Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Every day was the same. Wake up, spend every waking hour in front of a computer screen, go to sleep. Wake up, work, sleep. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Every day as mundane as the last.

Until the nightmares began.

Lola wasn’t sure when, exactly, everything started to change. It was gradual, the way that a small stream of water can carve a canyon out of solid rock one grain of sand at a time. Lately, though, she was suffering from vivid nightmares and insomnia. She wouldn’t have thought much of it, except it was beginning to negatively affect her productivity at work. And she couldn’t have that. Especially not when one mistake could cost her not only her job and her reputation, but possibly even her life.

Being a hacker-for-hire was no walk in the park.

Tonight unfortunately was no exception to her sleep woes. No matter what she did, Lola could not get comfortable. She was too hot to sleep with a sheet over her but too cold to sleep without one. The mattress was too hard here, too soft there, the pillow somehow always at the worst possible angle for her neck. Eventually, she gave up and got out of bed to get herself a glass of water. She kept the lights off in the vain hope that she could prevent herself from becoming more awake, navigating her small apartment solely from muscle memory. Thankfully, the kitchen wasn’t far from her bedroom. A quick drink was just what she needed. The water was cool and soothing against the back of her throat, and she felt better after finishing the whole glass.

On the way back to the bedroom, Lola paused by the large double window in the living area. A faint amount of light came through a gap in the blackout curtains she had installed upon move-in, leaving a thin sliver on the floor like a shining unicorn hair. Lola grasped the curtains with both hands, meaning to close them and go back to bed, but something made her linger and look outside, instead. Most of the windows in the neighboring buildings were dark, but here and there, city lights glistened like precious jewels. It was just enough to drown out the stars, but nothing could drown out the full moon hanging low in the sky, as if it were hovering over the nearest building.

Lola frowned.

The moon was glowing red.

Lola was not an astronomer, but she was relatively sure the moon wasn’t supposed to be red. During certain times of year, the moon might appear kind of reddish — why it did that, she didn’t know — but not like this. Not like this, where it seemed to glow under its own power like a little red sun...or as if it were drenched in blood.

Lola shivered. Better not think about that.

Yet she lingered by the window a little while longer, studying the moon’s red glow. There was something eerily captivating about it, like a big red eyeball in the sky that never blinked, always watching her.

Okay, she really needed to stop thinking creepy things and go to bed.

Lola yanked the curtains shut and plunged the apartment into total darkness. There, she thought, no more distractions.

She turned on her heel and made it three steps to the bedroom before something crunched under her bare feet and stopped her in her tracks.

“What the...? Oh, I hope that wasn’t something important,” Lola muttered.

Her job was a decidedly solo endeavor, with most of her interactions occurring through a computer screen, so she had gotten into the habit of talking to herself. There was no one around to respond, but there was also no one around for her to bother them with it — or at least, that’s what she told herself.

Lola crouched down, feeling around in the dark, and came up with...was that a dead leaf? She frowned. How on earth did that get into her apartment? She didn’t have any houseplants, she lived in an industrial part of the city that had very little vegetation, and she rarely went outside. Maybe she was interpreting things wrong in the dark. Lola stood up to turn on a light, good sleep hygiene be damned, when she was distracted by something else: a faint breeze against her skin, as if she had left the window open in her bedroom and it was wafting through the open doorway into the rest of her apartment.

She had not left her bedroom window open.

Lola took a step forward, and then another, cautiously approaching her bedroom door. As she neared it, the breeze grew stronger, and with it came fresh air. But it wasn’t what she would expect from the city. It didn’t smell of vehicle exhaust, cigarette smoke, or the nearby river. No, the breeze carried with it the smell of moss, leaf rot, and wet soil. It should have been jarring and unfamiliar, but instead, she recognized it immediately, and unexpected nostalgia welled up in her. The breeze ruffled her hair gently as if it were an old friend welcoming her home. The rational part of her brain, which was screaming at her that something was horribly wrong, seemed to fade into the background. All she could think about was finding the source of the mysterious breeze.

Her next step forward crunched again, as if she had stepped on more dead leaves. The step after that felt gritty and uneven, as if someone had spilt dirt on the floor. Another step, and she swore she felt a whisper of underbrush against her bare ankles.

One final step, and Lola reached the threshold to her bedroom. She couldn’t help the little gasp that escaped her when she realized what she was seeing in the gloom.

There was a dark, firefly-lit forest where her bedroom used to be.

Chapter Text

Lola took a tentative step into the forest. The ground was mostly soft under her feet, covered as it was in leaf mulch, moss, and downy underbrush. That wasn’t to say that it was completely harmless, however — Lola felt something prick the bottom of her bare foot on her next step, and she winced and stopped walking. She bent to rub the pad of her foot. Thankfully, it didn’t feel as though whatever she had stepped on had broken through the skin. Maybe it was just a small fallen branch? A sharp rock? Some kind of thorn?

She looked back over her shoulder. Two gnarled old trees stood on either side of the doorway in place of the door frame, creating a natural archway through which the rest of her apartment was still visible. The transition from apartment to forest was abrupt and the contrast was sharp. Except for the little bit of soil and leaves that had spilled out into the hallway, the tree archway separated two disparate worlds.

Lola turned her back on her apartment and took another step forward into the forest, then another and another, looking around her in awe. The forest was full of flickering fireflies. Their little yellow glowing bulbs cut through some of the gloom and shed intermittent light on Lola’s surroundings, which looked nothing like her bedroom had. The mysterious forest was made up of old gnarled trees of different shapes and sizes, whose trunks were coated in moss, lichen, and other fungi. Upon closer inspection, the trees lined what looked like a small, winding dirt path that led away from the rest of Lola’s apartment into the dark depths of the forest.

Lola looked back over her shoulder again. The tree archway leading back to her apartment was still visible through the trees. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to go a little farther, right? She was filled with a morbid curiosity to see just how far this weird mystical forest stretched, to see if there was anything left of what used to be her bedroom. Really, what else was she supposed to do? Despite being an avid reader as a child, Lola had never read anything before about what to do if your bedroom disappears and is replaced by a forest, instead.

Besides, the forest was calling to her, drawing her in, and it was becoming harder and harder to resist the temptation. Why not travel just a little farther?

Lola squared her shoulders and set her resolve. She would see how far she could travel into the forest in a minute, and if she didn’t find the end of it in that time frame, she would turn back. Simple as that. So, she set off into the forest.

The dirt path under her feet was uneven. She had to watch her step carefully, lest she trip over a tree root or step in a thorn bush. Thankfully, it wasn’t too hard to see the path in front of her. The fireflies seemed to congregate around her, as if helping to light her path. Lola smiled when one of them landed on the back of her hand and decided to stay there, blinking slowly. Any sense of foreboding or fear she may have experienced earlier was gone. All she felt was a sense of peace and comfort, as if she had finally arrived at home. Even her apartment was far away in the back of her mind and fading fast.

A minute quickly passed, but Lola decided to keep moving, ever drawn into the forest’s mysterious depths. The trees became more and more mystical, their trunks twisted into fantastical shapes and covered in spots of glowing moss in different colors. The moss lit her path now, as most of the fireflies had disappeared. At one point, she heard the sound of running water, though the river or stream always stayed just out of sight. Somewhere above her head, an owl hooted, and another owl in the distance answered the call. It was peaceful but lonely. Then, just as Lola was beginning to tire and thinking of going back, she spotted it: a big flash of bright blue off the beaten path.

Lola hesitated for only a second before she pushed into the thicket to follow it.

The farther she strayed from the path, the thornier the forest became, and darker, too. She could no longer see exactly where she was going, and she hissed as she stubbed her toe on a tree root and nearly fell into a thornbush. Despite the near miss, Lola still caught a leg-full of sharp thorns, which ripped into her pale blue dress and dug into her skin. The thought crossed her mind that she didn’t own a dress like this and certainly hadn’t been wearing one before, so where did it come from and when did she change clothes? But the thought disappeared immediately when she caught a closer look at the blue light that she had been following and realized that it was a huge glowing butterfly.

Entranced, Lola pulled herself free from the thorns and kept moving.

Strangely, no matter how hard or fast Lola pushed through the underbrush, the butterfly stayed several steps ahead of her. She lost it a few times in the trees, and every time, panic overcame her. But then she would catch a glimpse of it again and keep pushing. Sweat rolled down her back and into her eyes from the exertion. Thorns pricked at her feet, her legs, her arms, her sides. Just as she was about to collapse from exhaustion, she noticed a break in the trees, through which the butterfly was clearly visible. Lola pressed harder, and finally broke through into a clearing, which was lit up in a faint eerie red glow by a reddish moon above. She stopped in her tracks.

Five girls stood in the clearing in a loose circle with one empty space, as if they were waiting for someone to join them. They were all wearing pale-colored flowy dresses not dissimilar to the one that Lola was wearing, except for one girl, who was wearing black. The butterfly fluttered around the girls’ heads, shedding its strange blue light on them, before landing on the shoulder of the girl in black, its wings opening and closing slowly.

The girl nearest to her reached out her hand and smiled. “Lola, welcome. We’ve been waiting for you.”

Chapter Text

Lola wanted to ask how the girl knew her name, but as she took a step forward into the clearing, a dizzy feeling similar to vertigo swept over her and she realized suddenly: I know these girls.

The girl with the adorable, round face whose hand was still outstretched towards Lola? Her name was Satbyeol. She and Lola liked to pick flowers to make daisy chains together. Lola didn’t know how she knew this or where the memories had come from, but they were as vivid as if they had just happened earlier that day. Next to Satbyeol, with the big captivating eyes and innocent face, that girl’s name was Sua. Lola once comforted her during a storm that had shaken their tree so hard that they had feared it would topple. But why had they been in a tree in the first place? Lola’s head hurt. She couldn’t remember.

Yet, as Lola stood there in shock, more memories continued to unfold. Sua was holding hands with a pretty, impish-looking girl with distinctive lips — Dajeong, that was her name. She liked to sneak out for early morning treasure hunts, and sometimes Lola would wake up to a gift tucked into her bed as if left there by a fairy: a colorful rock, a bird feather, a piece of shiny broken wing—

But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t Dajeong who had found the wing, it was—

Lola’s head throbbed. The girl standing next to Dajeong, the one in the black dress, her name had been Dia. Wait, had been? Why the past tense? It was all so blurry. The big blue butterfly was still on Dia’s shoulder, glowing faintly and twitching its wings from time to time. Dia and Lola had been good friends, though as hard as Lola strained her brain, she couldn’t come up with any memories of them together. Why? What happened?

The last girl with large eyes and a charismatic aura, her name was Ella. She had been the leader of their little troupe, before...well, before what? What went wrong? Why couldn’t Lola remember?

Between Ella and Satbyeol was the empty space in the circle. Looking at it again, despite the gaps in her memory, Lola suddenly understood. The girls had been waiting for her. The empty space was for her. Lola didn’t know how or why, but this was where she was meant to be.

Lola tried to step forward to take her rightful place with them, but it was as though she was frozen in place. She looked down and choked on a scream. Thick, gnarled vines were sprouting from the ground all around her and wrapping themselves around her legs, holding her in place. She kicked and fought, but the more she struggled, the tighter they got.

“Help me!” she pleaded, looking in the direction of the other girls, but to her horror, vines were also tightening around their arms and legs...

...all of them except for Dia.

The butterfly on Dia’s shoulder flapped its wings and flew upwards into the middle of the circle, where it hovered over the terrified girls for a moment before fluttering past Lola’s shoulder and disappearing into the forest behind her. Lola tried desperately to follow it, but she couldn’t move. True panic began to set in. Now Lola remembered the dark sense of foreboding that she had felt when observing the odd glowing red moon from her apartment window, and how that feeling had only intensified upon discovering a forest where her bedroom had been. Why had she ignored that feeling? What had she been thinking?

“Dia!” one of the girls shouted. It was Sua, who was still struggling against the binds of the vines around her. “Help us! Please!”

Dia smiled. It was not a warm smile. “Why should I?”

Lola’s heart dropped into her stomach.

“You all betrayed me and left me for dead!” Dia’s icy voice cut through the clearing like a scythe. “Why should I help you?”

Dajeong began to cry. “I’m so sorry, Dia, it was the witch, she—”

But Dajeong never got to finish her sentence, as the clearing suddenly echoed with a horrifying, loud, low growl sound. Lola had never heard anything like it before, but it seemed to be coming from Dia, whose eyes began to glow red in the same exact shade as the full moon above them. A ripping sound followed as huge black feathery wings unfolded from Dia’s back and spread to their full extension. Then came horrible wet cracks and crunches as Dia’s limbs lengthened, growing black fur and huge curved claws. Her face elongated into a cross between a muzzle and a beak, and when she opened her mouth, it was full of long, sharp predator’s teeth.

Someone was screaming. Lola didn’t know if it was her or someone else.

The creature that used to be Dia roared and lunged forward, knocking Dajeong and Sua over with one swipe. Adrenaline flooded through Lola’s veins. In a feat of panicked strength, she managed to yank her arms free from the vines holding her in place and desperately began untangling her legs. Screams echoed around the clearing as the creature lunged for Satbyeol and Ella next. Lola was crying. When had she started crying? She pulled herself free just as the creature turned its glowing red eyes on her and roared again. Lola turned and fled into the trees in the direction that the butterfly had disappeared.

There was no rhyme or reason to where Lola ran once she was free of the clearing. She didn’t remember where the forest path had been or exactly what direction the butterfly had gone. All she could think about was getting away from the thing chasing her. Spiky thorns tore at her dress, her hair, her limbs, her bare feet. Lola swore as the sharp barbs dug into her skin, but there was no time to stop. She could hear the creature roaring and crashing through the underbrush behind her, and it sounded as if it were gaining on her.

The forest became darker and darker the farther she ran. There were no more colorful glowing mosses or friendly fireflies to guide her. A sharp, painful stitch developed in her side, stabbing her with every step and gasp for air. She was quickly losing momentum.

Then it happened: Lola tripped.

“Shi—!”

She threw her hands out in a desperate attempt to catch herself as she fell straight into a thorn bush. But the bush, large as it was, wasn’t solid enough to break her fall, and suddenly she was tumbling headfirst down a thorny, rocky ravine. Her vision blurred when she landed hard against a flat rock sticking diagonally out of the hill.

Dizzy and disoriented, Lola could only lay in a crumpled heap, gasping for air and clutching her side, where she was sure she had broken at least a couple of ribs. Her left wrist burned painfully, as did her left hip. Had she broken those, too?

The roaring was growing closer. Lola groaned and rolled onto her back, struggling to focus on the dark treeline far above her at the top of the ravine. Everything around her was bathed in an eerie red glow from the full moon above. The moon hovered above the top of the trees, taunting her with its unblinking judgment. The trees rustled violently as the creature closed in on her. Lola let out a choked sob, cradling her broken wrist.

The creature burst out of the forest, drool dripping from its huge yellow fangs.

“Time to face your karma!” it bellowed, and then lunged at her, mouth wide open, its fangs ready to sink in—

Lola screamed and bolted upright in bed.

At first, she couldn’t process what she was seeing. She was too dizzy, her heart pounding too fast. Where was the forest? Where was the creature that had been about to eat her? Why was she sitting on a mattress and not tangled in a bed of thorns?

Lola struggled out of bed, stumbled to the light switch and flicked it on, and frantically checked her body. She was no longer in a bloody, thorn-torn dress, but back in the pajamas she usually slept in. Her skin was pale and unblemished. There was not a scratch or drop of blood in sight. She felt her ribs, her hip, and her wrist. Everything felt normal. She looked around wildly, only to see her bedroom and not the dark, twisted forest she expected.

Just the way it always was.

So what the HELL had just happened?

Chapter Text

Understandably, Lola could not sleep. How could anyone fall back asleep when they had just experienced such realistic and vivid terrors in their own bedroom?

Lola turned on the lights in every room and scoured her small apartment from top to bottom, searching for any sign that her nightmare had been real. She didn’t want it to have been real, but the idea that her mind could make up something so vivid and horrible out of nothing was almost as terrifying. She got down on her hands and knees and checked her apartment floor for any hint of leaves or dirt, but she found nothing. She combed over every inch of her bedroom, but there were no signs that there had ever been a forest there. Everything looked exactly as it had before. In a last ditch effort to prove to herself that she wasn’t crazy, Lola yanked open the thick black-out curtains covering the large double window in her apartment’s living area and looked up at the moon.

The moon was its usual normal pale yellow-white-ish color. Hell, it wasn’t even a full moon, just a simple partial crescent.

Lola sat down on the floor by the window and pressed her forehead against the cool glass. So it had just been a dream. A horrible, awful, painful, incredibly vivid and realistic-feeling dream, but just a dream nonetheless. She should feel relieved. Instead, she felt antsy and unsettled. What bothered her most was the other girls who had appeared in her dream. They had seemed so real to her. Lola was relatively certain that she wasn’t capable of imagining such vivid yet imaginary people with distinct names and unique faces and all. But she must be capable of it, because it had happened, hadn’t it?

But if the other girls were just imaginary, then why had they felt so familiar?

Lola took another peek at the moon. Still normal. Completely and utterly normal.

She sighed, heaved herself up from the floor, and yanked the black-out curtains shut, plunging her apartment back into darkness. Then she went back to her bedroom where she laid down in bed and stared up at the ceiling. The more she thought about the dream — no, the nightmare, she needed to call it what it was — the more she felt unsettled. The other girls weren’t the only detail about the nightmare that had felt strangely familiar. There were so many other things: the smell of the forest, the flickering fireflies, the blue butterfly, the thorn bushes, the red moon. Why was that?

Lola spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, unable to keep her thoughts from racing. By the time the sun came up over the horizon, she had not slept a wink. She got up and made herself a gigantic cup of coffee and then sat down at the computer, yawning and rubbing her eyes.

As Lola logged in and started her workday, tapping her fingers along the keyboard with practiced ease, she suddenly thought of something reassuring:

Maybe the reason why the previous night’s nightmare had felt so familiar was because she had had dreams in the past that had included some of the same details without her remembering it. That kind of thing happened all the time, right? Like when you get a weird sense of déjà vu that you know can’t actually be true because you have never done something like that before. That must be what it was! Keeping this idea in mind, Lola did her best to push the nightmare to the back of her mind and focus on her work.

She was mostly successful...until night fell again and she had to lay down to go to sleep. Every shadow on the wall looked like the waving branches of a moonlit forest; every noise sounded like tree leaves shaking in the wind or branches scraping against her window. Multiple times, Lola got out of bed to look out of her bedroom window and make sure that the creepy full red moon wasn’t back, even though every time she got up to check, the night sky was completely clouded over, with not a star, planet, or moon to be seen. Sometime after midnight, it started raining, and the rain lashing against the window finally put her to sleep.

That is, until she startled awake around 2 am, sure that she had heard someone whispering to her about curses and a red moon opening its eyes.

Lola tried to fall back asleep, but it was futile. No matter how exhausted she was, every time she felt herself slipping back into bad dreams, she instinctively struggled and forced herself awake. She was filled with a strong, irrational fear that if she kept dreaming the same dream, she might eventually find herself stuck, unable to get out. No, it was much better to stay awake than to get stuck in the crazy nightmare that her brain seemed insistent on cooking up every time she fell asleep. By the time morning arrived, Lola’s vision was blurry with lack of sleep and her head pounded with every heartbeat. It was infinitely harder than usual to get out of bed and start work. Her eyes glazed over every time she tried to focus on the code filling up her computer screen, and she burnt her morning coffee so badly that she had to dump it out and try again.

The next week unfolded much the same. Every day, Lola struggled to keep her eyes open long enough to do her job, and every night, she slept and woke in fits, her sleep broken up by strange visions, vivid dreams, and ominous whispers. It was always the same: a dark, mystical forest; an unspoken friendship with the surrounding butterflies and other small creatures; and the same five girls from her original nightmare-hallucination, always with the same faces and names. Then came the glowing red moon, unease, and fear, with everything inevitably ending in death.

Until one night, when the story changed...

Chapter Text

Lola awoke to someone shaking her shoulder. The face of the person hovering over her slowly came into focus as she blinked the sleep from her eyes. It was Dajeong, one of the girls from her neverending nightmares. Dajeong’s face looked particularly drawn and pale this time, pinched around the eyebrows and lips as if she were worried about something. Her long, thick hair caught the slanted rays of the setting sun and glowed red like a bad omen.

“Dajeong?” Lola said, her voice still raspy with sleep. “What’s going on—”

“Shhh!” Dajeong put a finger to her lips. “I have something urgent to talk to you about, but please don’t wake the others.”

Lola knew that this was just a dream, but as happened more and more lately, that knowledge seemed to slip away from her almost immediately, like sand flowing through her fingers. The real world already felt so far away. She looked around her. She was sitting down with her back against the tree on the outskirts of a little forest clearing. It was the first time she had seen the sun in her dreams, albeit it was setting now and the landscape would soon grow dark. The girls must have all been napping under a couple of smaller trees. Except...

“The only one who’s still asleep is Dia,” Lola said slowly. “Everyone else is already awake.”

Dajeong winced. “Yes, well, please don’t wake her. I just want to talk to you about something. In private. Is that okay?”

Lola frowned. “I guess?”

She stood up and followed Dajeong several feet away, where Dajeong sat down on a large, flat rock and then looked up at her with large, worried eyes. Instinctually, Lola wanted to reassure her and make that pinched look on her face go away, so she ignored the warning bells in the back of her mind and sat down next to her.

“What’s going on, Dajeong? You’re worrying me.”

Dajeong hesitated, her eyes flicking over to where Dia was still asleep, so naturally Lola’s gaze followed hers. Despite not waking when Lola and Dajeong had been speaking right next to her, Dia seemed to be sleeping fitfully, her eyes moving under her eyelids and her limbs twitching occasionally. Lola’s eyes then moved over to where the rest of the girls were sitting. Strangely, they were clustered together a couple feet away from Dia, whispering among themselves, and they kept glancing over at Dia.

“Do you trust me?” Dajeong asked, drawing Lola’s eyes away from the other girls and back to her. She reached out hesitantly and took Lola’s hands in hers. “You trust me, right?”

“Of course I do,” Lola said, and it was true — she didn’t know why, but she trusted these girls with her life. It was an instinctual knowledge, something that welled up from deep inside her and had no logical explanation.

Dajeong took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay. Good. Because I have something to say that may sound a little crazy at first, but please hear me out, okay?”

Lola didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded, her curiosity getting the best of her.

“I think Dia might’ve stolen the wing.”

Lola blinked. Something stirred in the back of her mind. “The wing?”

“Yes! I can’t find the box anywhere, and Dia was the last to have it. I’ve already asked everyone else, and they all said that the last time they saw the wing, it was in Dia’s hands. How are we supposed to get our wings from the witch if we don’t have the offering she asked for?”

It shouldn’t have made any sense, what Dajeong was saying, but Lola suddenly remembered that little wooden box. It was all coming back now. Ella enjoyed woodworking and had made the box by herself a few months before, which she had gladly offered up to hold the precious cargo they were carrying. Lola remembered the wing, too: a large piece of shiny, glowing wing, tattered and torn as if it had been ripped forcibly from its owner. Hadn’t Dia been the one to find it in the first place?

“Why don’t we just wake Dia up and ask her where it went?” Lola asked, puzzled. She went to stand up, but Dajeong yanked on her hands to stop her, and Lola sat back down rather hard.

“No!” Dajeong looked a little panicked. “Lola, think about it. If Dia really hid the wing, why would she admit to it? Of course she’s going to say that she doesn’t know where it went.”

“Why don’t we ask the others what they think?”

Dajeong looked a little sheepish. “...I already talked to them, Lola.”

“What?” Lola looked at the other girls again. They were looking right at her and Dajeong, but when they saw her gaze, they turned their heads away quickly. Frustration and anger began to well up in her. “Is that why they were already awake? Why did you talk to everyone else before you woke me up?”

Dajeong sighed. “Because I knew you would be the hardest to convince. You and Dia are close, and I knew that you wouldn’t want to believe that she’s capable of betraying us...”

“She wouldn’t!”

“Do you know that for sure?”

Lola opened her mouth and then closed it again.

“Look at the evidence,” Dajeong said firmly. “The box is gone. Dia was the last one to have it. Now look at her! How can she sleep so soundly knowing that she was the last one to have the wing? She was the one who found it in the first place, and she’s the one who told us about her visions of the witch. Who’s to say she hasn’t been lying to us this whole time? What if she’s already made a deal with the witch that doesn’t include us? You saw how she looked at that wing, as if it already belonged to her. And now it’s missing, and she’s over there sleeping the rest of the day away when we need to get moving again or we’ll never find the witch in time! Too many things point in her direction. It’s the only explanation.”

There was a long pause as Dajeong let her words soak in.

“What did the others say?” Lola said quietly.

Dajeong bowed her head. “That it’s likely that Dia has already made a deal with the witch to betray us.”

“So that’s it?” Lola began to feel angry and frustrated again. “Just like that? Dajeong! Even if Dia betrayed us, shouldn’t we at least wake her up and make her tell us where the wing is?”

“What if she refuses to tell us?” Dajeong countered. “What if we end up wasting our time, and the moon comes up before we can find the box? Then we’ll never get our wings.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?”

Dajeong set her shoulders and waved the other girls over. The girls scrambled to their feet and came quickly. As soon as they were clustered around Dajeong and Lola, Dajeong said quietly and firmly, looking each of the girls in the eye, “We need to sacrifice Dia to the witch instead.”

“What?!” Lola stood up. “Absolutely not. We are not doing that.”

But to Lola’s horror, the other girls stayed silent, exchanging glances with each other.

“I know it’s hard to swallow, but it really does look like Dia has betrayed us,” Ella said after a moment, her brow furrowed as she met Lola’s eyes. “And if she refuses to tell us where the wing went, then we’ll never make it to the witch in time.”

“Which means we’ll never get our wings,” Satbyeol murmured.

“But if we sacrifice Dia, the one who’s made a deal with the witch already, then the witch should understand and take that as her payment and we can still have our wings,” Sua added, the hope showing in her eyes and voice. “Lola, haven’t you always wanted to fly?”

Lola felt a horrible wave of dread sweep through her. “But Dia...”

“Was going to leave us!” Dajeong said. “She was going to keep the wing all to herself and leave us behind, after everything we’ve been through together!”

“This is our only chance,” Sua said. “We’ll never get our wings if we don’t leave her behind before she can do it to us.”

The other girls murmured their agreement.

In a past life, maybe Lola would have agreed with them. Maybe she would have felt the desire and greed for wings overtake her, and she would have been swayed to believe in Dia’s betrayal and the drastic solution proposed by Dajeong. But as Lola stood there, listening to the other girls speak, a feeling like déjà vu came over her. It wasn’t the normal kind of déjà vu, either — it was an intense, overwhelming feeling that what was about to happen was bad and that she needed to prevent it from happening at all costs, because what would happen next would be horrible and catastrophic if she didn’t. But the stronger the feeling became, and the more that Lola tried to explain why she wasn’t on board, the less the other girls listened.

“I really don’t think we should do this,” Lola said, her panic building as the other girls ignored her pleas and pushed past her in the direction of the still sleeping Dia, their intentions clear. “Please, I have a bad feeling about this! It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just— it’s just—”

“It’s just what?” Dajeong said suddenly, whipping around and crossing her arms as she glared at her. “Is there something you’re not telling us Lola? Like maybe that you are in cahoots with Dia, and that’s why you’re so against this plan?”

“What! No!”

“Then what is it?”

Lola was stunned into silence, unable to reply. The other girls, sending her suspicious looks now as well, each took one of Dia’s limbs, picked her up, and left the clearing, turning their backs on where Lola stood.

Lola shook herself out of her trance and chased after them, but as she tried to follow them, time and space began to warp. The forest trees seemed to close in around her, their long, spiky branches reaching out to tear at her hair and clothes. Her surroundings became darker and darker with every step she took. Had the sun fully set already? How much time had passed? How could she have lost the other girls so quickly and easily? She shoved her way through a thorn bush, panting, and then spotted them through a break in the trees: the girls were laboring up to the edge of a cliff with Dia, who was somehow still asleep, held up between them.

“Stop!” Lola tried to cry, but nothing came out except for a quiet croak. All she could do was watch helplessly as they heaved Dia up over the edge of the cliff and let go.

Immediately, the world tilted underneath her feet; the entire sky lit up blood-red, and the full moon shone the brightest of all, like a huge red eye passing judgment on their sins. The cliff began to crumble, and then Lola was falling, everything around her was falling, and the girls screams echoed into nothingness as they fell and fell with no bottom in sight—

Lola gasped and sat up in bed. As she sat there, hand against her heaving chest to feel the way her heart raced in her ribcage, her dark bedroom slowly came into focus. Lola didn’t know how or why, but that was when it hit her:

This had happened before. Her mind wasn’t just making things up and playing cruel tricks on her — somehow, something like this had happened before, even if the details were a little different than in her nightmares, and now she was beginning to remember it. But why? Why her? Why now? And how could it possibly be true that this weird, dark, mystical past was really part of her?

Who was she?

Chapter Text

Lola really needed to lay off on her caffeine intake, but given how little she had been sleeping lately, she felt as though the amount of coffee she was drinking was justified.

As soon as her coffee was ready, she sat down in front of her computer, logged into her work email so that she could justify to herself that she was working, or at least that she was “at work,” and then opened a blank document and titled it “what I know.” By the time she was done typing, over an hour had passed and her giant coffee mug was empty. She sighed and adjusted her reading glasses, frowning at the screen.

Her notes read as follows:

• dark mystical forest

• butterflies. lots of butterflies

• a big blue butterfly that glows

• thorns. lots of thorns :(

• i can feel pain, which is not fun :(

• EVERYTHING feels super real. not just the pain but the ground, the wind, the smells...the thorns

• my bedroom turned into a forest once??? (probably not?? maybe not?? but it FELT real)

• the same 5 girls: Dia, Dajeong, Sua, Satbyeol, Ella (i think those are their names. they must be, if i can still remember them so vividly)

• i feel like i know the girls from somewhere. they’re too vivid and detailed not to be real. it’s starting to freak me out

• actually all of this is freaking me out!!! i just want the nightmares to stop and for everything to go back to normal T-T

• it always turns into a nightmare, too. why can’t i have a nice dream for once?!

• anyway uh what else

• at first i didn’t think anything of it, but i don’t know if we’re human. I think we might be pixies or fairies or something?? it’s unclear. we don’t have wings, but i think we want to have them? Sua mentioned always wanting to be able to fly

• there’s some kind of witch?? and a piece of broken wing? and a box. Dia had the box last.

• Dajeong told me that Dia had the box last.

• did Dajeong lie...?

• ...

• i think we did something bad

• :(

Lola sighed heavily and took her glasses off to rub her eyes. This was supposed to be helping her sort out everything, but the more she looked at it all written down on paper (the electronic equivalent of paper, anyway), the more ridiculous she felt. Seriously, a witch? Magic? Fairies?! Could she really and truly justify to herself the oddball idea that she must have been a wingless fairy in a previous life just because of some recurring nightmares?

It sounded crazy. If someone Lola knew tried to tell her that they were having weird recurring dreams that they thought might be memories from a past life, and then they started describing fairies and witches and a glowing red moon like an eyeball, Lola would have gently pointed them in the direction of the nearest hospital.

And yet...

There was something so real and familiar about the nightmares that Lola couldn’t shake. She put her glasses back on and continued to type:

• what do i know about the other girls? even if it’s just speculation?

• Dia — i think she and i were friends once. the glowing butterfly seemed to have some kind of connection to her. did we actually throw her off a cliff????? god i hope not

• Dajeong — likes to collect shiny things and used to bring them to me as gifts, so she likely brought gifts to the other girls too. very persuasive. was she lying about Dia?

• Sua — she wants to fly and knows that i’ve always wanted to fly (apparently). i think i comforted her once during a storm? she and Dajeong seem close

• Satbyeol — on the quieter side. i remember (if “remember” is even the right word to use) picking flowers with her to make flower crowns and daisy chains

• Ella — the leader of our group? seems pretty level-headed and kind

Lola paused, chewing on her bottom lip. Maybe she should write something for this “past self” of hers, too, if she was so certain that her nightmares were part of a past life. Hesitatingly, she pressed enter and continued:

• Me — i was friends with these girls. we trusted each other. i picked flowers with them and comforted the younger ones during storms and kept all the gifts that they gave me.

         i miss them

The last sentence was unplanned, but once it came out of her fingertips, Lola realized that she was crying. She quickly took off her glasses and swiped away the tears with her sleeves. What was wrong with her? The lack of sleep must finally be negatively affecting her emotions the way that it was affecting everything else in her life.

That was what Lola told herself, anyway, but she couldn’t stop the frustration from welling up in her the longer she stared at the blinking cursor next to the words “i miss them.” How could she miss people who likely didn’t even exist beyond the messed up world of her brain? How could she seriously be considering the possibility of past lives and alternate worlds right now? She was wasting her time!

Lola closed the document of notes with an angry click, then took her empty coffee mug to the kitchen sink and washed it with a little more aggression than was strictly necessary. When she came back to her computer, she was determined to focus on work only and nothing else. Yet for the rest of the day, her thoughts kept wandering back to her notes document and the world that had begun to unfold in front of her eyes every time she had a nightmare.

IF the world from her dreams actually existed at some point in time (and that was a very big “if”), but Lola was now living in this world, then wouldn’t that mean that the other girls might be in this world, too? Finding them even if they did exist would be like finding a needle in a haystack, but if the nightmares continued to bother her and disrupt her life, wouldn’t it be the logical thing to do to seek out the other girls and see if they were having the same dreams?

Once the idea found its way into Lola’s brain, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. So, finally, she decided that if the nightmares didn’t stop, she might have to resort to such drastic measures. Even if it meant aimlessly wandering around the city and looking out for people who may not exist, surely it was better than doing nothing and letting the uncertainty drive her crazy, right?

Maybe she was already crazy. Either way, she was determined to find out.

Chapter Text

That night, Lola dreamed again.

This time, the dream didn’t start in or near the forest. Instead, Lola opened her eyes in the middle of a swaying, sun-warm field of wildflowers and grass. Just as before, though, the knowledge that she was dreaming slipped away from her almost immediately.

Lola sat up and stretched. She was pleasantly warm from the late afternoon sun; she must have dozed off while picking and weaving flowers with the girls. From next to her, Satbyeol looked up from the flower crown she was making and smiled. Sua and Dajeong were fast asleep curled up together on Lola’s other side, but there was no sign of Dia or Ella.

As if on cue, Dia and Ella came into view through the grass, whispering to each other excitedly. Dia looked up from their whispering and made eye contact with Lola, and Dia’s face broke out into a wide smile. She said something quietly to Ella, and then they both hurried over to where the rest of the girls rested.

“You’ll never believe what Dia found!” Ella said breathlessly, her smile mirroring Dia’s and lighting up her face.

“What is it?” Lola asked.

“Come on, wake up the others!” Dia said. “You have to come see it.”

No matter how much Lola and Satbyeol teased them about it or asked various questions, Dia and Ella were tight-lipped about what Dia had found. So Lola gently shook Sua and Dajeong awake. As the youngest girls yawned, rubbed their eyes, and asked what was going on, the scene seemed to ripple and melt all around them. Next thing Lola knew, she was back in the dark, mystical forest, following Dia and Dajeong closely through a small winding path lined tightly with trees. It should have been a jarring transition, but instead, Lola barely gave it a second thought.

“Over here!” Dia said.

Dia ducked underneath a sturdy, low-hanging branch sticking out from a particularly old, gnarled tree and disappeared into the underbrush, dragging Dajeong with her by the hand. The rest of the girls followed. Between some very old trees, nestled in the middle of a patch of flattened grass and underbrush, something glinted. Lola gasped, her heart leaping in her chest.

It was a torn piece of glistening blue wing.

The girls crowded around the wing, eyes wide in awe.

“Is that...?” Dajeong whispered.

“A wing!” Sua finished for her, grabbing her hand and squeezing it tightly.

Dia lifted the glowing wing carefully out of the underbrush and held it up as if it was the most precious, valuable thing in the universe. “I wonder where it came from,” she said breathlessly, clearly as affected as the rest of the girls.

Each of the girls reached out to gently touch the glowing membrane of the wing. Something stirred deep inside Lola as she trailed her fingers across its shiny, delicate surface. She wanted to have wings like this. The unexpected desire tugged at her heart and swelled up in her chest until it was all she could think about. Just imagining that this wing was one of hers filled her with indescribable joy. If only it could be true...

The scene slowly rippled and melted away again. Now, instead of surrounding the wing, the girls surrounded Dia, whose face was white with fear.

“It’s the same nightmare every night,” she said, her voice wavering. “This witch with glowing red eyes comes to me and says I need to give her the wing, and if I do, then we’ll all get shiny new wings of our own, but if I don’t...” Dia’s voice broke for a moment, “...then she’ll curse all of us.”

“What should we do?” Sua said, her eyes wide with fright.

“Maybe we should go find the witch,” Ella said quietly. “Do you think she’ll really be able to give us our own wings?”

“If it’s between getting wings and being cursed because we didn’t listen to her, I choose the wings,” Dajeong said with conviction, and the other girls murmured in agreement.

The idea that her friends were willing to go with her to find the witch seemed to strengthen Dia and give her fortitude, as she straightened up and said, “If we do, we have to do it before the red moon rises and opens its eye. That’s what the witch told me.”

“‘Opens its eye’?” Satbyeol said. “What does that mean? Maybe we have to reach the witch before the full moon rises?”

“We should get going soon, then,” Lola said. “The full moon is very soon.”

Again, the other girls agreed, so Ella carefully placed the piece of wing in a box she had carved herself, and once the box was safely in one of the girls’ arms, they set off deeper into the forest.

The scene melted around Lola again. Now, instead of making their way through the familiar mystical forest with its friendly glowing bugs and moss, the girls were surrounded by huge old leafless trees that were covered in thorns and cloaked in shadows darker than the darkest night. A horrible sense of foreboding swept over Lola. Where were they going? Would they be able to find the witch before the full moon rose? Was this really worth gaining her own pair of wings? Lola’s steps faltered for a moment, but all she had to do was remember how she had felt when her eyes had landed on the piece of broken wing for the first time, and she pushed on.

Her surroundings melted around her again. This time, Lola was being shaken awake by a pale, scared-looking Dajeong, who proceeded to tell her that she believed Dia had stolen the wing. The creepy old forest, with its shadows and thorns, loomed over them, casting its foreboding and evil spell over the girls’ minds.

Lola didn’t want to believe what Dajeong was saying — “That can’t be possible, we all made a promise to find the wings together! Do you really think she would do that?” — but the more that Dajeong spoke, the more Lola found herself believing her words. Dajeong’s words slipped into her mind and took root there, and the more Lola thought about Dia betraying them, the angrier she became. The other girls clearly felt the same, because when Dajeong said that they should rid themselves of Dia by pushing her off a nearby cliff, they agreed.

So that was how Lola found herself carrying Dia with the other girls — the other fairies, she corrected herself, and soon-to-be proper ones, at that, once they had received their wings — towards the edge of a moonlit cliffside.

As they lifted Dia up over the edge, the scene rippled and melted away again. Now, Lola huddled together with the remaining fairies, quivering in fear as the entire night sky lit up red as if it were drenched in blood.

“Something must have gone wrong!” Dajeong shouted. “We have to find Dia!”

The scene rippled again. Now a ragged, black cliff-face stretched up above Lola like a bad omen against the blood-red sky. Lola pushed through the underbrush, calling out Dia’s name, but there was no answer. Just as she was about to give up hope, she spotted a flash of blue in a clearing up ahead. A cloud of dark butterflies swarmed around her, and in the middle of them, a fluttering glowing blue butterfly stuck out easily from the rest.

“Everyone, I think I found something!” Lola called out.

No response.

Lola tried calling out to the other fairies a few more times, but to no avail. A horrible feeling of loss and abandonment swept over her. Was she truly alone now?

As Lola stood there, trying to decide what to do next, the glowing blue butterfly fluttered away from the clearing. After a moment’s hesitation, she followed it. She couldn’t explain why, but she felt some kind of connection to it, as if it were the only kindred spirit left in the forest whom she could count on. The mysterious butterfly led her down a winding, rocky path that twisted away from the cliffside and disappeared into the dark depths of a narrow ravine. The walls of the ravine grew taller and taller around Lola as she followed the faint blue glow, and a feeling of claustrophobia crept up the back of her neck. She was ready to turn around and go back when she spotted it: glowing footsteps on the ground.

“Dia?” Lola called out. “Is that you?”

No response.

Lola crept forward, following the glowing footsteps and the big blue butterfly fluttering ahead of them. The ravine wound this way and that until it suddenly opened up into a dark, rocky cavern. At the other end of the cavern stood a huge, engraved wooden doorway with gnarled old trees standing on either side of it like guards. The glowing footsteps led right up to the door. The blue butterfly fluttered up to the door, and then to Lola’s horror, disappeared in a small flash of light.

“Wait!” Lola cried. “Don’t leave me!”

She rushed up to the door and was about to start hitting it with her fists when she noticed for the first time a small glowing object that the butterfly had left behind: a key.

Lola picked up the key, and with shaking fingers, inserted it in the keyhole and turned it.

The huge wooden doors swung open. Behind them was a large white room, where the butterfly was now hovering. As Lola watched, the butterfly began to glow more and more brightly, until Lola had to look away, it was so bright. When the light faded, Lola opened her eyes and gasped. The big butterfly was gone, and in its place was a young fairy much like herself, but with only a single, glowing blue wing. The one-winged fairy looked up and made eye contact with her, and Lola was suddenly filled with a rush of understanding and recognition. You helped us, Lola wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come out. You’re like us. Who are you? Who hurt you?

“Find me in the new life,” the one-winged fairy whispered, reaching out her hand. “Please.”

Lola reached out her hand to meet her halfway, but then the scene dissolved around her once more, and Lola awoke with a start. Her pillow was wet, and her hair was sticking to her cheeks. She reached up to touch her face and realized she was crying. As she got up out of bed to wipe away the tears with a warm washcloth, Lola felt a new sense of resolve settle in her chest. There were no longer any doubts in her mind. It might mean that she was crazy, but Lola knew what she had to do next.

She was going to find the other fairies and track down the butterfly who had helped them.