Page 45

“Maybe they did once,” Ava conceded. “But I'm tired of all this shit. All of it. It ends here. It ends now.”

She raised her hands, feeling the power surge through her, around her. The Web responded to her call, to her need. She could feel it stretching, spreading, reaching for her across the divide between dreams and reality.

“No, Ava, don’t—!” Valroy lunged for her, but it was too late.

With a sound like reality tearing at the seams, Ava pulled the Web into Tir n'Aill.

Or rather…tried to.

She felt it the moment things went wrong.

The power was too much, too raw, too new to her.

It bucked against her control like a wild horse, throwing her into chaos. She had meant to create a doorway, a controlled merger of the two realms.

Instead, she tore a hole in the fabric of existence itself.

Fly?

Bazooka.

The clearing exploded in a kaleidoscope of light and sound. Ava was thrown backward, her body slamming into the ground with enough force to drive the air from her lungs. Around her, the world fractured like broken glass, shards of reality colliding and overlapping in impossible ways.

Through the chaos, she caught glimpses.

A city street in New York, cars honking as pedestrians stared in horror at the sky tearing open above them.

The twisted corridors of the Web, buckling and writhing as they were pulled into a world they were never meant to occupy.

The forests of Tir n'Aill, trees screaming as their roots were ripped from the ground by forces they couldn't comprehend.

And faces. So many faces. Humans. Fae. Creatures of the Web. All caught in the maelstrom she had unleashed.

Bitty, her tiny form tumbling through the air like a leaf in a hurricane, wings beating frantically as she tried to stabilize herself.

Lysander, shifting instinctively to his cat form as he fell, twisting to land on his feet only to find nothing solid beneath him.

Nos and Ibin clinging to each other as the ground disappeared from under them.

Valroy, his face a mask of fury and terror as his wings beat against air that no longer obeyed the laws of his realm.

And somewhere, distantly, she felt Serrik's presence—his shock, his alarm, and beneath it all, a grudging admiration for what she had done.

What had she done?

The realization hit her with sickening clarity.

She hadn't just merged the Web with Tir n'Aill.

She had shattered the boundaries between three worlds.

The three she’d known. She’d reached out to everything that was familiar to her.

And smashed it all together into one big sandwich.

Earth, the Web, and Tir n'Aill.

Three realms that were never meant to touch, now crashing together like tectonic plates, creating a new and chaotic landscape that followed no rules she understood .

“No, no, no,” she gasped, trying to regain control, to pull back the power she had unleashed. But it was like trying to stop an avalanche with her bare hands. The damage was done. The worlds were merging, colliding, reforming into something new and terrifying.

“I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” The last thing she saw before darkness claimed her was Puck's face, no longer amused but solemn, ancient.

What have I done?

The thought followed her into the dark.

When awareness returned, it came slowly, in fragments.

The feel of grass beneath her, cool and damp with dew.

The sound of birds singing somewhere nearby, normal Earth birds with normal Earth songs.

The smell of wildflowers and the faint, acrid tang of smoke.

Ava opened her eyes to a sky she recognized—blue, cloudless, the sun a familiar yellow-white disk overhead. For a moment, she allowed herself to hope that it had all been a dream.

A real dream. All of it. The Web, Tir n'Aill, the terrible truth, the catastrophic merger of worlds—all just a nightmare from which she had finally awoken.

Then she saw him.

Serrik stood over her, silhouetted against the sky. He was in his human form, his arms outstretched, basking in the sunlight. He looked so ridiculously out of place against the blue sky that she stared at him in confused silence for what must have been a good thirty seconds.

“S…Serrik?”

“Mm?” He turned toward her. “You're awake. Good. We have much to discuss.”

Ava tried to sit up, wincing as her body protested. Every muscle ached, and her head pounded with a dull, persistent throb. “Where am I? What happened?”

“You— we —are on Earth," Serrik replied, extending a hand to help her up.

“Or…what remains of it. As for what happened?” He smiled br iefly in something that might have conveyed wry amusement.

“You did, yet again, what neither I nor Valroy thought possible. You merged three worlds that were never meant to touch.”

Memories flooded back—the clearing, Valroy's threat, her desperate attempt to force a confrontation between the two fae, the catastrophic loss of control.

“Oh god,” she whispered, accepting his hand and letting him pull her to her feet. “The others—Bitty, Lysander, Nos and Ibin—are they…”

“Scattered,” Serrik answered, gazing off into the distance. “But I can sense them. They are unharmed. The merger was not…clean.”

He gestured around them, and for the first time, Ava truly looked at her surroundings.

They stood in a meadow that could have been anywhere in rural America—tall grass, wildflowers, a line of trees in the distance.

But beyond those trees, she could see the twisted spires of what looked like Manhattan, buildings bent at impossible angles, some hovering in midair, untethered from the ground.

The sky above the city was wrong too—a patchwork of Earth's blue and the twilight of Tir n’Aill, with strands of the Web's silvery tendrils stretching between clouds.

Somewhere out there, humans were grappling with a world completely changed. Fae were finding themselves thrust into a reality they had only glimpsed through the mists. Creatures of the Web—constructs, dreams given form—were experiencing true independence for the first time.

All because of her.

Because of her stupid choice.

She fisted the strands of her hair and stared at it in horror. “What have I done?” she breathed as she took in the scale of the disaster.

Serrik stood beside her, his hands clasped behind his back. “You, my love, have begun a war. A war that may well end both the fae race and humanity…and three worlds. Two, depending on who is counting.”

“Wh—what do I do?” She just stared at the chaos .

Serrik laughed as though it were the funniest question he’d ever heard. It sounded unnatural coming from him. “I haven’t the slightest clue. But whatever you choose? It shall be your path to walk.”

Ava took a breath and let it out in one word to sum it all up.

“Mother fucker!”

To be continued in book three…