A preternatural tickle settles in my stomach. It doesn’t feel sorrowful like earlier in the night—back in my real world—when the rabbit sacrificed himself. This feels more like…an inevitability. Like something that happened long ago.
I follow the poisoned stream to a clearing where a pile of dead crows rises taller than my own head. Circling it slowly, I watch with strange detachment as another crow falls on top, its wings giving their last flutter of life, as it exhales thick, black smoke.
A smolder of rage burns in my chest, but like this dream, it feels odd—distant.
The memory of an old feeling.
There’s a break in the trees ahead, and I find myself stepping out onto a rocky overlook. A valley stretches below me, and while I don’t recognize the forest, the mountains themselves haven’t changed. It’s the Vallen Mountains. Below, the Ramvik River churns through the valley where Norhelm should rest on that promontory.
But I don’t see the dark spires of Drahallen Hall now. Or the gray slate, pitched rooftops of houses.
There’s a different city here, now.
The name comes to me as a whisper:Calisyrune.
The city itself is a marvel—a primitive but megalithic collection of sun-baked brick houses, all circular like beehives. They spiral outward from an imposing stone temple made ofpolished limestone, guarded by twenty-foot obelisks lit from below by fires.
It isn’t the striking architecture that captures my attention, though. It’s the hundreds of pillars of black smoke rising high from cooking fires, blacksmith huts, burn pits—enough to blot out the sky. A heavy, poisonous haze hangs over the city.
Another crow flies out of it, faltering, coughing out smoke as it flies overhead toward the death-pyre of its companions.
The Ramvik River doesn’t look crisp, now. It’s clogged with the city’s waste—human and animal refuse, livestock carcasses gone bad with disease, cast-off building materials, broken buckets, stained cloths. One of the creeks leading out of the city center runs pure red, coming from the butcher district.
I think of the dead fish, the coughing crows, the stunted trees.
Rage builds in me, thrumming and pulsing—but that’s not what makes me take action. It’s theheartbreak. I feel such a deep well of sadness, to be so connected to death and hurt in the natural world, that I’ll break the world itself to heal it.
My body lengthens, seems to rise on the wind as though I’m almost hovering above the soil. Strange words slide from my lips. Power builds in my core, shooting down my fey lines to blast from my fingertips.
Everywhere the silver light strikes—the beehive homes, the obelisks, the temple itself—cracks open in the earth. A quake tears through the glorious city. Stones fall. Walls collapse. Screams are smothered under rubble.
Slowly, the earth stills.
As soon as the dust clears, my heart swells with hope. All the poison black smoke fades away, its fires’ embers snuffed out and buried under the city’s rubble. The sky clears, sunlight beaming down on the valley once more. The creek stops bleeding red withno more animals’ blood poured from the slaughtering fields, and my beautiful Ramvik River flows clear.
I feel it—all of nature, the fish and the crows, singing with my heart, rejoicing in a world I healed.
It wasn’t a dream, but a memory.
That’s the first thought that fills my skull when I blink my eyes open, staring at the pine boughs overhead.
I’m absolutely certain of it.
The Alyssantha and Popelin I saw were the real fae, from thousands of years ago. The version of them from an earlier Return. I read about it in Woudix’s book—The Fall of Calisyrune, though in the text, it said nothing of how Immortal Solene stopped the poison flowing out of the city to save the entire valley ecosystem.
I sit up, dizzy with the memory, trying to capture every detail in my mind’s notebook before it all slips away.
“It’s coming back to me, Basten,” I say, shaking him awake.
Groggy, he groans as he flops over and rubs the sleep off his face. “What’s that, wildcat?”
“I remembered something.” I practically pounce on him in my excitement. “A memory from long ago. It was a beautiful one—one where I saved the lives of so many creatures. I reset the balance of nature. And I saw the other fae in their previous versions. And—and?—”
The strange look in his eye stills my words.
I follow his gaze to the clear’s edge and flinch.
When we fell asleep last night, the clearing was like so many others—pine boughs, doghobble, mossy stones.
