it to me. I’ve kept it safely here.”

“Thank you, so much,” Lirin said, and reached out. Willow handed it over; Lirin felt the spark of magic in it as soon as she touched it and breathed a sigh of relief. So much for her worries about travel. She’d be able to easily fly back to the Inn now, and from there to wherever she needed to go, as long as she didn’t go over three hours.

“Tell me,” Willow murmured, “what else do you remember?”

Lirin paused.

“Lastly, I want to show you this.” Willow picked up a basket and placed it on the counter, then lifted the lid and carefully picked something up, out of the dried grass within. It was a gleaming, deep-blue object, ridged surface glittering in the candlelight. “It’s a dragon’s egg.”

Saya breathed in sharply, eyes wide.

“It’s a hacklebury dragon, from up north. She’s set to hatch in just a few months. Isn’t she gorgeous? When she hatches, her scales will look just like this; absolutely iridescent. So beautiful.” Willow tapped her fingernails on the outside of the egg’s shell, cradling it close to her body. “Hacklebury dragons are very good guard dragons, and extremely loyal. They can live for several hundred years, and this one will be a very docile dragon, just like her mother. Unless, of course, something threatens your or your home – they are excellent for protecting the home, or your herd. They’re very sweet, caring, gentle animals, and they get along perfectly well with other dragons or animals.”

“How is their flight?”

“They grow to about thirty feet long, including the tail; they are perfectly capable of flying very long distances without getting tired, and can definitely carry someone with them if they desire. This one will be large like her mother, and more than strong enough to carry someone about like you. Physical weight doesn’t matter when the wind will buoy her up from beneath.” Willow smiled.

“So she can take me… anywhere?”

“That’s correct.”

“How long will she live? You said several hundred, but…”

“Hacklebury dragons can live to about seven hundred. Ideal for you, with your unique… lifestyle.”

“Hmm.”

“Hackleburies are some of my very favorite dragons. I think that this would be a good match for you. Are you interested?”

“Yes,” Saya murmured. “I think I am.”

“Excellent. I’ve had her for a few days, but I haven’t shown her to anybody else yet, because I would never show a dragon egg to anyone who I don’t think would be a perfect match for such a creature. Do you have any ideas for a name?”

Saya paused thinking, and said, “Brindlethorn.”

“Brindlethorn!” Lirin gasped, yanked out of the memory by the name. “I bought Brindlethorn here?”

“Traded for her, actually,” Willow corrected. “You gave me an enchanted crown you had recovered from a ruined estate overrun with ghosts.”

“I… don’t remember that.”

“Perhaps not. When you spoke of the event, it seemed like it wasn’t that much of an adventure to you.”

She might not have taken it from an overrun castle; there was a chance that Lirin had slain the noble that the crown had belonged to and taken it off their corpse. “It must not have been very interesting,” she murmured.

“Evidently not.” Willow paused, tapping her fingernails on the counter again. “But now, you have your cloak back. What else are you here for?”

“Well, actually…” Lirin paused. “The tavern girl from Babblebrook sent me here to get a protection charm for myself, in case the bandits at the bridge to the north of the mountains decided to attack me again, but I don’t know think they will. I am here on an errand from her though. Do you happen to have any mermaid’s bubbles?”

“Mermaid’s bubbles? Yes, I do, actually.” Willow stood and moved to the back of the shop, rummaging around in the various bottles and jars stacked on the rear shelves. “They should be around here somewhere…. where… ah! Here we are.” She picked up a clear glass jar, vaguely square, and brought it back over to the counter. It was filled with what looked like small glass spheres. Willow pulled one out and tapped it gently with one nail.

“Those are mermaid’s bubbles?”

“Indeed they are,” she murmured, turning it over in her fingers. “Strong, but they will break if you press them between your teeth. If you break one and swallow the shards, it will grant you the ability to breathe under water for a short time – roughly half an hour, give or take.”

“Oh!” Lirin viewed the simple bubble with renewed interest. Fascinating… “How does it work?”

“They are byproducts produced from a certain type of anemone,” Willow explained. “The stalks excrete these bubbles, which can be harvested by mermaids, or people under the effects of mermaid’s bubbles. They are hard as soon as they are detached from the stalks, and can be immediately packaged and kept to be sold or traded later. They’re very useful if you have any business with those that live below the surface of the lakes, rivers, or seas. You said the tavern girl needs them…?”

Lirin nodded. “Yes, she said she had to fetch lakeweed for a picky customer at the inn. I’m not sure why…”

“Most likely a kelpie, or a relative of one,” Willow mused, placing the bubble back in the glass jar. “They tend to be very fussy when they’re out of their home territories. It covers up their nervousness.”

“Well, that I can understand.”

“Is there anything else you needed? Oh, and I assume you brought payment for it…?”

“Yes. The tavern girl said you were always in need of pillow-moss; I went ahead and collected some from the Fenfoss River for you.” Lirin picked up the still-dripping bag of moss and held it out. Willow, a delighted smile etching itself across her face, accepted the bag and peered inside.

“Oh, this is very fresh indeed. Thank you! I was running a bit low, I must admit.” She looked through it a little more intently. “Actually, there’s quite a lot here. If you were in the market for any more items, this would be ample payment for most anything I could offer you… or potions.”

“What do you have??”

“Well, I’m glad you asked.” Willow smiled and set the jar of mermaid’s bubbles aside, pushing it away so the center of the counter was clear. “I did just pick up an item that I think you would be very interested in; you had one of these, once, but I am assuming you don’t now.”

She reached into a dark wood box and hefted out a massive chunk of opalescent stone, pink and red and white. “This is a bloodstone,” she murmured, running her fingers over its smooth surface. “An enchanted stone that will protect you from death. It cannot save you from harm, so you can still be wounded, but should you fall to a point where your body can no longer function, it will prevent that injury and keep you awake and alive.”

Lirin’s eyes widened fractionally. Such a powerful item…!

“It will function once, and then it must be recharged under a full moon. Still, that’s one near-death experience per month; I think it is well worth the cost… Which is usually quite steep, except for the fact that you have brought me a fantastic quantity of the very item I need to make even the most base of my potions.” She smiled again, eyes crinkling and nearly disappearing among the black makeup that was smudged around their edges. “For that, I will give you this as a bargain. You do not owe me anything else.”

“Consider me interested,” Lirin said, sitting back in her chair. She ran the feathers of the raven’s cloak between her fingertips, delighting in the silky feel against her skin.

“Very well.” Willow put the stone next to the jar of mermaid’s bubbles and tapped her fingertips on the counter yet again, glancing around. “Next… oh, what should we look at next?”

“You know the stock of your shop far better than I.”

Willow sent her an amused glance and reached over to the left, picking up a bundle of string. “Soulmates’ thread,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like the type of thing you’d be interested in, but I thought perhaps I would ask anyways.”

“What is it?”

The Willow-witch unwound part of the skein, twirling the bright red thread around her fingers. “Tie one end around your pinky when you go to sleep; when you wake, the other end will be tied around that of your soulmate. They can be quite the distance away, so I would be cautious if you aren’t prepared for a long journey, but the thread assumes a more ethereal form once it is activated, so you won’t have to worry about it causing physical problems for you if you try to move around in  your daily life while it is active.”

“I’ll pass,” Lirin said, shaking her head. “It’s not something I could use.”

“Understood. No need to worry.” Willow wound the thread back into tis bundle and set it aside again. “By the way, since you mentioned her; where is Brindlethorn?”

Lirin stopped, frowning.

“…is she alright?”

“I think so,” Lirin murmured. “But I don’t know.”

Willow paused for a moment, looking her over. “What’s happened?” she said gently.

“I don’t know where Brindle is. I can’t feel her in my mind.” Lirin looked up, allowing the concern she had been hiding to show. “She’s always there, every time I come back. But this time, I can’t feel her. I don’t know where she is. I can’t sense her presence anywhere, and her call isn’t echoing in my mind like it always is. She’s not – she’s not dead, I would know if she had died, but she’s just… missing. I don’t understand it at all.”

“Do you think she’s left the world?”

“And gone where? To another one? To the fae realm?” Lirin shook her head. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t understand why it would happen.”

“Perhaps there was something there she wanted to find. Perhaps she felt a reason to disappear.”

“Well, I hope she comes back,” Lirin grumbled. “She has everything that I’ve collected over the years.”

“Not everything.” The Willow-witch smiled and wagged a finger, indicating Lirin’s cloak; Lirin scrunched the feathers in her hands and let out a breath.

“That’s true. Not everything.” She paused. “And if I really need to find items that are less… friendly, well…”

“There’s always Nightshade.” Willow’s expression fell from a gentle smile to a troubled mask. “You could visit her, but I don’t know if it would do you much good. She has never been the type to sell useful items, she’s more – “

“I know of Nightshade,” Lirin said, cutting the Willow-witch off. “I have spoken with her before.”

“Oh. Have you.”

“I have.” Lirin paused. “And I believe I will again.”

“Well,” Willow said, after a moment, “what you do with her is none of my business; I have no part in the dark rituals that she seems to be so fond of.”

“That’s fine,” Lirin said, shaking her head. “It would be best if as few as possible knew about my exploits, anyways.”

Willow paused, peering closer at her. “So you really do intend to carry on the fight?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The question would have struck her, several lives ago, but now she had an answer ready. “Because the fight is necessary,” she replied simply. “As long as we must fight for the right to exist, that fight must be fought. The day it is no longer needed is the day it will end. It must happen.”

“Such discord,” Willow sighed. “Such disharmony. Is this the way to fix the world?”

“Unless someone comes up with another idea, this is the way of things,” Lirin said firmly.

Willow said nothing.

“I don’t mean to argue with you, Willow,” Lirin said gently. “I don’t mean to. I’m sorry. I have my ways, and you have yours.”

“And I will not interfere with yours.”

“Nor I with you. I apologize.”

“It’s alright, my dear,” Willow said, a sad smile on her face. “But I am always afraid that your course will lead you to doom.”

“What can the Crown do?” Lirin said, smiling mirthlessly. “Kill me?”

Willow opened her mouth, then shut it again.

“You know I cannot ever truly die.”

“I do not know how you managed it,” Willow sighed, “but you’re right. You can’t die. Not really.”

“I will fight until they are defeated. I cannot be ended.” Lirin paused; thunder rumbled overhead, and she took a breath and calmed herself. “I… my apologies. I’m agitating the sky.”

“So you are.” Willow smiled and glanced upwards. “I can smell your magic in the air.”

The smell of petrichor filtered through the heady scents of the potions that had recently been brewed. Lirin shook her head and tried to disperse her magic.

“Again, my apologies.”

“It’s not as if it’s unpleasant.”

“Ah, yes, but it’s rude to do magic in someone else’s home without asking.”

Willow shrugged.

The rain on the rooftop began to lessen slightly as Lirin released the sky from her control. She and Willow went through several more artifacts, none of which caught her attention, aside from a small pouch that could hold any number of objects. That seemed useful, and she paid the Willow-witch twenty gold for it.

“There is one more thing,” the Willow-witch said, as Lirin prepared to take her leave. Lirin turned back towards her, hands busy buckling the clasp of her raven’s cloak.

“Yes?”

“Instructions were left,” Willow said. “There is a resting place of your sword.”

Sword? Lirin frowned. “What sword?”

“Vhiirak,” Willow said.

The name sounded familiar; it sounded like the silence of a gleaming silver blade in the night, the glint of light on the edge and a spark of lightning leaping from the tip.

“I… don’t remember this sword. At least… not very well.”

“Look where the sky’s fury struck the ground at Duniskwalgunyi,” Willow recited. “Vhiirak is waiting for you there.”

“At… where?”

“It’s not far north from here.” Willow pointed. “It is between here and the inn from which you came, actually. Duniskwalgunyi is two mountain peaks; you will be able to see them from the sky. One of the smaller roads off the main way that runs through the mountains past Kuwa’hi leads to it, but now that you have the cloak back, you will be able to fly to it. It’s far easier to reach it that way than it is to walk there.”

Lirin nodded. “A high peak?”

“Not extremely, but they are barren peaks. They will be easy to see.”

Lirin nodded. She had almost no memory of ever using a sword, especially one that she had apparently named. “I will find it.”

“It is up to you.”

Lirin swept out and felt the magic of the raven’s cloak settle around her shoulders. The bloodstone hung heavy at her waist; the jar of bubbles clinked in her pouch.

Her sword. She spread her arms out and drew upon the cloak; for a moment, she felt the world fold in around her, and realized that it was her changing shape, not the air. After a few moments her form condensed into the dark, swift form of a raven. She flapped her wings frantically and powered upwards into the sky.

She was so swift! She had forgotten what it was like to fly, really fly, spread her wings over the tapestry of green and streak over the faraway ground.

She let out a delighted croak and angled inwards, towards the mountains; she could see now the small trial where she had walked earlier that day. Turning her eyes to the horizon, she scanned the mountain peaks for the barren ones.

There, and there – she spotted two, similar heights, but one taller and one shorter. She banked towards them and summoned a breeze beneath her wings to carry her forwards. She felt as if she had never been able to go this fast before!

Above her, something moved in the clouds. She glanced upwards and saw a distant form go streaking overhead – massive wings and a steely-gray body. A dragon, most likely, one of the great sky-dragons that spend their time looping amongst the cathedral thunderheads and enjoying the sun on their scales. She turned her attention back forwards.

The peaks grew rapidly closer as she flew, powering onwards under the wind, and sailed down to them. They were windswept, rocky peaks, gray capstones poking through the bushes and heathers and trees. She flapped down to one and sat on the gray stone.

It was still wet from the rain, but the sun was drying it swiftly. She glanced around.

‘Where the sky’s fury met the earth’. Well… that could only be a lightning strike, right? It had to be. She couldn’t imagine another meaning for the phrase.

And she knew what lightning strikes looked like.

She cast around for the telltale scorch marks on the stone, hopping from rock to rock in search of the blackened earth.

It was not the blackness of a scorch that caught her eye, but the glint of sunlight on metal. She flapped over to a tumbled pile of boulders next to the corpse of a long-dead tree and spotted a metal edge lying beneath a stone.

There. She shifted back to her humanoid form – it had been so long! What a relief it was to be able to do that – and bent down, reaching forwards.

Yes, it was a sword – a sword with a black-wrapped handle, a nearly fist-sized iron pommel stone, and a slender, leaf-shaped blade that flared out towards the tip before tapering to a razor sharp point.

“Hello, Vhiirak,” she murmured, taking the sword. In response to her touch, a flicker of electricity leaped along the blade and cracked off the tip.

Lirin smiled. She didn’t remember where she had gotten this sword, but it was definitely hers. It felt like her magic, and it wasn’t rusted or damaged at all. No, it was magical, and it was hers.

Tucked behind the rocks in the pile, in a safe spot out of the rain, Lirin could also spot a black leather scabbard. She picked it out of the rocks and tested it; it seemed to be in good condition, so she unbuckled her belt and hung it at her waist before refastening her belt.

It felt right at her side. She rubbed the pommel with her palm, then turned and swept her cloak around her again before casting herself off the top of the mountain.

She transformed into a raven part of the way down and caught the wind under her wings. The breeze carried her up and she shot off back towards the Inn…

…but, ah, she had time to spare, and now that she remembered the Nightshade Witch, she felt like it would probably be the time to pay her a visit.

She had things she needed from Nightshade, after all.

But where was Nightshade? She’d forgotten to ask Willow where to find the rival witch; she would have to work by memory.

She knew Nightshade was up on one of the greater mountains. Mount Pinion? Perhaps. It certainly wasn’t Kuwa’hi; from what she remembered of Nightshade, she wouldn’t go any place that was difficult for the locals to access.

Perhaps she would find it on the other mountain; Mount Pinion. She banked towards it and began to scour the slopes with her sharp raven eyes.

This could take hours… but it was worth it. With Nightshade by her side, it would be much easier to overthrow the Crown. All she had to do was convince Nightshade to curse the King, and then the Queen would be easy to get rid of.

One step at a time. She turned her beak to the wind and beat her way towards Mount Pinion.

Chapter Text

“Hey, Allie.”

“Hello, Bryan.”

“Hey – if you didn’t see on the Facebook group, there’s been a huge upset with that game supplier. You know, the one who only sent us one copy of the game that we have twenty-one holds for.”

This – this, here, was something Aleira cherished. This was something she looked forward to. Her job and the people she worked with. Oftentimes people didn’t value – or, more importantly, properly respect - their coworkers, but Aleira’s were… special. “I didn’t check. I will now,” Aleira said, as she stepped in and put her water bottle down next to one of the computers.

The game store was one of her favorite places to be. She’d been here many times before, and had spent a great deal of time here before getting hired; she’d been a devotee of their LAN center, spending countless hours on the computers there to play games when she hadn’t had enough for her own laptop.

They’d hired her based on her recommendations to other customers about games she’d played and the fact that people really liked to talk to her. She didn’t really understand it – she was just talking? What was weird about that? – but people seemed to enjoy her company.

The game supplier in question had called off all their print runs of the game, it seemed, and set up a deal with Amazon, of all people. “Wow,” Aleira said, staring at the news post. “That’s bullshit.”

“I know,” Bryan muttered, rolling his eyes. “It really is, and people are really going to be pissed at US for it, for no reason. It’s not our fault!”

“It’s not. I guess I should look forward to annoyed customers?”

“Probably. Sorry in advance.”

The regulars came and went. It was Tuesday; there was always a regular on Tuesday who came in to play Dungeons and Dragons, and he always stopped by to talk about the latest books. He wasn’t here today, it seemed; maybe he was sick.

“Really nice weather for autumn,” someone commented to her, glancing out the windows of the storefront. It was surprisingly warm and sunny out. “Tourist season is winding down a little ‘cause school’s starting up and stuff, but the weather’s incredible. It’s a little weird that no one else has been coming back here for the hiking.”

It was a little odd. Aleira herself was wondering lately about heading into the park, either by walking or by taking a taxi; Gatlinburg wasn’t really good for buses, and she didn’t know anyone she could carpool with. But if she could get to the mountains…. It might be nice to go to them for a stroll.

She’d never really had too much of an inclination to do that, but maybe this was an opportunity. With the tourist season on the wind-down from summer vacation, she might have a little more time off – she could head in, try out some of the trails she’d never had a chance to walk before. She’d hadn’t actually been to the park at all; she’d never had the chance, and it was just…. Not something that had occurred to her before.

Hm. Maybe she would. Maybe she would go.

A couple of the semi-regular summer residents were gone, too. They must have gone home for the autumn and year, probably back south or north or to wherever tourists went when they left their vacation homes.

People might show up to come look at the autumn leaves; that was something that happened in the autumn sometimes, when the trees turned colors. People seemed to really like that.

The idea stayed in Aleira’s head until after work, but she got off far too late to go check out the mountains tonight. She worked the next day; maybe she could go before her shift the next day?

Maybe. She’d consider it.

The steady flow of customers lessened to a trickle, then to nothing, as the night wore on. By the end of shift there were only a few guys playing Warhammer in one of the back rooms; Bryan shooed them out and helped Aleira close up.

She walked back to her apartment. The night was clear, and the sky overhead would be starry but for the lights of Gatlinburg drifting upwards in a luminous haze. Aleira glanced up –

-and saw, for the briefest moment, a clear, untainted sky, swathes of stars scattered across it. At the same time she heard the sound of laughter and the bark of a dog, as well as the sound of a chicken clucking sleepily to itself.

How do I know what a chicken sounds like? Aleira found herself thinking, bizarrely. I’ve never heard one before, not in real life.

She glanced around – but no, the sounds were gone, and she was just looking at the streets of Gatlinburg at night, far off the main roads. When she craned her head back to look up again, the sky was again a dim gray backdrop, no stars visible.

It must have been her imagination. A dream, perhaps. A momentary fantasy. She’d never seen a sky that clear in her life.

The only things that were dark in this city night-scape were the mountains encircling it. They loomed, quiet, distant, all-encompassing. Benevolent, she hoped. Apathetic, she feared. What were people like her to the mountains but a passing mayfly over the river, a blink of an eye in time?

This was a weird train of thought.

Aleria shook her head, trying to pull herself back to her senses. She needed to feed the cats again; they’d be crying at the door waiting for her. Or, at least, Vokun would. She had to go feed them.

Bundling her coat under one arm, Aleira turned her back to the mountains and lengthened her stride. She could feel them, watching silently, just sitting there.

“Let me go home in peace,” she muttered, and hurried along.

Chapter Text

When she returned to the Inn, she hid Vhiirak under her cloak. No sense in causing a fuss bringing an ancient magical sword openly into a friendly tavern.

“Did you make it to the Willow-witch’s cottage?” the tavern girl asked, as she swept in. She had taken off her raven’s cloak and stowed it away underneath the woolen one.

“I did, yes,” she said, and fished the jar of bubbles out of her bag. “These, I believe, are what you requested?”

“Yes!” The tavern girl took the jar, eyes sparkling. “Thank you so much! What did it cost you?”

“Nothing, don’t worry. The moss was enough to cover everything I needed.”

“Oh, I’m so glad. I was worried I’d sent you on an errand that would cost more than what it was worth.” She laughed lightly. “Good thing it didn’t turn out that way!”

There are so, so many more things here at work than you could imagine, Lirin thought, shaking her head. If only you knew and understood what I have to do. But you do not, and I will not subject you to it.

The Nightshade Witch. Lirin needed her – and she needed to know about the current state of the Crown, in Lancaster. She’d skirted around the massive city on her way into the mountains and didn’t have any leftover knowledge from her past life, or knowledge she’d gained in this one – Grand Fleur was technically its own, very small country, and didn’t subscribe to the rules of the Crown. “I do have a question, or several,” she said softly, seating herself at the counter.

“What do you want to know?”

“Tell me about the Crown.”

The tavern girl stilled and glanced around the room before leaning in slightly. “Ah,” she said, pleasant demeanor fading somewhat. “They, um. Well… they’re not… Hmm. How shall I put this?”

Lirin waited patiently for her to gather herself.

“About twenty years ago, the King was murdered. A witch waged war on the Crown and was defeated, but in the final battle she managed to strike down the King before she herself was destroyed. She did this to try and free magic-users from the Crown’s control, but ever since then, the Crown has been harder on mages than ever. You’re only allowed to use magic in service to the Crown – and if you’re caught using it in other ways, well…” she shook her head. “It doesn’t end well.”

“Then how does the Willow-Witch remain a secret? How is she alive?”

“The Crown doesn’t know about her, because they can’t know about her. She’s protected herself so powerfully that anyone who tries to talk about her to any Crown informants simply finds themselves unable to speak at all. She cannot be spoken of, or written about, or even conveyed through charades to any Crown forces at all. That is where most of her power is – protecting herself. It’s worked so far.”

“Peculiar.”

“But the Queen is on a crusade to wipe out all mages and witches from the land unless they are servants to her. And she has quite the retinue of servants. She doesn’t look anywhere near as old as she truly is – and that’s not a compliment. I’m trying to say, well, she’s slowing her age with magic. That’s one of the things you should not do if you are a witch, but witches are immortal anyways, so it’s never been a thing they’ve had to do.”

So the Queen was still the same Queen. “What of the rest of the royal house?”

“There is a prince,” the tavern girl murmured, nodding. “Though he's not as warlike as his mother. We don't know much about him… he doesn’t interact with the country as a whole, and he doesn’t speak out for anyone.”

A prince? She hadn’t heard about this. He must be a child… especially if she’d destroyed the King in her last life. “How old?”

“Eighteen. His birthday was last month.”

Almost the same age as Lirin, then. It made sense; the Queen was beyond childbearing age now, but she hadn’t been when Lirin had last been alive, when she had killed the King. Damn! If only she had been faster, perhaps this wouldn’t be an issue.

“And they are all in Lancaster?”

"Yes," the tavern girl said, "at the palace." She looked a little confused.

Lirin almost asked what the defenses of the castle were like, then stopped herself. As if this tavern girl would know – and she didn’t want to push her luck on the tolerance of this inn with magic-users. “Hmm. Thank you.”

“You must have been very isolated not to hear about all this.”

“Grand Fleur is its own world. Though I traveled, I did not often go south; I went north, into Aderack, and the Northlands.”

“Oh, I see.” The tavern girl nodded. “The Crown has no reach there.”

Lirin nodded.

This information was new and worrying. A prince she had to contend with? It was good that he was eighteen – she didn’t want to kill a child. She had less issue with killing an adult. It would be difficult to destroy both him and the Queen, but the Queen didn’t know that Lirin was alive.

Perhaps she’d be able to do this the easy way.

After the sun had set, Lirin opened her window and left it open as she swept her raven’s cloak over her shoulders and dropped into the night sky. It was harder to see at night, but the ease of travel and the stealth she could muster was worth it.

The star-strewn sky stretched above her like a tapestry as she ferried herself northwards on a light breeze. Harbington sped by beneath her, lights winking out of sight between the trees and low, simple houses, the cobblestone streets vanishing under cover of darkness. She followed the lights north to Lancaster.

For a raven with the wind on her side, it was a simple and easy flight, not even an hour. She spiraled down out of the clear sky towards the largest building she could see – the palace.

As she had expected, there were guards ringing the massive wall, and she could see magic glittering over the parapets. But there was nothing directly above. The Crown would see all aerial threats coming… or so they thought.

By ‘aerial threats,’ Lirin meant dragons. The Crown could be devastated by a dragon attack; there was nearly no way to defend against an adult dragon’s magic from above unless you knew what type of dragon it was, and exactly how to nullify it. They were prepared for that, wary of that. They would pay no attention to a single raven.

She coasted down towards the towers and slowed herself, trying to get a good look into the windows. Here is where she regretted the raven’s cloak and its specifications; her raven’s eyes were not particularly good at piercing the darkness.

In one room, she managed to make out some shapes speeding by, and whirled around to land on the windowsill. Peering through the thick glass, Lirin saw a massive bed with a sleeping form in it. Perhaps the Queen, perhaps someone else; she did not know. She knew she couldn’t get through this glass, not without shaping out, and then she wouldn’t be able to hang onto the edge of the windowsill. She swept away again to a different window.

A light softly burning caught her eye – a candle. Lirin landed on the edge of the window and hopped up to the glass.

Inside, someone sat at a desk, studying a massive tome by candlelight. Occasionally they would look up and glance around furtively, then go back to reading. The book was huge and dusty, and looked very out of place in this room. Lirin spotted a circular diagram of some sort in it. The mysterious figure at the desk seemed very engrossed in it. Lirin wondered who they were.

Only when they turned towards the window did she recognize the features with a shock.

That prominent, hooked nose, those piercing gray-blue eyes, the dark brown hair – this was some relative of the King, whom she had destroyed. And the youth of this person meant that it could only be the prince.

Shocked, Lirin stepped backwards and nearly fell off the windowsill. She flapped her wings to keep her balance and saw the young prince’s head whip up and turn towards the window.

Nope. Nope. She let herself fall and dropped out of sight, turning to speed downwards in an emergency dive.

The prince. She hadn’t expected to see him. She swept around the tower several times, debating, and angled back up to land on the windowsill again.

The prince was back at the book, and Lirin tried to get a better look at it. It didn’t seem like ordinary reading material; it was old, clearly, and a rather decrepit-looking tome. She couldn’t, however, tell exactly what it was. The prince was a good study – what would he use that knowledge for? Continuing his parents’ reign of oppression?

Time passed. She was acutely aware that there was a time limit on her raven form; she didn’t want to push it and risk falling out of the sky on her way home. That could hurt.

Nothing happened – the prince kept reading, and the candle kept burning, and the night wore on. Lirin had to turn and leave lest her time run out.

Disappointing, but at least she knew the Queen still lived in the same tower as last time. And she knew where the prince was. Anything was progress – and this was quite a lot of progress.

The next night, she returned, and was rewarded with a fantastic bit of luck: The prince’s window was open.

She swept in and landed silently on the floor, shifting back instantly. The prince was asleep, curled under the bedsheets, and Lirin wondered how to get a sample of his blood.

In order to kill him, she needed that. And she wasn’t going to simply kill him here and now – she needed to do it in a manner that would not fail. If she made any unnatural noise at all, the guards she was certain were stationed just outside the door would rush in and kill her. And even if she did kill him, he could be brought back without too much trouble. No, she needed something unstoppable. She needed magic; she needed a curse. A death-hex.

But how to get his blood?

If she injured him in his sleep, would he wake? She did not know.

Lirin had come prepared – she had a vial, and her knife. She just needed to get the blood from his veins into her glass jar.

Hmm.

Perhaps a wound that one wouldn’t feel. Where was an unfeeling part of the body? She thought for a moment, then settled on the palm of the hand, near the thumb. It was a rough part of the hand, with thick skin, and not part of the hand that was particularly good at feeling. Lirin crept to the bed and reached towards the hand that lay on top of the sheets, then uncorked her vial and ever so gently pricked the skin, digging deep until blood welled up around the tip of her blade.

Luck was with her – he did not stir. She removed her dagger and watched in breathless anticipation as the dark crimson dripped down his hand and onto the lip of the vial, then in, running down the side of the glass in a dark stream. Once she had enough – and she only needed a few drops, really – she took it away and corked the bottle, heart pounding.

How easy it had been. She stowed the vial in her belt pouch and stepped away, then swept her cloak around her again and took off, turning sideways to slip through the window before dropping away into the night.

Now she had what she needed, and all she had to do was find Nightshade.

Chapter Text

Aleira woke with a start.

“What the hell,” she said, aloud, staring at her ceiling in the dark.

Another dream, stranger than the last – snippets of flight? As if she’d been a bird? And she’d stabbed someone. Someone who was asleep. For his blood, to put it in a vial. Why? Why?

Maybe she should be writing these dreams down.

She scrambled up and went for the nearest little notebook – a gift from a friend a long time ago – and a pen, trying to recall as much of the dream as possible. Flight, night, wings, blood. She scribbled down this; then, as an afterthought, started writing down some of the other things she remembered from previous dreams.

This was weirdly linear. Aleira spent thirty frantic minutes scribbling as much as possible, then sat back and flipped through the pages she’d filled with messy scrawlings. There were some identical aspects in these dreams so far, the few she’d had.

A girl who could talk to the sky. Those feathers. Magic. Something about royalty.

The blood was new, though. The blood and the knife – that was not something she’d dreamed of before. Well, it was, but not in this dream. Not in this weirdly realistic dream.

“I wonder if this means something,” she murmured.

Her door creaked open. She didn’t bother looking up. “Here, kitty,” she said, reaching out and patting the bed. She felt the mattress depress as one of her cats leaped up and saw him out of the corner of her eye as he padded over to her side and curled up, a knot of glossy black fur in the semidarkness. She absentmindedly reached out and stroked his fur; he started to purr, closing his orange eyes to narrow little slits.

Aleira had always been a fan of fantasy.

When she’d been in high school, she’d wanted to be a writer. She wasn’t very good at it, but she’d still wanted to, and she’d always had a rather romantic view of anything out of the ordinary. She’d never lost that desire for the otherworld; her inherent love for anything that couldn’t be explained. She’d never lost her desire for magic.

And this – this couldn’t be explained. It was like her mind was putting on its own TV show, some wild fantasy thing with magic and queens and princes and maybe dragons. She’d thought that she, in the dream, had thought something about dragons. Maybe there would be dragons!

“You know what,” Aleira said, after a moment, out loud. “I’m not gonna complain about this. I like this.” It certainly made her life a little more interesting, that was for sure; she was a boring person overall, and anything that added a little spice to her life was worth keeping alive.

Her cat, next to her – it was probably Vokun, since he was more of a cuddler – purred and leaned his head against her side.

She picked up her phone with her free hand. 5 AM or so. She had an appointment later today, with Dr. Russet; if she went back to sleep, she’d probably sleep through her alarms. Better to stay awake and not risk missing it. It had been enough of a hassle to get it in the first place; she couldn’t possibly miss it.

Sighing, she pushed her covers back and got up. She had to work today after the appointment, too. She’d be tired by the time she got off shift, but… that was what she had to do.

“Come on,” she said to Vokun. “Get off; if you keep purring like that it’ll put me back to sleep.”

Vokun refused to leave her alone, but did move a bit away so he wasn’t directly purring on her lap. Aleira went to her computer to play games until she had to leave. What else was she going to do?

The appointment was not nearby; it was off in the real town part of Pigeon Forge, where actual people lived. It wasn’t easy to get to, and Aleira would have to take a taxi there, which she hated. Those cost money. Money she didn’t have.

But she had to get to the appointment.

Climbing into a stranger’s car was always fear-inducing, but she kept quiet and so did the driver and she arrived safely outside the building twenty minutes before she was due to. This gave her enough time to fill out the requisite paperwork that they always had her do when she signed in; it was a nuisance, but it was a necessary nuisance.

The questions in the appointment were much the same as well. “Have you noticed any changes due to your medication?” “How are you feeling?” “Have you noticed any side effects that we should know about?” “Do you think the dosage is working properly  or would you want to adjust it?”

How the hell should I know what the right dosage is? Aleira thought, halfway through the meeting. I don’t know how medication works, really, and I’m not an expert! Just give me what you think is right.

“Aleira,” her doctor said, catching her attention. “We offer counseling services and therapy; would you be interested in that?”

“Uh, um,” Aleira said, blanking.

“If you would like, I can forward your information to some of our therapists and whichever one would be the best fit can contact you.”

“I – “ Aleira froze. “I – I guess?”

“You don’t have to – this is just a possibility, or a suggestion.”

People online always said therapy was a good idea. “Uh – no, yeah. Yes. If you want to do that.”

The doc raised her eyebrow and clicked a few things on that old chunky laptop of hers. “Alright, got you there,” she said. “The only thing left is we need your bloodwork.”

Aleira hated bloodwork – she didn’t like needles. “Sure,” she said, glum.

They only took one tube, which was fine by her, and then she was able to go home. She had to take another expensive taxi back, but it was better than the several-hour walk.

She didn’t have time to eat before work – she went straight in, only stopping home long enough to grab her work jacket. It was too hot to wear it outside, and she still overheated in the store, but she had to wear it for her uniform. It was that or a shirt that didn’t fit.

Her Tuesday regular was still gone. It was a busy evening – a new card game set had come out, and the store was packed – so she didn’t notice if any other regulars were also out, but she thought they probably weren’t. Jake – that was his name – was probably sick, or off visiting family.

Consequently, she didn’t get out of work until well after midnight, nearer to 1:30 am or so. The walk back to her home was dull and tired, but at least she wasn’t scared; her height usually dissuaded anyone from bothering her on her walk. That, and the fact that she didn’t look like a woman at all, and thus wasn’t one to really undergo much catcalling.

Vulon and Vokun were whining by the door when she got in. “I work late sometimes,” she grumbled to them, stumbling to the kitchen. “I’m sorry, okay? I’ll feed you now. Please don’t suffocate me in my sleep.”

Sleeping. She wondered if she’d have any more strange dreams?

She horfed down a few pizza rolls microwaved on high for a minute, burning her tongue in the process, and gave a half-hearted effort at brushing her teeth. Then it was to bed – she had work tomorrow, too, and needed her sleep.

This night, however, she made sure to keep her journal right beside her, and she lay down and readied herself for anything that might confront her in the dark.

“Show me more,” she murmured, mostly to her own mind. As she drifted off to the faint sound of cars and the purring of her cats on the bed, she mumbled to herself, “I’m ready.”

Chapter Text

Lirin found Nightshade on Mount Pinion, just as she had expected. She landed some distance away and hiked up to the door – she was certain that there were magical protections around the cottage she couldn’t get through if she were flying. She had to push her way through a tangle of thick, thorned bushes on the way; the leaves scraped at the sides of her face and left burning red rashes behind. Irritated, she accidentally roiled the sky into an agitated mess of clouds that began to drip fat drops of rain down onto the mountains.

But she made it. She knocked on the door and was rewarded with a pause, then a low, “Enter.”

She did so. Nightshade was there, just as resplendent as she remembered, writing in a book while a fire crackled nearby. She said nothing as Lirin carefully sat down in a chair facing her desk.

After a moment, she spoke. “What are you doing here.”

Typical. Lirin cleared her throat.

“I need a curse,” she said.

“Of course.” Nightshade blew gently on the ink in her book, then snapped it shut with a sigh, setting the quill back in the ink. “And why is that?”

“I – it’s my only option. My best option. For the harm I want to wreak.”

“You humans,” Nightshade purred, laughter soft in her voice. “So petty.”

She doesn’t recognize me, Lirin realized, in a mixture of relief and sadness. It was good – she didn’t want many people to know she was already working magic again, and Willow knowing was already bad enough – but the pang of sorrow remained. Bella had always been a good friend and was the least likely of all the witches to turn her in, though the most likely to track her progress.

“But,” Nightshade continued, setting the book down on the counter, “that’s fine by me, as long as you’re paying me for it.” She tapped her claws on the book she’d been writing in, then abruptly turned, fixing Lirin in her dark gaze. She leaned forwards just a tad bit; had Lirin been an ordinary human, she would have felt pinned by those eyes, like a bug to a piece of cork. Prey in front of predator. “What have you brought me?”

“Something you’ll like,” Lirin said, trying to shake off the fear that struck her when she came into contact with Nightshade’s power; not even her active power, just the aura of it, humming around her body like the potential before a thunderstorm.

“Mm,” Nightshade said, glancing down at her claws again. “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we? Hand it over.”

Lirin silently thanked her past self and pulled out the egg she’d plucked from the chest that had held her journal. It was in a soft velvet bag; Nightshade took it, curious, and opened it up, dumping the contents onto her palm. Lirin saw her eyes light up as she examined it.

“An amber-fang egg,” she murmured, tapping her claw-like nails on the egg’s surface. “These are quite rare. How did you go about obtaining this?”

Lirin smiled. “Not in a manner I would be willing to share,” she said.

Nightshade smiled at her, dark-streaked eyes holding that characteristic glimmer of light. “I see, of course,” she said, looking back to the egg. She held it up near one of the candles to examine the quality, muttering to herself; Lirin waited.

“Yes,” she said after a moment, “this appears to be in excellent condition. I believe it will do; but first, I will need you to tell me a bit more about precisely what you’re looking for.”

“I need a curse,” Lirin repeated. “A powerful one, a slow one, one that cannot be remedied.”

“What curse do you want?”

“A death-hex.”

Nightshade raised her eyebrows, glancing down to the egg. “Really?” she said. “What fun… you are lucky these are so rare, or I would require additional payment for something so sinister. And just what did your victim do to deserve this?”

“It’s the royal prince.”

Nightshade paused for a moment. “Interesting,” she said, after a long moment of silence. “I will happily assist you in this; for my own reasons, and for such a fine specimen that you have brought me today. I must admit I am eager to create this curse that’s so very well deserved… I’m all too used to simple peasants coming through looking for ‘hellbound revenge’ for a stolen cup.” Her eyes belied the disgust that she held for such requests, though she laughed, amused by the antics; Lirin privately agreed. “But I suppose that’s what happens when you only live for a measly century. Everything must seem very important, I’m sure.”

Ah, she’d forgotten what Nightshade was like. Almost condescending – Lirin felt it would be much worse if she were one of the mortals Nightshade so despised – and yet also found herself so entranced and entertained by. Her every move was calculated, like a sleek cat, every flicker of her eyes and click of her claws a deliberate motion. She moved slowly, because she did not have to move quickly.

Lirin swallowed. “Ah, yes,” she said, trying to keep herself nonchalant, but also not too casual in the presence of an elder witch like Nightshade. “I – perhaps it is important, really. Or maybe it isn’t.”

“Wise words,” Nightshade said, tone suffused with sarcasm. “Or is that just ignorance I detect? Even a fool says wise things once in his life.”

Lirin shifted uncomfortably.

“Well. First things first. Did you bring me a few drops of your victim’s blood?”

Wordlessly, Lirin pulled the vial out of her pouch. In the low firelight, the prince’s blood at the bottom of that clear glass glistened darkly.

“Good,” Nightshade murmured, the gold on her eyes and lips gleaming. “Good, good, good. Have you done this before?”

Lirin paused. “Yes, once,” she said, quietly.

Nightshade narrowed her eyes slightly, accepting the precious vial of blood in her clawed fingers. She looked at it, then up to Lirin again. “Tell me, have I met you before?”

“Maybe.”

Nightshade glanced to the window, beyond which a storm was raging. Lirin pushed on it a bit, softening the rain. Nightshade looked back to her with one eyebrow raised.

“You’re quite young for a witch,” she said, setting the vial down and tapping one claw on her chin. “Who taught you?”

“I…” Lirin faltered.

“Don’t be nervous, dear. You are, after all, among equally illicit company.”

“The Stormseer taught me, a little bit,” she said meekly, casting her eyes down. “Before she died.”

“You must be quite the heir,” Nightshade murmured. “Did she pass any of her artifacts to you?”

Did she know?! Lirin couldn’t tell. “Nothing more than her knowledge,” she replied, still looking away.

“A pity.” Nightshade leaned back. “I sold some of those to her. Ah, well, I won’t ask any more. Let’s get back to business, shall we? All you will need to do is sit back and relax while I…” she paused, smiling. “While I call upon the tortured spirits of the underworld, what fun, what fun. Ah- ”

Here she paused, as if remembering something. She blinked a few times, looking to the side, then turned her gaze back to Lirin, pinning her again. “Just – just stay put. And please, don’t. Touch. Anything. Do you understand?”

Lirin swallowed hard and wrapped her hands in her cloak. She nodded, tipping her face down.

“Don’t touch anything,” Nightshade whispered.

“I won’t,” Lirin promised, blurting it out; she felt she had to. It was only Nightshade that could make her feel so young and helpless, like a new mage, not even a witch, desperately trying magic for the first time.

Nightshade treated her to one of those gleaming smiles. “Good,” she purred. “I will claim no responsibility for any atrocities my curiosities may commit against you. And that’s that, isn’t it?”

Lirin swallowed again.

“Our first step,” Nightshade sighed, sliding the book she had been holding aside, “is going to be to establish a strong, protective barrier around you, to ensure that none of the negative energy of this curse is able to harm you.” She smiled. “Yes… please, take a deep breath, dear, and try not to panic. Just relax, and let me handle the magic.” She raised her hands and the scent of firesmoke became saturated with the heavy perfume of nightlilies as she began to swiftly weave a faint web of darkly glowing lines around Lirin’s form. The magic hung heavy in the air, and it made Lirin’s head spin.

“Meddling with dark magic,” Nightshade murmured, after a moment, the lines trailing from her clawtips, “is certainly risky business, but you have absolutely nothing to worry about. I will keep you entirely protected, I can promise you that.”

It was reassuring, really; very reassuring. Nightshade knew her business, and was extremely competent. Anything she said was, while perhaps touched by bias, very true.

After a moment, the web sank down to surround Lirin very closely, though she didn’t feel its presence on her head or shoulders. Nightshade drew her hands back, the deep light trailing off her clawtips and dissipating into the air. “That’s done,” she said, smiling, and picked up a bundle of dried herbs, holding it up to one of her candles to catch light and begin to let off a fragrant smoke. “Now, time to call upon my beloved spirits.”

Almost instantaneously, Lirin began to hear the faint whispers of long-dead voices, echoing around the chamber. Faint shapes swept through the smoke, causing eddies and currents in the otherwise still air. Lirin tried not to look.

“Don’t be nervous, dear,” Nightshade said, smiling. “They would never hurt you.” She paused, looking contemplative. “Even if they wanted to, they have no hands.”

You don’t need hands to hurt someone, but that reassurance might work on an actual girl of eighteen or so, Lirin thought to herself.

“They’re actually quite overjoyed to have you here. It gets a bit lonely; I don’t often have visitors. I do plenty of business, but it’s all quite… indirect, if you will.” She smiled and cast around, gaze roving over the various instruments of her craft that lay scattered around her desk. “Now, where is my good cursing paper…?”

“Cursing paper?” Lirin couldn’t help herself, but she also had to fight the urge to clap a hand suddenly over her mouth. She’d done this before, but that didn’t mean she remembered it.

“Of course.” Nightshade plucked a small, square sheet of thick black paper from a sheaf held in a wooden slot on the wall. “I have different types of paper for different types of magic. What type of back-alley witch do you take me for?” She smirked, amusement glittering in her dark eyes. “I happen to use only the rarest, finest quality ingredients in each and every one of my spells… and that’s why you came to just the right place.”

Lirin couldn’t argue with that. She settled deeper into her chair, feeling the warmth of the raven’s cloak surrounding her underneath the woolen outercloak.

Nightshade set the black paper atop a lighter sheet for support and began to scribe a series of circular symbols on the paper and, through the smoke and the smell of nightlilies and the scratching of quill on paper and the faint forms of the spirits, Lirin heard words echoing.

“When the Wheel begins to turn, let the Beltane fires burn…”

Nightshade hummed to herself, very quietly.

“When the Wheel has turned a Yule, light the Log and let Pan rule…”

Lirin felt a faint breath whisper past her face, almost felt the scraping of a claw over her cheek. She sat very still.

“Heed ye flower, bush, and tree, by the Lady blessed be,
Where the rippling waters go, cast a stone and truth ye’ll know,
When ye are in dire need, harken not to others’ greed,
With the fool no season spend, or be counted as his friend,
Merry meet and merry part, bright the cheeks and warm the heart,

Three times past, three times go.”

Nightshade drew a long, curling circle, the symbol for ending. Lirin felt the heavy pressure over her body lift slightly, and the spirits backed off, hovering once again in the corners of the room.

“Yes, there are countless different methods of cursing, but letters are my personal favorite. I’ve found them to have the most powerful and direct effect,” Nightshade whispered, half to herself, as she penned in the last few lines of scripting and added a few touches here and there. “Which is reasonable, when you consider a curse cast from a long distance as compared to one unveiled directly into the victim’s face. Mm… that should do it.”

She set the quill aside and looked over the paper, then pulled a large sheaf of crinkly black paper from another wooden slot in the wall and carefully wrapped the curse up; Lirin caught a glimpse of it as she folded it, the dark surface now glinting with a set of runes scribed in silver. “Lovely,” she breathed, tapping her fingertips on it. Lirin could almost see the violet drifting off the paper, though as Nightshade passed her fingers over it, the color seemed to retreat into the paper itself. “We’ll just need to seal this.”

Lirin watched as Nightshade plucked a stick of scarlet wax from a small wooden box and held it over a tea-light she picked up from the table. “The gold,” Nightshade murmured, “is for blessings, and my beautiful, beautiful scarlet is for my curses.” She smiled.

The wax went soft and glistening, then drippy; Nightshade held it over the letter and bright red dripped onto the black in a glistening pool. She set the letter down and held out a hand. “I’ll be needing that blood now, if you will.”

Lirin held out the vial. Nightshade took it from her hand, flicked the cork open with one clawtip, and tipped it over. Lirin watched the precious drops slide out and land in the wax, mixing with it instantly and vanishing.

“Perfect,” Nightshade cooed, and sealed the wax with a golden stamp of a flower. She handed it over with a smile as soon as the wax was dry. “Alright, my dear.”

“Thank you,” Lirin said.

“Don’t thank me; you paid for this,” Nightshade said with a smirk. “Now, make sure you do not botch the delivery, hmm? In the dead of night, when you are certain you will not be spotted, you will need to deliver this to the doorstep, or perhaps windowsill, of your victim. And upon its opening, the curse shall be cast. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Good, good, good, good…”

Lirin took the letter and placed it carefully in her bag, sliding it between her old journal and a small bag of coins. She stood from her chair and bowed to Nightshade.

“I will return if I have further need of your services,” she said.

“I would hope so,” Nightshade replied, raising an eyebrow. “If you bring me curiosities of a comparable caliber to today’s prize in the future I would be more than happy to oblige your whims. Run along now.”

For a moment, Lirin didn’t know if she should respond. She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Nightshade raised an eyebrow.

Lirin turned and left the building, into the light rain.

Chapter Text

“Oh my god,” said Aleira’s customer, eyes wide. “I know you!”

Oh, shit.

“You’re Aleira!”

Oh… not shit? Aleira looked up, perplexed, and then realized – it was Jennie, the girl from the pet store. “Oh,” she said, panicking. “Hi.”

“Hey! I didn’t know you worked here.” Jennie beamed. She wasn’t in her work clothes, and had her hair down; it fell to about her shoulders, straight and black. Slung over one shoulder was a massive black purse, jingling every time she moved.

“I, uh, yep,” Aleira said, mind blanking out. “I sure do.”

“That’s awesome, this place is the greatest.”

“Yeah.” Aleira frantically tried to remember how to speak so she wouldn’t be rude. “Hey, it’s good to see you here. Uh – did you come looking for anything in particular?”

“Mm, yeah, I heard about a card game?”

Oh thank god. Not the board game that’s backordered ‘til the next century. “Sure, do you know the title? If not, describe it to me, and I might be able to guess what it is.”

She did not know what it was, but her coworker Isaac did. “I don’t think we have any copies out here,” he said, “but I’ll check back ‘cause we just got stuff delivered. Let me run and look for that. Aleira, hold down the counter.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

 Jennie leaned on the counter. “Actually,” she said, “I came here for – well, I mean, I did come for the card game. But I’m picking it up for a friend, as a present. Have you seen him lately here? I know he comes here a lot.”

“What’s his name?”

“Leo Bernal.”

Now that she thought about it, she knew Leo, but hadn’t seen him recently. “Uhh… no, he hasn’t been here in the last… at least the last few days, maybe week and a bit or so. Huh. Is there some kind of out-of-town con he went to?”

“Not that I know of, why?”

“A few of the other regulars haven’t been around either.” Aleira frowned. “Maybe it’s just the end of tourist season.”

“That’s probably it.” Jennie paused. “He hasn’t answered his phone, either.”

Aleira got a heavy, uncomfortable sinking feeling in her stomach. “That’s weird,” she said. “Maybe he lost it.”

“Maybe.”

But she felt a shiver. A worried chill in her bones.

Isaac returned from the back rooms, triumphantly waving a box over his head. “Got it!” he called across the store. It wasn’t horribly busy today, calm enough for Aleira could have these conversations with Jennie and get away with it.

“Oh, awesome,” Jennie said, beaming. “Leo’s gonna love it! When I get it to him.” She laughed, but it took her a fraction of a second too long to do it.

“I’ll bet,” Isaac said, missing her hesitation. “That’s a popular one. Anything else you need?”

Jennie shook her head. “No, that’ll be it, I think. Though… I might be back for some of these? Not right now, but like, later. I want to try them out.”

“We have open board game nights on Wednesday evenings,” Isaac supplied. “And –“

“You can also –“ Aleira said at the same time, then stopped. “Oh, sorry, you go.”

“Nah, you go ahead.”

She shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I was just going to say you can come in at any time and use the board game library, as long as there’s a table free.”

“Or the floor if you really want,” Isaac chimed in, and paused, thoughtfully. “Actually, don’t do that.”

Jennie glanced between them. “Do I need to bring a partner player or a friend group or anything?”

“Probably a good idea, but if it’s a slow evening, we can demo games with you,” Aleira said. “We’re not really supposed to do that if it’s not one of the games actually on the demo tables, but… eh.”

“Well, I don’t want to get you in trouble!”

Aleira snorted. “Please,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ve seen Isaac do it more times than I can count. He’d be happy to do it again.”

“Or, you know, you could do it for once,” Isaac grumbled good-naturedly, shooting her a glance with his arms folded.

“Me? Uh… I don’t know how to play most of those still.”

“Then you better learn. You got a job to do, man!”

Aleira winced internally. The words were playful, but she really didn’t like being referred to like that. “Yeah,” she mumbled. She took the card game from where Isaac had set it down and rang it up. “Would you like to make a rewards account here?”

“Uh, sure.”

“Okay, give me a second. I’ll need – just your name and phone number, that’s all.” Aleira clicked a few times. “What are those?”

“I’m Jennie Libardi, spelled L-I-B-A-R-D-I.” She waited while Aleira tapped her name in, then listed off her phone number.

“Alright,” Aleira said, and reached for a card, scanning it in. “This is yours now.”

“Cool, awesome.” Jennie flipped it over to look at it, then slipped it into her wallet.

“Total’s 17.33. Will you be wanting a bag or a receipt today?”

“Neither. Man,” Jennie muttered, shaking her head with a grin. “Your customer service script is better than mine even. I should take notes.”

That caught Aleira by surprise. “I – uh, thanks. I’ve done retail for… a while.”

“Yeah, same. When do you work next, so I can come in and get game instruction from you instead of some rando?” She shot a glance towards Isaac, with a smirk.

“Hey,” he said.

“I don’t know my schedule yet,” Aleira said automatically. “We don’t get it until the end of the week.”

“Ah, that’s a shame,” Jennie said, and smiled. “Well, text me when you know. You have my number already.” She winked, grabbed the card game, and sauntered out of the store.

“Wow, okay,” Isaac said, watching her go. “I wish that happened to me.”

“Huh?”

“She just came in here, flirted with you a lot, gave you her phone number, and left.”

Aleira stared. “She what.”

“Did you not notice that…?”

This is absurd. He’s delusional. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aleira said. “That – we were just talking. And stuff. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Alright, sure, but she did just straight up tell you to text her, so like…” Isaac shrugged energetically, spinning in a circle. “I dunno! That’s what it seemed like to me anyway.”

Yeah, he definitely doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “She just wants to know when she can come in and learn how to play stuff. When is our next schedule out anyway?”

“Should be, like, two days from now.”

“Mm. Okay.” Aleira glanced back at the computer.

“Are you gonna do it?” Isaac grinned. “You gonna message her?”

“Not while I’m on the clock!”

“Well obviously no, yeah, right. But afterwards?”

“Maybe.” Aleira ran the sale program back to the default screen. “Maybe not. I don’t know.”

Isaac laughed. “I’ll leave you be,” he said, sauntering across to the other register. “I’m gonna sort cards, and you definitely don’t gotta tell me anything. But like, if you want to, later, after you message her – I mean, if you message her –“

“Please,” Aleira said.

“Shutting up now.”

She returned to her work – there were a bunch of special order notification emails that needed to be sent out – and focused on it, trying not to mull over the interaction from earlier.

But before she left work, she added a contact to her phone – Jennie Libardi – and saved her number for later.

Chapter Text

It didn’t matter which side of the doorstep the curse had to be placed on, so when Lirin found the prince’s window open once again, she took the opportunity to leave the black letter just inside the prince’s door. She fluttered in and landed on the floor, and with a sweep of one wing became herself again. The prince didn’t so much as stir. She removed the letter from a pocket inside her coat and propped it up against the wood of the door, inviting and mysterious.

That would do it. The prince’s curiosity would be his downfall.

With that, she pulled her cloak around her again and leaped towards the window. She hopped onto the sill, then out between the glass panes, leaving nothing behind save the curse. As she went she felt the faintest whisper of Nightshade’s magic curl across her feathers and dissipate into the wind.

She did not know if he opened it in the morning or not. If he did, she would likely hear news of it soon enough; the slow decline of his health would not remain secret for long. The royal family was in the public eye, whether they wanted to be or not, at all times.

But while she was waiting for that to take effect, she could afford to get herself some new transportation. Sure, her raven-wings were fine, but they would only last so long, and if she had terrible distances to fly she wouldn’t be able to manage it on her own. No, she needed more than borrowed wings from an old feathered cloak. She needed a mount.

Brindlethorn was gone. Of that, she was sure, though she was equally certain that her old companion was not dead. But she was missing, and without her Lirin couldn’t fly. She needed a replacement.

She went to Harbington.

It was a small city, tucked in a valley in the mountains south of Lancaster. It was mostly ignored by the Queen’s men, despite the fact that many of the inhabitants there actively interacted with witches; no one there was considered capable of staging a rebellion of any type.

Their folly, my fortune, Lirin thought, as she set out. She would walk to Harbington to avoid raising suspicion about her travel time. She didn’t want anyone thinking she’d used magic to get there, of course.

The morning was dreary, drizzling and a bit cold for the end of summer. Lirin had left her raven’s cloak behind in the Babblebrook Inn, opting instead for her coat. It was less memorable than her heavy woolen traveling cloak, and she wanted to avoid attracting undue attention.

She’d heard mention once or twice of an animal menagerie in Harbington. Various customers to the Inn had talked about it – Maybell’s Menagerie, it was called, and apparently it hosted a remarkable selection of creatures. Certainly Lirin would be able to find something there to suit her needs.

 Harbington presented itself suddenly. One moment, Lirin was walking through trees; the next, she stepped out into a clearer portion of the road and saw before her the cobblestones of a road that opened itself willingly to the mountain path. Beyond it, a winding streets snaked between neat little buildings, and even from here Lirin could suddenly hear the chatter of a morning crowd. Despite the gloom there seemed to be a great deal of people out and about.

Lirin took one step into Harbington and blended into the background instantly. Fashions were highly varied here, and her coat and boots were no exception; no one paid her any mind.

It took a few turns and one rather embarrassing request for directions before she found what she was looking for: Maybell’s Menagerie. The building was large – of course, it had to be – and Lirin saw it was surrounded by a tall stone-wall perimeter topped with iron-wrought spikes. The spikes themselves were festooned with various colorful, glittering strips of fabric or ribbon.

Counting the yard, the Menagerie was by far the largest building around. Lirin knew it wasn’t large enough to hold many fully-grown beasts, but most menageries did not sell those; they were too strong, and too unused to the mortal races, unless they’d been raised amongst them and sold off.

Unlike witchcraft, the care and keeping of magical creatures was not a controversial or illegal hobby in Lancaster and its surrounding territory. The Menagerie was proof of that. Even if it weren’t, Lirin doubted the Queen’s men would be willing to storm such a place and try to shut it down; the amount of creatures the owner of a menagerie had devoted solely to them would be enough to overwhelm most small arrest squadrons, if not larger groups of soldiers. No, nobody wanted to bother with it, and it wasn’t like ordinary people were going to be able to handle the more powerful magical creatures as it was. Any that could be a threat to the Queen would escape confinement and disappear into the wilds when they so chose.

Not for a witch’s pet, though. Lirin smirked as she stepped up the stones to the doorway and entered, pushing open the wooden doors. They looked very new, freshly painted; there was probably a reason for that.

The interior of the shop was rather dim, lit by candles and light streaming through one slightly dusty window. Immediately Lirin felt dwarfed by the looming mounds of clutter – birdcages, boxes, baskets, piles of papers and things wrapped in paper, metal pump-handle canisters and glass bottles sealed with cork and wax, potions of various types with their colors swirling mysteriously and potion ingredients lined up beside them, a ring of keys hung high up out of reach prying hands or claws, pieces of protective clothing and gear folded neatly but scattered haphazardly, rope and sacking and netting, labels and sticks of wax and even eggs sitting out in the open, glittering beautifully in the flickering firelight. Everything was stacked up on wooden and metal crates, probably containing even more stuff. The storefront was surprisingly small; Lirin gathered that this was where all the inactive creatures and eggs were shown off, and that the rest of the Menagerie was dedicated to actually holding already hatched (or just young) magical creatures who needed plenty of room to move around.

She took a breath as she stepped through the door. The shop smelled of candlesmoke, and of animal fur, and very very definitely of magic. She could hear already the curious murmurs and growls of various animals in amongst the dusty gloom, and hurriedly moved forward and shut the door before any of the tiny figures she saw scurrying about managed to escape. As she hurriedly closed the door, she heard a small bell tied to it jingle merrily.

The counter, which she had previously assumed was empty, was very suddenly occupied by a short woman with curly brown hair and a pair of thick glass goggles that made her eyes seem even larger than they already wore. She was dressed in a tattered jacket of a material Lirin wasn’t familiar with, and had a red handkerchief tied around her neck.

“Hel-lo!” she said, immediately. “How are you?”

“Ah – fine, thank you,” Lirin said, taken aback.

“Good! If you don’t mind, I would just like to take a quiiiick look at you, just to sort of get a sense of what you’re here for. What brings you.” She tilted her head all the way to the side and screwed her mouth into a twist, peering carefully outwards.

Who on earth is this woman? Lirin thought, perplexed. She stood motionless, waiting, as the Menagerie owner – and that meant Maybell, right? – bobbed her head up and down, left to right, squinting at her newest customer.

“Alright,” she said, after a few rather awkward moments, “interesting. Ah – hm. I’m not really – I’m not seeing anything yet but I think – I just need to focus, if I just, um… if I just concentrate, if I just concentrate, it will come to me…”

Lirin stared at her as she took her fingers, just poking out of her long, ragged sleeves, and pressed them against her temples, squeezing her eyes shut.

“Yes,” she said, wrinkling her nose up. “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm… nope.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve got absolutely no idea.” She beamed, seeming completely unbothered by this fact.

“Do you… normally guess?” Lirin didn’t smell any magic…

Maybell sighed, blinking a few times, and looked to the side, looking rather let down. “No, it’s, ah… I’ve never been able to tell before, but…” Her expression brightened again as she looked back to Lirin. “That doesn’t keep me from trying! Persistence pays off! Except for when it doesn’t! Words to live by.”

Lirin had barely a second to process this before Maybell extended an arm and swept it across the counter, pushing a number of small trinkets to the side out of the way and knocking a coil of thin rope to the floor behind her. “Well, don’t keep me in the dark!” she said, pulling a padded stool from behind the counter and plopping down on it. “What can I help you with?”

Her enthusiasm was… not quite infectious. Lirin glanced around at the shelves. “I’m just searching,” she said. “For… I’m just looking.”

“Just browsing? Sure thing. Well, welcome to the Menagerie! We’re all very happy to have you here –“

From her side, a low growling sound echoed, perfectly encompassing the emotion ‘consternation.’

“…well, except for Theodore,” Maybell said, glancing down. “He’s um – he’s in a bit of a mood at the moment. But that’s all right!” She made a motion with her hands behind the counter; the creature called Theodore evidently departed them, at least for the moment. “If you would like to have a seat, and stay a while, I can personally guarantee that, by the time you leave, you will be entirely convinced that you need one of my creatures.” She pushed her glasses up on her face, peering intently at Lirin. “Mhm?”

“Uh – “

“Absolute guarantee! We can spit and shake on it.”

“We can what.”

“No… you don’t – you don’t do that where you come from…” Maybell said, studying Lirin’s expression. “…alright, fair enough.”

Maybell was so often smiling that whenever she didn’t, when her expression fell, her eyes seemed even larger. They were a deep hazel, ringed with short lashes that looked in several places to have been removed by some method and grown back not quite the same.

Interesting, Lirin thought, as Maybell went into a tangential monologue about… shoes? From what I can tell, she is entirely devoid of magic. Yet she runs an establishment concerned wholly with creatures infused with it. Perhaps that is the secret to such a place?

“Um… what was I saying?” Maybell said, blinking. “Oh –“

She began to search amongst the various objects scattered about. Lirin watched her impassively, fascinated.

“Ooooh,” she said, picking up a potion. It was clear, with a glittering powder layered in the bottom; as she tipped it upside down and back again the powder mixed into the medium and formed a swirling nebulous mass, beautiful, reflecting the light of the candles. “I don’t think you have any need for this, but isn’t it pretty?” Maybell said, eyes fixed on the potion.

“Ah – yes,” Lirin agreed, caught off guard.

Maybell set the potion down and continue searching. She came up a few moments later triumphantly holding a small wooden box with a golden latch. “How’s about a spicy fresh batch of wintergreen dragon breath mints? Have you heard of them?”

Lirin had not. “Ah… no.”

“Mm? Well, they’re a Maybell’s Menagerie special, so I’m not surprised you haven’t.” She unlatched the box and removed a piece of paper with handwritten instructions, revealing a number of small, shiny spheres, dark silver in color with a gold sheen to their remarkably smooth outsides. “So. You just take one of these, place it in the mouth of the dragon, and their fire-breathing abilities will be dampened for just a few minutes!” She nodded sharply. “They’re quite useful if you need to brush their teeth, or retrieve somebody from their mouth, or just aren’t in the mood for complete incineration.” Her eyes crinkled up at the edges as she slipped the paper back into the box. “That would be a bit inconvenient! I speak from personal experience, of course. My eyebrows have never grown back quite the same.” She set the box down on the counter, latched shut again, and leaned forward, eyes going intent. “You, on the other hand, have lovely, entirely unsinged eyebrows. They’re so smooth, wow…”

Lirin pulled her head back just a tad as Maybell leaned forward, staring at her face.

“Your eyebrows, they have, um –“ She looked back to Lirin’s eyes. “They have a nice luster.”

“…thank you?” That was definitely the first time – in any of her lives – that Lirin had received that particular compliment.

She nodded, grinning. “You’re welcome.”  With that she leaned back, practically bouncing on her stool. “So, uh, what do you say? Would you like to… stay a while, in exchange for maintaining your lovely, lustrous eyebrows?”

I don’t even have a dragon, Lirin thought, but in response cast around and grabbed the nearest stool. She had to remove a small bag from it, which she put on the counter, and sat.

“Excellent!” Maybell said. “I’ll just set these aside for you… say, I’ve never seen you here before. Most of our customers are regulars. And I never forget a face! Except for when I do! Which happens… quite often…”

She went from sunny and laughing one second to mildly confused and sad the next, and back again in mere moments. It was almost difficult to follow, but Lirin found it increasingly endearing.

“Where did you come from?” Maybell asked, peering at her with what seemed like genuine interest.

“From up north, near Grand Fleur,” Lirin told her.

“Oh! Well, I hope Harbington has been treating you well.” She paused, flipping her head to the side again. “Precisely what sort of a person are you?”

Lirin froze. “Ah –“

“Not sure how to answer that, are you? Yeah, me neither.” Maybell grinned. She opened her mouth to say something else, but at that moment both she and Lirin caught sight of a long, weasel-like critter, scales mixed with fur with six limbs, poking his horned head into Lirin’s bag.

“Theodore!” Maybell scolded, and reached over the counter, grabbing him immediately. “Do not – give that back!”

Clutched in Theodore’s mouth was a small burlap pouch. Maybell reached over and grabbed his head, pressing at the side of his jaws as she grabbed the pouch and wrenched it away from him. “You know better than to do that,” she hissed, as she let go of his head and scooped him up, setting him on the ground behind the counter. “You can’t steal from customers…!”

“What,” Lirin said.

Maybell straightened up, expression seemingly caught between embarrassment and annoyance. She held the pouch out to Lirin. “I believe this belongs to you, I’m sorry about that, why don’t we just put that back in your pocket…”

Lirin accepted the pouch and slipped it into her bag. It was one of the ones containing one of the various precious artifacts she’d collected; it had been stashed with the journal and a few other trinkets, including the amber-fang egg with which she’d paid Nightshade. All my preparation of lives past paying off. I only hope I will make it worth it.

Maybell sent a last, baleful glance after Theodore, then returned her attention to Lirin. “So,” she said, regaining her usual enthusiasm. “Are you in the market for a new creature?”

“I –“

“Or, um, any creature-related supplies? We carry cages, foods, medicines, cleansing products, caretaking manuscripts, handling protective measures, like… gloves, goggles, repellants, retardants…”

My gods, she speaks fast. As soon as there was a break in the flow, and Maybell looked to Lirin, she held up a hand. “Just a creature,” she said.

“A creature? In that case, would it be alright if I ask you a series of questions to determine what sort of a creature might be suitable for you?”

Lirin already knew the answer – she’d come here for a dragon, and a dragon would be what she left with, she had no doubt – but she saw no reason not to comply. “Alright,” she said, hiding her smile.

“Great!” Maybell chirped, and began to cast around again, poking through piles of stuff. “Let me just fetch my book…”

She came up with a green cloth-bound book and an enormous flack feather quill, and opened the book, flipping past pages of cramped, compact writing before finding a clear one.  She pressed the book down on the counter, readied her pen, and looked to Lirin. “So, tell me: What is the weather like where you come from?”

“Variable. Temperate. Often very stormy, especially in the summer.” Lirin hid another smile.

“Oh, that sounds absolutely awful. No wonder you’re in such a dark mood!”

Lirin shrugged. “I’m… fine, actually. I quite like it.”

“Oh, you’re feeling excellent?” Maybell peered at her, pausing her scribbling for a moment. “Interesting… you don’t have a very readable face. No… It’s a very nice face, but it’s quite stoic.” She glanced back to the book. “Hmm, let’s see… “So what size of creature? One that you can fit in your pocket, one that you can ride, or somewhere in between?”

“One that I can ride.” Definitely.

“I see. And how much dedicated space would you be able to offer your creature in your living quarters? Just a corner tucked away in a cabinet, or a full room, or acres of land?”

She had the entire sky. “All of the space it could ever need and more.”

“How often do you travel, and what sort of places do you travel to?”

“Constantly, and everywhere. I travel by trade.”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Maybell said, looking up, “what do you do?”

“I’m a blacksmith, but I sell what I make.”

“Ah. So travel’s quite necessary. I’ll be sure to make a note of that.” She nodded and looked back down, muttering to herself as she wrote. “So… a creature that could transport… vast distances… Do you have any prior experience with handling or training magical creatures?”

“Yes.” Lirin did not elaborate. The questions continued.

“What is your temperament? Are you easygoing and calm, are you precise and structured?
“Are you primarily nocturnal or diurnal?”
“How much time will you be able to devote to care and maintenance of your new creature?”
“Purposes you would like your creature to fulfill? Will you need them to be able to deliver letters, sniff out people or ingredients, be a comforting companion or a fierce protector…?”
“Are you interested in a creature that strongly attaches and bonds to you for life, or a creature that is less personally devoted, more… solitary, task-oriented?”
“What level of physical strength will you require for your creature?”
“And what level of intelligence?”
“How expensive can you afford?”

Lirin raised an eyebrow. “I have an old dragonfire opal pendant, one of the protective ones,” she said, reaching into her bag. “I’m certain that – “

“Ah – no, no no, don’t take it out!” Maybell hissed, eyes flicking down to where a strange stoat-like being was watching Lirin with beady black eyes. “You’d have it snatched out of your hands before you can blink. Um… I’ll take a look at it later, when the coast is clear, to ensure that’s authentic, but if it is real, that could purchase you nearly any creature here, e-even a… dragon.”

I would certainly hope it’s real; it was hard to recover this from the ruin where I’d left it after I made it a few centuries ago. “Understood,” Lirin said, trying not to laugh.

“Final question.” Maybell looked back down to her book. “How much of a commitment are you prepared for? We have creatures with a… wide variety of different lifespans.”

Lirin allowed the corner of her mouth to quirk up in a smile. “I’m certain that I will be able to fulfill anything that is required of me,” she said coolly.

Maybell beamed. “Well, I have tentatively decided that you are a very kind and trustworthy person, so I don’t think that you will have any problems with creatures being willing to, ah, listen to or obey you, or creatures being harmed under your care; and based on what you have told me, the most suitable creature for you will, without a doubt, be a dragon.”

Of course; that was as intended and expected. Lirin thought again of Brindlethorn and felt that familiar ache in her heart where the dragon’s presence wasn’t.

“I’m going to show you the ones that, I believe, will be a best match for you and your specific needs – that is, the dragon eggs. We do not sell, um, full-grown dragons here as you could prooobably guess from the size of the shop…” she laughed through her own words, and Lirin, unthinkingly, laughed with her.

“That’s fine by me,” Lirin said, and settled in.

Maybell led Lirin through a series of eggs – the first was Ardenti demonium, the fire-drakes of the volcanic ashlands with thick armor plating and immense strength, twice the size of a horse when fully grown.

“Demoniums have a lifespan of about one hundred years, and are immensely strong, robust, and muscular. Juveniles are glowing orange like hot iron when they’re young, but as they age, their skin deepens to this iridescent scarlet shade, with keeled, black-tipped scales that look almost singed by fire.”

This would be an excellent dragon for a blacksmith… if Lirin were really a blacksmith by trade and not just training. She felt a little bit guilty lying to Maybell about her trade, since the shopkeeper was extraordinarily friendly and also remarkably perceptive when it came to what would be best for a person, but the secrecy was necessary. Still, that one was promising… if there were no better, she’d likely end up with the fire-drake as her new companion. It might cause problems for the Inn or the forests…

Hm, she was going to have to find a new place to live no matter what.

Maybell led her through a series of different eggs, showing each one off and describing the dragon it would become. “This one,” she said, tapping on the outer shell of a sparkling green egg encrusted with dirt and leaves, with a tiny white flower bud sticking out of the top, “is the Viridi vitaem, with about a four-hundred-year lifespan. When she’s ready to hatch, this little flower on top of the shell will fully blossom; right now, it’s just a little bud. You have to keep her – in the egg – well-watered and misted, or the vines around it won’t grow strong enough to break the shell when it’s time for her to hatch. The Viridi is very kind and mild-mannered; she’ll grow up to be a stout, small dragon, the color of pine trees and spattered with shimmering golden freckles and beautiful big golden eyes. She will be ideal for a cook or a potion-creator, because when she’s grown, all over her back will sprout a wide variety of mushrooms and herbs which can change with the seasons.” She stroked the greenery, going on about the dragon’s eventual temperament; how easygoing it would be, how sedentary. “What do you think?” she finally asked.

Fascinating. What a good dragon this would be for Willow. But they were sun-loving dragons, and they could not fly; and thus, would be a terrible fit for Lirin. “No,” Lirin said, “I don’t think she would work out very well. I’d like something that can move.”

“Something a bit better-suited for travel? Sure. Let me think…” Maybell fussed with the vines encircling the egg, ponderous. “Oh! I have just the one.”

She leaned down and replaced the vitaem in the compartment she’d gotten her out of, and came up with a completely different egg from a dark box with a cloth draped over it. The egg was shiny and silvery-black, the surface pebbled.

“This is a Moonsleek,” Maybell said, tapping her fingers on the reflective armor. “They live for about a thousand years. Underneath this impenetrable silver armor is a smooth, shiny, midnight-black shell. Once she’s ready to hatch, she will shed all of these scales – which you should certainly collect and use in armor fabrication, they are extremely rare and of course highly coveted for their impenetrability, naturally… useful, in a suit of armor. The moonsleek – ah, that is Noctalia luneris – will have midnight-black skin and eyes with long, beautiful eyelashes. She’ll be very stealthy; they move undetectably and in complete silence, even while carrying an owner. They are slim and slender and can carry you through almost anywhere, and entirely nocturnal.”

Lirin leaned forwards, looking at the extremely small egg. “Beautiful,” she murmured. A dragon completely able to sneak anywhere undetected, associated with invisibility, and able to tie knots or pick locks? Fascinating and incredibly useful. Valuable.

But storms were daytime work, and the moonsleek would serve her poorly in that regard. Despite her recent activities, her best magics were worked in the day, when she had access to the sun’s fierce heat.

Maybell nodded and carefully placed the moonsleek egg back in the box it came from, pulling out an even smaller egg, this one coated in golden petals. “This is an Aura florens,” she said, smiling. “This will be a small, delicate, beautiful dragon with light glittery wings. She will emit a soft, warm glowing aura that will lift your spirits whenever she’s nearby. Her scales are bright gold petals, just like the ones here on the egg – and they are absurdly valuable, mind you – and they like to sleep in silk and satin and will only eat the finest quality meals.”

Mm. Definitely not. Too pricey and delicate; Lirin would not be able to care for that.

“Here we have the Masse seatus, or water weed dragon. They are covered in water weeds and mud, and algae. They are gentle and curious, and like living in shallow seas…” she trailed off, judging Lirin’s reaction.

No, absolutely not. Lirin shook her head sharply. “I need to fly,” she said.

“That’s what I thought.” Maybell replaced the egg in the heavy wooden trunk it had come from with a slosh of liquid. She hurried away for a moment and came back with a wooden crate sealed shut. When she opened it, cold air billowed out in clouds.

“Glaci ictus,” Maybell murmured, reaching in and bringing out what looked like a cluster of snow and ice in one hand. “Blizzard dragon. They take about ten years to hatch and this one has about four years left, so this likely won’t be the egg for you, but I just wanted to show you the sprinklings of snow that accompany the egg at this point in development!”

True to her words, as soon as the egg was brought into the open, the tiniest snowflakes imaginable began to whirl through the air. Lirin glanced up, delighted, and watched the whip around. Maybell tried ineffectively to catch one on her tongue for a moment, shrugged, and put the egg away.

“This is the celestial or night dragon; they’re from the same family as moonsleeks, actually, umm, Noctualia. These ones are Noctualia noveria. They’re medium in size usually, but can be truly massive with wingspans of up to seventy feet. They can cause their scales to glow or not, and they can use the tip of their tail as a beacon, as well as shed bright white light from their pure white eyes. They’re very, very magical.”

Dangerous, but true. Lirin raised her eyebrows and considered the possibilities – long-term communication? Amplified spells? Ah, but only at night -  but waited as Maybell put it away and turned back to her after glancing towards a locked cabinet.

“This one… well, we don’t know what it is, but she likes darkness. She was found in the mountains buried in the ground. I’m going to blow out the candles if you want to see her; she likes to be buried in the deep, deep, dark.”

The words rang with a sort of ominous feeling; Lirin shivered and shook her head. “No, thank you.”

“No problem!” Maybell turned and actually fetched the next egg from a hammock near the ceiling.

“This is the Columbus europus, or as it’s colloquially called, the skyhopper dragon.”

Lirin focused instantly.

“This will be a truly colossal dragon, with a wingspan of up to a hundred and fifty feet. They range in coloration from white to gray to a very pale blue, but when they emit one of their powerful lightning or storm blasts, they turn a deep stormy gray with bright flashes of white and yellow. They have smooth scales that blue electric blue around the edges when they’re agitated, which is a warning that is incredibly effective at warding off the few predators they have. They are solitary and seldom seen, and there’s a possibility that they can absorb or even manipulate storm magic.”

Lirin stared at it. “That,” she said, “is perfect.”

“Oh?”

Yes. Absolutely. Lirin leaned forwards; the egg, almost, seemed to wiggle when she came closer.

“Oh!” Maybell said, looking at it. “Fascinating! It’s become somewhat warmer, and lighter – that usually means that the dragon inside feels a connection to its possible owner. This is – hmm! It’s been quite some time since this happened to anybody.” She looked ecstatic.

“May I hold it?” Lirin asked, eyes fixed on the egg.

“Of course, of course,” Maybell murmured, but her eyes were on the egg. Lirin reached out and cupped the soft white egg in her hands – and it was warm to the touch, with a faint mist hovering around it.

“Remarkable,” Maybell whispered.

Lirin brought the egg up and, after a moment, took a breath and breathed it out over the egg’s surface, imbuing it with a tiny spark of her magic. Cool air blew from her lips and a tiny spark of lightning leaped from her to the egg. It touched the surface and sparked out in a branching pattern over the white surface. The egg glowed for a moment, a faint zircon-blue luminescence that gathered like mist around Lirin’s fingers.

“OH!” Maybell actually moved back a moment. “Now, isn’t that something!”

“Isn’t that something,” Lirin murmured, unwilling to hand the egg back.

She didn’t want to let go of the egg – it reminded her of Brindlethorn, how her egg had immediately bonded to Lirin and never let go. But she did, so that Maybell could package the egg and take her payment. She verified the pendant was real and handed Lirin a basket of assorted goods – hatchling feed, potions for care, accessory items for their day-to-day – along with the skyhopper egg, nestled safely in a bed of cotton inside a small, lidded basket.

Maybell bid her a cheerful farewell and she stepped back out into the rainy day.

Chapter Text

It took Aleira probably half an hour this time to record the full happenings of her dreams. It was clear, so clear, and though the memories were fading, she knew that – just like with the others – they wouldn’t go away fully.

These dreams. They were so vivid, so realistic, so detailed. They weren’t nonsensical and confusing like other dreams she’d had, before these. Before that first one, where she’d been reading ancient journals and jumping through the trees in a thunderstorm like some kind of anime character.

Dragons! Well, dragon eggs. Dragon eggs, in her dreams. And such weird-looking unique ones, too. None of the gold-scaled Game of Thrones nonsense, all of them uniform and boring. Dragon eggs with leaves and ice and cloudstuff. And her breath, she’d been able to make a little spark, and she’d had a cool cloak, and there had been a whole town out there that her dream-self hadn’t explored, and maybe if she were right about them being partially lucid she could go there next time or something and look around, who knew what she might find –

She had to go to work. But as she got ready, her mind was entirely filled with the dreams.

The week before, she’d finally had the courage to text Jennie her schedule (Isaac, in the background as she’d clocked out, had refused to quit chanting “do it, do it” until she’d sent the message) and had been startled to find her showing up on the slowest night of the week.

“I’ve never played this,” she’d said, setting down a two-player card game on the counter. “Teach me how?”

She’d returned two days later, and promised she’d be by the next week. That was today, so…

Aleira walked to work, trying not to run. It was still hot out, despite the oncoming autumn and the fact that it was not yet midmorning, and she didn’t want to get disgusting before her work shift.

As she’d hoped, it was slow as anything. Jennie didn’t come in for the majority of her shift, though – she only came in five or ten minutes before Aleira got off.

“Hey!” Jennie said, beaming.

“Hey,” Aleira said, glancing to the clock in the corner of the computer screen. “Um, I’m nearly off work…”

“That’s actually why I came now instead of earlier,” Jennie said. “I figured I should probably not be taking up all your work time. If you’re free we could play after you get done, though.”

That made sense, actually. “Uh, fair,” Aleira said. “That – yeah, that’s reasonable. It’s not like I’ve got anything more interesting to do with my time.” She winced internally; that sounded so rude, and that hadn’t been her intention at all. Oh, god. She hoped Jennie wasn’t upset. “I’m off at four thirty…”

“I’ll wait around ‘til then. If you’re cool with it, of course.”

“No, yeah, sure.”

Aleira rang up one final customer, then handed the counter over to Maluhia, who had just come in. She pulled her game-store jacket off and slung it over one shoulder, then went looking for Jennie.

She was in the board game hall, looking at the library of games. “Hey,” she said cheerfully, and picked one up. “How’s this one work?”

The game – called Odin’s Ravens – looked relatively easy. “I dunno, I’ve never played it,” Aleira said.

“Let’s try it out, then.” Jennie headed over to a table.

Good thing she just Does stuff, Aleira sighed to herself. I’d never do anything on my own like this.

The game was beautiful and simplistic. The goal was to get your raven all the way through a gauntlet of different environments, and try to beat your opponent’s raven. There were beautifully painted mountains, endless golden-grass plains, lush green forests… the cards were gorgeous.

“Oh,” Jennie said, as they began to lay down their cards in turns. “A few friends and I are going to be going to, um, sort of a get-together? If you will, on Saturday. If you’re going to be free, you’re welcome to come along.”

That threw her for a loop. “Uh, what?” She laid down a mountain.

Jennie shrugged, playing another card, and moved her raven. “We’re all college students, so we kind of know each other, but like, nobody’s gonna object if you show up too. You don’t have to stay if you don’t like it.”

Aleira played a card, unsure of how to respond. People want me to come spend time with them? Those ones don’t even know me! And parties are awful! Not that I would know. I’ve never been to any.

“Super no pressure though,” Jennie said, tapping her fingers on her hand of cards, and playing one. “Like, definitely no worries if you don’t want to! You have pets to take care of and also probably work.”

“Yeah. Um, I can check my schedule.” What am I doing?

“Oh, that would be great! I’ve lived in Gatlinburg forever so I know most of the people who actually have lives here and stuff, and like, Grace – Grace Mattison, uh, you probably haven’t met her – is super chill, so her stuff won’t get wild.” Jennie laid another card and moved her raven again, delighted.

“I’ll… check. I’m not really, um… I don’t do parties, normally, I’m not, uh…” Aleira fiddled with her cards and selected one, laying it down. “Not invited, and they’re not super my style…”

“You don’t have to! It’s an offer, is all,” Jennie said, grinning. “I figured I’d offer.”

“I, yeah, thanks. I’ve not, um… you’ve lived in Gatlinburg for a while?” She didn’t realize people just lived here; it was mostly a tourist town.

Jennie looked up, eyes slightly wider than normal. “Oh, yeah, always! I was born near here. My family moved here when I was just a baby. I’m guessing you haven’t?”

“No, I moved here from Vermont, uh… not even a year ago yet.”

“Vermont?” Jennie leaned forward, over the table. “That’s way up north! Why’d you leave?”

Aleira shrugged. “Didn’t like it there,” she said. “Too much emphasis on maple syrup.”

Jennie laughed, a raucous, delighted sound. She searched through her hand and laid down, with a flourish, a trick card. “Hah!”

“Oh, dang,” Aleira said. “How does that resolve?”

“Uh, I don’t know, actually. Let me check the rules.” Jennie reached over and started looking through the rules booklet.

She’s giving me an opportunity to reject. Like, gracefully, I think? That’s… wild. But… won’t I just ruin it? The entire thing? The party, I mean.

“Oh, I borked that up,” Jennie said, drooping. “I think our ravens switch places. I think.”

“We can play it like that.”

“That sucks for me, then. Whoops…”

“Are you sure?” Aleira said, watching her swap the ravens. “I mean, actually that might not be the right way to interpret. You have the rulebook and I believe you, but –“

“It’s cool! Your poor raven needed a boost. He was lagging behind on his sad little wings. Maybe he’s molting? I’m sure I’ll catch up to you super quick anyway with my master strategies.” Jennie winked, grinning. “It’s your turn.”

“O-oh.” Aleira looked down at her hand, pulled a card, and laid it down.

“So yes! Sorry, we got off topic there for a second. Um, the party. There’ll be a bunch of people there, but like, the quantity where you don’t have to interact with anybody actually. It’s just a crowd at that point. So, like, if you’re worried about interacting with people, you super don’t have to ‘cause everyone’s already interacting with each other. But! If you want to –“ Jennie laid down another card and moved her raven – “you can totally talk to people. You’ll be fine.”

Aleira nodded. “Okay,” she said, and laid down a card. She couldn’t move her raven with that, but she didn’t really have any other cards. “I’ll… check. And I’ll let you know if I, uh, if I can. But I don’t know where it is or how to get there.” She paused. “I don’t actually have a car…”

“Oh, that’s fine! If you want I can drive you.” Jennie studied the game field. “Yeah, my raven’s catching up to yours. Which one do you think it is?”

“Which –“ Aleira paused, caught off guard. “You mean, which one of Odin’s ravens?” The god did have two, specifically; that was kind of the premise of the game.

“Yeah!” Jennie picked her piece up and examined it. They were just silhouettes, carved out of wood, but one was a light, almost white wood, and the other was a darker, more classic tan-orange color. “They’re called – oh, what were their names? They almost rhymed, I remember that.”

“Munin was one of them,” Aleira said, thinking back to what she’d learned in high school.

“Yes! And the other one – I think was called Hugin?” She pronounced it with a peculiar – and possibly more correct – twist, a ‘y’ sound before the low u. “Hugin and Munin.” Munin she said without the y, with just the ‘oo’ of the u.

“I think that’s right.”

Jennie put her piece back down and laid another card. “I agree. Teamwork!”

Aleira smiled and pulled out another card. As she laid it down, Jennie watched, then looked up at her.

“Okay, you’ve gotta tell me – I have to know what you’re doing,” she said, looking amused, but also a little baffled.

“Um – what?”

“Is that, like, a strategy?” Jennie gestured to Aleira’s cards. “You’ve only played forests and mountains, after each other.”

Aleira paused, looking down, and frowned. She picked up her already-played cards and looked through them. True enough, it was just forests and mountains. When she looked back to her hand, she could see there were other things in it. Why, then…?

“I… don’t know why I did that,” she said, slowly. “I don’t think I was paying attention.”

Jennie laughed. “Apparently not?” She laid a card and moved her raven, past Aleira’s.

Needless to say, she won. Aleira couldn’t catch up, even when she started paying attention to the game. Jennie held her raven up triumphantly.

“Behold, the fastest raven,” she said, grinning. “Which one is this?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll say this one is Hugin, because it has hug in the name, and I like it. Yours can be Munin.”

“Aren’t ravens black? Why is Hugin so light?”

“Maybe he’s an albino raven,” Jennie said, and held the little wooden Hugin close to her heart for a moment. “You don’t know he’s not.”

“Fair, fair.” Aleira rubbed her wrist. “To be honest, I know most of my mythology from, um… from God of War. And a couple other games. But mostly that one.”

“I haven’t played that, but from the sound of it, I might not like it,” Jennie said.

Aleira nodded. “I don’t think that it’s, uh, really your style.”

“Maybe not.” She paused, thinking. “Probably not. Want to try playing again?”

“Sure.”

They played another round. Halfway through, Aleira realized she was doing the same thing – laying down forests and mountains and nothing else as they chattered above the cards. Unless she paid attention, she just… did that. Weird. Maybe her brain just liked the colors, and chose them if she wasn’t actively choosing something else. The subconscious was a strange and interesting thing.

After that round, though, she couldn’t stay any longer; she’d already worked her full shift and was tired and hungry, and wanted to go and make something to eat. And check on her cats. “Hey, I should probably, uh… go home and see what Vulon and Vokun have destroyed,” she said, with a nervous glance towards the door.

Jennie nodded sagely. “What they’ve destroyed, not if they’ve done it,” she said, unsurprised. “Cats are just like that, huh?”

Aleira almost asked how she knew she had cats, then remembered – she bought her cat food from Jennie. Of course she knew. “Yeah. Do you have any?”

“Me? No, I wish,” Jennie said, with a grin. “God, I’d love to have personal pets. But I’ve got my hands full dealing with Lenjamin at the store.” She leaned closer, dropping her voice to a whisper. “He doesn’t like competition.”

Guess you’d better not let him see me with you, Aleira thought, and determined she would never ever say something like that aloud. “Hah, fair enough,” she said instead. “Though if it were a home pet, how would he know?”

“He’d know. He’s just like that. I petted someone’s fish once when I was over at their house, and he bit me five times on the ear in the exact same spot the next day.” Jennie shook her head. “He just knows.”

“Petted someone’s fish?”

Jennie picked up the box and nestled the wooden raven from her set back into it. “Back you go, Hugin. May you fly to victory in someone else’s hands.” She started stacking the cards up and nodded. “Um, yes. You can pet fish. They like it! They kind of, like, ram themselves into your hands.”

“Aren’t they covered in slime?”

“Uh, yeah, and that can be kind of offputting, yeah,” Jennie agreed. “But they’re so cute! They’ll ram their little faces into your hand and flare their gills out. They really do like it, some of them. It’s true!”

Aleira helped her clean up the game, though there wasn’t much to do. They closed up the box – it was shaped like a book, and slipped inside a cardboard shell – and replaced it in the board games library shelves.

“Hey,” Jennie said, as Aleira stood up and picked up her jacket. “I don’t know where you live – obviously – but you mentioned that you don’t have a car. You want a ride home?”

“No, I’m alright. I like the walk.”

“Okay. Text me if you want to go ahead and go to that thing, no worries if you don’t.” Jennie stood and headed over to the shelf, replacing the game. “But, like, totally let me know, yeah?”

“I will,” Aleira said, before even realizing it. She blinked to herself, startled, and then smiled, softly. “…yeah, I will.”

Chapter Text

Lirin coasted over the trees, skimming the verdant canopy. She was on the hunt.

Not for Queen’s Guard – she had to remember that was what they were called now, not Crown – patrols, or for food. No, she was searching for a new home.

The Inn was a wonderful place, warm, welcoming, filled with light and laughter and good smells. But she couldn’t live there. It was far too dangerous, both for her and for the tavern girl – Bridgette. She couldn’t afford to put them in such a risky position anymore. She had to find a safer place to stay.

She wasn’t afraid of losing track of where she was in relation to the Inn and the room that held her precious dragon egg, stored safely in a nest of blankets in her temporary bed. She could draw herself back to it easily enough. Even while only partially knowing the layout of the mountains in this direction – she didn’t remember it otherwise, and remembered more of the northern regions, where she’d grown up this time – she could always find her way back to a designated point.

She’d find a new place to live, and mark that one instead. And then she would be safe. She’d just have to transport everything she had there. If only she had Brindlethorn…

No.

She’d returned from Maybell’s to the Inn, and Bridgette had immediately pounced on her, asking all sorts of questions about her visit. Lirin had shown her the egg.

“It’s beautiful,” she’d said, as Lirin carefully held it out, fingers hovering inches from its pearly surface. She was reluctant to show it to anyone , but Bridgette she trusted. “When will it hatch?”

“A few weeks at most,” Lirin said then. “And then it will grow swiftly.”

“Hopefully it will be grown by the time winter sets in! Wouldn’t want it to be cold and hungry in the snow.”

“Hopefully. Though its ilk are accustomed to the cold, given how high they fly.” Lirin had paused. “I – I’m going to keep it very, very far away from Lancaster.”

“Of course.”

And so now, she was searching for that place. Somewhere, she knew, she could find a new home safe in the wooded slopes. Somewhere, amongst the tumbled rocks and ancient rivers, she could find a place where her beautiful new dragon would be safe.

And herself, of course. Where she would be safe too.

If it happened to have enough room for Brindlethorn, too, that would be an added bonus. She knew she’d find her old friend one day. She would be ready to welcome her back.

Lirin followed the rivers through the mountains, backwards towards their sources. She spent hours tracing them up and down, trying to find a good place to set up a camp.

She found something far, far better. She’d seen a clear lake from a distance and had been headed towards it when something caught her eye – the unexpected regularity of cut wood below, through the leaves. She arced around and pierced the canopy, diving between the branches.

Below, a river tumbled over mossy stones, glittering in the sunlight. Just up the shore from it stood a cabin, reddish wood walls and a roof of shingles covered in fallen leaves. Around it were a few low stone walls, stacked rock coated in lichens and mosses with adventurous ferns poking out from the cracks. The trees nearby were tall and strong, their bases rich with pads of moss. There was a small front door, and a larger back porch, the length of the cabin, that looked out towards the river. Near the steps was a small firepit and Lirin even spotted a rope hammock hanging between two trees closer to the water’s edge.

She stayed in raven form, landing on the ground, and hopped around to the side of the building. Was there anyone here? There didn’t seem to be any roads leading to this building, just a broad unpaved pathway winding back into the trees and around the side of the mountain, and the gutters hadn’t been cleaned. She fluttered forwards, then leaped up, onto sweep of the circular windowsill, and peered through the glass.

As far as Lirin could tell, there was nothing inside. She searched the interior. No movement.

Warily, Lirin hopped down and transformed back to herself in a swirl of feathers. She stepped around the cabin to the door and knocked.

No answer. She knocked a second time, then called, “hello? Is anyone there?”

No answer, again. There didn’t seem to be anyone inside. She tried the handle.

It was locked. Definitely no one home, then. She bent down, peering at it. Hmm…

Wait – there was a chimney. She took back her wings and flew up to the roof, then perched on the chimney, staring in. The flue was shut. Damn it. But that might mean the cabin was closed up, and its owner was gone for good, not just gone temporarily. She glanced around – there was a sheltered stable area and a pen for a horse, but the gate was open, and all of the bins and tools inside were stacked up, disused. It seemed like the previous inhabitant might be just gone entirely.

Hmm…

She hopped off the chimney and fluttered back to the ground. Perhaps she could pick the lock, or get one of the windows open with a knife if they were simply latched?

That’s where she had luck. She had no tools with which to pick the lock, but the windows were an option. She had a belt-knife, and slipped it under the sill of one of the square windows, wiggling it through there until she managed to push on the latch. It finally grated to the side as she wiggled her blade, and when the metal hook slipped free Lirin pulled her knife back, stowed it, and hauled the window up.

The interior air whooshed out in a billow of stale dust. It was clear nobody had been here in a very long time; Lirin sneezed, then coughed. She’d have to air this place out. But! This mean that this place was long abandoned.

The interior was decorated, too. Why would the owner have left? She poked her head through the window, then with a sigh hauled herself up and climbed ungracefully through, flopping out the interior and falling onto the wooden floor with a heavy thud.

She probably could have flown through. Oops.

Lirin pulled herself up and dusted her cloak off. There was a full layer of it on the floor, and on top of nearly everything inside the cabin – no, definitely, there was no one here, and there hadn’t been in quite some time. There was furniture, and trinkets, but it honestly looked as if someone had gone on vacation and just… never come back. Colorful crocheted blankets draped themselves over the backs of the fluffy couch and a large plush chair, and a collection of intriguing but mundane artifacts was displayed both on cabinets and above the hearth, which was empty, having been scraped out and cleaned. There were a few stains of soot inside, in between the stones, where whoever had washed it hadn’t quite gotten it all the way clean.

The hearth, massive and set half into the wall, too big to be fully recessed, was at one end of the cabin. At the other, to Lirin’s surprise, the cabin split; there was a small loft, with a few steps leading up to it, housing a bed and a tiny latched window and what looked to be a bookshelf. Beside those steps led a few that went down into a dip in the ground, where she could see a woodstove, cabins, and what looked like an icebox.

Fascinating. She moved over to it, leaving the window behind her open, and started to look through the cabinets. They were mostly empty, dusty but otherwise clean. She did find a bag of rice in one of them; the previous owner must have left it behind.

They’d cleared the entire place out, though, of food at least. None of the trinkets left behind looked too personal – there were no portraits, no love letters, nothing with names or pictures on it. It was cozy, but impersonal.

Perfect, to be honest.

“I can work with this,” Lirin said, out loud, and took her cloak off. She laid it over the back of the plush chair and headed to the door. It did unlock from the inside, and she doubted anybody would be able to find this place if there were no maintained roads leading to it, so she didn’t have to worry about the fact that she didn’t have a key for it; nobody was going to stumble upon this place on accident unless they were flying like she had been, and she doubted anybody would be doing that. If she really had to, she could probably find a way to have a key made for the door, or the lock replaced. And she was a blacksmith by training. She might be able to do it herself.

She opened the front door and all the windows, letting the late summer breeze sweep through, carrying with it the sound of birds and leaves and water and the scents of the forest and the river nearby. A lot of the blankets were covered in dust; she started to carry them outside, then paused.

No. She had to go check on her dragon’s egg. She had to bring it here, out of the Inn. She had to bring all of her possessions.

Ordinarily, she could take a few things with her in flight if she had them underneath her raven’s cloak when she went to transform. But that wouldn’t work for the egg; she couldn’t take another living thing with her like that. Possessions merged into her form easily, but another form of life such as that would not. She’d have to take a horse here, if possible.

The path leading to the cabin was promising. Lirin paused for a moment inside of it, marking it in her mind and heart as a new place she knew how to get to. Then she grabbed her cloak and left the cabin, closing the door but leaving all the windows open, and strolled down the path. It stayed broad and clear for a good distance, then narrowed and became less obvious before finally coming out onto a road. Halfway down it, she got sick of walking and resumed her flight, low and swift and winging just over the leaves that patterned the pathway like an early autumnal mosaic.

There was a pathway that led back to a main road with real traffic on it. There wasn’t much – few people were traveling into the range at the moment, and there wasn’t much in this direction save the unbothered peaks – but there were a few instances where Lirin had to alight in a tree and assume the behavior of a normal bird, fluttering away when startled.

She had to shed her raven’s form after a few hours and spend a bit of time walking. Again she wished she had a dragon to ride…!

Not yet. Not yet. Soon. Once her dragon hatched and grew. Patience, Lirin. Patience.

The Inn wasn’t too far, though it was just past dark by the time she reached it. She slipped through the door after another tenant and silently made her way through the crowded dining area, to the halls behind it. She unlocked her door and slipped inside, then locked it behind her.

The dragon egg was still safely nestled in the blankets where Lirin had stored it. When she uncovered it, it wiggled ever so slightly, and she caught a wisp of mist off its surface, curling like morning fog, accompanied by a faint hint of that vibrant blue glow. She smiled and tapped her fingers on the outer shell like Maybell had told her to. Apparently the hatchlings liked it, and it helped the shell grow strong so it could hold them.

How amazing, she thought, that such a tiny egg would eventually become such a massive dragon. The egg could fit in one of her hands, and she knew that the dragon it contained would one day be large enough to blot out the sun and send armies running. How beautiful it would be.

She packed most of her things – she didn’t have many – and slept soundly that night. In the morning, she went to Bridgette.

“Hello,” she said, “I need to borrow a horse. I can assure you I will return it.”

“Sure,” Bridgette said. “What for?”

“I’ve found a new home.” Lirin held up the basket, repacked with the egg inside. “For my little one. I wouldn’t subject the Inn to this youngster.”

“You know, probably a good idea,” Bridgette said, with a smile. “I can have one of the mares saddled up and brought out to you, if you’re willing to sit and wait a minute. Is that okay?”

“Yes, of course,” Lirin said.

She rode a big, sturdy horse named Strawberry, friendly and laid-back. Lirin loaded her saddlebags, packed a sack, and mounted up, settling her dragon’s egg in front of her.

“I’ll have her back by dark,” she said. It was nearly midmorning; she’d have enough time to get Strawberry back.

“Sure! Be careful out there. If you have Willow’s charms, you might want them… though if you’re heading deeper into the mountains you should be fine.”

Ah, of course. Lirin couldn’t afford to use magic with her dragon egg on her person, nor could she risk harming Strawberry. She rode with her woolen cloak on and her head held high, as if she were an ordinary traveler who had every right to be where she was.

She didn’t meet more than a few people as she rode Strawberry southeast through the mountains, on a pathway that departed swiftly from the Fenfoss River and climbed a bit before heading down into the Azure River valley.

When the path met the Azure River, she turned off it, onto a leaf-strewn pathway. From there she just backtracked – she’d flown this area the day before, and recognized the landmarks. It was just as beautiful a day as it had been the one before.

Following the twists and turns of the roadway, and the subtle and barely-visible forks and turn-offs, she followed the Azure River up, then followed one of its larger tributaries until she finally came around a corner and beheld the little cabin. The windows were still open, and nobody else was there; she had been right about it. It was abandoned save for her.

She took her egg inside, installing it in its basket on the table near one of the windows where the wind could caress it underneath the curtains, and unloaded her possessions. Strawberry got a break to eat some of the grass and drink from the river, and then Lirin took her on the long ride back to the Inn.

It was nearing dark by the time she got there. When she rode up, she saw the door open and Bridgette peer out. The tavern girl’s face lit up in a bright smile, and she hurried down into the yard. “There you are!” She said. “I was worried you’d gotten lost. Are you sure you want to return to your home so late? It’s a long walk, it seems…”

Lirin smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll make it just fine. I don’t fear a bit of a night f – night walk.” She stopped herself just in time on the word ‘flight;’ she’d forgotten, for a moment, that she was hiding herself from Bridgette. Not because she didn’t trust the tavern girl, but because she didn’t want to endanger her.

Bridgette took Strawberry’s mane. “She seems happy, at least,” she said, stroking the horse’s nose. “Are you all right? Do you want to come in, for something to eat, at least a bit?”

Well, she could spare a few moments. “Ah… I don’t see why not. You’ve convinced me.”

Bridgette grinned. Lirin headed inside, and Bridgette rejoined the Inn a moment later, once Strawberry was taken care of. The tavern girl had just made some fresh bread, and there was a stew on; Lirin ate more than she could hold nearly and had to turn away extras.

“Thank you for letting me use your horse,” she said, as she was about to leave. She fished through her pocket for money and found only stones. “Hmm… will you accept this as payment?”

“Oh, don’t worry about –“

“No. Here.” Lirin reached out and revealed a shining oval of topaz in her palm. “Take it.”

“…I, well, if you insist,” Bridgette said, eyes wide.

“I do.”

She took the topaz, marveling. “It’s beautiful,” she said, tapping her fingernails on its smooth surface. “Where did you find it?”

“I… it was handed down to me. Not as an heirloom, or anything; someone I knew had a collection, but I can’t find a use for them sitting on my shelves. I thought it best you have it to use for whatever you please; it should be worth no small sum.”

With that, Lirin took her woolen cloak and stepped outside. She headed down the path, casting the occasional glance back at the Inn. Was Bridgette watching her through the window? No, that couldn’t be. Why would she?

Once she was out of sight, she took her woolen cloak off, revealing her raven’s cloak, and bundled the woolen one up into a roll that she tied to her back. It made wearing the second cloak awkward, but it didn’t matter for more than a moment. Lirin swept the cloak around her, dissolving into a whirl of black feathers and darting up into the sky.

She couldn’t see too well at night, but she could follow the mark she’d left for herself in her mind and heart. She could follow the beacon home, that tugged at her heart, and in just an hour or so she fluttered down into the clearing of her new home and stumbled as she landed into human form, exhausted.

It had been a long day. A long few days, actually. She dragged herself inside and sneezed at the dust. It was dark; she blinked a few times, trying to spot anything in the shadows. Were there candles? She could light them with a spark or two. Yes, there was one; she moved over to it, tripping on the carpet, and snapped her fingers next to the wick. A spark leaped forth and landed on the string, and did nothing.

“Oh, well, alright,” Lirin said dejectedly, and went to find her matches. She closed the door, fumbling about in the dark.

Wait. Was that light?

She glanced up. Yes, there was a faint, blue light cast across the cabin. She turned and saw it emanating from her egg, which sat where she’d left it on top of the dresser. It hadn’t moved, but it was letting off a soft, steady glow.

“Well, well, well,” she said, dropping her bag on the ground and stepping over, eyes fixed on the egg. “Look at that. What are you doing that for?”

The egg wiggled slightly when she got close, and she crouched down and tapped her fingers over the shell. The glow strengthened when she touched it, and she could feel the warmth of the shell beneath her fingertips. It was alive, and excited. Eager, perhaps?

“I cannot wait to see what you will become,” Lirin said, gazing lovingly at the egg. Cloudstuff was manifesting around it in little puffs and curls, and she gave it one last loving tap before heading back over to her bags. Through its light she could finally find her matches, and lit a few of the candles.

In the candle-light, the egg didn’t glow as much, but she could still see it shining. She seated herself next to it and watched it for a time, pulling out a piece of travel-bread to eat.

She’d have to find more food later. Ideally there’d be something she could gather in the area, and she could always fish in the tributary nearby. It wouldn’t be too much of a problem, and she could likely get some simple things like flour and butter next time she was near the Inn and near Harbington.

Lirin hadn’t planned on living here for any amount of time. But this was where her goals – the Queen and her lineage – were, and this was where she was going to raise her dragon, so she was going to be here for some time. She finished her bread, washed her face and hands with water from the pump in the yard, and took the egg up to the little nook upstairs. She knocked the dust off the bed and curled up under the blankets, just underneath the roof.

Before she drifted off, she unlatched the tiny window, to let the sounds of the forest and the fresh outdoor air in while she slept. The egg – which she had placed carefully on the nightstand next to the bed, within arm’s reach and in no danger of falling to the floor – seemed to like it, wiggling slightly when the air brushed against its shell.

“Sleep well, little one,” Lirin said sleepily to it, “for soon you will wake to a greater state than ever before, and together we will know the skies as no one ever has.”

The egg glowed to her, then slowly faded in pulses until it was dark. Lirin closed her eyes.

Chapter Text

Aleira’s mind was filled with images of the mountains from the moment she woke up. The dreams had been so beautiful – the bird-form, flying over the canopy, and that peaceful horseback ride, and the beautiful creek…

She didn’t have work today; it was her one day a week off. And now she so, so desperately wanted to go to the mountains, despite the fact that she never had before. She had to get there.

Aleira grabbed her phone and texted Maluhia. “Hey,” she wrote, “I took your shift last week. Could you do me a favor instead of taking one of mine?”

“Sure,” Maluhia wrote back, “what do you need?”

Aleira paused, feeling a bit silly, but forged onwards. “I wanted to go into the mountains, because I’ve never been. Could you drive me in and then drive me back out later?”

“That it? Yees, sure.”

Aleira got up and fed her cats, then packed some granola bars and water and a sandwich and put her sneakers on. She didn’t have hiking boots, because those were expensive, but she didn’t think she’d do anything too strenuous on her very first visit to the mountains proper.

Her very first, implying there would be more. Was she suddenly a mountain hiking fanatic? What was going on with her lately?

She dismissed the thoughts with a shake of her head and waited for Maluhia to show up outside her apartment. The ride into the mountains was extremely quiet and awkward, and Aleira prevented herself from panicking about it by watching out the window at the trees flashing by.

God, it seemed so similar to the dreams. Almost familiar – probably from the dreams, though of course, the dreams weren’t a real place, and this world was.

“Do you want me to, like, bring you to a trail?” Maluhia asked, breaking the silence as they came out into an open area and turned right towards a large building.

“Here’s fine,” Aleira said. “I’ll just wander around this area.”

“Okay, well, don’t get murdered or anything,” Maluhia said, and turned into the parking lot. She pulled halfway into two different parking spaces and stopped the car.

Aleira got out. “Thanks,” she said, and shut the door, taking her bag with her. Maluhia waited until she’d moved away before driving off.

Okay, well, this was it. Time to go… deeper.

For some reason, that made her shiver. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself, and headed towards the visitor center.

It was, startlingly, a lot larger than she thought it was. Inside she found an entire museum of taxidermy animals and plants; a big boar, lots of hawks and owls, some smaller birds like wrens and warblers, models of native shrubs, trees and fungus, some snakes and lizards, and weird little shiny lizard things – salamanders. She read the plaques. Oh, they weren’t lizards? They were amphibians, like frogs. That was weird. “Slime lizards. Long frogs? Worms?” Aleira murmured, frowning at a bright orange salamander model with black spots. She still didn’t understand it. “How is that thing real?”

The model stared back at her, glossy golden eyes impassive. She wondered where they lived. She’d certainly never seen one before.

There was a theater that played some videos, and there was a gift shop she wandered through, but she didn’t buy anything. She was more interested in going outside.

That’s a first, she thought to herself, shaking her head. She was an indoors girl. She liked playing video games in her room, not wandering around in the forest. This was so weird.

But she just felt… drawn to it, somehow. She never had before, but now…

Aleira left the visitor center. Behind it, there was a paved path that gave way to dirt underneath the trees. She followed it past a bank of solar panels and blackberry bushes. I’ve never seen a blackberry bush before, she thought, curiously peering at them. At least, I don’t think so. But this is definitely what that is. Right?

Maybe she’d spotted it in the museum room. She stepped off the path and looked closer at the bushes; sure enough, they had plump berries on them, glistening in the sunlight. She reached out and poked one, then took hold of it.

It was way firmer than she was expecting, and she gave it a gentle tug and pulled it off the bush. Huh. Should I eat this? Probably a bad idea.

Almost definitely a bad idea. What if they treated the bushes with chemicals? But no, this was a national park; they wouldn’t do that.

Eat the berry, Aleira, she told herself, and did, wincing. She glanced around to see if anyone was looking before she put it in her mouth.

It tasted, unsurprisingly, like a berry. It was tart, sweet… overall, fine.

Huh.

She went back to the path and wandered into the woods. Halfway along the path she stopped, stunned; a downed log lay alongside it, but sitting on top of the log was the largest bird she’d ever seen in real life that wasn’t a hawk or vulture. It was a woodpecker, striking black and white feathers accented by an enormous red crest, and it was decimating the log. As Aleira watched it ripped a huge chunk of pulpy wood out and threw it to the side, landing a good five feet away. Holy shit.

A small family came along the path from the other direction, and stopped to marvel at the woodpecker. When they got close enough, though, it looked up with bright eyes and leaped into the air, fluttering way in a flash of black and white.

Wow.

Aleira continued, looking down to avoid eye contact with any of the passerby. She kept moving forwards, examining the ferns, the grasses, the –

Ahead of her, she heard the burble of water. She glanced up and saw that the path crossed a tiny stream; she stepped over the bridge, glancing down into the clear water, and kept moving. For some reason, that seemed almost familiar.

As she went along, that sensation only grew stronger. It got to the point where it was unnerving, and as she turned a corner and saw a fallen tree serving as a match to a bridge that crossed a larger brook, she stopped short, skin tingling. What is this? Why do I feel like this?

She couldn’t figure it out. It unnerved her enough that she crossed the stream and headed away from the location that was bothering her so much, heading downstream.

It eventually flowed under a bridge, and there the path ended; she figured she could go further, but should probably turn around. The sensation of familiarity was less here, and she was a little more comfortable.

She forgot about it temporarily when she saw two people crouched in the stream. Confused, she watched them for a moment. It was one boy with bright white hair and one girl with an extraordinarily long ponytail and glasses, probably roughly about her age, in their twenties (though the girl looked older), and they were poking about in the water, flipping rocks over and running their hands through the dirt underneath.

Occasionally, they’d look up to each other. They looked incredibly similar – they had to be siblings.

“Hey,” the boy said, looking up across the creek to the far side, “hey, there! Sam! There!”

“What is –“ the girl – Sam – started, and then made a full on lunge into the center of the creek, clearing the entire thing to get her hands on the far shore. Aleira jumped, startled, but there was a reason; Sam turned around and her hands were full of a large, angry snake. It wriggled and writhed furiously, but with an expert twist of her hands Sam pinned its head down, then grabbed hold of it just behind the jaws, firm and businesslike. It whirled its tail around and she ducked backwards before grabbing its tail too.

“Nice!” the boy crowed, throwing his fists in the air. “Hell yeah!”

“Oh my god,” Aleira said, staring at it. Both of them looked to her. “Oh, sorry, um,” she sputtered, and then the boy vaulted up out of the creekbed, grinning. He was dressed in cargo shorts, heavy-duty hiking boots, and a ‘Cornell Lab of Ornithology’ T-shirt, as well as a pair of red plastic sunglasses and a necklace of a dragon.

“You wanna see it?” he said, eagerly.

“The. The snake?”

“Yeah!”

“Oh, my god, Eli,” the girl said, sloshing through the creek towards them. She was wearing a pair of black shorts and a tank top patterned with sharks, and when she stepped out of the water Aleira saw she had hiking boots on as well, though these ones were soaked through. She had a pair of the same sunglasses, but in a deep blue color.

“It’s public engagement and education!” Eli called to her, then turned to Aleira, rolling his eyes. “Yeah! This is a watersnake, it’s not dangerous.”

Not dangerous? Aleira eyed the dark gray shape warily as Sam reached the edge of the creek. She glanced down at the tail end of the snake and wrinkled her nose. “Ew, bath time,” she said, and dunked the lower half of the snake in the running water, swishing it around like a wet bathing suit.  When she pulled it up the back half of the snake was a much darker shade of brown with clearly visible patterns instead of the dusty gray it was on the front half. Sam nodded and climbed out of the creek with no hands, stepping up to them and presenting the snake.

“It really can’t hurt you,” Eli said. “Sam’s got it safely held. Here, touch it just like this.” He put one hand under the snake’s belly to support it and gently stroked the top of its spine. It recoiled from his touch, and he shushed it fondly. As he did so, Aleira noticed the brightly colored rainbow band encircling his right wrist, and the blue, pink, and white one next to it. Immediately she relaxed more. She could trust these people.

Well… I guess… Aleira hesitantly put a hand out, and brushed it against the snake’s scales. They were warm and dry to the touch, each one not smooth but ridged down the center, making the skin overall quite rough. Already it seemed calmer, not pulling away as much as it had from Eli.

“Yeah, see, there!” Eli said, delighted. “The top half is all warm and dry ‘cause it was out of the water. The lower half Sam washed because it musked everywhere, so it’s wet, but should still be warm. He was in the sun for a while.” He grinned. “Good grab, Sam.”

“Thanks!” Sam said brightly, beaming. She looked to Aleira. “Yeah, I wouldn’t touch the tail. He’s smelly.”

“Uh, what,” Aleira said.

“When snakes get scared they don’t bite, they just um… expel a really gross fluid from their vents,” Sam explained. “It tastes horrible – “

“Which we do not know from personal experience,” Eli cut in.

“- so most things will just drop it immediately and not bother eating it. Unfortunately for this guy, because we’re humans, we’re not eating it, and we’re also not scared by that.” Sam held the snake up, peering at its face. “But fortunately, because we’re humans, and we’re not eating it, we’ll let him go afterwards, no harm done.”

“This doesn’t hurt it?” Aleira asked.

“Nope! Not at all,” Eli said.

“He should have calmed way down by now,” Sam said, and to Aleira’s horror, let go of the snake’s head. But it didn’t flail and bite as she thought it would; instead it laid in Sam’s hands. She slowly put her hands together, looping the snake through her fingers, and it sat there, sniffing the air with its forked tongue.

“See, not so bad,” Eli said, to the snake.

Sam looked up. “They have no legs, so they panic if they can’t feel the ground underneath them. They have nothing else to hold on to. Holding them like this means they can always feel something under their bellies, so they don’t freak out as much.”

“Really?”

“Yeah!” Sam held the snake up a bit. It raised its head a bit, smelling the air, but did nothing else.

“Sam’s magic,” Eli said, looking to Aleira. “Any snake she holds just calms right down super quick. She’s a druid, actually.”

Sam smiled, but didn’t refute the point.

“I’m better with salamanders,” Eli said. “Sam’s better with snakes and lizards. I always let go of them on accident.” He winced. “Like with the mourning gecko.”

“I’m sure she was fine,” Sam said automatically.

“The what?” Aleira said, glancing between them.

“A species of Australian gecko we found on a college campus over there. One fell like four feet out of my hands to the ground with eggs in her. Yikes.”

“They fall all the time in the wild, I’m sure,” Sam said. She raised the snake to her eye level and got close enough that Aleira felt real fear watching her stare into its unblinking gaze. “Snakes aren’t so scary once you figure out how they work.”

Eli beamed at it, then at Aleira. “A friend,” he said proudly, gesturing towards the snake. It yanked its head back, startled, and he blinked. “Oh, sorry, buddy.”

Huh. Aleira stared at it a little longer, but there was no way she was getting her hands close to it with its head free. It started to move, slithering through Sam’s fingers, and she effortlessly wound it back through her hands, letting it bump its way between her fingers.

“Yeah, snakes still make me a little nervous ‘cause I don’t know if I’ll handle ‘em right, so I let Sam do it,” Eli said, watching it. “Again: I like salamanders more.”

“I saw those in the museum,” Aleira said, hesitantly.

“You wanna see some real ones?” Eli looked to the creek again. “We just had a few, I can dig them back up no problem.”

“Oh, don’t bother them again,” Sam said, with a sigh.

“It’s for education, Sam! There’s nothing more important than instilling a love of nature and the natural world in other people!”

Sam shook her head and turned, hopping back down into the creek and wading towards the shore. Eli hopped down too, but stepped into the sort of off-shoot of the creek that was shallower, with a lot of large, flat stones. “This is primo salamander territory,” he said, grinning. “Check this out.”

He crouched down in the water. Aleira had to kneel down to see what he was doing, almost sitting on the dirt path. Eli grabbed a rock, then hauled it up, peering underneath. “Nobody,” he said. “This might have been the wrong one.”

Across the river, Sam laid the snake carefully on the bank and let go. It immediately slithered away at a remarkable and frankly terrifying speed, vanishing into the undergrowth.

“Let’s try this one,” Eli said, after he laid the rock down. He heaved the second one up, then dropped it onto his raised knee and slammed both hands into the water.

“You don’t have a bag ready,” Sam called to him.

“Shit!” he said. “I got him again, though.”

“Well, you better figure that out,” Sam replied, amused.

“Saaam!”

Sam sloshed over again and reached into Eli’s packet, pulling out a plastic Ziploc bag. She opened it and dipped it in the creek, filling it partially with clear water, then held it out. Eli opened his hands into it.

A billow of silty water fell in, as well as a surprisingly large, wriggling shape. It was a dark brown color, and as the mud settled, Aleira made out the chubby, slick form of a salamander. Its underside was a sooty black color, unmarked.

“A black-bellied salamander,” Eli proclaimed, carefully laying the rock back down. “A pretty okay one in size, though it’s not stream-ruling monster. These ones can be cannibalistic so you usually find only one master salamander in a stream if there’s blackbellies. The salamaster, if you will.”

Aleira snorted. She peered at the salamander. It wriggled occasionally, but seemed otherwise nonchalant about its situation. “Is it slimy?”

“Oh, very,” Eli said. He wiped his hands off on his shirt, leaving blots of water behind, and took the bag from Sam. “You wanna touch it?”

“Uh – sure.” She fiddled with the cuff of one sleeve, looking to the bag.

“Wait, wash your hands off in the creek water first. You gotta remove soap and chemicals, and also as much skin oil as you can.” Eli waited while Aleira awkwardly bent down and splashed her hands in the brook. It was surprisingly cold. He nodded as she stood again. “Salamanders are super sensitive to pollution. They can only live in the cleanest possible streams, which is why this park is so good for them. If their habitat gets even the slightest bit polluted, they can’t live in it.”

“Really?”

Eli nodded. Aleira shook her hands off, then looked at the bag. “Go on, reach in and touch him,” Eli said. “He won’t bite, hah!”

Aleira did so. The salamander’s skin was smooth and slimy, but it wasn’t disgusting like she’d thought it would be. It seemed… clean?

“Yeah, once I was searching for them in a stream on the other side of Gatlinburg and a bit further, past where there was a tornado a few years back. The entire stream was devoid of salamanders, though I did find cutworms and the like, and I couldn’t figure out why the hell it was like that until we rounded a corner. The stream had eroded itself into the ground, the banks were probably about four feet high, and there was a pipe stretched across the stream. A buried gas line, maybe? I don’t know what those look like. But like we watched it for ten minutes and it dripped once. We went past it, and about four feet upriver from the pipe…” Eli snapped his fingers. “Salamander.”

Aleira blinked. “But it was only a little drip…”

“Doesn’t matter. They’re that sensitive. They need the purest water possible. The fact that we’ve found so many in this stream means the water here is great quality.”

“So many?” Aleira glanced around, at the stream. Were there more?

Eli laughed. “Oh, boy,” he said. “Yeah, we’ve found a ton. Probably about fifteen or so in the bit’s we’ve looked in. And of course we don’t catch all the ones we see, and we don’t see all the ones that are there. So, you can extrapolate… pretty big salamander population.” He paused. “There are terrestrials on land, too. Ones that have lungs and can breathe outside of the water.”

Aleira looked back to the salamander in the bag. “Wait, what?”

“No lungs in this bad boy,” Eli said, gently tapping the side of the bag; not hard enough to disturb the amphibian within. It sat there completely still, little feet pressed up against the sides of the plastic. Its toes were miniscules; it struck Aleira as being incredibly complex, absolutely tiny and intricate and so very vibrant and alive. 

“They breathe through their skin,” Sam said. “That’s why they need the water to be that clean. Their respiration systems depend on it.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” Aleira asked, genuinely baffled.

Sam shrugged. “We picked it up,” she said. “We come from a… science family.”

Eli laughed. “Been coming here and catching them since I was a kid,” he said. “Love these little slime boys.”

Aleira took one last look at the black-bellied salamander in the bag. “Well, dang,” she said. “Thanks for letting me see them.”

“Yeah, no problem! Spread the good word of salamanders,” Eli said.

“Eli, dude, come on,” Sam said.

Eli shrugged. “I’m trying.”

Sam rolled her eyes. “We’re headed downstream to see if we can find any on the other side of the road outflow under the bridge.”

“Good luck with that,” Aleira said, and meant it.

“Thanks! Have a great day,” Eli said. He took the bag with the salamander in it and unceremoniously dumped it out into the creek, pouring it back next to the rock he’d grabbed it from; Aleira saw a flash of movement as it wriggled out of sight.

Aleira turned and headed back up the creek. That was so wild; people were just out here, doing stuff like that… for fun? They just did it. They just knew all that stuff about amphibians. That was crazy.

She glanced down at her hands. She’d touched a snake and a salamander, just now. She’d never touched either of those things before, not even the class pet snake back in high school.

As she walked upriver, the feeling of familiarity returned. She looked around. It almost felt as if she had walked here before, like she knew this from somewhere. What was that…?

As she neared the bridge, she stopped.

Wait. She did recognize this.

Across the bridge, and up the pathway a bit. There the ground sloped slightly up. She followed it, staring at the ground and when she got to the turn she followed a side path until it trailed off amongst the flowers.

Here, there was only forest. But she knew it in her heart – she knew it – that this was the exact same piece of land as the inn from her dreams.

It was exact, down to the flowers and roots that led up to where the inn would stand. What was it called again? The… Babblebrook Inn? That was it. It had a name and everything.

“How,” Aleira said, staring into the forest. Here, of course, there was no inn; just trees, sprouting from the place where in her dreams there was a grassy lawn. In her dreams, every time, there was a grassy lawn, always the same save for the changes the seasons wrought upon it.

Aleira shivered again. This wasn’t normal! She’d never been here before. There was no reason for this piece of land to be cropping up in her unconscious mind. There was no way it could be happening. It wasn’t possible!

It wasn’t possible.

Aleira glanced around. There was nobody nearby. She took a breath and nearly choked on the scent of decaying wood and fresh water from the nearby brook; the sounds clogged hear ears, the rustle of branches over the babbling of the creek, woven through with birdcalls. I have to be making this up.

But no, she could almost see where the Inn stood in her memory, between the trees. There’s where the steps were, there was where the horses could ride up, there was where the sign would hang, there was… there was…

She couldn’t quite grasp the thought. She moved forward and crouched, examining the ground. This was where the steps would be. Maybe there was some trace of them left? No. That made no sense. The inn wasn’t real. It wasn’t building that had once existed and was now fallen down. It’s not like she’d seen pictures of a place that fell apart; she hadn’t, and the inn had never existed in the first place.

There was no trace in the soil and roots of there ever having been stairs or a porch, or anywhere else of a building existing back here. She searched for stones of a foundation, holes for support beams, anything. There were no marks.

“Hey!” called someone from the path. “What are you looking for?”

It was Eli; he and Sam were strolling along, deeper into the woods. Aleira realized it was already much later than she’d thought, and the sun was brushing the tops of the peaks on the western side of their little valley.

She pushed her way out of the bushes and plants, shuddering when their soft petals brushed against her skin. “What?” she said.

Eli gestured to Sam. “We’re going looking for terrestrials higher up. Want to come with us? We might find pygmies.”

“Not at this elevation,” Sam said.

“You never know!”

“I do.”

“No, thanks,” Aleira said, cutting into their dialogue. “I probably have to… head home. Maluhia won’t, um, be around forever to come pick me up.”

“Oh, that’s fair,” Eli said, nodding. “What were you looking for up in the bushes? Any fallen logs?”

Aleira glanced back to the flat area where, in her mind, there stood a warm, laughter-filled inn, with a kind innkeeper and elves and ogres and a wild girl with a dragon’s egg. “I thought I saw something,” she started, and shook her head. “But I - it was nothing.”

“Ah, well,” Eli said, with a shrug. “You tried, though.”

“Yeah.”

He grinned at her. “See you around, maybe,” he said. “Probably not though.”

“Have a good evening,” Sam told her, and the two of them turned and kept walking.  

“You too,” Aleira said.

They headed up the path and out of sight over the rise. Aleira turned back to the forest. She stood for a moment, then pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of the area. I have to look this up. Google this or something. There’s got to be some kind of explanation for this. I’m probably making it up, too, it doesn’t make sense otherwise…

She thought about the snake. She felt like it had now, her heart twisting into knots to try and escape confusion and panic. It’s because he couldn’t feel the ground, Aleira remembered. He had nothing to hold on to. It felt like that. Flailing in the dark. Trying to understand something she couldn’t.

She slipped her phone back into her pocket. “I thought I saw something,” she murmured again, to herself, and turned away from the clearing, heading back over the creek and out to the road to go home.