It was what appeared next.
Grandma Jo’s garden materialized in the water, as real as if I was looking through a window into Earth. Every detail was perfect—the heritage tomatoes hanging heavy on their vines, so ripe they seemed about to burst. The roses climbing their careful trellises, each bloom exactly as I remembered. The herb spiral with its mysterious plants that had never quiteseemed to belong. Even the greenhouse was there, its glass panels catching late afternoon sunlight in a way that made them gleam like burnished metal.
And there—there by the greenhouse door—stood a figure I knew too well.
“Julian?” The name escaped before I could stop it, scraped raw from my throat.
My ex-fiancé stood in Jo’s garden, but not as a memory. This was current Julian, wearing the blue button-down I’d bought him for his birthday last year. There was a fresh cut on his cheek—had he been in an accident? He looked lost, confused, searching as he called out.
“Elle? Elle, where are you? Your dad’s worried sick. We all are. The police said you just vanished, but I know you wouldn’t just leave. Please, just come home. We can work this out. I know I messed up with Melissa, but—”
It was impossible. There was no connection between Earth and this realm. But the water showed him turning, searching, and I could see the engagement ring he still wore on a chain around his neck—the one I’d thrown at him when I’d found him with Melissa in our bed, in our apartment, on what was supposed to be our anniversary.
“That’s not real,” Peeble said urgently, their voice sharper than usual. “Elle, you know that’s not real. The lake shows what you want to see, what you fear to see. It’s a trap.”
“I don’t want to see Julian,” I said, but my voice came out wrong, uncertain.
“Don’t you? Some part of you that wishes you could go back? Pretend none of this happened?” Peeble’s words stung, but they were trying to break through whatever hold the lake had on me.
Before I could answer—before I could even process the truth in their words—the image shifted again.
Now it was Jo herself, but young Jo from the locket, standing in the water-garden. She wore a dress that seemed to be made of flower petals and morning dew, still wearing the crown of roses. Her eyes were the same warm brown I remembered, but there was power in them that made my marks burn.
She pressed her hand against the surface from below, and I could see herlips moving, forming words I couldn’t hear but somehow understood.
“Come home,”she seemed to say.“Come back where you belong. This isn’t your fight. This isn’t your world.”
“My grandma died weeks ago,” I said, but my hand was already reaching for the water, moving without my conscious control.
“Elle, don’t—”
My fingers touched the surface.
The contact triggered an avalanche of sensation. Not pain—something stranger. Like every memory and feeling I’d ever had was trying to surface at the exact same moment. I saw myself at seven, planting seeds with Jo, her weathered hands guiding mine as we tucked tomato seedlings into the earth. At fifteen, screaming at my dad that he didn’t understand me, that I was meant for something more than his suburban dreams. At twenty-six, saying yes to Julian’s proposal in that restaurant where he’d hidden the ring in the tiramisu, feeling like I was settling even as the word left my mouth. At twenty-eight, about a year ago, watching him with Melissa, seeing them tangled together in sheets I’d picked out, and feeling more relief than heartbreak.
The water gripped my wrist, but it felt nothing like water. Warm and dense, it moved with purpose—pulling with a strength no liquid should possess. Steady as a tide, patient as stone. I tried to pull free, but I was already in past my forearm. Through the surface, I could sense the other side. Warmth. Real warmth, not the strange temperatures of Wynmire. The warmth of grass in sunlight and houses with central heating. The warmth of the world I’d lost.
I could smell it through the water—freshly cut grass and barbecue smoke from the neighbors. Could hear distantly familiar sounds—cars passing on the street, a dog barking, someone’s music playing too loud. All the mundane symphony of the life I’d left behind.
“Elle, no! Hold on!” Peeble’s voice was pure panic now. “He’s coming—I can see him running—just hold on!”
But the lake was stronger, older, hungrier. It pulled me through the surface up to my shoulders, and now I could see both worlds—the realmabove, Earth below, and me suspended between like I’d always been.
Through the bond, I felt Kaelren’s awareness snap to attention—felt the exact moment he realized something was wrong. Felt his terror spike like lightning through my chest.
“Find me,” I managed to say to Peeble, to the air, to whoever might hear. The words felt important, necessary, like a key being fitted to a lock. “Tell him—in this lifetime or any other. Tell him to find me.”
The water surged, and suddenly I was through, pulled into depths that couldn’t exist in a lake so shallow. But through the water, through the crushing weight of it, I saw him—Kaelren, running full speed from the camp, his mouth open in what must have been a scream of my name though I couldn’t hear it underwater. His corruption spread like wings of darkness behind him, beautiful and terrible, as he dove for the lake without hesitation.
The last clear thing I saw before the darkness took me was his hand reaching through the water toward mine, fingertips almost touching, the thread of our bond stretching between us like it could defy physics itself.
Almost.
But almost had never been enough.
Through the muffling water, I heard Peeble’s voice, not sarcastic for once, laden with a grief that suggested this wasn’t the first time they’d witnessed this:
“Not again. Please, not again.”
