Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Midwinter is different here.

You are used to the snow, the long nights, the cold, harsh wind—and yet, this is not the same winter as the one you know so well. Perhaps, you think, it may simply be the distance from everything you used to have, but that’s hardly enough to explain it; even trudging through deep snow up a hill feels oddly comforting.

The sun is beginning to rise over the sea, slowly but surely working on its low arch across the sky. You yawn, still tired after your long journey yesterday, and stop for a minute to wonder at the colours. (Jorvik, some would say, looks as though everything is coated in a filter that makes everything a little more vibrant. The sunrise agrees, filled with purples and pinks and oranges in shades you feel like your eyes have never seen before, and it almost makes you feel like the world before has been muted or faded like an old photograph—that this is how everything truly looks.

Down at the stables, things are becoming more lively: kids getting ready for the first riding lessons of the day, parents chattering about, stablehands trying their best to keep everything calm and organised. It wakes you up a little bit more and, with one last glance at the sunrise, you turn to walk back down the hill. You’ve got boxes to unpack, after all.

Chapter Text

Midday stable tasks done and over, you walk away from the courtyard and take a deep breath. Your muscles are beginning to feel sore—likely a byproduct of the amount of chores on your to-do list increasing—and for a second you let yourself lean back against the wall and close your eyes.

The cold bites at your cheeks, though not quite as angrily as when you arrived; if the deep-midwinter wind was an angry rat in the garbage bin, this is something more along the lines of a playful kitten. Even so, you know in your heart that the wait for the spring breezes start showing back up will be a long one.

You shake off all thoughts of bad similes and the turn of the seasons, opening your eyes again. Around you, adults and children alike are riding by from all directions. Some come alone, some in pairs, a few people form a little trail riding line; a small company of three is trekking up the freshly plowed road to Nilmer’s Highland at a pace best described as gloomy. Over by the cliffs, the blacksmith is hammering away at something or other, the sound of metal against metal ringing out in the same rhythm as always. As loud as it is, the sound has become familiar—almost homely—to you.

Your stomach growls, and you check your wristwatch with a sigh. Lunchtime, for sure; you walk away from your spot by the wall and begin to make your way back towards your room. There’s soup in there, just waiting for you to heat it up, and a little warmth does sound rather nice.

Chapter Text

It is probably a universally accepted truth that Doyle’s Abbey is a rather melancholic place. Even for someone with no personal connection to it, the heavy air carrying countless memories of bygone eras is palpable, and it tops a notable number of tourism websites’ lists of the eeriest places in Jorvik. All of this, you knew; what surprised you at first was that the old abbey is also an incredibly peaceful place. It’s silent there, for one, and despite the heavy feeling there’s an aura about it that makes you feel safe—and maybe even protected, shielded from the world. The latter, though, you brush off; to think anything of the sort would be pure superstition.

A cold, unexpected wind rushes in over the fields, and with a shudder you grab your reins in one hand to zip your jacket up completely. When you grab a hold of the reins again you speed up into a trot, and then a gentle canter. The wind flows against your face and through the horse’s mane, gentle but icy, and when you take a deep breath, it almost doesn’t burn your nostrils.

You find yourself approaching a fork in the road, and slowly bring the horse to a halt to hesitate for a second. You could turn the same way you always do, of course, towards the fields, farms and silos of Silverglade, or…

You steer the horse to the right. She glances at you and nudges your foot a little, appearing surprised, and you give her neck a reassuring pat; an ‘it’s okay—just a new adventure’. She snorts and lowers her head, almost as if in agreement, and you let your reins slack just the littlest bit. It might be quite some time before you get back to Moorland, after all.

Chapter Text

Still cold to the bone but with a blanket hanging loosely over your shoulders, you sit down at the kitchen table and rest your tired head in your hands. The stable here may have become a home of sorts to you, but you can’t imagine any comfort in the world that could even begin to rival a snowstorm like this one—especially not if one is caught in the middle of it.

There’s a filled mug right in front of you, warm and inviting, but you hold off on it for just a second longer; even in your cold, tired state, you possess enough wisdom to know that it will burn your tongue if you try to drink it now. Instead, you tilt your head a little, glancing out of the window. The wind has begun blowing hard enough that the big, wet snowflakes are not so much falling as they are flying sideways. The sight makes you shiver, almost as though you were still outside, and seeking warmth, you curl your hands around your mug.

An extraordinarily strong wind blows in from the sea, sending snow flying in more directions than before. It rustles through the old cottage, making the windows creak and whistle, and another shiver courses through you. Slowly and cautiously, you bring your mug to your mouth and take a small sip. It’s just hot enough, and you can almost feel the warmth spreading through your body. It’s not quite like anything you’ve had before; if you didn’t know better, you might almost think it was magical, might almost believe in the legends.

You put the mug down for a second, wrapping your blanket tighter around yourself. Another strong gust of wind whistles through the trees, but when you pick up your mug again, it makes you feel just warm and safe enough to close your eyes, and right then and there—for only a split second—you find yourself just the smallest bit comforted by the storm.

Chapter Text

Far, far below you, the river is beginning to flow again. It is a calm, quiet process, almost unnoticeable if one doesn’t look closely at the waters. You make sure to take note of it all, down to every little bit of ice that chips off from the main mass and slowly makes its way towards the sea. Right now, you are taking it—along with the lighter breezes that are just beginning to come in from the sea—as a sign of hope.

If you step inside so much as for a few minutes sometime over the coming week, the meteorologists claim, you may very well miss the last cold wind. You hope dearly that you won’t be outside to feel it; that you will wake up one morning and the air will be warm, just like that. Deep in your being, too, something tells you that it will happen soon; somewhere between the ever earlier sunrise, the familiar feeling in the air this morning even at dawn, and the scene playing out right in front of you, it is all clear. Soon, this river will be rushing wild and free, all the tension built up over the cold, harsh months released as the cliffs and roads let go of all the ice and snow they’ve been holding onto so tightly for so long. One can only imagine how loud it will be, then, to stand on this bridge—a stark contrast to this moment.

By then, though, you will no longer pass by this road; your six-week lease in the cottage you live in now is nearing its end. Granted, there will be another bridge, and it is entirely possible that the Silversong River will melt in even more drastic ways than these waters, but… well, it won’t be Moorland.

You suppose Moorland will never be Firgrove, either.

Chapter Text

You wake up in the middle of the night with a strange sense of unease coursing through your body. You’re slow to come to full consciousness, and the world comes back in fragments;

A street lamp is lit right outside your bedroom window. It’s flickering just a little bit in the night, and maybe if all was still you could’ve heard it buzzing, but tonight the wind is whistling a lonely tune, wandering the village roads and leaving no corner unrounded.

Your eyes are tired, still aching after the long day, and something within your soul is restless; somewhat, you feel as if you’re being tugged towards something. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling to you. Rather, it’s the opposite: almost ever-present since even before you arrived. Even so, it wears heavy on you; at times, it is almost strangling, almost paralysing.

You pull your blanket up to your chin—maybe it’ll help you bear the tension—and stare at the ceiling. The wind is still wild and sharp, and you can feel the cold draft coming in from the windows; if you were to look in their direction, you might see the curtains tremble the smallest bit. Maybe, just maybe, you could have found the smallest bit of peace in that.

A sigh slips from your lungs and you close your eyes again, slowly slipping back into sleep even as a grain of unease remains in your heart.

(May Aideen let you rest, now.)

Chapter Text

The cliff walls tower above you, steep and threatening as they are, as you slowly make your way up the mountain. Night is beginning to settle in, the village slowly quieting down and its windows lighting up, and the muffled sound of hooves against the steep, narrow dirt path below you is the only thing between you and complete silence. The horse knows its way around, never missing a step or putting a hoof in the wrong place; had it not been for its certainty, you’re not sure you could’ve looked past what could await just beyond the wooden railings.

At the highest point of the mountain pass, the slim, steep paths finally open up, laying trees and snow-clad mountaintops and the burning evening sky out in plain sight. The waterfall is becoming audible in the distance, the staticky, rumbling sound making its way up the cliff walls. Tonight, something tells you, you and the old forester down by the lake may very well be the only ones around to hear it.

At last, the lake begins to show itself, a few glints of gold and pink peeking out from behind the fir trees; at the same pace, the path begins to become a little less steep, and you urge the horse into a just slightly faster walk. It is eager to follow, ears pointed straight forward and a spring in its step.

There’s spring in the air, too, getting closer with every minute of every day; the sun rising a little earlier and setting a little later, birds finally beginning to sing and flowers beginning to bloom again now that the cold is releasing its hold on the island. Almost as if to remind you of this, a gust of wind blows up along the mountain, playing with your hair for a second. It sits just between warm and cold, the perfect spot to make one wonder whether choosing to wear a winter coat was a mistake.

For a moment, everything is just as it should be.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

It is pitch black when you wake up.

For a few seconds, you find yourself gasping for breath, perhaps completely thrown off from… well, really, you have no idea what you’ve seen. Still recovering, you scramble around in the dark for your dream notepad and a pen—for this is not the first time something of this sort has occurred—and barely remember to turn on a lamp before you open it.

You struggle to recall things, but slowly, a few vague images come crawling to you. Something glowing, a strange bright pink; a mist-filled forest, though not one you recognise; cold dread trickling down your back.

As you write the images down, they seem to disappear from your mind; when you have emptied them all out on the page and look over it you can barely picture them anymore, despite the descriptions harboring as much detail as your tired hands could muster. All that remains is an uneasiness that you can’t quite rid yourself of.

You put the notebook and pen away and turn off the light, slipping back under your covers. Part of you knows, somehow, that you’re a long time away from falling back asleep.

Chapter Text

The next time you unpack your things, you’re not quite ready yet.

It is beautiful here, you must admit; in the spring morning, birds are chirping, a gentle wind is rustling the just-emerging leaves, and the sun is warming your back as you carry yet another cardboard box through the front door. The village is waking up, people just opening their doors and—clad in warm winter coats—stubbornly having a cup of coffee on their front porches. The air is silent, still, too early for friendly conversation with neighbours.

You bid your latest home farewell at just the time of day where the soft, golden rays of the early morning sun peek out through the mountain pass, and at just the time of a spring morning where birdsong is at its most novel and beautiful. A warm wind was flowing through the village, pushing your hair around your face; it almost seemed to be thanking you for your time, wishing you well, and you gave it your thanks, too. There could have been no more worthy goodbye, but even so, the melancholy remains.

The wall is warm with sun as you lean back against it. Despite everything, there is something peaceful in the air here. Maybe, eventually, it will even begin to feel like something comfortable. Maybe, even, you will find that what pulled you here may be stronger than what ties you to the mountainside cottage.

(Nonetheless, you must not let this one become a home.)

Chapter Text

The first heavy rain hits on a warm, quiet spring day.

You are sitting on your front porch when it begins. The first drop lands right next to you on the greying white railing that you still need to get around to washing, lightening a small round spot on the wood. It is slowly joined by a few more, and more, and more, until finally the railing is no longer dry anywhere the eye can see and the village is blurred and gray from the downpour.

Your shoulder is already turning wet from the water splattering off the railing, but something compels you to stay, almost pulling you out towards the fields. It’s reminiscent, really, of the feeling that pulled you to Jorvik in the first place.

The village is beautiful like this; bright colours more muted, dampened and deepened by the rain, a thick grey mass filling up the air between every house. The birds have turned even quieter than before the rain began, and not one free-roaming cat is in sight. The streets are empty, but warm light is flowing through every window; even now, there is little loneliness here.

You shiver, realising that you are soaked to the bone, and step back from the railing with a tense exhale. If the thunderstorm keeps going, which seems to be its intent, it is probably best to head inside.

Chapter Text

It is so late that it’s almost early when you awake from a dream, all out of breath and with your heart still half in your throat. The dream—much like usual—escapes you, and you find yourself too taken aback to dig for whatever it was that shook you.

In the distance, you faintly hear a ferry announce its departure. It must be the half past one, the last boat headed for the peninsula; on the poor sailor’s behalf, you thank Aideen for this. Not quite as far away, you can hear two horses approaching, hooves softly clacking against the Silverglade village’s stone paths. For as long as it lasts, you find peace in the sound.

A distant conversation is slowly becoming audible through your ever-so-slightly opened window. It’s probably the riders. They laugh, sometimes, in a quiet way that sounds like they’re teenagers doing something forbidden, but there’s something a little bit off about it; they sound nervous, on the edge of afraid. This is not an enjoyable rebellion.

The horses come to a halt. “It’s a nice house”, someone says. The wind rustles through the trees, and one of the horses neighs: a low, rumbling thing.

Someone else snorts. “I mean, they’re all kind of the same, but…”

“Okay, miss Valedale resident”, says the first voice teasingly, hooves hitting stone once again and voices growing further away.

“That’s different!” protests the second voice, loud and clear and echoing through the night; there is no anger, though, and the mood seems to have lightened somewhat. The riders keep talking, but it is impossible to make out the words any longer.

You try to recall your dream—for the dream journal, maybe—but, though the chilling sensation remains, you find the concrete images to be just out of reach.

You decide to go back to sleep. The night goes on as it always does.

Chapter Text

At five thirty in the morning, you finally give in to the strings in your chest that have been tugging you towards the stables all night.

It is quiet there this time of day, and just too early for your morning shift to truly have started. The horses are standing in their stalls, most barely awake and some chewing on the straw covering the ground beneath their hooves. It isn’t much warmer here than it is outside, but it does feel the part, and you feel your grip on your blanket loosen just a little.

One of the horses looks your way, and something indescribable, something fundamental yet minuscule, clicks in the deepest depths of your being. The horse neighs, deep and rumbling through the morning air. You’ve never seen it before; it must be the one that arrived yesterday evening, on your off night from stable work.

For a second, your feet are frozen to the ground, but whatever strange thing was keeping you in place quickly melts and you walk up to the horse. It looks at you, eyes kind and calm, and you reach out a cautious but firm hand; it leans right into you, asks to be scratched under the chin.

Whatever clicked finally settles, grows in your chest; it almost feels like you’re glowing. The horse’s eyes pierce through you, and it seems so strongly like it’s saying hello that you can practically hear it. Somehow, you feel like you’ve been waiting for this—for this moment, for this feeling, for this horse.

You are terrified. The horse knows, you are sure of it. It blows warm air on your cheek, bumps its muzzle against you, lowers its head and rests it against your chest, and that is enough for you to know peace.

This is where you were meant to be, is it not?

Chapter Text

The beach glows pink and golden, light shifting and sand shimmering. As you and the horse slowly make your way forward, you cast long, gangly shadows over the wet sand: stretched out mirror images of the two of you, moving in perfect synchronisation with your steps. Behind you, a trail of hoof prints stretches out as far as you can see, coming all the way back from the cold, blue beginning of dawn.

It is still quiet here; too early yet for any teenage riding camp attendee in their right mind to have even considered waking up, much less going to the beach. There is only you and the fisherman, and he much prefers the silence this time of day. You don’t mind. For this moment in time, the horse is more than enough.

Every so often, you find yourself pondering the horse with sadness. It is only temporary, after all: you have the all clear to borrow it for as long as the owners are away from Jorvik. Whether this is a few weeks or a few months, you have no idea, and neither does the farmer; all you know is that this is temporary. Sometimes, something tells you that it will be okay.

Before you, the beach stretches as far as ever; behind you, the trail of hoof prints is longer than ever. As it rises, the sun slowly begins to warm your back. The horse snorts and shakes its head, and you loosen the reins a little. You lean forward to pat its neck, feeling its smooth, warm coat of fur under your hand.

It will be okay.

(So, you hope.)

Chapter Text

Tonight, the fields feel strange.

The dusk colours the world a strange, eerie purple, and the trees and mountains tower above you, laying vague, long shadows over the road. High above you, the gondola lift continues its swaying path up the mountain, its rhythmic noise only almost audible to you. Highest of all sits the observatory, patiently waiting for the stars to come out together with its very own stargazer; tonight, you can just barely see him leaning against the observatory terrace’s railing.

You wonder if he is what makes you feel like someone’s eyes are glued to you.

The feeling comes back every once in a while. It’s a never-ending chase: it shows up, you shake it off as nothing, and just when you’ve almost let it go, it returns. Tonight, it’s overwhelmingly loud, fuzzy images of your fears forming in your mind—there, atop a mountain, stands a strange figure whose shape you do not know, and it watches, and it waits, and your heart tells you that you are in danger—and yet again, you try to brush it off.

The mountains cast their long, threatening shadows over the island, and you shiver. Tonight seems a hopeless case. You steer the horse away from the mountains, finally looking back towards the path to comfort and warmth.

(Until you reach the stables, the feeling remains: a cold, sharp gaze fixed on your back. You will not shake the discomfort until the morning after.)

Chapter Text

Jorvik is shrouded in something strange.

It feels almost as if the island is holding its breath. The trees seem to be whispering amongst one another more than usual, the birds seem suspiciously quiet; there have been quiet rumours passed from person to person, door to door, village to village, that the Druids have been gathering more as of late. Some say, under their breath, that it has something—or, perhaps, everything—to do with the Moorland boy, who has not been seen in days. Those more superstitious might tell you to watch the sky at twilight: if you ask more, they will lower their voices and say cautiously that it has been strangely pink as of late. The druids know, they might add if they are feeling bold, that this is an omen of no good.

Amidst it all, there is your horse. Your horse, now. (It is still sinking in, and it still feels like minutes ago that the farmer sat you down and told you, quietly, that its owners had called and announced that they would not be returning to Jorvik. He did not say anything else, and you did not ask, for you could tell that he knew more than he was passing on to you. You try, and sometimes fail, not to think about it too much.) Something tells you, every time the two of you are around each other, that this was at least part of where the pull in your heart was leading. A part of you thinks it to be the eye of the storm, a sliver of normal in the ever-shifting world; another, still feeling a strange pull, wants nothing more than to see how far you can go through the storm now that you are no longer alone.

Tonight, you might ride through Hollow Woods. The sunset is stunning there, you’ve heard.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

The woods, if possible, seem even more beautiful now.

One would expect the opposite, perhaps. The village and the woods are your every day now; you awake with the golden, misty sun coming in through your curtains, the trees stretch out their long arms right outside the window you stand by to do the dishes, you have walked the village paths enough for them to almost entirely stop feeling novel and interesting. Despite it all, you do not feel like this place could ever become boring to you.

The trees stretch tall above you today; had you not known better, you might have thought that they’d shot up a metre overnight. Your horse’s ears are pointing straight forward as it looks at something which, to you, is obscured by the mist, and its walk is filled with equal parts curiosity and caution. Something tells you that you should be at unease, and perhaps, if you were to dig for a little bit, you would indeed find a strange, gnawing kind of butterflies in your stomach. You do not, of course, instead simply reaching forward to pat your horse’s neck and calmly tell it that there is nothing to worry about. You seem to believe your own words; you do not hesitate for so much as a second as you walk on through the trees, and the deep breath you take is one of contentedness rather than of anxiety. Distantly, but clearly, the air carries a scent of oncoming rain, and the forest, already damp from the mist, smells of the cliffs and pine trees surrounding it.

After all this time, something in your heart has finally, finally stilled and found a home. You could hardly ask for more.

Chapter Text

The village is whispering again.

Beyond the wall of ice separating your home from whatever lies north, something is moving. It is the dinosaur of the myth, people say under their breath; it is coming to lay ruin to our home, and then the rest of the island, house by house and village by village. The children at the stable have incorporated it into their games, and the older children into their scary stories. Some say that their horses have grown more unsettled recently; that they’re only calmed by exiting the forest and become nervous again the second they come back.

A few days back, you rode high enough into the mountains to see for yourself what’s making noise on the other side of the mountain. Needless to say, you were unable to see a long-dead dinosaur roaming the frozen landscape. With just enough squinting, though, something caught your eye: an old elevator—the same one you assumed, the first time you noticed it, to have been out of order due to the harsh cold for longer than you’ve been alive—had started slowly, painstakingly running.

If you happen to walk by the right open window of the right house at just the right time, you might—on accident, of course—overhear people whispering different, more superstitious, things than most. There, you will find no murmurs of dinosaurs; instead, you might hear that this is the beginning of something worse than what is imaginable, that all-too-recent history is repeating itself (and fast), that some form of strange, secret operations that wrapping your head around seems impossible need to take place. You would prefer not to think about this; the villagers’ gossip is far less unnerving.

Some nights, you hear something out of the ordinary—a loud creak, the roar of a machine, something booming in the distance—and the most anxious part of you wonders if every speculation wandering the village paths might, despite everything, be headed in the right direction.

Chapter Text

Today, the world seems to be moving in slow-motion.

Part of it, certainly, is the village’s complete stillness. Many are travelling south to prepare for the approaching summer festivals, which Valedale—remote and unexciting as it is—plays no part in. The human population seems, as such, to have been reduced to you, the old fisherman up at the lake, and perhaps half of the Druids. You would’ve expected the sudden absence of liveliness to give the village a hollow or lonely air, but the silence is almost relieving. Your head has been busy lately, darting around different thoughts for most of your awake time, and something about today lets it take a well-needed rest; perhaps your body is simply too occupied with managing to exist in the hot, sticky air for any leftover energy to reach your brain.

Two riders come into view on the path some little distance away from you, catching your horse’s attention and pulling you back to the moment. Your horse neighs, and a chestnut pony that desperately needs its mane brushed throws its head up and responds at an impressively loud volume. Its rider laughs and pats its neck, then turns and says something to her companion. Your horse snorts, gives the pair one last glance, and goes back to grazing. You take a slow breath, realising how hard you’re holding your horse’s lead rope and loosening your grip on it.

You shift your position, leaning against the large tree behind you; its bark is hard and uneven, but cool against your uncomfortably hot and damp back, and its thick crown casts well-needed shade over you. Time passes slowly, each second only distinguished from the next by the rhythmic sound of your horses chewing being interrupted as it tears up another chunk of grass or a change in the birdsong. Every so often, your horse stretches its head over to you to check if there may be treats in your pocket (you don’t, but a horse’s hope for such things never ends) or if you’re willing to scratch some itch or another.

Occasionally, you consider standing up and going back to the village, but the idea always flutters away just as fast as it came; something tells you that today, warm and sunny and bright, is not to be taken for granted.

Chapter Text

It must have been a full month—if not more—since the fog was this dense.

Before this point, you had almost forgotten how all-encompassing it is, how strange the world feels on days like these; perhaps, even, you haven’t seen it quite like this before. The air lies heavy on your shoulders, as does the feeling of unease you almost dared think you’d escaped, and the very basics—waking, breathing, blinking—don’t come as easy to you as they should. Fog, in this forest, is more than a short field of view and a greyer world, and it certainly is not afraid of reminding you.

You saddle your horse hours later than usual, still not feeling like you’ve quite woken up entirely, and begin your route into the mountains. The usual path feels unfamiliar today; you keep turning and looking behind and around you (despite the dead silence around you, the feeling won’t quite escape you that someone is here, somewhere), the trees are swaying at half speed in the perfectly still air, and your horse moves as though the air is as thick as it feels to you.

Strangest of all may be the rune stones. The runes seem a few shades lighter than normal, and if you didn’t know that the fog was fooling your eyes, you might have thought that they were glowing pink. Your horse seems unbothered, which is of some comfort, though it seems to be anxiously glaring at something further down the path. You think nothing of it—a horse will be a horse, and it is impossible to see very far ahead—but as you get closer, there, too, seems to be a pink glow, diffused in the mist and moving just slightly.

You turn around and start making your way back the way you came. Today, it seems, is an excellent day to try out a different path.

Chapter Text

You fall out of nothing, off your horse, and onto the ground.

At first, you are still stuck in unreality; the world is spinning, and whether or not you keep your eyes open, you feel as if you are still stuck in the darkness (the great Nothing? the great Everything?), desperately clutching your horse’s mane despite neither of you really moving.

Slowly, things begin to come back to you. Your hands and knees are burning where they’re pressed against the cold, hard cobblestone, your stomach turning after the fall, your horse’s breath warm against your shoulder. (You wonder, briefly, if it might simply have spooked at something—maybe the closer-than usual pink glow—and thrown you off in the process of running, but you cannot remember being anywhere near cobblestone in the forest.)

When you look up, you are met with a sight unlike anything else. You are in the middle of a perfect circle made up of worn statues that might once have taken the shape of horses; to your right is a locked gate, and to your left a cliff ledge with a perfectly preserved metal sculpture. Coating everything is a thick, pink mist, and the feeling that you are being kept company, that someone is watching over you.

Your horse nudges your shoulder, and something in the depths of your mind whispers to you: turn around.

Fighting nausea, you do, and find yourself face to face with a hooded figure. The figure kneels in front of you, as if to get closer, and when the hood is pulled back, you find yourself face to face with a middle-aged woman who’s looking at you with such intensity that she almost seems to be studying you.

She sighs as she slowly stands up, shining red hair spilling over her shoulders. “Good Aideen, that took you long enough”, she says quietly, stretching out her hand.

You take it.

Chapter Text

The world feels different now.

What you have been told, and what you have been asked to be a part of, is almost too great of a burden to bear. Part of you almost wishes that it was—that you were, all in all, a hopeless case, and your shoulders not as strong as they are—but as it is, you remain still, solemn, quiet, hoping that what you feel in your heart is either the spark of determination or the beginning of your quick downfall.

Today, just as so many other days as of late, it is completely quiet, save for the light summer rain tapping on your window. You do not know what time it is; it’s light outside, but this time of year, it never seems to get dark, and your relative alertness tells you nothing, considering that it’s been weeks since you felt so much as a trace of exhaustion. It is as if you’re stuck in a strange, lingering state of shock, overcome by little else than confusion, upset, and the numbness that masks everything else.

Lately, you’ve been revisiting old riding paths and exploring new ones: a long walk down to Doyle’s Abbey, a half-ride, half-climb up the mountain path to the lake, a visit to the observatory. Though you try to tell yourself otherwise, this has everything to do with the runestones standing along your usual path. Knowing that you weren’t just imagining the strange, pink glow hasn’t made your heart feel lighter in your chest—not when you also know why they glow when you and your horse are near. There is no comfort in being reminded of what you are.

Maybe it is time for a change.

You take a deep breath, then release it with a sigh.

Maybe, today, it is time to face yourself.

Chapter Text

You meet the Soul Riders, broken up and defeated as they are, in the stone circle where it all began.

The morning is quiet and cold, and you are surrounded by thick mist and rows of hooded figures far too silent and standing far too still. Before you is the red-haired Druid who found you here a few weeks ago, and on either side of her are the remaining two Soul Riders, just barely old enough to have become young women. You recognise one of them—bright orange knit hat and scruffy chestnut pony standing out just as always, and the look she shares with you making it clear that you aren’t new to her, either—but the other, wearing a cable-knit cardigan and round, golden glasses, is a stranger to you. Between the three of you lies a strange tension that’s only almost there, but there is no time to address it: the meeting is short, simple, and played perfectly straight, seemingly scripted or following strict tradition. It is closer to a ritual than anything else.

The past few days’ events, in fact, have through and through been tinted with something ritualistic. For every waking moment, you have been transported between countless different places and people in a swift, perfectly planned manner, taking in information and taking on tasks deemed necessary. On longer journeys and during sleepless nights, you sometimes find yourself wondering if you really did keep the Keepers waiting for too long, and not all too rarely, it feels like your training is taking place during borrowed time—like you arrived just a second short of too late and are being put through the necessary motions at a speed on the far end of reasonable—but this is a train of thought you do your best to stop. There are better uses of your time and energy than contemplating whether you will have enough time to prepare for what is to come.

When you leave the stone circle, you are made to ride between the two Soul Riders, as if you are now a part of them just as much as the missing two.

You can’t quite find it in yourself to believe that.

Chapter Text

Tonight, deep silence rests over the island.

Far above the mountain tops, constellations upon constellations are coming out from their hiding places behind the midnight sun. Deep in the valleys and forests, a silent breeze rustles between trees, the odd yellowed leaf falling off and making a small noise upon impact with the ground; along the shorelines, the ocean waves are lapping gently at stone and sand, murmuring secrets to cliffsides and silently apologising to seaside villages for the trouble it has caused; all across, house after house turns the lights off, tired citizens longing for a peaceful night’s sleep. Somewhere in an evergreen forest, a lonely horse is wandering around, and just as deep in a forest not quite as evergreen but all the more ancient, you toss and turn in a bed that refuses to stop creaking.

In this silent moment, you know that you are real—when you stretch your hand out and look at it, it feels like yours, and the thin wisp of wind coming in from the leaky windows is cold and sharp enough against your face to truly settle it—but it is far from always, these days, that such is the case. This, you are told time and time again, is normal—that with time and experience, seeing something through your mind's eye will feel less like physically tumbling through time and space, and vice versa.

You let your eyes drift to the window. A tree is waving in and out of view, obscuring part of the sky; behind it, the stars are shining, and the giant moon shines lonely, cold light into your room. When you take a deep breath, it carries the cold almost-autumn air with it; despite the chill burying itself deep in your bones, there may very well be solace to be found in it.

The moon, great and bright, is watching, and the sea whispers a promise of peaceful weather. A small wooden house somewhere in the mountains is last to turn off its every light. The island lies under a thick, heavy blanket of peace, and finally, it sleeps.

You bury yourself deeper in your sheets, hoping with all your heart that you will not dream tonight.

Chapter Text

You awaken suddenly with a gasp. Sweat is soaking your sheets, your heart is in your throat, and even before you awaken enough to gain full control of your body, your hands are scrambling for your bedside notebook and pen. Something deep in your soul tells you, wordlessly, that what you have seen must not be lost.

In a valley of gold, soaked in eternal autumn and eternal sunset, a small boat stops at a secluded beach, and a figure cloaked in red and black begins to unload a dappled horse. They do not seem to belong together. Indeed, the horse is far too kind and sweet-hearted for the figure’s aggressive demeanour as she near enough drags it off the boat and mounts, spurs wielded sharply and violently against its side. Wind pushes her hood back as the horse picks up speed, revealing a long, dark braid that whips through the air and against her back in near perfect time with the steady beating of hooves against dirt.

The scene switches, and you see the figure and her not her horse someplace dark and misty. There is somebody else, but you cannot see their face—only their long, black robes, covering them from head to toe, and their hands, covered in green gloves. (You think, at least, that they are gloves—it is an awfully strange colour for gloves and skin alike.) There is a flash of light and dark all at the same time, and the horse’s eyes turn a black too deep even for a horse, its face as perfectly still and expressionless as a stone carving.

You snap your notebook shut, taking a deep breath and looking out of your bedroom window. It is cracked open, and cold autumn wind flows in from the forest, cooling down your damp nightclothes enough to make you shiver. Behind the trees, the sky is beginning to glow with golden light, and as the day slowly breaks, the village below you begins to go about its morning affairs. You may not feel well rested, but you have slept for long enough; there is no room for wasting time.

When you step out of bed, the wooden floor is dry and warm against your bare feet, but even as you close your window, the cold lingers on your skin and in your bones. In the very core of your stomach sits a heavy, gnawing feeling that what you saw, should it truly occur, would bring something terrible upon the island—but you know, also, that it has not yet begun.

You can still stop it.

Chapter Text

The early morning of these woods is much different to that of your home forest. Though the island is creeping close to the short time frame where it will perfectly match this valley and the woods within it, it is still too cold, too dark, too silent here. Of course, it is in very few ways soothing that the island is falling further and further into autumn; more than anything, it stands as a reminder of how fast the long, dark winter is approaching, and this, perhaps, is what most of all fills your lungs with dread.

Summer’s last birdsong, a cold and lonely tune, echoes through the valley; the sound comes to you from so far away that you cannot even be sure whether it comes from this forest. It is beautiful, but soon drowned out by a rustle in the leaves above you as a slow ocean breeze flows in from the forest’s southern path. The wind smells more of salt than you’re used to, and that, together with the shallow smell of the forest and the young-looking trees, makes it very clear that this is not your home. That is an unfamiliar feeling these days, and perhaps that is something to find peace in amid this strange, foreign place.

The forest around you is a deep, haunting gold, and though it seems all but ancient at first glance, it is so clearly perpetually stuck in this state of being that it feels like time and space both end and begin here. Leaves are swirling around the woods, but the rich, golden shroud of leaves seems to be keeping itself mostly intact; no new leaves are coming off the trees and entering the flurry, and none leaving the air to fall to the ground entirely. There is a strange, magical air about this place, one that gives you a strange sense that whatever forces are keeping reality here intact have been carefully woven into a soft, warm blanket that one could easily fall into and be cradled by—or trapped in—for the rest of time.

Not too far away, you hear the faint creaking of wood, and a days-old vision flashes through your head. With it, unstoppably spreading and settling all throughout your body, comes an uncomfortable blend of fright and déjà vu—and the grounding knowledge of precisely what is to come.

Chapter Text

You wake up deep in an evergreen forest, cold to the bone and tangled in blankets that feel heavy and light all at the same time. Across the room the fireplace glow is taking its last breaths, and your windows are fogged up with condensation, pink in the last moments before sunrise. The world has shifted a little bit one way or the other; you feel for whatever has changed, the same way you would feel for a fleeting dream, but it is not until you open your door and let in a cold, crisp gust of wind that you find it.

Late last night, the island took its final step into autumn.

The fog coating the forests and mountains has changed—it is denser and heavier now, rolling in over the land with a majesty unseen in the whirling late-summer mists—and the air carries something new: something cold and foreign and yet skirting the edge of familiar. All gone is the scent of morning dew on perfectly green grass and the comfort of morning’s first sunlight as it reaches your cheek; now, the deep gold of sunrise is but a reminder of what it once felt like to be warm, and the air smells of leaves and mountains and rain and, if you breathe in deeply enough, the first tinge of winter.

Chapter Text

By the west coast of Jorvik, a once locked-away valley lies silent and still; even in the cold, dark winter covering the rest of the island, it remains golden and autumn-warm, sun still shining over the hills and forests. Just off the shore, a blizzard is brewing; the calm before the storm is nearing its end, and even in this place of eternal autumn, the smell of snow can be felt in the air.

A harsh wind, cold as a clear midwinter night, blows in over the shores from the great ocean west of the island. It comes in over the beaches, snaking its way through the fishing village by the sea and exploring every nook and cranny of the hills and the valleys; even deep in the forest, it is felt. By the foot of the highest hill this side of the island, it blows through a fence, leaves winding around the bars as if the wind is playing a game. In its wake, it leaves behind piles upon piles of maple leaves, some still mid-air and slowly falling to the ground. The trees seem not to have taken much note of the sudden gust; they stand as still and golden as ever.

Your hair breaks the descent of a leaf, and another sticks to your nose. You brush them off and reach forward over your horse’s neck, picking out a few leaves here and there and smoothing out the tousled mane before leaning back in the saddle and taking a deep breath. The air, some degrees colder now than it was only a few moments ago, burns your nostrils and lungs, and you shiver. Something tells you that the snowstorm will not be merciful even to this place of eternal, timeless autumn.

Something flashes through your mind: for a split second, there is a white, all-consuming light, and then the island, all bird’s-eye view, and roots at your feet. The image escapes you, and you tumble back through your mind, landing smoothly back on your horse with a slight nausea, like carsickness, resting in the core of your stomach.

Inside the heavy armoured-iron fence and its long-locked gate, the hill towers over you. It stands silent, still and eternal, inhabited now only by the seemingly lifeless scarecrows whose button eyes have not left you since you stepped foot near this home of theirs. If you were to move, you are sure they would too; sometimes, when you have looked away for a split second, you could swear there is something glowing inside their skulls of straw and fabric—something haunting that you wish no part in.

Atop the hill, something golden glints in the sunlight, almost as though it were winking at you. Come get me, if you dare, it seems to be saying to you.

You blink back at it, and then steer your horse away. The scarecrows do not turn away until you are far out of their sight.

Chapter Text

Tonight, the island is dark.

These days, in fact, it is almost always dark. The sun barely rises anymore, only just peeking above the horizon at midday. It is a quiet, solemn season, a long wait for the winter solstice to pass and the days to begin getting brighter. This winter, they say, is different from all the rest: it is too cold, and too uneasy. There are whispers in the villages that something strange is afoot: some say they have found footsteps leading nowhere in otherwise untouched snow far too soon after a blizzard, and others tell tales of strange silhouettes or unseen, yet strongly felt, presences in the woods just before the storm started growing, almost as if something was there, conjuring forth the wind and snow. All such haunting stories are forgotten in the peaceful hours, when a deep, blinding white blanket lies over the island, so wondrous and bright and sparkling it almost makes up for the many missed hours of daylight—but in the long, cold, raging nights, grandparents will gather their grandchildren around the fireplaces, telling cautionary tales of snow and magic alike.

In a small, seaside village on Jorvik’s western coast, the Tuesday night is following its usual routine. The lit candles around the streets are beginning to burn out, storeowners finally packing away their wares or locking up for the day, children tucking into bed and adults sitting by their windows with a book, the evening paper, or simply each other as company. Many will flinch and open their curtains as a bright light shines through; upon finding its origin, they will draw the curtains shut, return to their business, though perhaps in a different room, and never speak of the sight that met them. In many years, the few children who snuck a peek at the strange occurrence may tell their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the lonely, cold winter night that the sun rose, if only for a moment.

Atop a hill overlooking a quaint fishing village, you glow with the light of something—someone—long gone; it is powerful and bright beyond your comprehension, and yet perfectly within your reach. In front of you, a small, strangely metallic apple hangs loosely on a branch that seems almost to reach towards you; the apple reflects your light, colouring the world a deep, blinding gold. Around you, just out of the light’s reach, are dozens of green, glowing eyes. They watch you, and they wait. For what, you do not care to find out. You take the apple, and you tell your horse—quick nudge to its sides, quick click of the tongue—to run.

Chapter Text

The ocean is dark, and the night a sharp, grounding cold.

The sun has not risen today, nor will it tomorrow or the day after, and the seemingly endless night—only interspersed, occasionally, with the light of early dawn and late twilight—has deepened this deepest winter, finally letting it cement its hold on the island. Even so, the blizzards have been slowing down over the past few days, and by now, the island is so peaceful that it is almost difficult to believe it was ever another way; with no more fear of what may come at any time, even the smallest and most vulnerable of villages are coming back to life, children and adults alike back out in the streets and horses being taken on trail rides for the first time in weeks. The snow now swirling all across the island is quiet and beautiful, falling in flakes so small that the very air seems to be glistening. Some would imagine it, just as much else, to be the work of the Goddess; children, joking and mocking as children do, might claim that she sits on a cloud, slowly pouring over the world a large bucket of glitter, and the elderly, though shaking their heads at the playful superstition of their grandchildren, may lean back in a chair and take a moment simply to thank her for the beauty she once gifted this island.

The ocean, of course, is just as deep, dark, and threatening as always. In this midwinter cold, small ice floes float just below the surface of the endless black depths, bobbing up and down in the gentle waves with total ignorance and disinterest in what might lie beneath. With the last storms having passed, the calm making its home over the ocean is both greater than ever and unlike any other. Indeed, the uncharacteristic blanket of silence so suddenly laid over the waters of Jorvik is unsettling enough to dishearten even a confident sailor—and yet, somewhere south of the Harvest Counties, a small, wooden sailboat is making its way across the water, bow pushing ice aside as the boat continues its slow, patient way forward.

Through gaps in the thick sheet of clouds spread over the sky—gaps, if the superstitious and the young are to be trusted, where Aideen herself may very well be sitting—the stars occasionally peek through. Over the southwestern ocean, far from any large settlements, the stars are perhaps more visible than anywhere else; tonight, they seem to speak to you, almost as if reaching out to you where you sit in a boat far too small for the journey it is on. If you squint and focus enough, you might be able to make fragmented constellations out through the small windows in the clouds: two of the Rune’s stars here, the Adventurer’s telescope there. In this lonely, cold night, you find parts of yourself hoping that the stars are here to watch over you; other parts of you doubt that they are there for much more than guidance, or even by any more than pure chance.

In the distance, growing closer, a large metal building stands tall in the middle of the ocean. The snow, forming something like a thick, white mist, obscures your view, but even so, the strange glow around the construction is clear and bright as day, silently letting you know that you are on the right path. You shiver, though something tells you it is not from the cold, and deep in your heart, something familiar—something you haven’t felt in a very long time—stirs and grows just a little uneasy.

Chapter Text

The deep midwinter is cold, calm, and comfortingly familiar.

The cold, the dark, and the snow are no longer threatening—rather, they are all beginning to feel like old friends—and hours by the fireplace wrapped in woollen blankets feel like warm, soft embraces that one could stay in for days at a time moreso than desperate attempts to escape all that winter brings. Months of lacking sunlight has made it unquestioningly normal to wake up with hours of darkness still awaiting, and it has become second nature to put on just one more layer of warm clothing than seemingly necessary. Winter brings rigidity, and it brings routine; no day is much different from another, and if one twists and turns that just right, it may very well hold more safety and comfort than boredom.

Today, as most days, you leave home at sunrise; by then, as by most sunrises these days, it is already late in the day. The village is as lively as ever, full of the same people as always going about their daily business. Some walk in pairs or more, gentle mist puffing out of their mouths in irregular rhythms as they talk and laugh in the cold winter’s day. Many pass through the village astride a horse, gently weaving through the crowds of people or stopping for a moment to greet a friend. Just at the edge of the forest, two riders slow down from a race with no apparent winner; one of the horses, a small, tousle-maned palomino pony with mischief clearly written all across its face even from some distance away, tosses its head about as its rider holds it back from setting off at full speed into the woods again.

By the time you and your horse begin making your way along the roads, the sun is setting somewhere beyond the thick of the forest, lighting the snow up in oranges and golds and all-too-rich pinks. It is all reminiscent of something long passed, yet all new, all different. The sun, reaching for you through the rare gaps between trees, no longer seems to blind you, the snow-covered path creaks and crackles beneath your horse’s hooves as it wanders on through the woods, and above you, the trees stretch their long, spindly fingers into the sky, reaching only a little further than a year ago. For better or for worse, Jorvik has changed. For better or for worse, Jorvik has changed you.

Something warm crackles and sparks silently in the palm of your hand, almost as if in agreement. Before you, the shadows are growing longer, and the light pinker as the sun makes its way back below the horizon; over the world and on your shoulders, destiny lies heavy and immovable.

Perhaps, if you peer carefully enough through the lens fate has granted you, there is great beauty to be seen beyond the weight of it all.

Chapter Text

The moon, bright and full, shines over Jorvik. Even this darkest hour of night is lit up by forceful, blue-white light that casts strange shadows in the forests and beneath the mountains. The island is asleep, but unease lies over its peaks and valleys; many toss and turn in their sleep, plagued by dreams and restlessness. Even in the stables, some have half an eye open, turning their big heads around over and over again just to be sure that something hasn’t made its way into the corner.

You are awakened by the ending of a dream, eyelids slowly opening and eyes—still thick and blurry with sleep—flickering around your room as you try to find your footing back in reality. Your bedsheets feel all too rough and all too soft against your skin, and cold, cold air is flowing over your chest and right arm. Your curtains hang heavy and perfectly still over your windows, moonlight seeping through the cracks between fabric and wall and lighting up your bedroom in a faint glow. Where the moonlight shines, dust dances through the air, and your sheets are tousled and bunched up, one or two blankets lying abandoned on the floor. Your clock, ticking loud as ever on your desk and echoing through the silent room, shows—almost illegibly—twenty minutes past two, or perhaps ten minutes past four. The dark knots in your wooden ceiling stare at you, empty eyes in the darkness, and you stare back. You have seen worse.

(The oil rig, empty and dark, rises tall above the ocean. Something juts out off to the side; it glows, moves, spirals, sucking life into it and spitting out something else. You move closer. Atop a platform, you see now, is a blindingly bright gate-like structure. Despite its glow, it seems to cast a deep shadow over everything around it. In that deep shadow stand five dark silhouettes, a stark contrast against the white glow, perfectly still and coordinated as if gathered by the gate. You lean back, shoulders hitting the cold metal wall behind you, and for a second your vision is not with you, but somewhere else, and there is a horse, dark yet glowing, by the gate. You pull yourself back together, metal cold through your coat again, and the horse is gone, and then it is there again. You blink. The gate has gone dark.)

Cold night air breezes again over your bare arm, curtains dancing in the light draft. In the wake of your still-vivid dream, you are wide awake, and for lack of other things to do, you stare again at your ceiling. It stares back. You pull your blankets back over yourself as best you can, shuddering as your body begins to slowly but surely warm up, and let the occasional dance of your curtains lull you to sleep as your clock sings you a gentle, rhythmic good night song.

Once you fall back into a deep sleep, you will dream of shadows and of something far too pink and far too bright, but until then, you will be perfectly at peace.

Chapter Text

A silent, unintimidating winter chill lies over the Silverglade village.

The rising sun warms up the snow-covered roofs one after the other, and the meltwater dripping off their edges slowly forms icicles that reach toward the ground like outstretched, yearning hands. Occasionally, too heavy to bear its own weight anymore, one will break off, tumbling towards the ground and shattering on someone’s snow-covered wooden front porch or the grass outside their house.

At the edge of the village, by a small cluster of trees, a drop of water falls from a roof and lands on the crown of your head, extraordinarily cold even in the midwinter air. Shuddering, you lean back against the sun-warmed, red wall behind you, tilting your head back to bask in the bright midday sun; your horse, next to you, snorts and buffs its muzzle against your arm, and you reach up to scratch under its chin. It puffs out a breath, forming a small cloud of mist that turns a warm, golden shade as the sunlight hits it, and then it pulls back and raises its head, muscles freezing up, eyes widening, and ears pointing sharply in all directions.

Something is wrong.

There is a loud crack, as if the surface of Earth itself were being torn open, and an ear-splitting scream, followed then by crack upon crack and scream upon scream as the village lights up in pinks and purples and the sky darkens. The village plaza turns in mere seconds from a peaceful, quiet place into what is best described as a nightmare: the ground, indeed, is opening up, cobblestones rising like small mountain ranges and giving way to a blinding pink light that seems to reach all the way into the suddenly clouded sky. Many are closing their curtains and blinds, some staying at the window and carefully peeking outside; others are attempting to run from the plaza, instead taking to the streets and alleys of the village, only to be met with more of the horror they escaped. It does not take long for the shadows, large as a horse and with two glowing, almost eye-like red dots at the centre of their shapeless bodies, to begin pouring out of the village’s open wounds, wandering around as if in search for something. There is no longer so much as a single curious eye peeking out between a pair of curtains.

Something dark, glinting with red, rushes past you where you sit pressed against the blood-red wall. Determination pushes aside the dread threatening to pour over you, and with your heart still in your throat, adrenaline pulsing through your veins, and something immensely powerful crackling and sparking in the palm of your right hand, you mount your horse and gallop towards the village plaza.

Chapter Text

Greendale, it is said, is a place for the lost, the lonely, and the wandering.

The woods are quiet around you as you make your way deeper, silence only interrupted by the gentle crunching and springing back of frozen moss that your horse’s hooves push down with every heavy step forward, occasional rustling in the frozen leaves as silent, ice-cold winds blow in from the ocean, and the slow, quiet sound of your own breathing. Thick, grey mist fills up every gap between the trees, reducing your line of sight to but a fraction of what it could have been and slowly but surely soaking you with the kind of dampness that is unnoticeable until your clothes weigh twice as much as normal and your skin is beginning to itch and goosebump from the cold, wet fabric of your undershirt. Above the tree crowns, the day is bright and clear—somewhere far above, perhaps nested in the deceivingly warm sunlight, a lone bird sings, already calling for spring even though winter is little more than halfway done—but here, under the thick blanket of leaves, only a few sunbeams light up the bare ground, filtering through the mist on their way down and leaving long, swirling trails of gold behind

The woods deepen and deepen and deepen, mist growing thicker and sunlight becoming impossibly rarer as you go along. The trees themselves, too, seem to be growing thicker and nestling closer together in more and more of a labyrinth, and as you with increasing difficulty navigate the shrubbery and the ever steeper cliffs, you become less and less sure that you could make it back out of here without help. In the back of your mind, slowly sneaking up on you, is the thought that maybe, you were wrong to follow your gut feeling here—that maybe, recently, you have grown too used to trusting it

Your horse stops and stands as if frozen to the spot, only ears moving but moving wildly, back and forth and side to side; someone is here. Between two trees, you catch a glimpse of something blue shifting in the mist, and you know with sudden certainty that you have seen this before.

(Somewhere deep in an evergreen forest wanders a lonely horse, eyes as blue as its mane and its heart aching with loneliness in the absence of something important, though it no longer knows what. Perhaps, once, it was reaching out to find that something again; these days, it barely knows how to reach.)

For a moment, you remain there, only the sound of somebody else’s soft hoof steps echoing through the woods as you wait to feel the tension slowly seep from your horse’s body beneath the saddle. The hoof steps grow closer, a little further, a little closer, and stop.

From behind a large, mossy rock, an icy blue eye peeks out, beckoning you to follow, and you do as it asks.

Chapter Text

Just by the ocean shore in a remote corner of southwestern Jorvik sits a lonely, almost-forgotten tree.

She is old as time and grey as the mountains, but she is alive. Her branches sprawl and stretch towards the sky in a million different roundabout directions, entangling themselves in knots that slowly but surely have tightened as twigs have grown into sticks and then into branches; and though it happens all too slowly for the human eye to observe, she is breathing: her trunk rising and falling, expanding and contracting, and a gentle breeze forming around her with every slow breath. Around her, a great snow-covered field stretches out from Devil’s Gap and the accursed farmland in the west to the frozen Southsilver Waters and the Silverglade Manor in the east.

Even in the blindingly white snow, the Manor earns and upholds its position as a landmark. It is a grand, pompous structure almost whiter than snow, obscured from sight only in the deepest forests and valleys, and as such is something of a lighthouse for travelling riders. Not all too rarely, it is not only a navigation mark but also a destination, especially for scholars: its library is famed all over the island for its vast expanse of tomes new and old, and rivalled only by the long-lost Nova Alexandria of myth. The library is warmed and lit by a fireplace that may very well have burned without interruption for hundreds of years, the air is dry and stale and smells of old books, and the main room—save for the turning of pages, scribbling of pencils, and the occasional cough as yet another dusty book is pulled from the top of a shelf—is empty of all sound, or perhaps full of a thick, peaceful silence.

In the Forgotten Fields, perched upon a cliff at its northeastern edge, sits a lone tree as old as the land itself. She wishes and wants and yearns, as she has for hundreds of years, though no living person knows any longer for what or for whom. Her branches rustle in a gentle breeze as she begins her hours-long exhale, and at the same moment, a young girl in a dusty, warm library turns a page and pushes her glasses up her nose and finally, finally utters a cry of victory, and then is thrown back in her chair by something that can only be a premonition.

Through the Forgotten Fields, galloping hooves thud into the untouched snow, hoofprints quickly covered up again by the wind and the thick snowfall. Your horse is tired, and so are you, for the journey here was long and painstaking and is only becoming even more so—but even as you curse the snowflakes and wind whipping against your face, you spur your horse on, pushing forward through the storm and towards the sleeping Primeval Tree. There is no cause to slow down, snow or not: you have a friend to save, and she has waited long enough.

Chapter Text

The fields around Firgrove are wide, bright white, and perfectly peaceful in the winter midday. A gentle breeze travels over the gently rolling hills, blowing wisps of bright, powdery snow into the air as it travels. It is not quite cold enough for the river to have frozen over; one can hear it lapping against the shore down below the small grove of sleeping apple trees, and only a short distance further south coming from the rockier shores of Firgrove the roaring and crashing of ocean waves sounds out, though it is no more than gentle ambience by the point it reaches the fields.

Quieter yet is the forest. No breeze will pass through the towering fir trees, and so the only sound is that of the odd animal moving through the branches; likewise, all is so still here that the only movement is the shaking of branches that dusts snow into the air and lets it slowly trail down to the ground, powder glittering in the sun breaking through the trees as it falls.

In a small room at the edge of a ranch neighbouring the fields and the forests a window is open, despite the freezing cold; from there, rolling over the snow-covered slopes of the ranch, into the Firgrove forests, and down to the Silversong River, the gentle tones of an acoustic guitar ring out. For hours it has been occasionally sounding, interrupted by long silences and, if one listens closely, quiet, stifled sobs. The strings are a little off-tune, the notes a little unclear and the bar chords buzzing a little, but the music played is far too advanced for a beginner—like the guitarist is skilled, but too out of practice to properly show for it.

Starshine Ranch, in a way, is a place of mourning.

(Perhaps that is the fate bound to a house when built into it is a room for somebody that should have been there, but was not, and may have been returning the next day just as well as never.)

It is different now, of course. No longer is the mourning for somebody; rather, it is for something: for time lost, for a life changed in one’s absence, for so much living ripped from one’s hands.

Most of all, perhaps, what the sister of the Star Circle mourns is the luxury of being eased into the end of the world—of being allowed a time, however short, of peace and quiet before signs of the returning darkness begun slowly showing themselves on the horizon. Instead she, much like you, was simply sat down and told in cold and formal words of the apocalypse at hand; expected simply to handle it, like she should have no issue at all returning to her duty.

Starshine Ranch, despite it all, has become a place of joy. The thick sheet of snow covering the ranch grounds that was once interspersed only by occasional, deep footprints has now been trampled down all the way to the ground, and the faint laughter of equestrians young and old sounds out all over the ranch. On a small deck to the east, a small black-and-white cat carefully weaves between the feet of people dancing to lively music, taking special care to walk just so that somebody might trip. A blue-maned horse, seemingly having escaped its stall, stands by an open window at the edge of the ranch; occasionally, a hand with black-painted nails will reach out and hand it a treat.

From the sea comes a gust of wind, reaching deep into the forests, wide over the fields, and into each corner and crevice of the ranch. With it, it carries the first breath of spring.

Chapter Text

For quite some time, the island has been silent.

In the forests, buds are beginning to make their homes on the dry, brown branches, and in nooks and crannies everywhere a curious eye might glance, the first flowers have bloomed: snowdrops beneath a garden hedge, purple crocuses between the roots of a tree stump, buttercups under a sleeping rose bush by a thatch-roofed cottage. A gentle breeze is blowing in from the ocean, travelling along the rivers to the lakes, through meadows and forests, and over mountains and into valleys, carrying with it at long last the warm, soft air of early spring.

By the eastern shores of Jorvik, near a lone tree and an ancient tree stump with crocuses growing between the roots, sings a voice as bright as spring itself, and the divinely soft yet clear strings of a harp are carefully plucked to play a song few living people have ever heard. By the shore just near the river mouth walk two horses and their riders; in the lead, a horse with a shining blue mane carries the sister of the Star Circle, whom in turn carries the Harp of Aideen. The air shimmers around her as she plays. You follow her lead, and you do not look down.

In your arms is a small, white crystal more powerful than any earthly being could ever fully grasp. You are holding it tightly against your own body where you cannot gaze at it—a mistake you made once, and were lucky to move past with your senses and sanity intact—and with it held there, you feel the warmth and life surging through it. At all times its power takes all of your strength and willpower to use, and yet something only partway conscious deep within your soul is resisting it, as if to keep you perfectly in control of something you do not believe that you could lose control of.

Below you, the Southsilver Waters are shimmering in the light of Aideen. Your horse is stepping gently across, seemingly unbothered, and its hooves are just barely touching the water, every step forming small ripples that slowly grow and spread across the surface. Beneath the water, the roots of the Sleeping Widow follow your lead, creaking and yawning as they grow. It must be said, of course, that it is rather the light they follow: it, not you, is what heals them and what guides them.

Far above you the mountains stand tall and proud: stone giants of dark, dull grey obscuring the deep blue sky. The sun shines upon them as warmly as it shines upon you, and they cast no shadow over you; even so, you shrink beneath them.

From your chest, where you clutch the crystal, emanates a bright, divine force of light that pushes your back to straighten and your shoulders to carry your duty with grace, if not pride. You take a deep breath, and so does your horse, perfectly synchronised with you. Deep in your soul, something moves, and you feel the power you hold in your hands pulse just once; it is quiet as a mouse’s heartbeat, unnoticeable had you not been holding it so tightly, and yet your own heart jolts at the feeling.

Be not afraid, whispers a quiet voice in the back of your mind: this is your destiny.

Chapter Text

For days now, the rain has been coming down in thick, heavy sheets, and the clouds are not showing any signs of letting up soon. The ocean—indistinguishable from the sky in the  downpour—is far too dark for a spring afternoon, and great, foaming waves emerge from the grey mass of water to crash with more force than ever into every rock and cliffside they can find.

Unease lies over the island, a thick, heavy blanket dulling every experience and weighing down on every shoulder; perhaps most telling is the horses’ unease, for indeed, not one hoof has been still today, nor even one eye calm or ear relaxed. All over, all day, horse owners and their neighbours have been hurrying to bring horses inside, for the storm could arrive at any moment though it has been biding its time for what feels like an eternity.

From a cliff overlooking the ocean, you watch the first lightning bolt strike in the distance.

By the Moorland beach, a large industrial barge is docked. Its engine is always turned on, even at night, almost like the crew is perpetually ready for a hot exit despite the rough dozen shipping containers strewn around the beach. The old fisherman shakes his head at it all—the ruckus is disturbing the fishes’ natural habitat!—but other than him, everybody keeps almost too quiet about it, as if getting the sense that something is more severely wrong than meets the eye. (The storm is coming. The fisherman should not be at sea now.)

Far out into the ocean rises a tall, metal structure. Something atop it emits a strong, white light, making it seem almost like a lighthouse; but it is a lighthouse only for ill will, and for evil, and for things of unspeakable horror, and sailors know—if not from a warning, then by instinct—to steer clear of it. Atop it stands a doomsday prophet, speaking of the nearing end with joy, for the unspeakable is his life’s work and his grand plan is finally setting into motion. His hands crackle with deep blue flashes and bolts of pure power as he speaks, and all that stand around him listen to his words with the same sort of nonchalant respect he holds for himself. He is a means to an end. Here, that is a position of honour—of pride and arrogance and great importance.

Thunder booms far away, and a cold wind whips over the oceanside cliffs. The rain smatters against your face, cold as ice and hard as stone. You are shivering, as is your horse beneath you, and your teeth chattering in the mind-numbing cold; yet, you wait, and you watch.

Far out into the ocean, the unspeakable is happening. As you are now, you cannot stop it.

Perhaps, though, there is something else you can stop.

Somebody you can save.

There is no more time for waiting.

Chapter Text

All around you, the ocean is dark and neverending.

Deep, black waves roar and swirl as far as the eye can see in every direction, their crowns of foam just barely visible in the dark of night. Heavy rain pours over you in what feels more like a steady stream than droplets, and close enough that you can see it hit the ocean, lightning strikes; for the split second that everything is bright, you can see the faint, grey silhouette of Jorvik in the far distance. Noise is coming from somewhere below you—shouts and screams and the unmistakable crackle of divine lightning—but you do not look down. You are far from the chaos, left with only the aftermath and the storm, and yet your heart races as you clutch your horse’s mane like it is all you have and all that keeps you tethered to this world.

And then there’s the Moorland boy, holding on to you like his life depends on it.

His body is shaking against your back with deep, desperate sobs mixed with half-hearted attempts at slowing his own breathing. For what he cries, you are unsure; perhaps it is relief of being free, or anger at being torn away from his grandfather after years upon years of estrangement, or simply shock and terror and the deep cold of the ocean seeping into his bones.

(It keeps playing over and over in your head, just as it must be in his: him out right by the edge, suddenly not on the edge anymore, and your horse speaking to you not for the first time, but letting you know for the first time that it has been, all this time—our bond is strong; open yourself to Aideen’s light, and we can soar—and without your command or willingness taking the leap over the edge, after the boy.)

Far below you rages the ocean, waves crashing against the metal poles of the oil rig and water splashing high enough to be lit up by the portal atop one of the platforms. Heavy rain pours down over you, thrumming silently against your horse’s spectral, pink-shimmering wings as you slowly descend towards the oil rig’s small ferry landing. The wind whips the rain and the cold into your face, nearly throwing you off balance, but your horse remains steady, a point of calm and safety in the midst of the storm. With every flap of its wings, something powerful is sent through your very being, pulling you almost away from this reality as it stirs something deep within you.

From the oil rig comes the sudden, jarring sound of galloping hooves against metal. The Moorland boy takes a deep breath—the first of its kind in longer than you know—and loosens his death grip on you, if only by a little.

Chapter Text

You stare at the knots in your wooden ceiling, and they stare back at you.

Cool morning air is streaming in through your open bedroom window, and your curtains dance in the breeze, every now and again fluttering apart just enough to let in a ray of sun. From outside comes the gentle noise of an awakening village: the quiet tread of leather soles against cobblestone paths, doors creaking open followed by the light slam of metal against metal as people attempt to close their mailboxes without making a noise, and a distant choir of eager, hungry neighs and whinnies. Somewhere in the distance, a woodpecker is making quick work of a tree trunk, the harsh noise of its beak turned into little less than a quiet buzzing by the time it reaches your home at the edge of the woods.

The storm, at last, has passed, as has every trace of winter: the sun is warm upon the grassy fields, a warm, gentle wind is rustling the crowns of the island’s every tree, and in every crevice of Jorvik’s mountains and hillsides run lively, babbling streams of rainwater and melted snow and ice. Through the forests echo the bright, lively sound of birdsong and the noise and laughter of riders young and old embarking on the first long trek of spring. The rivers are rushing wild and free, as if in a race to clear out any remnants of the cold seasons and instead make way for the new, and though you hardly have room for anything new (for your duty persists even through the passing of the seasons, no less perpetual than the sun, the moon, the stars, and the storms themselves), change squeezes its way into the corners and crevices of your life: in the mornings, you awake to the sun warming your skin, when you leave home your coat remains on its hanger by the front door, and the metal of your horse’s bridle is no longer cold to the touch.

In the village, people are beginning to go about their daily chores; many are opening their windows and hanging laundry out to dry in the sun, others changing their curtains to something more cheerful in honour of the coming of warmer days or to something that will better block out the light in the early hours of the morning. By the river a small group of riders has gathered to let their horses drink, and the stables are busy with both departing and arriving riders, full of chatter and energy and more laughter than has been heard in months. Outside the stables, a few people clad in silvery-grey woollen cloaks—with the hoods pushed back, for once, revealing long, meticulously cared for cascading hair and high collars of linen and lace in the same silvery grey as the cloaks—are huddled together over their saddles and bridles, taking the fine weather as an opportunity to clean and oil their tack in preparation for a new, long season of horseback work.

The knots in your wooden ceiling stare at you. You break from their gaze, looking instead towards the window and the morning sun. A lone sparrow is perched on the windowsill, cocking its head sideways and staring curiously at you.

In the stables, something is calling your name. You can do nothing but follow.

Chapter Text

Your horse’s hoofsteps echo through the frozen valley.

Its long, careful strides beat against the frozen ground in a steady, muffled rhythm that echoes between the cliff walls surrounding the valley’s vast expanse of barren fields and forests, and in the quiet moments between the steps you can hear your own heartbeat, slow and heavy in the freezing cold air. The silence lies heavy over you, and every foreign sound—a twig breaking under a hoofstep, a rustle in the trees somewhere far away, a deep sigh from your horse—feels almost deafeningly loud; if a pin dropped into the soft snow, there is no doubt that you would hear it loud and clear. Outside the small space that you and your horse take up, there is nothing but deafening, all-consuming silence, interrupted only by the occasional freezing wind howling between the trees and, from time to time, the roar of a geyser erupting somewhere far away.

Before you, the barren trunks of long-dead trees stretch into the sky. The years are uncountable since they grew the leaves that now lie buried under layer after layer of impenetrable ice and snow, and on the day they lost their final leaf, the years were uncountable since the time they were still young and growing. Now they stand only as monuments of an age long past and protectors of the innermost corners of the valley: a last line of defence deterring any curious souls that made it this far from navigating through the narrow, treacherous gaps between them. On the other side of the dead forest, large ice pillars creak and sing. A passing gust of wind colder than freezing kicks up whirls of snow around you and pierces deep into your bones with the petrifying sort of chill that no amount of huddling deeper into a down jacket or warming your hands under your horse’s mane can cure.

The valley is filled with thick mist, never letting you see further than a handful of metres: no more than just enough to see any immediately upcoming sharp turns or obstacles. The evening is getting late, and here in the highest part of the valley, the falling sun sets the mist and snow in a deep, almost-golden glow. Behind you, where the path reaches deeper and lower towards the frozen lake, the mist turns darker and bleaker until it reaches a muted grey; above, it swirls in whites and silvers and hints of deep gold, and sometimes a gust of wind disperses it just enough to let you catch a glimpse of the deep pink and orange hues of a sunset sky far, far above it. You are not given the luxury of dwelling on these things of beauty for all too long, of course: the valley is silent and barren, but it is not dead, and for as long as you are here it will watch you closely. With every step forward you take, it closes a path behind you, and with every glance you cast towards a new path, one the valley does not want you to take, the mist seems to thicken around you in all directions except forward.

In the end, of course, you are not here to dwell, nor to wander or take in the sights, and the valley is right: your path goes only forward.

Chapter Text

You tumble back into Jorvik, Pandoria finally far behind you. Your stomach and head are spinning, and your mouth tastes of bile, but for the short time that the ringing in your ears remains, you feel only relief: real, Jorvegian gravity is anchoring you to the earth, and the air smells of pine forests and damp, cold mountains and the rain dusting your skin and like home.

Slowly, you come back to reality, the veil between your eyes, your body, and the world lifting at last. The rain against your helmet and your back and your horse’s warm body sounds like static, quiet and peaceful, but as your ears open entirely to the world all you can hear is noise, so sudden and so loud that your head pulses with searing pain. Your horse takes a sudden stride away from wherever you were standing, and the vile taste in your mouth grows stronger again as the spinning in your head worsens, but pushing past the nausea and headache, you force your eyes open and your ears to focus.

You only just have time to realise what happens before it ends, and later, you will have to have it retold to you: the panicked shouting, the crackling of divine lightning, the cackling of a doomsday prophet bringing something forth from the portal through which you had just come, and something—blurry at first—moving and writhing in all too vibrant pink and purple and the slow recognition of the long tendrils—tentacles—being covered in a pattern of something like the dried-up suction cups of a creature that hasn’t seen water in all too long. You will remember only the worst parts: the shiver running down your spine, the horror at realising what is happening, your horse’s whisper-scream through the back of your mind—Garnok—and the bright flash of light in the midst of the chaos, cold magenta-tinted white and so bright it leaves you wondering if the sun has crashed into Earth; the light shooting another bolt of pain through your head and forcing your eyes shut, but even through closed eyelids remaining bright as day; a shrill no!, a final, enraged shout fading into nothingness, and then, at last, only silence.

By the time you have opened your eyes and fully regained your vision, there is no sign of the terrible things that were nearly allowed to happen only minutes ago. All is calm and silent, but tension and worry are so heavy in the air that one could raise a hand and feel them hanging just above one’s head. The sister of the Star Circle is hovering over something next to the pedestal that used to hold the keystone now lying behind her, and on the edge of the cliff reaching out into the great beyond stands only half of the portal, surrounded by dozens of obsidian shards that still glow faintly with Pandorian energy.

A small tuft of blue fur pokes out from behind the Soul Rider kneeling by the keystone pedestal. She is singing quietly and chanting prayers under her breath, lights of magenta and silver and gold swirling around her: healing somebody. She grows desperate quickly, finding herself coming short, but you—already collapsed forward onto your horse’s neck—hardly notice. Eventually, she will come to you, eyes red and cheeks wet and breath jagged, and she will cure whatever ailment has afflicted you, but for now, you remain tired.

So, so tired.

Chapter Text

You wake up to a terrible storm. It tears your window open, glass shattering and falling to the floor and rain and cold wind rushing into the cottage; outside, thunder strikes, and somewhere in the mountain range, a tree falls to the ground. Even as far from the ocean as you are, you can hear it roaring, or perhaps something roaring in it, and

You wake up to the sun in your eyes. Your window is wide open, and outside a tree sways in the wind. The day is bright and new, deep golden light filling your room and the world and warming your skin. All around the village, doors are creaking as people begin to go about their mornings. A bird is chirping on your windowsill, and the trees are a deep green in the late summer, and

You wake up to a light breeze running over your cheek. It is cold in your room, and your sheets are cool against your skin; the window is cracked open, the spring-green leaves of a tree dancing in the breeze outside. The clouds are dark and heavy, and as you come out of the blur between sleeping and waking, the first few raindrops land on your windowsill. Your neighbour slams their mailbox shut, the clang of metal against metal echoing through the forest.

Perhaps it is all a dream, or perhaps it is all real.

It does not get easier to distinguish between the two.

In the mornings and evenings, when the sun is low and the air cold enough to give you goosebumps, and when the moon and stars are out and you find yourself too deeply lost in the mists of prophecy to sleep, you linger in the stables to bury your head in your horse’s fur and thread your fingers through its mane. Among it all, your horse is tangible and real: one of all too few things, these days, that you know to truly be so. It speaks to you more than ever in those silent hours of the night, quietly letting you know that you exist and that you are here, in body and mind. It is a welcome assurance, for the times have long passed when your visions were different enough from reality that you could tell one from the other on your own: now, the gentle evening wind against your cheek no longer lets you know that the stars you are seeing really are in the same place in space and time as you, and the hot sun on your back during a midday ride no longer tells you with certainty that the birdsong is truly being carried to you through the rustling tree crowns.

Perhaps it all a dream, or perhaps it is all real.

At times, you wonder whether it even truly matters. Real or not, the world is beautiful.

Chapter Text

Thick fog cradles the Jorvegian morning.

The mountains are damp in the mist and morning dew, and last night’s rain is still flowing down the cold stone in streams no wider than streaks of tears down a cheek. Silence lies over every peak and valley, dusted lightly as if with the brush of a feather all across the island by the gentle hand of Aideen. Beyond the wisps of fog and mist, the sun is approaching the horizon, casting Jorvik in a pale lavender glow. Even so, most of the island is still asleep: this time of year, with summer closing in, the day rises long before people wake and falls down long after they rest for the night.

Through a small, stone-framed window hidden away deep in the mountain ranges separating north from south shines the sun, just peeking up above the mountain-thorned horizon and snaking its way through the mist. It casts a ray of soft, golden light all through the room, and a figure clad in shimmering grey moves for the first time in hours to tend to their duty.

In the furthest corner of his room, laid gently underneath a warm blanket upon a mattress of down and under a canopy of the softest Druidic wool, lies the leader of the Keepers of Aideen, smaller and paler than ever. He will wake up soon—he must—but even as the sun shines upon his face, he makes no attempt to move, and so it is to him the figure turns, gently moving the canopy to block out the sun. As the figure moves, their silver-shimmering hood falls back ever so slightly; they are quick to correct its position, but for a split second, the sun shines upon them, too, and on their cheek something glints. Before returning to their position, the figure makes their way to the window, drawing the thick curtains shut and once again letting only candles light the room.

It is in that gentle candlelight that you slowly make your way along the bookshelves. You let your fingers and eyes trace the spines of every book, feeling smooth leather and rough fabric and the minuscule bumps of titles and cover inscriptions little bumps against your fingertips. The pages shimmer with something that makes your heart jolt in your chest: through these tomes courses magic that calls on something deep within you, every one of them begging to be picked out and held and studied for hours, days, or even months on end until there are no stones left to turn between the words.

A thin, golden ray of sun squeezes through the gap between the curtain and the wall, shining upon the worn leather book spines and warming your fingers as your hands move through the light. Familiar runes glow rose gold as your fingers trace over them, and at last your hands move—almost of their own volition—to pull an ancient, leather-bound book from its place on the shelf.

Outside, the mist is slowly clearing to make way for the light, the wind, and the warmth. In a crevice in the mountains, and in the highest branches of a tree, and between the beams and the ceiling of a wooden stable, birds are singing, brilliant and bright.

Little by little, the island finally awakes.

Chapter Text

The Moorland wind blows slow and steady over the seaside cliffs and through the rising grass, and the brackish water of the southern bay beats in rhythmic waves against the soft, bright shore. Though no moon shines over the ocean tonight, it is not yet pitch dark; the last sunlight is only just disappearing over the northwestern mountains, and the water is still bathed in the deep purple of late twilight. The dim, distant light of stars shimmer upon its surface, coating the waves and ripples in the sort of faint silvery white that one can only catch a glimpse of this far from all the major cities of the world, and every few seconds their light is joined by a faraway lighthouse’s golden glow.

In a grassy green paddock atop the Moorland grounds’ highest hill, a mare—a mother-to-be by the break of dawn—rests deeply and peacefully in the tall grass, her muzzle pressed into her curled up legs and her rounded stomach rising and falling with each slow breath she takes. You, sleepless in a bed harder than your own and staring up at a wooden ceiling that does not stare back at you, feel every one of those breaths: though you cannot see her, her soul is clear as the stars of a cloudless night in your mind’s eye, a speck of light just on the other side of the small Moorland estate—far beyond the dozens of light specks in the pastures and stables by the farmhouse, and yet brighter than all of them combined.

High above the ground, at the approximate level of the third-floor guest bedrooms, tension is strung tight through the cold evening. Under the eyes of only the gentle starlight shining through the window, a young woman burdened with all too much all too early stumbles and falls past the last blurry line between her and being undeniably in love with her best friend; in the next room over, you toss and turn in desperate attempts to rest, bones aching with homesickness and lack of sleep and head spinning and wide awake from the light behind your eyes. The wooden beams and walls of the old farmhouse groan in the ocean wind, more at unease than any other night in recent memory: much like you, they listen, they watch, and they wait.

In the distance, as though carried from over the ocean, you hear a whispered, whistling song on the wind. Perhaps, even, the song is the wind, blowing through roots and leaves and branches and giving a voice to something long thought lost to time, letting that something call you to it (come to me, it says, and I will show you what you seek, so that your tossing and turning may come to an end). Even streaming through the cracked-open window across the room from you, muted by distance and time, it is only almost powerless over you.

When you close your eyes, you see dozens of lights all around you. Focus, and you see only the one atop the hill; let yourself go, and the lights become hundreds, even thousands, invite you to lose yourself among them.

The next time you open your eyes, there will be two little lights atop the hill on the edge of the Moorlands’ property, and intuition will whisper to you in a voice sounding unsettlingly true that you have not found what you are looking for.

Come to me, the wind will sing to you: lose yourself, and you will find what you seek.

Chapter Text

You are surrounded by little more than the rhythmic, echoing beating of hoofsteps against the hard ground and the faraway mountain ridges obscured from your view by thick, endless mist. Before you lies a only vast expanse of white nothingness, but above the mists, the night is clear and the moon and stars bright as ever, and the thin, powdery sheet of snow laid atop the frozen lake where you walk shimmers ever-so-slightly even in the dull grey-white of the world.

Dusk falls earlier and earlier with each passing day: when you left Valedale, it was already evening. The midnight sun has disappeared as soon as she came to give way to ever darker shadows; in the depths of night the trees once again stand alone in the forests and the mountains guard their passes silently, for those either brave or foolish enough to walk through the deepest dark are few and far between. At night, say the village elders, the beasts come out, and the more superstitious may claim stranger things yet: should you begin to stray off the beaten path you may find that the trees behind you are not where they were mere seconds ago, and when you pass through the shadows, the evil that has always lived in Jorvik’s darkest corners has its eye sharply focused on you.

So far beyond the forest and the mountain pass that another forest has begun, you take a deep breath in and out, and the cold midnight air burns your throat and lungs. Beneath you, the ice creaks and rumbles, as though something is turning in its sleep far below the surface. Your horse’s ears twitch and turn at every noise, even the ones you don’t hear, and as you step further and further away from the cover of the trees behind you, its steps grow more and more tense under the saddle. The wind, cold and unforgiving, creeps slowly over the frozen lake and envelops you in a chill that penetrates flesh and blood and settles deep in your bones; a shiver trickles down your spine, and you think about how your jacket isn’t quite warm enough for this climate, but you do not think about the feeling of being watched that rests at the back of your mind. In the distance, what you hope is a sudden gust of wind roars through the ancient trees, and the sound of thunder echoes through the valley, though there is no flash of lightning to accompany it.

A glance over your shoulder tells you that the person you came here for is still nose-to-tail just behind your horse, icenthistles in hand and head hung low as she blindly lets her pony follow you through the valley. A dark, heavy gloom has made itself at home in the shadow beneath the hood of her jacket, and from it spreads an all-consuming loathing burying its claws deep in her flesh and bone. Though it is a new sight to you, you realise that this hatred, this anger – for herself: if I were Elizabeth, I would hate me too – must have been there for longer than you could ever know, carefully hidden just beneath the surface. You see all too clearly now, too, what the strange longing in her eyes has always been: the desire to become something more, something different, and the inability to recognise that which you cannot become because it is what you already are.

Another shiver washes over you, and you glance down at your hands, wishing that the slow hum of magic coursing through your blood and humming with warmth right at your fingertips could’ve helped you.

You don’t notice her quiet crying until it stops; by then, the two of you are far beyond the frozen lake and the icy mountain passes, and the sky over the Hollow Woods is glowing with the purple of early dawn. At the nearest edge of the village, a door slowly creaks open, and in the doorway, backlit by soft, warm-toned lamps, stands a familiar, friendly silhouette. From behind you comes a deep breath in and out, and then the hoofsteps grow quicker and louder; as Alex canters past you and further down the hill, the hood of her jacket slips backwards inch by inch until it finally falls.

For a split second, you can just barely make out the shapes of constellations far above you before the stars fade one by one as the first sliver of sunlight begins to peek over the mountaintops. A warm breeze rustles through the forest, and in the village, the door is still open, still waiting for you, still promising your cold, weary body warmth and comfort.

From the warm doorway, your name is called. You do not have to be asked twice.

Chapter Text

It is a dark and quiet night.

The evening dew hangs heavy in the full, deep-green tree crowns of late summer, and somewhere among the branches, the last bird awake sings itself a lullaby. A light wind moves through the forest, carried from beyond the northern mountains and bringing with it a subtle but biting chill; it travels slowly but surely southwestward, and everywhere it goes, each leaf in the forests and each flower in the meadows shivers and shakes. Even the Moon herself seems to be sheltering from it, the warm black of the night sky wrapped like a blanket around all but a sliver of her cold, harsh body, and much of what little light she lets shine over Jorvik is lost in the maze of sprawling tree crowns.

Deep in the forest, hidden between ancient tree trunks and their wild and weaving roots, something shimmers and glows with a strange, otherworldly warmth, unbothered as always by the otherworldly cold from beyond the mountaintops. It calls to you, pulls on the humming in your blood, and you allow yourself to play with it for but a moment before shutting down the current of energy and feeling the runestone grow still. Your horse’s back is warm against you, withers bobbing up and down just by your head as it grazes on the rich, evergreen grass. Every so often, the heavy branches above you move just enough that you catch a glimpse of the stars, blindingly bright against the deep dark of the sky and the forest; where the warmth of your horse’s back anchors you, the sight of the stars ignites in your heart a deep ache for something that you cannot quite put your finger on, but which feels deeper and larger than you and perhaps even than the world itself.

Something calls to you again, and you reach for it, winding it into your mind like yarn spun around a finger until it’s strung tight between the skein and the hand. The picture is weak enough that you have to focus for it not to fall away from you - weak enough that you know where you are, still, and that your horse’s fur has not stopped itching through the thin fabric of your shirt - and you clasp your hand around the thread, feeling your eyebrows tighten into a frown.

Something is wrong with the circus.

There are far too many horses, and they all look too alike and too familiar: even though you’re certain you haven’t come across this many white horses throughout your entire life, each and every one of them has something in the curve of their nose or the glint in their eye that you can’t shake the feeling of having seen before; the cages appear as empty as they always have, but you know it to be true in your heart as clearly as in your mind that they aren’t; it is the first time you have been alone here - not even the showman, or the constant pair his jester and his horse make up, are around - and the sense that somebody is watching you will not abandon you, no matter how many times you turn your head in every imaginable direction to check just one more time.

The wind blows across your face, waking you from the vision, and overhead the branches sway in the breeze just enough that you can make out a constellation far, far above you. The Mare. As you begin to unwind the thread from your hands, you catch on a knot: something previously unnoticed that will not let you leave it unseen any longer. You get no more warning than just the slightest tingle at the back of your head before blinding light fills the world, and then for just the briefest of moments you are standing before a cage that is no longer empty even to your eyes. Something grabs you and pulls you backwards, and then you are not you but somebody, or something, else: you are moving fast, too fast, and your arms and legs feel wrong - too long and slender and hard and fragile - and with the force your bare feet are hitting the ground they should be hurting like nothing else, but you cannot feel them at all. You look around and below you, and then you stumble and fall on far too many legs, and the air is knocked out of your lungs.

The ground is soft against your back and a damp, cold blade of grass tickles your cheek. You reach out for something, though you hardly know what, and when you open your eyes, it is to find your horse leaned over you; it puffs warm air into your face, touches its muzzle to your cheek, breathes starlight over your skin, and so deeply you might drown in it, you breathe in the night.

Chapter Text

The fabric of the circus tent flutters in the gentle, warm wind, and through the gaps and the seams shine slivers of golden sun. Outside, dark green leaves flutter in the breeze: summer lingers, still—later than usual, almost as if desperately clinging to the world—but it is nearing its end nonetheless, for autumn and in due time winter are the same unstoppable forces that they always have been.

The slow, steady tick-tock-tick-tock of the clock echoes through the tent. Space and time seems to shift around it wherever it goes, and the air itself feels unstable, like the space above a hot summer road as seen from a distance; this place was not made to withstand the wear and tear of time, and yet you have chosen to bring it here.

The ringmaster’s defences have run out, and now he is stumbling through the swaying air towards the central pillar, searching for something to bear his weight while he cannot. All is quiet except for the ticking of the clock, the muted sound of footsteps against the sand of the circus ring, and the soft rustling of fabric in the wind, and all that is left for you to do is complete your mission—

—only then the earth rumbles for a moment too long, and the ground splits and opens up in a dozen different places to welcome long, sprawling tentacles the colour of a different world into the tent. The cold shiver of realisation trickles down your spine: you have seen him before, and you were as powerless to stop him then as you are now.

The ringmaster is leaning against the central pillar of the tent, weakened and drained by the clock and yet mouthing inaudible curses and reaching his hands towards the creature as if in a desperate attempt to banish it from the shelter he has painstakingly carved out for himself. His eyes flicker to you, breaking his ever-present air of obnoxious confidence with anger and horror and something almost pleading, and you know in that moment three things and no more: something must be done, you cannot do anything, and if anybody can stop this, it is the ringmaster himself. On the far end of the circus tent with its feet half buried in the sand sits the Cosmic Clock, tick-tock-tick-tock still slow and steady.

The moment ends, and something you have only ever felt at the very edges of your mind snaps. There is a brief buzzing at your fingertips before you feel something greater than you—greater than any one person—course through not only your veins but your entire body, your entire being, and then, you feel yourself crack under the pressure. With the snap of a finger and a crackle so loud you think it might be the last thing you will ever hear, the world becomes nothing but a bright, magenta-tinted white, and the ticking of the clock stops.

Later, though you know not when, you come back to an aching body and a quiet, empty circus tent. Just outside—so close you can feel its warmth—is the brightest light you have ever seen in the form of a shining silver foal finally freed from its cage.

Chapter Text

The night is at its darkest when you finally lie down to rest, grass damp against your back and stars sprinkled so generously across the sky that the constellations are lost among them. There is a delicate, sharp chill in the air, but next to you lies your horse, radiating warmth and comfort; its muzzle is rested against your shoulder, and every one of its slow, heavy breaths seeps through the fabric of your jacket and the cold of the night to warm you up almost as if from the inside out. On your other side, the campfire crackles and pops, and occasionally there is a quiet shuffling of fabric as somebody moves over to add a log or to poke the hot coals, keeping the fire alive into the deepest of night. From across the campfire comes the gentle sound of a guitar; the singing has long stopped, but the repeating chord progression still rings out over the fields and mountains over and over: a sorry excuse for every one of you to not sleep just yet, or perhaps company and comfort in the fact that none of you are alone in your unrest.

You should be enthusiastic about tomorrow’s quest—hopeful, at the very least—but the closer you get to dawn, the more you find something gnawing at you: an oncoming loneliness, or a deep fear of it, and the feeling that with each second you grow further and further away from the other three people around the campfire; your sisters, supposedly, much like the one you are to rescue—but they will be rescuing a friend, someone dearly beloved and well known, and you a stranger you can only hope will not despise you.

Vague scenes keep flashing before you: brief moments of pink or of bright, blinding white, and of someone desperately calling out for somebody else. You cannot decipher them, only wonder if the rider of the Moon Circle has seen them too and dig yourself deeper into the abyss of worrying that something will go terribly, terribly wrong. It does not gnaw at you like the loneliness does, instead resting deep in your stomach, heavy and corrosive and slowly chipping away at your very being. You try, at times, to find more footing in the visions with the aid of your horse beside you, but it refuses to lend you any power: sleep, my friend , you hear every time, loud and clear, in the back of your mind; there is nothing more to do. Things will turn out as they will. It is of no use to worry now.

A chill blows over the slopes of Epona, rustling through the tall grass in the fields, the overgrown crops of an abandoned farm, and the tall, dark pine trees watching dutifully over the campsite. A lone, yellow leaf is blown off a faraway tree and carried over the hills into the campfire; a subtle crackle fills the quiet air when it is set aflame. During the night, it will be followed by another, another, and yet another, and soon enough the Jorvik you have known for the past summer will be no more.

Tomorrow, everything will change.

You can only hope that it will change for the better.

Chapter Text

Something terrible is about to happen.

All around you is endless, magenta void, scattered with dozens upon dozens of floating stone islands that move slowly and unpredictably around the nothingness. The island you’re on feels rather like a sailboat being tossed back and forth by the roaring waves of the universe, and your nausea is not helped by Pandoria’s sickeningly sweet, almost cotton candy-like scent that only seems to intensify with every fragmented vision or flash of bright pink before your mind’s eye. Despite it all, something here grounds you: a fragment of the thing buried deep in your soul that never stops pulling you in yet another direction is tethered to this place, much like another is bound to your horse and yet another to the runestone clearing in Valedale, and an undercurrent of power flows through the air and into your being in a way not entirely unlike how your horse strengthens you.

A flash of pink, and she is no longer there. The vision shifts, and you are facing the Lightning Rider; horror, shock and grief are forever etched into her face in equal measure, all weighed out by the guilt welling up in her eyes and spilling over. She will never forget. She will never stop blaming herself. She will never stop grieving.

In the distance there is a gentle, grounding sound, almost like music, and you find yourself back in reality; here, she is still in front of you, long green robes swaying in an intangible breeze and hair spilling over her shoulders as she turns and reaches out for the Lightning Rider, and it is not yet too late. You do not know that without you all will be lost, for you have not yet heard the fate of she who came before you; all you know is that something terrible is about to happen and that you cannot lose her. Behind her, the doomsday prophet reaches out for his cane and moves to stand on shaking legs, and your body acts before your mind has time to make a conscious decision. You stand between them, and with a low, growling chuckle he rises to his feet, raises a broken arm and reaches it towards you, lets his eyes pierce into yours.

Something terrible is about to happen.

In the back of your mind, a distant cry loud enough to bypass the veil between dimensions: I cannot lose you.

Elizabeth moves too fast for you to comprehend. She stands between you and him and remains there, and you watch as if you were the one frozen in place as she crystallises and shatters and unfolds into time and space, and finally as the impact of the explosion topples him over the edge of the island. The sound of the blast echoes through time and space until everything is quiet, and for a long time—be it minutes, hours, or days—all you can hear is the ringing in your ears.

Time works differently here, or perhaps it does not work at all. There is no sunrise and no sunset, only pink as far as the eye can see, and the very air seems to be shifting around you. For longer than you know how to keep track of, you remain where you were left, staring into the abyss and grappling with your mind in desperate attempts to take in what you have witnessed. This, you will find time and time again, is impossible.

When you eventually tear your eyes from the great nothing and slowly turn around to face Alex, her tears have long since run dry. She sits perfectly still on the cold, hard ground, her trembling legs folded beneath her and her face blank with shock as she stares down at the small shard of pink crystal cradled in her hands.

From somewhere in the distance, or perhaps from across time and space, a soft, quiet melody that reminds you of home rings out through the great nothing, and though it doesn’t pull you towards it by force, you know it is where you must go. For a moment, you cast aside your horror, your shock, and your grief, and you begin the long path home.

Chapter Text

The night after it happened, the five of you stay at her house in Valedale.

She did not have time to tidy up before she departed for Guardians’ Dale. The kettle is only half empty, two tea-stained mugs and a plate full of cookie crumbs have been left in the sink, and, in the room none of you dares do more with than close the door, the bed is still unmade. Next to the kitchen sink is a full rack of clean, dry dishes, and it will occur to all of you tomorrow morning as you pull yourselves together and begin chipping away at the effort of putting them away that none of you know the inner workings of this kitchen. At times, you find yourself almost calling for her help, as if nothing had changed at all—as if there’s somebody to ask where the muffin tin goes, or where you can put the big frying pan, or where the clean kitchen towels are—but everything has, of course, changed, and there is nobody who can answer.

Anne rode double with you the whole way from the Eastern Slopes: a day’s ride at a pace you were able to keep. She spoke occasionally in some of the rare moments she was awake, too tired to manage concealing the tinge of bitterness in her voice as efficiently as she clearly attempted to, and you cannot fault her for her anger. If you had taken half the time you did to get to her, it still would’ve been too long. The scars cover half of her body by now, trailing from her fingertips up the now-too-short sleeves of the dressage shirt that must’ve fit her perfectly on that fateful night far too long ago, past her unbuttoned, too small collar, and all the way over her face and scalp.

She sleeps in the corner of the room now, bundled under several blankets and equipped with earplugs and a sleeping mask. The world was too much, she said, after so many months hearing nothing other than her own heartbeat and occasional muffled voices coming from outside her prison. The rest of you are sleepless on the living room rug by the fireplace. The knots in this ceiling, you find, do not stare at you as the ones in your own room do, and you almost find yourself missing their company. In the absence of your own home’s distractions, all your mind can do is wander, and tonight it keeps wandering to the same place.

Anne shifts under her blankets again and draws in a sharp, shaking breath, and something twists in your chest. You think back to her first sharp, shaking breaths back on Jorvik, and the look in her eyes like she couldn’t quite believe it was real. You think back to Elizabeth’s hurry to rush after the missing Alex, and how she, in her hurry, did not find time for a quiet moment with Anne—how that could wait until after the chaos had been resolved.

She was so sure that she would return.

The fireplace crackles and a log falls against its metal side with a quiet clunk. You close your eyes, waiting for a vision in the form of a dream, but nothing comes to you. Not even the powers of Aideen herself, it seems, can tell what is next for you now.

Chapter Text

While you turned your eyes away for what felt like no more than a moment, the island stepped away from the firm, safe embrace of summer and into autumn’s melancholy gold. Now, the sun hangs low in the sky even though the evening is still early, and its golden beams shine with as much warmth it could possibly muster over the southwestern ocean. A gentle wind blows along the shore, rustling every leaf and every blade of grass in its way, and despite your coat you shiver just a little.

You do not think of how she would have loved this evening. You do not think of how she might have been standing right where you are, watching the last rays of sun slowly disappear from the ruins’ stone walls, or how she might have sat in her kitchen over a cup of tea lit up by the golden evening light, or how she might have been tending to her garden in the ever-colder breeze, taking special care of the roses as their bloom slowly came to an end. By now, of course, they have already wilted, but it was all too early this year. The gardeners knew something was terribly, terribly wrong, they said, when overnight their rose bushes withered and died, their thriving garden suddenly no more than a mess of crumpled, brown decay.

The ruins are filled with all those who loved her and all those she loved. At the edge of the cliff overlooking the Jarl’s tomb and spilling out into the meadow of wildflowers stands, secluded, a large group of Druids clad in the same sort of silvery grey robes as always, hoods pulled up further and hems sewn longer than you have ever seen before. By what once was the corner of the Abbey stands the stargazer—or, as he would prefer to be known today, Elizabeth’s closest friend—with his gaze fixed on the darkest point of the sky and something like anticipation in his eyes, as if expecting to see a constellation that wasn’t there before. The innermost circle of the Keepers of Aideen has gathered around the central altar, so completely and entirely silent that they are a stark contrast to even the rest of the gathering, and in the centre of the half-circle they form lies a lone red rose. It bloomed this morning in the lovingly cared for wild bushes outside her cottage, one of its kind in the crowd of withered flowers surrounding it, and it will remain bright for as long as it is remembered and loved.

Even long after the memorial ends and the sun sets, your group of five remains on the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea. When you finally leave, all of the Abbey’s candles have long since burnt out, the stars are so bright and countless that all of them cannot possibly have been there before, and left behind on one of the many memorial stones is a small, pink crystal.

By morning, even though it is far too early for the seasons to change, the wind will have turned and brought in a thick, chilling fog, and every one of Jorvik’s countless trees will be a vibrant shade of yellow. You will hear it, then, as a whisper in the rustling leaves, just as clearly as you will feel it in the sting of cold morning air in your lungs and see it in afternoon’s golden sunbeams disappearing over the horizon far too soon: even the island itself cannot remain the same without her.

Chapter Text

The island is nothing short of stunning this time of year. With each sunrise and sunset the white of the mountaintops pales and the fog in the distance thickens, and with every cold, leaf-rustling wind, the bite in the air becomes sharper. The forests have turned from deep green to pale gold, and one by one the wildflowers are wilting and fading to give way to the gentle waving of almost-mature field crops in the wind. You see hardly any of it; your mind, though you try to fight it, is all too occupied with what’s to come. You need only blink to see the endless turns of the seasons, and it is all too easy to get caught up in things not yet happening. Each time you close your eyes, the invisible veil between you and the world obscures more and more of your view; by now, you hardly notice the swaying of the golden, sun-lit trees for all the rainstorms and lonely midwinter nights the moon insists on showing you.

Your days are filled with restlessness and unease, and your nights with tossing and turning until you wake up in tangled sheets damp with cold sweat. When you go back to bed it is while cursing the moon and Aideen herself in equal measure and wondering whether sleep is at all worth it anymore. In your dreams, you are always slowly walking towards something—somebody, you realise eventually. She is turned away from you, and long, dark hair spills down her back and over her shoulders almost as if to further hide her from your view. Her long, flowing skirt pools around her ankles on the surface of a dark, shallow body of water; some nights, it weaves between wildflowers and tall blades of grass in a vast meadow. It is dark, and yet the moon and the sun and the stars shine upon her, casting long shadows and shimmers of silver and gold over the darkness. She begins to turn, and you wake up, restless and cold and frustrated.

As of late, Doyle’s Abbey has been inexplicably calling upon a deep-rooted, hidden-away part of this restlessness; every trail ride you set out on, no matter where you were planning to go, seems to take you there. At first you dismissed the strange, unstoppable calling to go there as part of processing the grief and chaos that has infested every part of your life, and more recently as muscle memory. If you were to think about it with honesty, though, you might find a feeling less like grief or familiarity and more like the calling of fate.

The moss between the cobblestones of the southern Silversong River bridge remains deep green. The stones themselves still look like they would be warm to the touch, but that will change all too soon: before you know it, the bridge will be covered in morning frost, blindingly bright in the morning sun and. All too soon again, a thick layer of snow will rest upon it, and the moss will bide its time until spring turns the fields and forests green again. (By then, more than you could ever imagine will have changed.)

You have crossed the bridge for what might be the thousandth time this week when your horse breaks its silence for the first time in hours, or quite possibly days. Look at the world. It is permission for something deep in your soul to open its eyes, and you realise only then—even after days of riding here—that the path back from the Abbey to Valedale is beautiful. The Silversong River glitters in the afternoon light, and even in the gently biting chill of the early autumn wind, the sun remains warm on your skin. Long, pale shadows are cast over the water, and the trees and wildflowers around you shimmer in a million shades of gold.

The veil will only be lifted from your eyes for a few minutes, of course, but in this moment, that does not matter. The world is beautiful, and for as long as you can, you bask in it.

Chapter Text

She came to you in a dream, only a voice and a blurry face that looked almost like yours and yet so recognisable as the woman you have seen in your recurring vision for weeks. She asked you to find her. She was like you once, she said, and you must succeed where she failed.

You and Linda spent hours upon hours and then days upon days reading and snooping and researching, and with each discovery the story grew more and more troubling. She was like you: blessed, as the Druids like to call it, with the powers of all four of Aideen’s circles, and a mere twenty years ago rather than the century the Druids tend to talk about. They gave her the same task you have been given—to defeat the great evil for good—but she died far too soon and took her sisterhood with her. It was the birth of her evil-descendant husband’s evil-descendant child that did it, you were told stubbornly by the few who would speak of her, but her diary, when you finally found it, told a different truth. She did not die in childbirth. She faded away slowly and quietly, longing for the freedom that would come after; in her final days, she would dream both asleep and awake of galloping through endless, open fields, as though she yearned for becoming what she had lost.

You remember being a horse, if only briefly, in the search for Concorde. To you, it was not at all as relieving as it seemed to her; rather, it felt bizarre and foreign. You told Linda, who said no more of it until she returned sleepless from a corner of the library days later, carrying a thick stack of notebooks and loose-leaf sheets of paper and bearing heavy news. Perhaps, she said quietly, she who came before you lost her horse in more ways than you had previously thought. Concorde came back, after all. What sort of terrible separation through time, space and matter could have led to an eternal guardian of Jorvik not returning home even in spirit after its body ceased to be? Your horse, unlike the other Guardians, carries no memories of a time long past. It has seen so few turns of the seasons that they can still be counted and remembered with ease.

You slept in the stables that night, body curled up around your horse’s head and fingers woven into its mane. It did not ask, only kept its head still and curled softly into the space between your arms, as if it understood you deeper than usual, and yet it did not speak to you all night. Perhaps, in that understanding, it shared your pain. Perhaps it all was too much—too heavy—to speak of. Perhaps you were not alone in needing company and warmth; it was the coldest night yet, and the full moon shone colder still through the stables’ southern windows. You dreamed of her again, and this time, she told you that she was looking forward to finally meeting you. The next morning, you woke up in a cold sweat far too early, saddled your horse at record pace, and began the long ride to the library with unease prickling at every inch of your skin.

You meet Catherine during the Light Ride in a shallow, pitch black body of water that reaches as far as the eye can see. The moon and the sun shine upon her, and her dark hair shimmers in silvers and golds as she turns to face you with a gentle, almost timid smile. She is not a day older than you. She tells you that you carry a power that you must not bear the burden of alone, a truth you knew somewhere deep in your bones, but one that is not made easier by hearing it from her. She tells you that you must show them the way, but she is not the first to tell you this: you have heard the prophecy of Guardian’s Dale through hushed tones and interrupted sentences. She tells you as she fades from your view that you do not have to follow, or even believe in, the pull of fate, and you want nothing more than to believe her.

When you rejoin your Soul Riders at the campsite above Aideen’s Whisper, night is already falling, and the gentle glow of the campfire they kept alive while waiting for you is soon to be the only light as far as the eye can see. Tomorrow, they will ask what you saw, but tonight, there must be something in your eyes that tells them it is not the time yet. You fall asleep surrounded by heavy silence and rested against the warm, solid body of your horse, and you do not dream.

Chapter Text

Time is standing still.

You aren’t sure whether your eyes are open or closed. You do not know why the grass seems to have moved to beneath the palms of your hands. You cannot tell what time of day it is. All you know is the presence of your horse anchoring you to the earth, the bone-chilling horror of having almost lost control of yourself, and the hope that you succeeded.

In the hours leading up to the ritual at the Sunset Islands, you were repeatedly warned that it could bring you to your very limit. You were under no circumstances to keep going if you began to feel like the magic was too much for you to bear, consequences be damned. You do not say it—you never do—but had you ever heeded this advice, you would have stopped using magic long ago. You are a dam of flesh and blood between your powers and the world, and whenever you tap into them for more than a moment, you feel like that dam is about to burst. You know that this is not what the Druids warn you about. The strain they speak of is not from holding together the dam, but from trying desperately to push every last bit of one’s magic through its few small cracks. You doubt that you could ever drain yourself in that way—the powers that course through your blood feel endless, as though it’s not a lake behind the dam, but an ancient, neverending river—and truth be told, the dam feels closer to fragile than to unbreakable. You do not want to know what would happen if you were to let it burst. You aren’t sure you would live to know the answer.

All things considered, perhaps the Druids’ warnings are not unreasonable. Still, you cannot live by them. You would be next to nothing if you did.

They have changed the way they talk about you, as of late. Between every word of every sentence spoken on the long ride from Valedale to southern Epona they hid secrets and cryptic messages clearly not meant for you. You understood them anyway, of course, and between the brief conversations you and the Moon Rider shared the occasional, silent look, almost as if to confirm that you had both heard and understood the same things.

You cannot live by the Druids’ constant warnings, because you would be next to nothing if you did, and you are not meant to be nothing. You are meant to be what she who you should not know of never became. You are meant to be the fifth to lead the way, as she could not. You are meant to stay true to your task, as she failed to. You cannot live by the Druids’ warnings, because you must succeed at any cost, and yet so much of what they lay on you rings false these days. It is no easy task to believe in their emphasis on you as one of a kind when the feeling that you are little more than a replacement of the girl who should’ve completed your mission two decades ago lies heavy on your shoulders through every second of every day.

In the end, you hardly experienced the ritual, as tends to be the case in situations where magic is involved. Every second of the process was spent desperately trying to control yourself, and when it is over, you spend minutes that feel like hours leaned against your horse, head still spinning from the forces that made your body their home only minutes ago.

You are beginning to think that something deep within you substantially sets you apart from the other four.

You are beginning to think that Catherine was wrong.

You are beginning to think that your fate is not an offer you can decline.

I am sorry , your horse whispers to you, and softly nudges your shoulder. It helps, if only a little bit.

You come back to the world when you realise that somebody is talking to you. The realisation that the sentences are filled with anger hits you before the words making them up do, and it almost makes you retreat into your head again. You force yourself to stay and take in the moment.

It boils down to this: you succeeded in bringing Fripp back, and now he is angry.

He is angry that you have involved a witch in the Druids’ business. He is angry that the Sun Rider is missing. He is angry that the Lightning Rider has gone after her. (You could have sworn that she was here mere minutes ago. Did she slip away during the ritual? Right after?) He is angry that you did not go after her together, and much, much earlier. You should have done so while there was still time and hope to stop her foolish decision. You should have realised what she was considering the second she asked where the foal had come from. For the short time before Linda intervenes, it is as if none of you have done so much as one thing right while you were left to your own devices.

By then, you are just aware enough of the world around you to share a cautious look with Linda, and it confirms what you already knew: you must keep finding your own answers. None will be given to you.

You lock away what little hope you had of perhaps, once Fripp came back, finally having somebody to ask about why the dam feels like it is about to burst, and then you throw away the key.

It will be fine. It has to be. You have made it this far on your own, after all. Going just a little further will not be the end of you.

Chapter Text

You found them in the stables last night.

They did not ask why you were there, and you were grateful for it. They do not need to know that almost half your nights are spent there, cradling your horse’s head and desperately aching for something you cannot quite identify. They do not need to know that in your dreams, the dam bursts, and your horse is all that can comfort you when you wake. They do not need to know that you, the fifth meant to lead the four, need more comfort in the deep hours of the night than any of them.

You did not need to ask why they were there, because what you saw told you all you needed to know. Anne was curled into Alex’s side, shaking with quiet sobs, and Alex was desperately trying to soothe her. Above them hovered Concorde, so much larger and nobler and yet still with the same sweet, innocent look in her eyes. She turned her head to look at you when you entered the stables, and something in her expression was desperate, as if she was trying to puzzle together what she had done wrong. Anne began to cry harder, and Alex held her a little closer.

You wondered, for a moment, how they had managed the ride from the Forgotten Fields at all—if Anne had been this much of a mess the whole way, or if it was only upon arriving, tired to the bone after what must have been a full day’s ride, that she finally broke. The desperate look in Alex’s eyes when she turned them to you for a moment was enough of an answer. This was not the first time she’d had to comfort Anne, and she was running out of ways to soothe her pain.

You knew what Anne had done, of course, but you did not know that she had taken it this poorly. It was to be expected, you had thought, that this Concorde even once grown would not be the same as the one she had lost. When she and Alex kept staying away, you feared that perhaps something had gone terribly wrong, but you know deep in your bones that this Concorde is the same as the foal you met, and your eyes work more than well enough to tell you that neither she, Tin-Can, or either of their riders have been physically injured. This is nothing other than devastation. A plan gone wrong, even though it went about as well as anybody except for Anne herself could have possibly hoped for it to.

You did not sleep in the stables. In fact, you hardly slept at all, kept awake by the knots in the ceiling and their endless questions that you cannot answer. At least this time you had something other than yourself to keep coming back to: Anne. You realised sometime in the deepest hours of the night that you had not seen her express sorrow even once since she came back from Pandoria. Up until last night, she remained stone-faced, stoic, and perfectly poised. Perhaps Concorde’s transformation not going according to her plan was simply the final crack that made her dam burst.

Whatever the case, she was back to her usual demeanour early this morning when the Druids called all of you to council. They were angry, of course, but they have been angry for a week. It does not stick with you any longer. By this point, it is little more than background noise, or a mosquito flying around by your ear. Today, Anne is the subject of their anger for having gone to the circus master for help with Concorde and, thus, having sullied a near enough sacred ancient guardian of Jorvik with Pandorian magic. Yesterday, it was you, Lisa and Linda for withholding information on Anne’s and Alex’s whereabouts. Last week, it was Anne and Alex for running off in the first place. It makes no real difference. What did stick with you, though the Druids neglected to mention it, is that you are complete at last. Five riders in union with their five horses. There is little left to stop you.

Somewhere, Fripp told you just before dismissing you, is the Light Ceremony Book. You must retrieve it, or all will be lost.

Now, you lie awake, staring at the knots in your ceiling. They ask you why you are so afraid of finding the book. They ask why you so stubbornly fear being the Fifth to Lead the Way. They ask what would happen if you were to let the dam burst.

You ask yourself why you keep looking up at them and letting them ask you questions you cannot answer, and then you turn over to look out of your window instead. The stars are bright above the trees and mountaintops. They do not ask questions, nor do they give answers.

In your dreams, the dam does not burst. Something terrible happens anyway.

Chapter Text

You wake up tired.

It no longer surprises you. You cannot remember the last time you were allowed a full night’s rest. Sleep comes to you in fragments these days; too many times each night to count, you are startled awake so violently that it is difficult to fall asleep again. Your dreams come in fragments, too, and it is becoming harder and harder to tell whether they are the same dream flashing back and forth between a thousand scenes or a thousand different dreams. You may glimpse a deep, wild ocean, or a cold, beautiful winter morning, or a raging scream that comes from you and yet from something entirely different—the list goes on. The moments are incohesive, and yet you feel like something you can’t quite place connects them. Like you only have to fill in the gaps. You cannot, of course, fill in the gaps.

You used to wake up feeling disappointed at it all. The fragmented visions, the gaps where something should connect them, and the uneasy sleep were frustrating at best. Now, it is only to be expected. Each day your time for evenings at home grows shorter and shorter as your training gets more and more intense, and yet each night you manage to put off going to sleep for longer and longer. You know that you will wake a thousand times with only the night sky, the rustling trees, and the knots in your ceiling to keep you company. You know that you will wake exhausted in the morning. You know that there is hardly any point to sleeping.

Oftentimes, your unease brings you to the stables. To your horse. It is still warm there. It will not be that way for much longer, though. Winter grows nearer with each dawn; the grass is already cold and crisp with frost when you wake each morning, and on colder days, your breath fogs even when the sun is highest. Soon enough, the stables will be too cold for anything but animals equipped with thick, warm coats made to let them live through the Jorvegian midwinter.

Sleeping in the stables is becoming more and more difficult, either way. Though you are never directly questioned, you know that people have begun to notice. When you leave for training far too early in the morning and far too undone to have woken up anywhere but your horse’s stall, people are already around. They begin whispering as soon as you have passed them on the village paths. How are you to save the world? How are you to lead the way? How are you to learn to control yourself if you cannot even sleep properly anywhere but the stables?

You do not actually hear them, of course—Valedale’s residents are too tactful and too used to speaking in hushed tones to let you catch their conversations—but you can only assume that these are their words.

When faced with you directly, on the other hand, they are all too nice and appreciative. Should you run even the simplest errand for one of them, they will thank you so profusely that one might think you were the goddess herself and that being graced with your presence was the greatest blessing they could have been given. Should you happen to look anything other than incredibly busy, it is impossible for you to ride through Valedale at midday without somebody stopping you to give their thanks for your constant, diligent and dutiful efforts towards keeping the island safe and to wish you well in the name of Aideen. Stood in the shadow of a house or half-hidden behind a building, others will be silently watching. Whispering. Sometimes, there is awe in their eyes. Other times, they look at you with an expression indecipherable to you. They must think that you cannot see them. Either that, or they don’t care that you can. You aren’t sure which is the better option.

The villagers doubt you, and yet you are their last and only hope. The only one on this island who can supposedly set things right once and for all. With each day that passes, even you find yourself having more and more trouble believing that you will succeed. Though you do not have the visions to prove it, a deep dread within you tells you that the Soul Riders are not the only faction to be gaining power. You have tried to find proof of it, but in your mind there is a blank, foggy space where you know you should be able to find something of use, almost like somebody is concealing something from your view. This only makes the feeling grow stronger; you can think of few people who would be that interested, much less capable, of hiding from your mind’s eye.

You do not speak of it. You cannot. It is not what you are to focus on. The most important thing—the only important thing—is your training. It is the only way you know to give yourself hope. It is the only way you know to keep going. And so, you rise with the sun every morning, painstakingly making your way through the village and up the frost-lined path to the mountainside paddock, and you do your best to hold onto whatever strength you have left.

Chapter Text

You wake up just before daybreak with a gasp and the sudden, terrifying sense that your opponents are complete. Though you cannot recall more of your dream than this knowledge, you are sure that it came from the moon. She is only a few days past full, after all. Something this powerful should have been expected. It has shocked you to your core anyway.

Hush , says your horse and puffs its muzzle against your arm. It is only then that you remember, with relief as always, where you are. The hay is warm underneath your tired legs, the wood of the stable wall hard against your aching back, and your horse’s head large and oh so grounding in your trembling arms. You are here , it reminds you.

This much is true. You are here. You are awake, you are alive, and blood runs through your veins; in fact, your heart is currently pumping said blood through said veins at an alarmingly fast rate. Your fingers are woven into your horse’s mane and desperately clutching tufts of it like it was all that tethered you to the world during the night. Now, if only for a moment, the warm scent of horses and hay from all around you and the faint, silvery glow of early dawn are enough to ground you. You loosen your grip and let a deep breath into your lungs. 

Then, the ocean is dark and neverending. A perpetual rainstorm pelts the metal of an oil rig. There is a portal, and somebody steps through it. You have never seen her before, and yet you know who she is. Darkness surrounds her, welcomes her into it and follows her around so diligently and almost lovingly that she is unmistakable. She is Death itself and Darkness itself. When she looks up to the sky, it is like her eyes are piercing into you.

You come back to the stables with yet another gasp. Your horse has stood up as if to watch over you, muzzle touching your forehead and warm air streaming through its nostrils. Everything else is cold. Soon, it may be too cold for you to sleep out here. The mere thought makes you shiver.

The sun has long since risen behind the clouds when you pull yourself together and ride to the mountain paddock. You are late, and it is far from the first time. The Druids are angry, but when are they not? Today, it is this. Yesterday, you weren’t giving enough of yourself. The day before, you were losing control.

You are always losing control, of course. It’s just that most of the time, they don’t notice it—at least, that used to be the case. It is all too obvious these days, to them as much as to you, that you are wearing yourself thin. You try harder and harder each day to stretch your limits just a little further. It is ineffective at best; your limit, after all, is a solid stone dam. Stone is known for much, but not its flexibility, and the dam must not break, but it must let more of your powers out. Every day is spent trying to squeeze just a little more water through the cracks and holding the dam together with just a little more force. You push, you pull, and you tear yourself apart just a little bit more. Some days, you feel a crack in the dam open just the slightest bit wider. You are always praised for it, and in a way it feels relieving to be able to let yourself go just a little further without fear, but you know that you cannot keep letting this happen. A dam can only crack so much before it breaks, and the dam must not break.

You do not speak of the vision—something tells you that the time isn’t right yet—but whenever the Druids are looking elsewhere, you allow yourself a glance at the Moon Rider. She looks tired, afraid, and perhaps a little distant. Only once, your eyes meet, and her expression tells you all you need to know. She has seen it, too. Time is slowly but surely running out. After that, you do not look over to her again.

Night falls early these days, and tonight, you are made to stay at the paddock for long enough that you begin to lose track of time. When you finally leave, an hour could have passed since sunset just as well as five. Regardless, you are tired to the bone. Again.

Tonight, you do not even attempt to sleep in your own bed. Something tells you that the moon will not be merciful to you, and as much as it feels like yet another step in the wrong direction, you know that loneliness will not help soothe you when you wake from yet another dream with trembling hands and a racing heart. A step in the wrong direction it may be, but you were set on this path long ago, and you cannot see any more forks in the road before you. There is no turning back anymore, only delaying the inevitable, and at least now, you have one less inevitable thing to worry about delaying.

Chapter Text

Last night, the first snow fell.

It lies in a thin, delicate layer all over the island. Near the village, you would hardly see it anymore for all the people that have disturbed it by now, but here in the depths of the forest it is broken only in places by the tracks of a wild animal. That, and a longer and longer trail of your horse’s hoofprints as the two of you slowly make your way through the woods.

You are supposedly on a mission right now. Not too far away, just on the edge of the forest, there is a large group of will-o’-the-wisps that need to be collected preferably sooner rather than later. It’s not exactly urgent, of course. They’re not at risk of luring some poor soul into a swamp here. At worst, someone will be lost in the forest for a little while longer before you get to them, and you’re told being lost among the will-o’-the-wisps isn’t an unpleasant experience, exactly; you simply disconnect from reality for a while.

You know better than many, of course, that being disconnected from reality isn’t always all that pleasant. Right now, you are blessed to know that the cold of your feet in the stirrups and the crunch of snow under your horse’s hooves are real, but all the more often, you are falling back into losing track of what is real and what is not. The moon will not leave you alone anymore, even during the day. One second, you are in the midst of an intense training session. The next, you are in front of endless rows of bookshelves so tall they cannot possibly be real, and all around you is the smell of dust and the uncanny warmth of a place so old its age cannot even be known. Just as suddenly, you will be in Hollow Woods, riding through ever thicker sheets of snow as large, cotton ball-like snowflakes keep falling through the treetops. One snowflake falls on your nose, cold and wet and real. When you come back to the mountain paddock, you can only hope that you’re really there. More often than not, you will be on the ground with at least one Soul Rider hovering over you in concern and at least one Druid already disciplining you for letting it happen again.

You wish you knew how to tell them that it’s not you letting it happen—that it just does anyway—without sounding like you’ve completely lost control of yourself.

Maybe you have.

What you do let happen is the detours you’ve been taking during missions. You could stop if you wanted to, but in this loneliness—or perhaps the undisturbed togetherness with your horse—there is solace and relief. For only a little while, you allow yourself to stop being bothered by the Druids’ demands and wishes, and listen only to what is calling you. Sometimes, it guides you to a vision. Other times, your horse will stumble over a root that you could’ve sworn wasn’t there yesterday, and then the calling will dissipate. Most often it leads you to a runestone, bright and alive and glowing so strongly in your presence that the runes almost seem to be burning. It is no different this time. You guide your horse around the foot of a hill and find yourself face to face with a magnificent creation of upside-down pyramids that almost seem to be floating. Judging by the wear and tear and the moss growing everywhere but the glowing runes, the runestone must have stood here for many hundreds of years. It is a wonder it hasn’t toppled over after all this time, and yet some part of you understands exactly why it’s still standing.

The runestone still calls to you. You let your horse take another step forward, then another, and yet another, until you are not only face to face with the runestone but right by its side. Then, you reach out a hand.

You have never touched a runestone. In fact, you have been strictly forbidden from doing so. There are too many risks involved—toppling it over, disrupting the flow of magic, chipping the stone—and little to no reward, should you manage to avoid the risks. And yet, even as only the smallest bit of space is left between you and the runestone, it seems to still be calling to you. You cannot do anything but answer.

The stone is strangely warm. You realise only as you touch it that there is no snow or frost upon it. Something within you hums with the warm, soothing feeling of having found the thing that was tugging you towards it. You could swear that something within the runestone, too, is humming with the pleasure of having guided you to it. It is as if something deep within you harmonises in an almost familiar way with the runestone.

Snow is beginning to fall through the roof of the forest. Sensing that it is time to move on, you return your hand to your reins. For a moment longer, you stay still, looking at the runestone. Nothing about it has changed—the snowflakes that land on it still melt, and the runes are still glowing just as vividly as they were when you arrived—but it is no longer calling you. It is as if you did exactly what it wanted you to.

Now that the runestone is satisfied, nothing but your duty calls you. You turn your horse towards where you know your mission awaits and urge it forward into a slow gallop. As it picks up the pace, the growing snowfall becomes less and less clear until it is only streaks of white on either side of you. Other than the crunch of hooves against the blanket of snow on the forest floor and the gentle wind in your ears, the woods are quiet. For a moment, everything is at peace.

Chapter Text

It is a calm and quiet morning. The last minutes before dawn bathe the island’s blanket of snow in a muted, blue glow, and the day lies open before you.

The Druids called off your training today. Supposedly, they thought you all deserved a day’s rest. Something tells you that it might be more about earning back your favour, or perhaps more likely feeling like you have stalled in your progress and not much can be done to help it. Pouring salt in the wound is the fact that rest, of course, isn’t an option. Though you haven’t been summoned for training, the weight of what is to come still lies heavy overhead.

You are to retrieve the Book of Light from Dark Core’s headquarters.

You suspect this is the third reason training has been called off. In the safety and secrecy of Fripp’s room, the innermost circle of Druids are planning the expedition. The innermost circle except for you and the other four, that is. Sometimes, you wonder if you are even counted to that group anymore, or if you all lost that privilege after the transformation of Concorde. You know that the other Soul Riders wonder, too. None of you speak of it. Anne doesn’t only wonder, she believes it, and she doesn’t need to hear anything that would further solidify that belief.

When you heard of the mission to come, you were tossed back to the night you had just left behind. In your dreams, you had held an ancient tome. It was the only thing you could see. Your horse was galloping, and the sound of your own heartbeat almost drowned out the clanking of metal against metal. You’re still not sure why you were running.

You awoke before the moon could tell you how it all had ended. It plays over and over and over in your head; whether it is a vision again or just your mind wandering, you cannot tell. You think you may now know what the book was, and that knowledge does not make the weight of the vision easier on you. Each time your mind is brought back to it, the pit of dread in your stomach grows deeper and deeper, and you try more and more desperately to hold onto the hope that it will end well.

When you exit the village, your mind calms for a moment. Few things are on your mind, and they are all peaceful. Your horse’s fur is warm and soft; a stark contrast to your cold body, and a much-needed one. The forest now glows golden as thin beams of sun begin to filter through the leaves and reach over the snow-covered ground. Overhead, the leaves rustle in a gentle, cold breeze.

The wind turns and becomes a sharp, cold gust that chills you to the bone and raises every hair on your body. It came from the river. More likely than not, it travelled here from the ocean. How far out into the ocean did it begin, you wonder? Did it come from the bay between Fort Pinta and South Hoof, or did it come from the wide open waters beyond, travelling first across the peninsula? Was it born over the cold eastern seas, travelling all the way around the island to reach you here in the forest? Far into the ocean, well beyond Jorvik’s southeastern shores, lies the oil rig. There, it is colder than anywhere else on and around the island, except for possibly the frozen valley north of Hollow Woods. Is it there the freezing wind came from?

A shiver runs down your spine. The wind seems to have calmed, and yet cold still swirls around you, slowly but surely making itself at home in your flesh and bones. Somewhere far into the ocean, freezing cold rain pelts against a towering metal structure. It should not be raining, of course, but some things go beyond the understanding and rules of even the universe itself. Whenever you close your eyes, even if it’s only to blink, you feel like the rain is pouring down on you, cold and merciless, and when you open them again you find yourself shivering even though you’re dressed more than warm enough for the weather. It is a familiar feeling, and one you had hoped you would never experience again: you are slipping away from reality.

You are in the depths of the forest now, and yet you do not remember continuing down the path from Valedale. The day is so bright that it must have been at least an hour since you left the village. It crosses your mind that this, too, could be a vision, but you dismiss the thought. This must be real. Your horse’s mane is warm when you weave your fingers into it, and you can feel every last strand of horsehair against your skin. A vision would have a goal; it would not allow you to focus on such mundane details.

Whether or not this is true, you don’t particularly care to find out. It is enough of a truth that you can hold onto it. It is also far from the first method you have invented for determining whether or not a moment is real; should it fail, it would not be the first to do so, and you doubt it would be impossible for you to come up with yet another.

Still, the methods grow more and more abstract. You can only go through so many of them without reality and unreality becoming irreversibly intertwined. Something has to happen before then. For a time, you could intuit what was life and what was vision, and there has to be a way for you to relearn that skill.

You only have to find it.

You realise suddenly that you and your horse have not moved since you took a hold of its mane. For a moment longer, you stay in the quiet, unchanging forest, a warm ray of sun on your back, and then you urge your horse forward. It is about time for a change of scenery.

Chapter Text

Darkness surrounds you.

Far below you, the ocean waves crash and roar. If you looked down, you would see nothing. You do not look down. Your eyes are fixed on the book in your hand. It is an ancient, leather-bound tome. Despite its hundreds of pages, it feels light. Warm. Its cover is etched with glowing runes. The light is not enough to show the way, but it grounds you. It is a reminder of your mission. Of your importance today. Of your importance here and now. Of how crucial it is that you do not fail. You have been undisturbed so far, but something is always lurking around the corner here. You must not lose focus.

You have kept your horse at full speed since you grabbed the book. Its hooves beat steadily against the ground. The sound of metal against metal is almost drowned out by your heartbeat. You still do not know why you are running, only that you must. From the black sky falls large, cold raindrops. They pelt against your face as your horse runs. Every freezing drop hurts. Your skin is beginning to grow numb from the cold.

The darkness is closing in. Something about it is deeply wrong. It is less like pitch black and more like nothingness. Like the world ceases to be where it begins. Your heart is beating louder. Faster. You can hardly hear your horse’s hooves against the ground over the sound of your heartbeat. Something is wrong. You are being watched.

Far away, there are hoofsteps. Somebody is behind you. Your horse is already running as fast as it can. It has been doing so for too long by now. Your only hope is that whoever is behind you is just slow enough to let you get back to safety.

The hoofsteps become louder and louder. It is all too clear now that the darkness is not of the night, but of something far, far deeper. It is closing in on you more and more. You cannot see the oil rig anymore. Your vision is beginning to blur. Your horse runs a little faster. A little faster again. Your stomach turns. An animal knows when it is in danger. Your horse runs a little faster yet.

From behind you comes the sound of echoing, almost ghastly hoofsteps. From beneath you comes the sound of metal horseshoes on metal ground. From within you comes the sound of your racing heart. They melt into a cacophony of clanking and beating and fear. The darkness grows closer and closer until you can hardly see. All you can do is hold on to hope and trust in your horse. The hoofsteps behind you are terribly close. You are beginning to feel faint. The bright runes of the Book of Light are but a gentle glow beyond a thickening veil of darkness. The hoofsteps behind you are as loud as your own horse’s.

Then, everything becomes quiet except for the ringing in your ears. Perhaps there was a sound so loud it was deafening. Perhaps all sound disappeared entirely. It hardly matters. All you can do is keep pushing forward. Magic threatens to surge through you. Pushing it back is so instinctual that it is almost easy. You do not let it run its course. You cannot.

Darkness envelops you entirely. All that exists is the cold, hard rain. You hardly feel it hit your almost completely numb skin. You cannot see. You cannot hear. You cannot think. There is a sensation that feels almost like an earthquake. The ground rumbles beneath you. Everything is impossibly hot and impossibly cold. It is possible that you scream. If you do, you cannot hear it.

Less than a moment later, sight and sound return to you. All you can hear is your horse’s hoofsteps and the wind in your ears. Safety is only seconds away. You dare a glance at the Book of Light. The sight makes you wish you were back to seeing nothing. In your hand is a black, burnt scrap of paper and leather. Not one rune or letter is legible. Your stomach turns. Was the blast of darkness meant for you? Was the book protecting you? Were you meant to be burnt to a crisp without even being lit aflame, just like the book? Or was the destruction only ever meant for the book? Was the book’s glow until the very end a failed attempt to withstand the darkness?

You are mere steps away from safety. Whoever was chasing you has retreated. The danger is gone.

So is your hope.

Chapter Text

Dawn had not yet broken when you left Valedale.

In its last moments with you, the woods seemed more beautiful than ever before. Thick, heavy snowfall flurried around you, filling up your tracks along as you went; the hoofprints must have stayed for no more than a few minutes before the snowy paths appeared as untrodden as they did before you walked them. Somewhere far away, but not quite far away that the snowfall obscured it, a wisp darted between the trees, beckoning you to follow it. From deep in the vegetation to your other side came the warm, pink glow of a runestone, calling you just as stubbornly to come closer. Every so often, you looked up at the evergreen treetops, marvelling as always at how much they felt like home. They asked you to stay, if only for a moment longer; to look up at them just once more in a moment of peace.

The forest was calling to you, and for the first time in longer than you can remember, you refused to answer. If you had, it would only have hurt more to leave.

You had known, of course, that the woods would ask you to stay. You had known that you would want nothing more. You had known that it would ache to leave anyway. And yet, you had hoped that your determination to refuse would make it ache less. It did not. You had expected the forest to call to you, but you had not expected it to come alive as it did; to reach out every last branch to you in yet another desperate effort to make you hold on, to sing you a song on the wind as if beckoning, to glimmer in a moonbeam that wasn’t there. You had not expected it to be missing so terribly from you once you left—for leaving to feel like something fundamental had been stripped from you against your will.

In the end, though, there had been no other option. The Druids refused to be of any help. You aren’t entirely sure that they would’ve even been able to. You have exhausted––destroyed––every last one of their plans. Not that there were that many in the first place. Not that it matters anymore. You have left. You must find your own answers.

Despite everything, there is relief in having left. Nobody is pushing you anymore, and they never will again. When you left the last of the evergreen trees behind you, the warm cloak of safety fell from your shoulders, but with it, too, disappeared the heavy burden of responsibility. You no longer have any duties to fulfil, and you no longer have to push the dam to its breaking point.

You spent the long ride mending every last crack. By the time you arrived at the great library, you were safely walled in, and there wasn’t so much as a single imperfection left to mend. It feels strange not constantly watching yourself for the last crack that would make you fall apart. It feels a little bit like something has left you, almost in the same way that Hollow Woods has. You suppose this is how it is meant to be. You suppose that you will get used to it. Either way, there are more pressing matters at hand.

The library is by far the mightiest place you have ever come across. The almost countless floors stretch deeper into the ground than you had ever thought possible. Each one is a library in its own right. Standing at the bottom of a bookshelf and letting your eyes trail up the shelves, you almost have time to wonder if they will ever end before you see the ceiling where the next floor begins.

Somewhere in these endless depths, you will find answers. So the Moon Rider says. She has already begun combing through the shelves. You can only pray that she is right. You will join the search, eventually. For now, though, you are tired. Far, far too tired. Instead, you make yourself at home in an armchair by a window on the top floor and gaze out at the endless snowfall.

It is dark again, of course. It is almost always dark this time of year. Still, this darkness is different from what you are familiar with. You understand now that Hollow Woods always had a strange glow about it that seemed to light up even the darkest of nights. For a moment in time, you allow yourself to grieve not having realised until it had already slipped away from you.

Outside, the snowfall grows thicker by the minute. The snowflakes flurry by too fast for your eyes to keep up, and before long you find yourself staring aimlessly into the distance. The library is ancient, peaceful, warm; it makes a poor replacement. Everything feels like it has shifted slightly to the left, or like you are stuck in a dream. Like you have slipped away from reality again, even though the moon hasn’t granted you any visions since before you left. This, somehow, is worse. You know that you are here––you know that it is real––and yet you are stuck in that same, nightmarish haze. You cannot recall feeling quite this distant this morning.

With each passing moment, the ache in your heart grows. It tugs you back towards Valedale, where you cannot go, and it pulls you forward to things yet unknown. It is as if you are stuck in the in between, with no way to proceed and no way to return. In this in between, there is a sense of wrongness. You almost wonder if you have made a terrible mistake in coming here.

You let the wrongness and the ache take up the space they demand. So be it, you think. You have made your choice. All you can do now is stick to it.

Chapter Text

The days grow darker and darker.

At night, you toss and turn until the world awakes. You haven’t so much as glanced at a clock in days; the world keeps time well enough for you. When the first footsteps creak against the ancient floorboards, you know it is awake. Footsteps aren’t the only things that creak, of course, but by now, you have learned to discern between that sound and the sound of the library itself. When creaking of its own accord or in the winter winds, it sounds cold. Harsh. Ruthless.

Some nights, you feel like the library is your tomb. Its tall, endlessly smooth stone walls reach high above and wrap all around you. From far, far above, hardly visible during the dark nights, the great domed ceiling keeps watch. The windows have been the same for centuries uncountable, not a crack or smudge to be seen. The library is unchanging. You wonder if it would turn you into something unchanging, too, with time. If you were to stay here long enough, the passing of time could very well begin to slip you by. How long could you stay here without noticing? Without ageing? Without changing at all? You have finished the rations you brought and then some, but you cannot remember feeling hunger in recent times, and hunger isn’t the only thing missing. Your body should be aching from sitting in this armchair, too, not to mention you should be freezing day in and day out. It is cold here, but you can really only tell from the way your breath fogs when you are near the windows. You hardly ever see anything but the endless expanse of books, and you should be bored out of your mind. You have felt none of these things. For a time, though you cannot say for how long, you have felt next to nothing at all.

Some time ago, you spent a night in New Hillcrest. In theory, there is a room above the stables for you at all times, but the trek from the library is too long to be convenient for an everyday commute. Still, that night proved a welcome break. You slept far deeper and for far longer than any other night in recent memory. You did not toss and turn, nor even awake cold and restless like you used to in Valedale. You did not dream, either, though you had somewhat hoped that you would. That perhaps all it would take for the moon to grant you a vision was a good night’s sleep.

Perhaps all it would take for the moon to come to you is just one more good night’s sleep.

For now, though, that luxury is not granted to you.

The days grow darker and darker yet. You still spend your nights tossing and turning and blaming your lack of visions on the waning moon. You dare not think back on how long it’s been since your last one. You aren’t sure you’d know even if you tried. You try especially hard not to reflect on that. You rise with the first creaking of footsteps, and you help in the search for answers as much as you can bring yourself to. The Moon Rider tells you that you can find what you seek here, if you look carefully enough. She will not state it openly, but between her words, there is desperation: you must find what you seek.

So far, you have found nothing.

The days grow darker and darker. By now, a while has passed since new snow fell. For the short while each day the sun is up behind the clouds, the snow lying still and untouched over the fields glows a pale, bluish grey, and the clouds mirror that same colour back at it. You watch the days pass in the blink of an eye from the library’s top window. Each day, the little bit of light behind the clouds grows rarer and rarer; shows itself for shorter and shorter times.

The clouds have been growing thicker—darker—as of late. Sometimes, you try to reach for the moon, but it feels like something is in your way. Like the clouds above are an impenetrable wall. If you reach far enough, it’s almost like you can touch them; feel their cold, hard surface against your fingertips. It stirs something deep within you, and you draw your hand back even as the clouds beckon you ever closer.

In the distance, a storm approaches. In between tosses and turns and the cold, harsh creaks of the library, you pray for it to come soon. A glimpse at the moon is all you need. A vision, however short, would tell you all you needed to know. A storm to clear the sky would let you see your path forward.

You can feel it in the air now. Its time has almost come. You must only wait.

Chapter Text

At long last, your seemingly endless search has come to an end. Yet, it is far from a triumphant victory; bittersweet at best. The answers you have found only bring on more questions. More problems to be solved. Where they bring hope, they also bring despair, and where they bring solace, they also bring dread. There is something that could be done, after all—that could bring an end to things for good—but it seems so frighteningly impossible that you feel even further from a solution than before. If this is your only chance, and it would certainly seem that way judging by the hundreds if not thousands of books you have combed through, you are barely left with any chance at all.

In the library’s basement, the hardwood floor has become worn and eroded with time. In one particularly decrepit corner, a root pokes through the half-rotten planks. It is hard to say if the floor has shifted around it over time or if it was always there, and it seems strange to find such a thing this far underground; regardless, it seems to belong. You sit there often. Touching the root feels familiar, almost like coming home. It buzzes with a warmth that you could never quite put words to before. You understand it better now. Running through the very foundation of Jorvik is a sprawling network of ancient, living roots. If the legends reaccounted in the great, dusty tome you found in the library’s furthest corner are to be trusted, Aideen herself courses through them. She may have given herself up all those countless years ago, but she never truly disappeared; she is still and always here, keeping the island alive just as she gave it life in the beginning. Someday, it is said, Jorvik will call to her for help, and she will once again be awakened.

The scholar noting down the legends seemed doubtful of their legitimacy at best and downright mocking at worst, but the Moon Rider brushed it off—this book is all you have, after all, and what reason would a learned scholar, a woman of science, have to believe in ancient Druidic legends? It feels like a thin, weak thread to hold on to, but it is all you have. The Moon Rider reminds you with care every so often that she saw the book in a vision, and that both of your powers, at their core, come from Aideen. In a way, the goddess herself guided you to this book. Surely, then, it must hold some truth.

The Moon Rider asks you, on occasion, if you have had any visions as of late. These days, your answer is always no. Her ever-present frown always deepens, as if she had expected a different reply this time around, and then she shakes it off and returns to her research. You try not to think much of her concern, or the fact that you haven’t had a vision in weeks, now. You hope desperately that it is a sign that things are okay. Perhaps your opponents have been halted in their quest to grow stronger. Perhaps there is no hurry. Perhaps you have plenty of time to figure out the next step of your mission. Even so, you feel like you are teetering just at the edge of something—a great abyss, or a cliff you cannot see beyond—and, yet, like the edge is just out of reach. It’s as though the walls you’ve built around yourself are closing in on you and the clouds overhead becoming denser with every passing moment, keeping you from seeing beyond the fall. These days, you only need to reach out the smallest bit to feel cold, hard stone.

You have completely stopped spending your nights in the library. With the mission you came here on completed and any further research seemingly hopeless, there is no more reason for you to stay there, especially when the stables bring you far more peace and quiet. Still, you almost never find rest. You dream of surges of power so great that you wake with a thundering heart and a looming fear that you will be destroyed by something within yourself. You dream of the dam bursting, of everything you have so carefully built up and repaired coming down in less than a moment never to come back, of the freedom that follows, then wake in a cold sweat, every inch of your body trembling with fear of what that would do to you. You dream of something so ancient it is unknowable and so terrifying it is unthinkable, but somehow, in the dream, carries a strange sense of familiarity so strong that you feel like you have known it and thought it all your life. You wake gasping for air and yet feeling, for a moment, like you are breathing deeper than you ever have before. At times, you wonder if these dreams are visions, but you brush the thought off as soon as it comes to you. They cannot be. They must not come to fruition. You have not had a vision in weeks. The dreams are nothing only just that: dreams.

Sometimes, just after waking while your dream has yet to leave you, you feel like the walls of the dam are beginning to tremble—to weaken with time—and wonder for a moment if learning the unknowable is inevitable. The moment you fully awaken, the thought once again feels irrational at best, and yet, it will strike you again the next time you wake from a strange dream. So the cycle repeats itself over and over each and every night until the rooster crows in the morning and you leave once again for the library. It is far from a pleasant cycle, and yet, you hope to stay in it for as long as you can. All you know to do with the future is dread it. You have no wish to find out what is to come.

Chapter Text

It is a beautiful day. The sun is soon to return; the pale, cloudless sky is brighter than yesterday, just as it was brighter yesterday than the day before. The trees stand almost unmoving, for the wind is strangely absent even in this seaside town, and the moon rests low but bright on the northwestern horizon. The chill of midwinter nips at your cheeks, reaching even into the furthest, warmest corner of the stables.

It is a beautiful day, and yet you are not quite present.

You have tried for some time to reconnect with reality. There’s little to do other than bide your time, and during your seemingly neverending wait, you have attempted to find your footing again. You cannot. The more you try, the more you are drawn towards the great abyss on the other side of the dam. The more you are drawn to it, the more you think that the dam might have to break—that maybe it is inevitable. The more you think of it as inevitable, the more you find that you don’t mind the idea much. It calls to you. It would be so easy to give in. Today, you feel it pulling you towards it more than ever before, and you know that it is your final calling. Every string tugging on your heart leads there. You still do not know what the abyss holds. It scares you. Still, you must find out.

You weave your hands into your horse’s mane. It’s warm, and it feels like home. If only for a moment, the world feels a little lighter on your shoulders. The walls of the dam surround you, so close now that you needn’t even reach out a hand to feel the cold, hard stone pressing against you, and it is easy to lean towards the abyss. It is easy to lean a little bit further, and then another little bit, and another, until you feel like you can almost see beyond the dam. Nothing happens. The stone presses against every inch of your skin. You breathe a sigh of relief and lean further forward.

Deep in your soul, something cracks.

Hold on, my friend.

Everything is quiet. Neither dark nor light. Neither warm nor cold. Neither real nor unreal. You wonder if this truly was the end of you. If this is what ceasing to be feels like. Perfectly still and peaceful. An eternity in nothingness. Yes—that is it: you have become nothing. You are nothing, and you exist nowhere.

And then, you burst open.

Everything is you. You are the mountains and the valleys. The shining, singing ice of the frozen rivers and the water still flowing deep below. Every horse whose hooves ever thundered over Jorvik’s soft, green grass. Every star in the sky, the sun and moon, and the storm on the horizon. Every root deep in the dirt and rock of the island. You know why you never stopped longing. You know why the ache in your heart never ceased, even when it wasn’t clear what was calling to you. You know at long last why you came to Jorvik. It is you coursing through the roots and it is your magic surging through the island, for it was you who created it long, long ago, back when you and your horse were truly one and the same. You gave yourself up, then, and it gave Jorvik life. You are still giving it life with every breath you take, and now, it breathes life into you in return.

You open your eyes and peer into the abyss. It is full of you—or, rather, it is you. Deep within, there is a vision. Its very essence sets it apart from the world, and suddenly, the idea of your visions disconnecting you from reality feels strange. Foreign, almost. You hardly understand how it could ever happen when the difference between them is this plain, and yet you understand more than ever that they are both real: the distinction between them isn’t that of truth and falsehood, but that between the present moment and a memory. You reach out to the vision, wind it around your fingers until the string tightens, and tug it closer.

(Rain pelts your skin. Something dark is growing; it isn’t too close, nor is it all too far away. Off the coast, evil hangs heavy over the ocean. Your opponents grow stronger and stronger by the day, only waiting for the right moment to strike. They won’t wait for much longer. It is almost time.)

The vision passes, and everything is real. Your small, fragile, human body lies collapsed over your horse’s warm shape, and your breathing is deeper and slower than you ever thought possible. Your fingers are still woven into your horse’s mane. It is still warm. Still feels like coming home. The hay beneath you is warm and dry against your legs, and a few straws prick through the fabric of your trousers, poking and stinging your skin. Someone gallops by outside the stables, snow flurrying around the horse’s thundering hooves. The snow glitters with the pale, blue-purplish colour of the sky for a moment, and when it falls and settles, it joins the rest of the island’s snow in glowing, almost shining, in the gentle light. Stillness lies all over the island, but it feels closer to restlessness than to peace; almost like Jorvik is holding its breath.

You turn your head, feeling something damp where your cheek lay just a moment ago; when you raise a hand to your face, you catch a falling tear on your knuckle. Your horse lifts its head slowly, and in the kind, dark eye facing you, you see the same recognition that you know your horse sees in both of yours.

Though you are nowhere near any primeval root or tree that you know of, the blood running through your veins is buzzing with their warmth. In this moment, you feel untouchable. The midwinter chill nips at your damp cheeks, and yet you do not freeze. Danger and darkness loom closer overhead than ever before, and yet you are not afraid, for you know what is to come.

Jorvik called to you for a reason. Now, you must only listen and follow, and finish what you once started.

Chapter Text

Slow, heavy hoofsteps thud against the snowy mountain path. The elegant strides of a shining silver mare. The quick, light steps of a rugged pony just barely keeping up. The slow, heavy beats of hooves older than any of you can fathom. The calm, steady treading of a yet calmer, steadier horse. At the front is your horse, whose steps only sound like home.

Dark, rough cliffsides frame the bone-white path in front of you perfectly; the slope only becomes gentle enough for snow to have properly settled on it far above you. Even so, you do not feel trapped, for where the stone walls of the dam once were is now a world only waiting, even begging, to be seen and heard and felt, and you only need to reach out a hand to feel it. The island is eerily still—not a wind along the coasts, not a wave in the ocean, not a trembling leaf in the forests—and you know, now, that this is the calm before the storm. Finality rests on your shoulders, as heavy as the world itself. Each breath you take and each step forward brings you closer to the only moment that has ever mattered. The only moment that ever will matter.

It is the first day in weeks that the sun shows itself. When golden light fills the mountain pass at midday, you climb a nearby lookout point to watch. Never before have you seen something so beautiful. The snow-covered mountains shine so brightly that they nearly blind you, and the inhospitable cliff walls surrounding the mountain pass almost begin to look warm. In the distance, the sea glitters with oranges and golds brighter than you’ve ever seen. In a crevice next to the lookout, a small, babbling brook gleams in the sunlight, somehow still flowing even in the deep, harsh cold.

Jorvik’s winters have always felt special. Now, you feel every tree’s pleasure at the sun’s return, the warmth once again cast upon their cold, weary branches. Every snowflake’s whimsical joy at finally getting to glitter bright golden once again. Every animal small and large stopping for a moment to feel the sun upon their skin. It leaves you awestruck in the same way Jorvik’s sunrise did the very first time you witnessed it. The sun slips back beneath the horizon after only a short while, and yet you feel like the glimpse of warm, golden light could keep you satisfied for an eternity.

Only long after sunset, when you are all far too worn out to keep riding, do you settle down for the night. You still have a long way to go, and it is best to keep up the pace. There is tension in the air; none of you have spoken since before you left, and something is beginning to bubble underneath the surface of the unbroken silence. You wait patiently. You have known since you began your long ride that the Soul Riders will ask you how you knew that it was time. When they finally do, huddled in a small half circle around a makeshift campfire, you answer honestly and without fear, for you feel all the island’s hope within you, and your horse’s muzzle is warm against your shoulder.

Off the coast, something is coming back to life. You have never been more ready to face it.

Chapter Text

All around you, the ocean is dark and wild. Cold, harsh winds howl over Jorvik, whipping flurries of snowflakes around the ocean and tossing foaming waves ever harder onto the shore. You stand untouched in the eye of the storm, where all is eerily still. Face to face with you is the tempest’s catalyst.

An ancient creature towers over you. He does not move closer. Neither do you. You look into his many eyes, and for a moment, you almost feel like the two of you could come to an understanding. In some strange way, you are a pair—parallel lines across time and space, intersecting only at the very beginning and in this very moment. You have trodden the same path, separated only by the line between good and evil, and now you must both destroy the other. For a moment, you almost feel like there’s a hint of sadness in his eyes. Perhaps he loves this island just as much as you. Perhaps there is more to this than you thought.

Except then his eyes harden, and he moves to harm you. You cannot let it happen. Your paths may run parallel, but here, his must end. You cannot let his chaos reign over Jorvik. You cannot let the Dark Riders succeed. It was you, though it may have been a different you, who brought life to this island many, many years ago. He had no part in that creation. He has no part in that joy. He will have no part in the island’s future.

Deep within your soul, something is beginning to slowly buzz and hum. It grows into a quiet ringing in your ears and then a rushing and roaring through your body, no longer a hum but rather loud, garbled noises. You have never felt anything like it before, and yet it feels almost familiar. It is overwhelming; by this point, you feel like it consumes your entire being, and yet it is still growing. It wants to grow far, far beyond anything you have ever done. For a moment, you hesitate, tightening the reins on it and slowing, almost stopping, the flow of magic.

In front of you is an ancient, towering being, lit up by a gentle, golden glow. His many eyes bore into yours. His many limbs reach for you, stretching and curling through the air. The magic strains at the rope that you hold it by.

Let go.

The roaring in your ears grows.

You will know what to do.

You take a deep breath, and then you let go.

There is a great, primitive roar, like that of something ancient and unknowable coming back to life. It is no longer in your ears, but a real, deafening sound. It may be yours. It may be his. It doesn’t truly matter. It grows and grows until you can hear little else. Though you can hardly see it from the eye of your own storm, you know that you glow with something ancient and powerful. The Light Ceremony could never have held a candle to you. What you are doing is something unspoken, unknown, unknowable. Even you hardly know what it is, only that you can and must do it. 

You need not even ask your horse to step forward. In this moment, you are as good as one. It moves closer to him, and he recoils, almost as if in pain. The light is so bright that it is almost blinding, and your throat is beginning to grow sore. Your small, fragile human body was not made for this—your hands, your eyes, your heart are beginning to burn and to ache—and yet, this is where you belong. Magic courses from the depths of Jorvik’s roots and through your bloodstream, radiating out from every inch of your being. The dam is broken down and long forgotten, as are the reins and ropes you held around your magic. There are no more reasons to hesitate.

Though you aren’t sure how you know to do it, you raise a hand. Your light shifts. Focuses on him. He begins to recoil, as if in pain. Your roar grows louder and your light brighter until you cannot see or hear anything else. You close your eyes. The island courses through you. Galloping hooves. The moon and stars behind the thick, dark clouds. The raging storm. There is a second roar. It is not yours. It is something deeper. It is desperate. Pained. Garnok’s. Your light is bright even through your closed eyelids. The wind whips around you. Snow lashes into your face. You stand your ground.

His time is up.

There is a sound so loud that you cannot hear it and a light so bright that you cannot see it. Then, it is truly silent. Dark. Peaceful. The storm has stilled. The chorus of roaring has gone quiet. You need not open your eyes to know that he is gone, but you do anyway, so that you may see the world.

He is.

In front of you is a vast expanse of darkness. The ocean, you realise once your senses begin to reaccustom themselves to the world. The moon is bright, almost perfectly half-full, and its light glitters in the water. The waves lap gently against the shore. A gentle wind blows past you, rustling the fabric of your coat before moving further along the coast. You look up at the sky, eyes still adjusting to the low light, and one by one, the stars begin to blink into place.

At long last, there is peace.

Chapter Text

Jorvik feels strange these days.

For a time, you thought the world as you knew it was doomed to end. That you would be forced to stand by and watch as the island succumbed to the storm. Now, you know better. It never will. Not as long as your age-old magic courses through its roots. Not as long as the moon and stars shine upon it. Still, you sometimes feel like everything did end, only in a different way; nothing feels like before, after all, and what is an ending if not simply great, irreversible change? Jorvik is quiet. Calm. Peaceful. There’s nothing lurking in the shadows. There’s nobody watching your every move, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Your dreams and visions carry little meaning, for there is little to be said.

Everything has changed, and yet you are no different, no more or less, than you have always been. You are still everything. You are still only you. Your horse is by your side as always, warm and comforting and just as unchanged as you are. When you look up to the sky, you still see yourself in every ray of sun and in the moon and stars beyond and in the clouds slowly rolling away over the eastern mountains. In Silverglade, just by the forest’s edge, there is a small, snowy meadow. It shines a brilliant golden white, lit up by warm, bright sunbeams, and perhaps, too, by the ancient light shining deep within you. There is laughter all around, bubbling with quiet, comfortable joy. One of your friends calls out a name that’s yours, and yet isn’t. You aren’t sure where the line is drawn—in fact, you aren’t always sure it exists at all—but you don’t truly care to find out. You are still you, after all, regardless of how much else you also are. When your friend shares the joke she just told the other three, you laugh with your whole heart.

The days are slowly but surely growing brighter. With each rise and fall of the sun, you feel your breathing grow easier and easier. You are no longer bound by fate, nor by duty. You have not attempted to prod at the future beyond the rare, peaceful visions that come to you of their own volition; it will bring whatever it may. You have learned by now that the island will take you where you need to be. These days, you trust it more than ever.

All you know right now is this: tonight, the stars will be bright and the northern lights vivid across the night sky. Tomorrow, the sun will rise a little earlier than it did today, and the island it casts light upon will be different in one of the small ways it is every morning. The sun will keep rising and falling. Keep changing the island little by little. Winter will become spring and the rivers will melt, rushing once again down to the ocean, and in the awakening forests every bird will come together in a choir of chirps and whistles. Spring will become summer, and the neverending sunlight will blaze hot and bright even filtered through the crowns of the forests’ many trees. Summer will become autumn, colouring the island in golds and reds and oranges and bringing rainstorms the likes of which you’ll wonder if you’ve ever seen. One night late in October, the first frost will fall, and then once again it will be winter, all muted blue days and snow glittering in the moonlight. With every passing year, Jorvik will be different in one of the small ways it always is. You don’t yet know how, and you don’t care to.

Whatever it brings, it will be the future. That is all you could ever ask for.