Callum
The inside of the cottage is a wreck.
Furniture overturned, cabinets ransacked, broken glass strewn across the floor. Dust sits heavily on the few undisturbed surfaces, and most of the windows are shattered and open to the clearing beyond.
And yet…
It doesn’t feelempty.
Along with the chaos, magick hangs heavy. Fae magick, I suppose, but it’s bitter and caustic on my tongue and makes me want to get the hell away from here as soon as we can.
“I’ll keep watch,” I tell Seren quietly, still not entirely certain there’s no one around to hear us.
The fae are canny. Their magick is tied to their realm, all twined up with nature, as their queen so helpfully demonstrated back at her bower.
For all I know, there could be a hundred fae melted into the very trees, hiding in the shadows of the forest, watching and waiting for us to drop our guard.
Seren goes to work searching the cottage, and I start a slow circuit of the room, nudging aside bits of detritus and keeping my eyes trained out the windows and front door for any hint of company.
Despite my lingering misgivings, no one shows themselves, and I take a few brief moments to survey the inside of the cottage.
It’s a single room, with a kitchen and fireplace along one wall, a broken bed along the opposite. The remains of a splintered wooden table sit in the middle, along with most of a desk backed up into one corner and the lumpy wreck of what might have been two armchairs set before the hearth.
Back at my original post near the front door, I scan the clearing again. Nothing moves. Not a breath of wind, not a dead piece of foliage. It’s too still, almost as if the realm itself is waiting for something to happen.
Behind me, wood creaks sharply, and I nearly jump out of my skin whirling around to see what happened. Hand on my sword, ready to draw, all I find is Seren staring down at the floor with a puzzled expression on her face.
“Goddess,” I breathe as my overwrought nerves settle back down.
“Sorry,” she says sheepishly. “I think… I think there’s something here.”
She crouches down and presses on the creaking floorboard, testing it out in a few places before it pops free.
“There’s an opening under here.” She starts feeling around, and I make another quick check of our surroundings.
Still clear, but in the sky above, clouds gather.
Probably just the strange weather of this strange realm, but they have a greenish hue to them. Unsettled and roiling, a storm rolling in.
“I’m not sure how much time we have,” I mutter. “Looks like the weather is about to turn.”
Seren glances out the window and frowns. With a quick nod, she reaches further beneath the floor, furrows on her forehead deepening until—
“I’ve got something!” Her exclamation is muted as she draws out a small wooden box.
She carries it quickly to the nearest stable surface to open it up, and the sound of rifling paper fills the room.
“Callum,” Seren murmurs. “Look at this.”
I’m loath to abandon my post and the line of sight it gives me into the clearing, but I step over to the small desk where Seren is holding a heavily creased piece of parchment in her hand.
A letter.
“I think… I think the heart is aperson.” She gestures to the paper. “This… it starts with the greeting,to my dear heart. And there are more. Dozens of them.”
She’s right. Scattered all across the desk are more letters. All of them written in the same hand and all of them well-worn, like they’ve been folded and unfolded, read and reread, a thousand times.
“I wonder who—”
