Reverie
Periwinkle stared around the stacks, knowing she was looking for something. She just wasn’t sure what.
The Hall of Winter was typically quiet. But at the moment it was noisy and crowded, the cool blue stacks full of fluttering wings and the trailing glow of fairies.
“Oops, excuse me.” Periwinkle fluttered over top of a fairy sitting cross-legged with a pile of maps. “Sorry, I just want to squeeze through.” Two music-talent fairies traded the books they were holding—identical books, she realized with a grin—and then stepped aside, letting her move between them.
“I need some light reading!” someone called from one aisle over.
“Try this!” said someone else. A burst of light shot toward the hall ceiling, then disappeared with the sound of pages slamming shut.
“Oh, very funny,” said the first voice. Periwinkle giggled.
Was she looking for the Keeper? Periwinkle slipped around an art-talent with a book on oil painting. No, she didn’t think so.
Was she looking for a book? Probably, if she was in the Hall of Winter. But Periwinkle couldn’t remember which one, or what about.
Suddenly, though, she found herself in an empty aisle.
Not a minute before, the hall had been noisy and pleasantly crowded. But a stillness settled over it now, a quiet comfort that existed only when Periwinkle was alone with her stories. Like being out in the woods, alone with the animals and the sound of the wind through the trees.
She walked between the shelves, trailing her fingers over spines, listening to their mumbling and musing. Then Periwinkle caught sight of something gleaming away down at the end of the aisle.
The thing shone like a spreading sunrise, twinkled like stars scattered across the sky. Whatever it was, she’d never seen it in the hall before.
Was it the work of a light-talent? A frost-talent? Periwinkle squinted, trying to get a better look.
But just then, a gust of wind struck her back. She frowned, then looked behind her.
Why should there be wind inside the hall?
And had the air been violet all along? Or was the lavender fog just then beginning to gather?
Periwinkle wasn’t sure what. But something was coming.
Thunder rolled, and so did the earth beneath her feet. The shelves on either side of the aisle swayed sickeningly, seeming to melt and deteriorate right before her eyes. Periwinkle lifted off the ground, wings fluttering, but the rising wind made flight feel chancy, too.
She turned. Behind her, trees burst through the floor—the tree, the Pixie Dust Tree.
Then the scene shifted, and the hall was gone, the ice tiles beneath her feet turning to snow and the twisted, collapsed shelves to enormous roots.
Periwinkle found herself looking at the Pixie Dust Root, impossibly close to the tree, with Winter’s well beneath it.
The wind rose, kicking up a cloud of pixie dust—not a sprinkle, but a wild spray. When the dust landed on the roots of the Pixie Dust Tree, they tore themselves from the ground and began to float eerily in the air, like the snaking legs of some strange animal.
Then the Pixie Dust Root twisted itself off the tree. It happened just like that. Spoiled sap leaked from the tree’s open wound, sickly sweet and rotten-smelling.
A crash came, so loud it hurt her ears. Shielding her head with her arms, Periwinkle turned and saw the Pixie Dust Tree had collapsed to the ground.
She stared wildly around for an escape, horrified, heart racing. And then—she saw it.
The Hall of Winter was still gone. But the broad gleam of light she’d noticed before, whatever it was, hadn’t disappeared.
Periwinkle raced toward the light with her wings straining. When the wind got too strong to fly, she ran, then crawled. She knew she had to reach it, one way or another, to get safely through the storm.
The last thing Periwinkle wondered before she woke up was this: Was she chasing the light? Or was the light reaching for her?