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Thea

A little girl lost in a forest was a feral, fearsome creature. She was aware of the dangers but free of the fears. Her mind made an adventure out of every dark little thing. The cawing blackbirds, the evolving shadows, the ghostly moonlight peering through the skeletal boughs, and the brambles that scratched her flesh and tugged at the edge of her cloak. They were all her companions, her fellow adventurers, or simply mysteries she needed to uncover. She saw no threat in the gleaming eyes of the owls, the scampering of the animals in the undergrowth, the slippery, moss-covered rocks by the riverbank, and the hungry family of nixies swirling beneath the black water. And she most certainly had no fear of the other, more insidious creatures of the night.

Unfortunately for me, I no longer was that little girl. I was twenty-two years old, alone in the woods after dark, and scared out of my right mind.

I’d always considered myself a woman of adequate intellect and notable capability. So, for the love of the stars, what madness had gone through my head to start this journey in the middle of the afternoon instead of waiting for daybreak?

My internal voice of reason must have thrown up its hands in exasperation at least a hundred times today, yet I did not seem able to listen to any of its many sensible arguments.

But honestly now, how was I supposed to wait even for a minute longer after receiving that wretched letter? Delayed letter. It had taken a whole month for it to reach me, and it hadn’t even come from the Castle itself but from my dear friend Lena, who lived with her wife in Kartha. The Eastern Kingdom had gotten the news first, for the Castle was currently resting above the strip of forestland outside the capital’s walls.

I still couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Eron and Esperida Aventine were dead.

Once again, I had to stop in my tracks, lean against the trunk of a tree, and wipe the tears from my eyes before I was able to continue.

I’d known Esperida had been consuming a potion to help her age faster—it was a common practice among vampires who wished to grow old with their human companions—but I had no idea that the two of them had also taken the Eternal Vow. It was done so rarely and performed by so very few priestesses these days that most people had forgotten about the ritual altogether.

Long ago, during the wedding ceremony, couples had the option of binding their souls for eternity by branding their flesh with the words of a sacred spell that knitted their two individual life threads into one. A spell so ancient and powerful that it surpassed any curse, even the one of vampirism. It didn’t matter if you were a fairy or a nymph or a witch. If your half’s heart stopped beating, yours was spellbound to follow.

I understood that Esperida and Eron had loved each other more than they had loved life itself and that they’d refused to be separated even in death, but by the gods, I still thought it was the most absurd, selfish thing in the history of the world. After all, Death was rarely cruel to the dead. It was the ones who were left behind he tormented the most.

But Esperida, in all her mystifying immortality, could have never imagined that her husband would be taken early and by something as mundane as a heart attack, let alone that she would have a child to worry about leaving behind. To this day, Hector was the only one of his kind.

Hector.

The mere mention of his name used to make me think of cozy winter nights. Intense gazes. Sandalwood and campfire smoke. The stiff leather of the chair in his study. Now it was a pang in my sternum.

Four years had passed since the last time I saw him. We disappeared from each other’s worlds like it was nothing, with a handful of ugly words and a single broken promise. But a broken promise was a lot like a broken destiny. It changed the trajectory of your life forever.

We had been inseparable once, despite the notable wedge of our differences. I loved meeting new people and discovering new places. I loved to dance and sing and walk with my face turned against the sun. I loved daydreaming and reading romantic stories, for that was the only way I could weave dream into reality. But Hector… Hector was the dream itself. A prince of the sky and a creature of the night. That was the substance of our antithesis. I was of this world, and he was of the one above it. I was made of clay and fire; he was made of clouds and frost.

Sometimes, he could be breathtakingly alluring too, but that was just the vampire in him. All of them were like that, wrapped up in layers of beauty and charm while the true darkness of their souls lay deep beneath their marble skin.

Ultimately, the only thing Hector and I did have in common was our age, for I was a mere day older than him. Both of us had just turned twelve that fateful day we met in the Dragonfly Forest.

I’d been born in Steria, a small village outside Thaloria, the grand capital of the Faraway North. Mother owned the local oracle shop, while Father, who was from the South and therefore magicless, owned land. Miles and miles of flower-dotted strawberry fields, which you could only go through by horse. We lived comfortably, and I’d spent most of my childhood running around the Dragonfly Forest, getting into all kinds of wonderful and terrible trouble. I’d played with pixies and laughed with sprites and even learned a little swordplay from Walder, the forest’s ancient spirit who had found me once wandering a little too close to Fairyland. He’d saved my life that day, for fairies were quite literally the vampires of the fey world.

For as long as I could remember, I’d been drawn to magic, and it was this exact yearning for all things extraordinary that united me with the Castle that day. My heart was a compass, and wonder was my north.

It was rare for the Castle to be in our part of the world, but Esperida happened to be visiting the Celestines, and so there it waited for her, in the heart of the Dragonfly Forest.

The stars aligned, Hector and I met, and before I knew it, he, Esperida, and Eron became my second family. The distance didn’t matter. Time and time again I crossed it without a second thought, yearning for their whimsy and magic-touched wisdom, which was incomparable to my parents’ land-bound one.

Yes, my friendship with Hector didn’t end on the best of terms, but I still couldn’t believe he didn’t write to tell me of their loss. Was he too heartbroken to write? Or did he hate me that much now?

According to Lena’s letter, the Castle was last seen outside of Kartha, so after I packed my suitcase with only the absolute necessities, I went straight into the city to Nepheli’s Curiosity Shop for it had a Door and I needed a Door to get myself from North to East as fast as possible.

Although Nepheli Curiosity was my newest, she was perhaps my greatest friend and the only one not to deter me from taking this journey. We had spent every day of the past year together, attending classes at the Academy of Magical Arts and getting her new Curiosity Shop ready. She had star magic in her veins, for she’d accidentally swallowed a handful of stardust as a child. Of course, something like that would normally be deadly to a human—especially a little one—but the gods of fortune had other plans for my little Nepheli.

In the short year we’d been friends, she learned to control her starlight, infuse it in inanimate objects to make them sentient, opened a new Curiosity Shop in the heart of the city, and got engaged to Prince Apollo of Thaloria.

All I’d done this past year was read scandalous books, daydream about fictional men, and eat an obscene amount of chocolate cake. I did discover that I had an inclination toward fortune-telling, but this was no grand revelation considering the kind of magic that ran in my bloodline.

My grandmother could hear the future like the notes in a melody. She listened to the turnings of the wind, the buzz of the cicadas, the rustling of the willow trees at night. She could discover whole destinies in the shush of the ocean, the rush of the waves as they approached the shore. Mother could read the future. In a palm, in a deck of cards, in the darkened tea leaves lingering along the edge of a porcelain cup. And I, evidently, could see it. Indeed, I’d had more than a few prophetic visions throughout my life to call myself a seer. However, they had all been so abstract and insignificant that they could hardly be compared to the fate-touched magic of the women in my family.

I was… lost. Physically. Mentally. Magically. I was completely and overwhelmingly lost.

Letting out a ragged breath, I readjusted my grip on my suitcase and pulled my cloak a little tighter around my gown, my only armor against the twinging cold of early spring.

At first, the night had been all chill and gloom, eager to gather the innumerable shapes of the forest and blend them into one daunting silhouette. My journey became a continuous stumble into prickling brambles and nests of stinging nettles, boughs laden with cobwebs swooping down to claw at the hood of my cloak. Then the clouds turned, and the moon was revealed, full and reddish, creeping across the misty sky. Moonlight painted a much eerier path for me, large shadows leaping out of every corner. But I soon grew grateful for them, for even shadows were better company than the abysmal hollows of the night.

The Door I’d gone through was the kind of portal one could only find in a Curiosity Shop, since Curiosity Shops tended to form around them, but, as all mystical passages had limits to the instructions you could give it. I’d chosen to be taken East and on land (Kartha was a coastal kingdom, and I really didn’t feel like braving the great Sandrea Sea), and so the portal had opened up somewhere in the strip of forestland outside the capital’s walls.

But, of course, my dear Nepheli couldn’t simply leave me to my fate, so she had provided me with a pouch of soporific dust, which, allegedly, could knock even a grown demon out, and a stardust compass to guide me to my desired destination. The needle of the compass was made of actual starlight, the very magic Nepheli carried in her veins, and it pointed to the exact place its owner’s heart wished to go.

I pulled it out of my pocket and consulted it once more, its silver face glowing like a lantern in the night.

Although it looked like I was on the right path, it didn’t feel right. The dark crested down on me, making everything seem sharp and deadly, the mountains in the hazy distance looming as foreboding and solitary as a dragon’s lair. Even the wind whistling through the boughs of the trees sounded menacing. There was so much noise. The angry rush of the river, the animals lurking in their hollows, the fallen branches snapping underfoot. And then there were the other, invisible terrors, which I did not dare think of.

Suddenly, the distant howl of a wolf tore through the fog-dazed air. I jumped out of my skin, my yelp so loud it prompted the band of blackbirds, nestling on the tree above me, to shoot up into the sky, their disgruntled flapping amid the branches showering me in a waterfall of pale petals.

“It’s okay,” I hummed to myself, shutting my eyes to shun the fear from my mind. “Everything is fine. Nothing is going to eat me.”

I was not going to give up, I was not going to turn around, and I was not going to run because if I’d learned anything growing up next to creatures of the night, it was that one should never allow themselves to get chased if they didn’t wish to get caught.

When I opened my eyes again, a single pink blossom was twirling in the air before my face. It landed gracefully upon the radiant needle of my compass, and, filled with curiosity, I lifted both my gaze and my impromptu lantern to shed some light overhead.

The forest was mostly hemlock and birch, their ancient bodies rising high and lush in their early spring bloom, but the foliage was different in this part of the path, unwinding into a sea of almond and cherry trees, their pink and white blossoms drifting like snowflakes through the air. Their trunks were gnarled and twisting in all directions, huddled together so closely their branches formed a low, narrow arch. I had to duck my head and cradle my suitcase to my chest to be able to pass through it. The ground below my boots was all dotted with fallen petals, glowing pale in the dim. The black velvet of my gown swished over them, disturbing their continuous pattern and revealing patches of fluffy, dew-kissed grass.

A few more strides and the boughs started to thin. The blossoming saplings gave way to wild undergrowth, and the path opened up fully.

On this side of the trail, several trees were reduced down to stumps, large and uneven as age-fallen columns, with silver moss sprouting around their protruding roots. The bell-shaped mushrooms that sprang from their sides were diaphanous and opalescent. I was familiar with them since the Dragonfly Forest was littered with this type of fungi, and I knew that had it been day, they would gleam like crystals in the sunlight.

This sudden evidence of magic heartened me a little.

The Castle had to be near.

After a while, the wilderness of mushroom-flanked stumps faded into a moss-covered stone path with all kinds of curling weeds erupting between the split cobbles.

Squinting against the moonlight, which was ample and radiant despite the thick clumps of fog that attempted to obscure it, I got the barest glimpse of something that resembled stone but wasn’t. Something hard like granite, shimmering like opals, and white as the purest pearl.

I put down my suitcase, tucked the compass into my cloak pocket, and, sucking in a deep breath, I finally craned back my neck.

There it was, hovering a few feet above the ground, the most magical thing a mind could ever conceive. The Castle.

Its dreaming spires and soaring towers untangled from the mist-dazed gloom to reveal a stained glass rose window, breaking the moonlight into an ocean of uncanny red beams. Below, the structure unraveled into a series of flying buttresses, serving as a frame to the facade, white stones curving into exquisite pointed arches and ribbed vaults that transcended even the most artful levels of human detail and reached into the realm of the divine. The arch of its massive door was spangled with dead roses, the darkened blooms crawling out of the cracks in the wall with thorns as long and thick as fangs, making the black surface look like the mouth of a yawning monster.

A chill shivered across my skin. The Castle from my childhood and adolescent memories was a cheerful wonderland, full of color and mystery and endless possibility. Within its ornate chambers, I’d seen whole worlds. Rooms swimming in rivers and alcoves draped in desert sand. I’d taken peeks into other Realms, kingdoms where fairies ruled over humankind, and universes where the constellations had different names.

Now it stood eerie and frightening above me. And reeking of death.

Perhaps it was the little magic in my veins, or perhaps it was my exhaustion and fear to blame, but the most horrid thought bobbed up in the dark of my mind. Leave while you can. Bad things are going to happen here.

I ignored it, clenching my fists at my sides. But when several minutes passed without the Castle letting down its stairs for me, a terrible fear began to expand in my chest.

How I wished I could turn back the clock and see the Castle in its ceaseless bloom again. The way its door would crack only a little open as if to hide a wonder that not everyone was meant to see was a feeling I had come to know intimately. Even these past four years that I’d spent away from the Castle that feeling, that comfortable excitement that I often compared to diving into a brand new book, still found me in my dreams. Constantly, I was overwhelmed by the image of me standing before the Castle’s door, waiting breathlessly to hear the hinges loosen and Esperida to appear like a fairy guarding the entrance to another Realm: ageless, moonlit, mischievous as a child. And then that initial burst of joy when Hector would dash down the stairs and close me in his arms.

“Please,” I whispered shakily. “Please, let me in. I’m worried sick about him.”

I brought to mind Hector’s face from the last time I saw him. Memory was infamous for smoothing the edges of the past, but I would never forget the way he’d looked at me that day, the way the curve of his mouth had turned into a stern line, and the way his hair had fallen over his watercolor eyes as he’d slanted his hard face over mine.

“Go, then. And don’t ever come back.”

These were the last words he spoke to me. Yet here I was.

I heaved a sigh, gazing past the bone-white spires of the Castle at the spill of stars across the sky. I did not regret the decisions that had formed my life, for if I hadn’t joined the Thalorian Court, I would have never met Nepheli and therefore wouldn’t have gained some of the most joyful and irreplaceable memories of my adult life. But gods, what wouldn’t I give to be able to tell the ignorant eighteen-year-old version of me that following a path others chose for you didn’t make life easier or simpler, nor did it magically transform you into someone good.

It just made you a fool. A weak, miserable fool.

“He can hate me all he wants,” I told the Castle, my voice steadier now, filled with conviction. “But he still needs me.”

Finally, with a nearly audible rustle of exasperation, the Castle let down its stairs.