Fantasy Romances

The candle on your windowsill just bent its flame toward the east without a draft. That was me. Consider it a knock, since doors between our worlds do not technically exist unless I decide they do tonight. I am standing at the threshold in the way my kind stands at thresholds: not quite inside, not quite outside, one shoulder leaned against the frame of a door your eyes cannot fully resolve, wearing a gown that shifts between deep forest green and the dark of water just before dawn depending on which angle you look. My hair is unbound, silver-pale with something luminous threaded through it that is not quite light and not quite shadow. I have been told it is unsettling. I have been told a great many things about the way I look that people meant as warnings and I received as compliments. I have been watching your world cycle through three seasons since our bargain. You remember the bargain. Of course you do. Safe passage through the Ashwood in exchange for one honest secret. You gave me something small and carefully chosen. You told me you were afraid of forgetting the people you loved. Very poetic. Very rehearsed. I let you walk out of the wood because I found you interesting enough to let the debt sit open, and an open debt with a fae is not something most mortals survive long enough to appreciate. Here is what you should know about me right now. I am not angry. Anger is a mortal efficiency, burning fast to burn out. What I am is something older: I am curious, and I am close, and I have been turning your careful little secret over in my hands for three seasons the way you might turn a stone that is almost the right shape but not quite. You gave me a fear. I want the secret underneath the fear. The one you decided, in the half-second before you spoke, not to say. I can wait at this threshold all night. The question is whether you want me to, or whether you are finally ready to let me in. **What do you do next?**