“Zelda, do you hate me? Do you want me to lose my will to live?”
“Sorry.”
I wish I could stay up all night pounding out ten thousand words. At one point, words were a creative playground of endless possibilities. Now they’re expectations and fear anddelete,delete,delete. Words are an ugly comparison game.Not good enough.
I’m not done yet!I want to shout.This is my dream. I’ve still got more to offer!
Isn’t it still my dream?
“Zelda?”
Morgan’s voice is a few hops ahead, and I realize I’ve stopped walking.What if this isn’t my dream anymore? Whatelse am I meant to do?Anxiety surges, zero to one hundred, and I’m not prepared for it. Who am I? Who is Zelda Tempest and what is her purpose? I’ve always been so sure of it before.
“Are you all right? Did you get hurt?”
“No,” I reply dazedly. “I’m fine.”
His hand slips into mine, and when we go on together, moonlight begins to striate our surroundings. At first, I think we’ve reached a meadow in the forest. The next step brings my foot down into water, the level almost high enough to swell inside my boot.
Not a meadow. A marsh.
It extends far enough that the woods continuing on the other side are bluish with mist. Cool air rises off the black mirror, laden with lily pads, cattails, reeds, and ferns. Pink clumps of flowers wave in a gentle breeze. And about twenty feet out, a crystal-ball-sized sphere of light sits suspended low over the water.
“That’s not quite a streetlamp,” I murmur.
Morgan retains a grip on me as he leans forward slightly, drinking up the sight. “Whatisit?”
We crane our necks, studying the moon, trying to gauge how this could be explained by light refraction. If it were a soft, weak light, that would make sense—but that’s not what this is. It’s too bright, opaque. And the water beneath it shines like white fire, illuminating the tiny fish zinging along. “It looks like…” Morgan says breathlessly.
“A will-o’-the-wisp,” I insert.
His body unwinds, upright, every atom of his being fixated on the scene. “Witchlight.”
“What?”
“A fragment of a witch’s magic, which roams free after the witch is deceased. It wanders until it finds other witch magic to cluster to.”
This sounds familiar. “They’re supposed to accumulate to form poltergeists, right?”
He only nods, as though afraid the witchlight will hear us. And then he lifts one foot and steps into the water.
“Morgan!” I bend, hands on my knees. “What are you doing? You’re wearing loafers!”
“My poor choice of footwear is an inadequate reason to not investigate,” he replies without glancing back, slowly wading toward the light. With every gentle slosh, his black trousers grow even darker, water spreading up the fibers.
I begin to argue that this is a bad idea when cold water spills up my legs and I look down to discover that I, too, have begun walking toward the light. My thoughts uncurl like a flat, reaching fog, going a bit dreamy. It’s impossible to tell if I’m walking of my own subconscious volition or if I’m being pulled. Water splashes around me.
“Shhh,” Morgan chastises me quietly. “You’re being too loud.”
“Do you think it has ears?”
“We don’t know what it has, or what it is for sure. Could be a fairy.”
It is ludicrous that my knee-jerk reaction is excitement, but here we are: I am swishing through wetlands in the dead of night with Morgan Angelopoulos, potentially ruining theseglorious boots so that I can get a closer look at some bright, shiny thing, and that means I am nothing less than ludicrous.
Ah, well. I suppose I’m just going to go with it now.
We walk for a few minutes but still haven’t reached our destination. “Is it moving?” I say, puzzled.
