Glastonbury, Somerset - The Mortal Realm
Before the dream there had only been the silence. Jesryn had learned to live inside it—three years of calling survival peace.
Rain tapped the eaves. The Tor watched through clouds. And beneath Glastonbury’s old stones, the ley hummed its thin, persistent note, threading through her like lightning caught under skin. Faery’s liminal heartbeat finding her even here, across the Veil between worlds.
She’d left to save herself. The human world’s noise and crowds and new studies would bury all of it—the goddess and her demands, magic changing under her skin, Owyn… and the flash of Ivy Bentley’s bare back as Jesryn halted in the doorway of his rooms. But it hadn’t.
A hairline crack chased across the kitchen window—not outward, but inward, as though light itself had been struck and decided to splinter. The air tasted faintly of iron. Rain sharpened to metal, then softened back into drizzle as if it had never meant to show its teeth.
The ley wasn’t only restless. It was searching. Even here in the mortal world. She tried not to think about what it was searching for.
Or who.
A raven croaked once beyond the roofline. A car horn answered on the same note.
Jesryn went still, waiting for the world to return to normal. But it didn’t. Even now the quiet felt heavier, as if the storm outside had drawn a breath and refused to let it go.
Harper’s laughter drifted from the kitchen, bright and too sharp to belong in a human house. Jesryn let the sound touch her like heat.
The cursor blinked again.
She sat cross-legged on the narrow bed beneath the eaves of The Silver Thorn Inn, rain whispering against the leaded panes. The room smelled of rosemary, old polish, and storm. Someone had left the casement cracked, and mist crept in like curious fingers.
She’d been awake since before dawn, since the dream had hauled her out of sleep and left her throat raw with a name she’d sworn not to say.
Every morning since the nightmares began, she tried to bleed them out through ink. One more unsent letter to the ghost of what they’d been. She opened a new draft.
I had the dream again last night. The black sea. The wings. The voice that isn’t a voice. I keep thinking it’s less a warning and more a countdown. You’d laugh at that.
She stopped. Backspaced. Tried again.
It’s worse lately. Closer. I wake with frost on my lips like I’ve been breathing winter. And I think of you, even when I don’t want to.
Her hands hovered over the keys, suspended between confession and refusal. There were a hundred things she could write. Apologies, accusations, the thousand small memories that still bled. And none that would ever reach him.
Footsteps sounded in the hall. A kettle hissed in the tiny guest kitchen. Harper would be hunting tea in another minute, all bright hair and tired eyes, pretending not to worry.
Jesryn’s fingers lowered.
Three years, and every storm still reminds me of you.
She stared at the sentence until the screen blurred. The cursor kept pulsing, patient as a heartbeat. Outside, the Tor loomed through the rain, a shadow crowned in cloud. The ley hum under the town was louder here, as if midsummer had tuned the world to a higher pitch.
The mug beside her trembled. Ripples feathered across the tea toward her hand. Static whispered through the room’s old wiring: lightbulb flicker, faint buzz, then silence.
This wasn’t a spasm of old stones and weather. It was hunger, wrong and widening. Faery bleeding through, where it did not belong.
She exhaled slowly, forcing her mind to calm.
Another tremor ran through the glass, subtle but real. Jesryn could feel the ley, restless, strained, like it was fraying under a weight it could no longer carry. She swallowed the familiar dread and the deeper, quieter truth beneath it. Lying to yourself always tastes like ash.
Faery didn’t sleep. It waited. For her.
A board creaked. Harper’s soft knock came through the door.
“You awake?”
Jesryn snapped the laptop shut. “Yeah.”
“You sound like the weather again,” Harper added, voice gentle as it was blunt. “Grey and unpredictable.”
Jesryn tried to laugh. It came out thin. “You’d be unpredictable too if your room hummed every time you breathed.”
“That’s not normal, Jes.”
“Nothing ever is anymore.”
“Tea in two,” Harper called, moving away.
Jesryn let the breath leak out of her chest. She slid the laptop beneath the pillow, lay back, and watched the ceiling’s crooked beams fade and sharpen with each blink.
She told herself she wouldn’t sleep.
She told herself she’d never write him again.
Outside, a church bell mis-tolled. One, then two, then a cracked third note that stuttered and died. The mist pressed harder against the window, as if listening.
The rain thinned to a hush.
Her eyes closed.
And the dark was waiting.
Did you truly think Fate would let you escape?
The voice did not come from the dark.
It was the dark—vast and female, older than gods and storms, thrumming through Jesryn’s bones like a drumbeat beneath the world.
Air pressed close, velvet-heavy. It tasted like blood and smoke and the ash of burnt offerings. No matter where she turned there was only black, not emptiness but presence. Shadow shifted like breath. Like wings folding and unfolding in the distance.
The Morrígan. The raven goddess of battle.
Jesryn had known temples to crumble at that name. Battle-prayers whispered over the dead. But never had she stood inside the goddess’s shadow.
These dreams had never felt like dreams. They felt like summons. Like chain-links locked around her soul, dragging her toward a destiny that waited with open arms. And sharpened teeth.
A sound rose around her like the beating of wings. Hundreds. The air vibrated until her heart fell into rhythm with that terrible pulse.
Cold woodsmoke and the metallic sting of blood curled into her lungs like soot. Beneath it: rain on iron. A battlefield waiting to happen.
Foolish child. Did you truly think you had a choice?
The voice coiled closer, cool breath brushing her neck. Jesryn froze. Her heart hammered so hard it hurt.
Any moment now she would wake.
She always woke.
But the dread was different this time. Heavier, edged with recognition. She knew this fear. She had been running from it her whole life. Since the day she stood at the Wyrdspire and the goddess had quickened her magic. Frost and shadow. A raven crown Jesryn did not want.
The ley is breaking and you are the seam.
The words fell like a blade into still water. Quiet, inevitable. They rippled outward through Jesryn’s chest.
Faery cannot hold its balance without you.
When the ley fails, so does everything born of it.
The forests will go first.
Then the blood-magic in your people.
Then silence.
The black pressed tighter, as if the world itself leaned in to listen.
You were made to mend what is splitting.
Jesryn’s stomach turned. Her magic, wrong under her skin even here, answered with a sharp, frightened pulse.
If you refuse, Faery will starve of its own magic. You have run long enough, daughter of my blood.
A pause—so deep it felt like the world holding still.
You are not being asked to return.
You are being told what happens if you do not.
Jesryn woke with a soundless gasp, the dream still clawing at her ribs—iron and blood and the Morrígan’s laughter echoing like a curse.
Before she could move, the air shifted—like a stitch tearing in the world.
A shadow slid over her like a second skin. Heavy. Warm. Alive.
Scent hit first—salt and lightning, storms breaking against a black shore. Deep water. Wet stone. Her body knew it before her mind could argue.
“Three. Years.”
The words were a growl against her ear.
He was on her, caging her in without touching her throat, and still she felt his fingers there. Sea-dark eyes locked on hers, predator-still, as if he couldn’t decide whether to taste her or tear her apart. One hand pressed into the mattress beside her head. The other trembled, from the violence he was keeping on a leash.
“Three years you left me to choke on your absence.” His voice climbed, fierce enough to make the old glass shiver. “Vanished without a word, without a trace. I tore through every leyline, every cursed inch of Faery. And you—”
A jagged laugh. His gaze dropped to her mouth.
“I don’t know whether to strangle you or kiss you.”
The fury lashed and recoiled, unable to decide its shape. For a heartbeat she saw the boy she loved, desperate and gutted, then the mask slammed back into place.
“Owyn?”
It escaped like a prayer and a curse at once.
He was beautiful and terrifying. Damp curls clung to his forehead, droplets sliding down the sharp planes of his jaw as if he’d risen straight from the Lake. His mouth, once soft, was fuller now, crueler. Rain and salt clung to him.
“Three years,” he said again, as if the number itself was an injury. “Three years I’ve had to live without the sight of you.”
“Get off me.” She shoved at his chest.
It was like shoving stone.
He tilted his head, studying her the way a serpent studies a mouse. Then he laughed, bright and cutting, and her skin pebble-prickled.
“Why?” he murmured, leaning closer until a dark lock of hair brushed her temple. “You left me, remember? Vanished into this dull, human world without a goodbye.”
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “How did you find me?”
“I didn’t,” he said, almost thoughtful. “I must have been dreaming, because you’re too cowardly to face me anywhere real. Then the Veil cracked, and here you were.” His eyes narrowed. “Your heart’s wards are pathetic.”
“Get out.”
He pressed his palm harder into the mattress beside her head. “Say please.”
When she didn’t, his smile became sharper. “Ah, there she is. The girl who’d rather die than yield. Do you know how many nights I’ve wanted to see that look again?”
“You’re insane,” she hissed.
“You made me this way, darling.” His eyes went dark, storm-tossed depths rimmed in shadow. His gaze traced her. Short violet hair, kohl-smeared eyes, concert tank, bare knees tangled in sheets. The air between them crackled. “You’ve gone human,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You smell like their world now. It’s wrong.”
Fury rose fast to cover the ache. “Then leave.”
Something flickered in his eyes. One painful echo of the boy she loved.
Then it was gone.
“I’m not finished with you.”
Magic or rage hummed between them; she couldn’t tell which.
He was still beautiful, in the way storms were: bright, destructive. Meant to be survived rather than loved.
“Tell me,” he murmured, lowering his mouth until the words brushed her skin. “Did you miss me at all, my Wildcat? Just a little?”
Her pulse jumped at the old nickname. She bared her teeth. “Not enough.”
His smile turned—slow, satisfied, like that was the answer he’d wanted all along.
Then silver threads cracked through the air around him, spiderwebbing like shattered glass. His body jerked as the Veil reached for him.
“Owyn—” Her voice caught.
His gaze snapped up, furious. “Of course,” he muttered. “Even fate conspires to keep you from me.”
His teeth bared. Half-snarl, half-vow.
“You left me once, Jesryn. Don’t think you’ll do it again.”
Light swallowed him.
His eyes held hers one last time. Mischief and rage and heartbreak braided together. Then he said, almost gently, as if he couldn’t stop the truth from being a blade:
“You can run across oceans, across Veils, across worlds,” he whispered. “But I will find you. And when I do—”
The light snapped shut.
The bed was empty.
Only the faint scent of salt and stormwater remained, and the hollow thunder of her heartbeat in the dark.
Somewhere deep in the room, beneath the walls, beneath her ribs, the Morrígan’s laughter followed, low and merciless.
Jesryn stayed frozen for one breath, then another. When the silence pressed too hard, she curled in on herself, clutching the sheets as if they could anchor her.
And the sobs tore free.
Three years she’d held herself together, callused over grief, over fury, over the betrayal she still couldn’t name without cracking. She had sworn she would never cry over Owyn Corey again.
Yet here she was. Broken and weeping in the dark.
Outside, a raven screamed, echoing through the storm like a bell-strike. The inn lights flickered in answer.
For the first time in three years, Jesryn understood with a cold clarity that stole her breath. The Veil had cracked—and it would keep cracking until there was nothing left to stitch.
The price of her freedom wasn’t sorrow. It was Faery going quiet, piece by piece: the wild forests turning wrong, then dying; the old creatures drifting into places they didn’t belong, starving on air that no longer knew their names. It was her people waking one morning to find the magic in their blood gone thin as water. Alive, yes, but stripped. Others wouldn’t be so lucky. Entire races would simply… end.
And when the ley finally failed, the seam between worlds would seal like a healed wound.
No more crossings. No more doors. Just two halves of a torn thing snapping apart.
Families caught on the wrong side. Children who’d never see their fathers again. Lovers with hands outstretched across a threshold that would never open. Names shouted into the Veil until voices broke, and still—nothing answered.
And it would be because she’d wanted peace. Because she’d wanted to be ordinary. Because she’d chosen quiet over blood and crown and god.