Page 43 of A Dance with the Fae (Mistress of Magic #1)

‘This is all you need. I am all, and you must let me in. Find yourself, Faye, remember your heritage, your ancestors, let them hold you. Let me fill you with my magic, and it will stay with you forever.’ She leaned forward and kissed Faye gently on the lips.

Their mouths lingered together, and Faye felt the fire of Morgana’s kiss consume her.

Morgana’s touch filled her soul with magic.

Morgana pulled away and traced Faye’s lips with her fingertip.

‘Get to know this place. This is the place of patterning. What you humans call the astral plane,’ she said. ‘And remember: I am here, forever. No one may supplant me, for I am immortal. You may visit me to refill your cup at any time.’

No one may supplant me. Did Morgana know what she and Levantiana had discussed?

This is the place of patterning.

Faye had spent her whole life learning magic: she knew that the astral plane was the dimension of energy, of being, next to the fully manifest plane of earth.

The astral was where spells, once made in the material plane of earth, emanated their magic.

The astral was where dreams lived, where ideas formed, where energy was available to be moulded and formed by thought.

That was where her carefully crafted poppet doll had taken its inspiration from, and this is where her instructions – her desires – had entered the ether as she sewed them into the doll.

Inspiration flowed to the ordinary world from here; intention flowed upwards, to make patterns which were then transmuted into reality.

Faye nodded, and kissed Morgana’s unnaturally long-fingered hands.

She had no fingernails, Faye noticed, and her skin was formed of neatly overlapping black scales.

When she met the queen of the moon’s diamond-like eyes, she was startled that they were not eyes at all, but places where the moonlight streamed through.

Morgana withdrew her hands and stepped back into the three shafts of moonlight, dissolving into them.

Faye felt the loss of her keenly and as suddenly as her desire had appeared; she was dazed, aroused and yet fulfilled at once.

Morgana had lit something in her soul, and she felt different, though she couldn’t say how.

There was nothing to explore inside the Crystal Castle.

Faye walked around the edges of the palazzo and in and out of the corners but found only the walls made of their glowing crystalline material.

A piece of it came away in her hand, and Faye held it up in wonder.

It glowed like a lamp. Carefully, she put it in her pocket, feeling that if Morgana didn’t want her to have it, it would not have come away so easily.

There were no other doors in or out except the one she had come in. Only the floor of the castle held any pattern at all, and that was the seven-pointed star of faerie, tiled in what looked like black glass or crystal against a pink-white stone.

Back outside the castle, she walked around it and approached the edge, and the wet grey cliffs fell away under her again.

She felt her breath catch. The drop was high and deep and she felt suddenly afraid, even though she hadn’t before. But she took a breath and steadied herself, and let her gaze wander over the surface of the blue-black sea.

As she watched, something broke the surface of the water.

She narrowed her eyes; perhaps it was a rock sitting under the water.

Though she loved the sea, and her beach at Abercolme, she had always been terrified of deep water – both its power, of the storms that occasionally lashed Abercolme, and what was in it; of mysterious, leviathan-like beings that roamed in the deep oceans, in the dark.

Beaches were in-between places, liminal, where water met earth. The deep water was something else.

As Faye watched, a black head emerged from the waves, followed by a large, black-scaled body.

The kelpie rose out of the sea; Faye stood on the edge of the cliff and watched it, her heart beating wildly.

Here was her fear made flesh, a creature of darkness, emerging from the impenetrable black water.

Scotland was full of myths of them: a black or white horse creature that drowned anyone who climbed on its back.

They were said to reside around lochs and rivers, especially at night or at dusk.

Like all Scottish children she had been told to beware of them, but had taken it for a cautionary tale to stop children drowning in dangerous water.

The kelpie pulled itself out of the water and stood on the short beach beneath her.

She had always imagined kelpies to be very like horses, but its eyes regarded her like marbles of the same blue-black water it had emerged from.

It had the head and torso of a vast horse, but its hindquarters were like a long black sea serpent.

It crawled up the cliff towards her; instinctively, she drew back. Dread and panic overcame her and she began to run back towards the castle, but it followed.

When she reached the castle walls, Faye closed her eyes and tried to catch her breath. There was nowhere to go, and her lungs heaved with the effort of running. She tried to quiet herself, to tell herself that there was nothing to fear here, but she was lying to herself.

She sensed the kelpie approaching, and squeezed her eyes tight like a child would, hoping that the monster might disappear, her back pressed into the wall of the castle, her arms over her face.

Even after all her experiences in Murias, even knowing that she was half faerie herself, her longstanding fear of the deep ocean and what lay within it almost overcame her.

She cried out ‘No, no, no, please,’ but the kelpie approached her, closer, closer.

No, I won’t be afraid . Faye reached down into herself, remembering the ancestors who had appeared to her in the golden cup of Murias. Remembering their gifts, their wounds, their magics, she appealed to them for help, and something came.

The trinket Moddie had given her. As her mother had given her the kelpie charm in spirit, and in the ritual of the cup, her gift had remained in spirit.

There wasn’t a physical charm around her neck when she was in the human world, but it appeared on a silver chain as soon as she appeared in Murias.

It was Moddie’s gift to her: a charm that protected her from Finn, a kelpie because of the tattoo that reared up his chest and neck.

But this creature was also a kelpie. Surely, it would protect her from that, too.

She opened her eyes, heart beating manically, her right hand formed into a fist around the charm, her heart aflame with will. Leave me! the words were on her tongue, but the kelpie merely licked her hand, like a dog would.

Faye jumped, pulling her hand away.

The kelpie sat next to her, head bowed slightly; it made no move to get any closer.

She watched it fearfully, expecting it to pounce, to move suddenly, to attack her. Yet, it sat next to her peacefully, panting slightly.

She held the charm, watching it. Nothing happened.

Cautiously, feeling her panic subside slightly, Faye laid her palm on the kelpie’s nose, ready to pull her hand away at the smallest hint of danger.

Instead, she was overwhelmed by a sense of power.

The kelpie’s energy was pure water, and Faye felt the joyful rush of a waterfall mixed with the furthest, darkest depths of the ocean; it was at once the brightness of a stream in a sun-dappled woodland and the insurmountable grey wall of a tsunami.

Faye looked into the kelpie’s unblinking stare and felt her fear melt away as it returned her gaze with its ageless seawater-and-glass eyes.

Without thinking, she climbed up onto its black scaly back, and, as if it knew she would, it stretched up into the sky, and then dived back under the black water.

Faye gulped in one last breath of air and went under willingly with the kelpie, just as Grainne Morgan had with the fae that had come to her aid.

And, under the water, she released the last of her fear – fear of taking up space, of being herself, and of coming into her full power– in one long, ragged scream that the seawater swallowed as if it had never existed.

Faye felt the faerie part and the human part of her merge, and was filled with the power of both worlds.

She plunged down into the deep darkness on the back of the kelpie, and found that she could breathe here, too, and she was filled with a wild exultation.

She screamed again, but this time with unfettered joy, and the kelpie under her roared a jangling, unearthly rumble that made the rock shake and pulled all the other water elementals behind them in its wake.

And when she finally returned to Levantiana, the faerie queen opened the door made of glistening shell.

And Faye Morgan, who had gone below the waves and returned alive, slid off the black kelpie and strode back into Murias with a piece of pink crystal in one pocket and three rose petals folded securely inside a single black kelpie’s scale in the other.