Wings of Reverie (Wings of Pixie Hollow #2)

Prologue Summertime on the Mainland

Prologue

Summertime on the Mainland

The fairies of Pixie Hollow did not dream.

Far away in Never Land—the land of mermaids and pirates, giants and lost boys and fairies—what need could there be?

In Pixie Hollow, magic was no fleeting shimmer that appeared in the night and disappeared with the dawn. Magic was the reality of the fairies’ waking hours, the basis of their very existence, woven into the life of the land. There was no need for dreaming, strictly speaking.

But something more than need drove Periwinkle as she drifted through the gathering twilight along the border of Winter and Spring. A soft snowfall dusted her pale shoulders, her short silver hair. The wind smelled like pine resin and frost, and somewhere far away, she heard the cry of a snowy owl.

As a winter fairy, Periwinkle could not cross the bridge that linked these two quarters of their realm; her winter wings wouldn’t last in the warmth of the spring sunshine.

But hovering at the edge of Pixie Hollow’s Winter, she could smell the flowers that were forever blooming in Spring, and she could see the soft green grass.

And, if she let herself pretend just a little, she could imagine she saw butterflies and fireflies floating like jewels and stars on the air.

Periwinkle found herself here more and more often: caught between her world and another one. Caught on the brink of—something.

There was just something about boundaries, and edges, and borders, and other kinds of in-between spaces, she thought.

Something about the way she couldn’t predict what might happen there, or what might appear.

Found things, Periwinkle sometimes called these little surprises. Trinkets and tokens of the unexpected.

No, it wasn’t need that drove Periwinkle to the border.

Because her life was fun, and free, and exciting.

She and her best friends Spike and Gliss were always bursting with ideas and energy.

They were frost-talents, nature fairies who brought winter to the Mainland at the end of every autumn, and they spent the better part of the year busily preparing for it.

Everyone in the Winter Woods knew them, and they knew everyone—well, almost everyone—in the Winter Woods.

Periwinkle loved her friends, and she loved her talent. They were beautiful constants in her life, like fixed stars in the winter sky.

But no matter how much Periwinkle loved and counted on her guiding stars, there was always a little piece of her searching for surprises. Seeking after the promise of found things, full of curiosity that only grew as it was fed.

Yearning to welcome the magic of the unexpected.

She finally found it there, that summer evening in Winter, close to its border with Spring.

For a moment, she thought the little puff on the ground was a small white flower, something that had drifted over from some delicate, waxy-leaved Spring tree and hadn’t yet frozen in the chilly Winter air.

When she got closer, it looked more like a tuft of cotton—impossible, since cotton couldn’t grow through the snow that never melted, and the thing glittered with iridescent light, like a frosted cloud of rainbow.

Periwinkle fluttered softly to the ground, feeling the powdery snow give way beneath her feet, and bent to pick up the little shimmering puff—

“Jingles!” She gave a quiet gasp of surprise as it began to melt into her skin.

One minute, she had been cupping it in her palms, watching it sparkle like a handful of gems. And the next, it had disappeared, sinking into the pale skin of her hands like melting ice.

The unexpected—there, and gone.

Or was it?

Periwinkle didn’t feel any different, at first. There was no change to the way her wings carried her home, no difference in the way her talent worked as she experimentally frosted a birch branch on the edge of the Frost Forest.

But there was a reason the winter fairies weren’t supposed to wander so close to the border. And for the first time, Periwinkle wondered if the warmth of its sunshine was the only reason why they were meant to keep well away.

She didn’t know just how impossible it was to control what happened in those in-between places, where reality threaded itself through gaps in the rules. Where the ordinary could be altered into something sparkling and rare.

Periwinkle had her first dream that night.

She had her second the night after that.

And with them, a new kind of in-between place became magically open to her.

Periwinkle was pretty well used to threading the gaps in the rules that governed life in Pixie Hollow. But the adventure she found—there at the heart of the dream magic, at the end of the thread—was a rare and sparkling one, indeed.