Reverie
The storm was all-consuming. And Periwinkle couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Beneath her feet was the Pixie Dust Root. It was visibly sick, weak and spotted and bloated, looking ready to wither completely at her first misstep. The Pixie Dust Tree stood close by, pitching in the wind that wrenched at her hair and drooping wings.
And in her hand, she gripped a spindle.
Spindles were for making thread; Periwinkle knew this.
She just didn’t know how, or with what. She stretched toward the storm clouds, hoping to draw them down and twist their fibers into something manageable—but it was no use.
She couldn’t fly with wet wings, and even as she struggled upward, she found the Pixie Dust Root had wrapped itself around her ankle.
It smelled spoiled, and its touch burned her skin.
It yanked at Periwinkle’s leg, pulling her down, down, down.
And then, before her very eyes, the rot inside the Pixie Dust Root crept all the way to the trunk of the Pixie Dust Tree.
The tree decayed and died in rapid motion. Spots crept over the rest of its roots and its trunk and branches; it grew soft and slimy before shriveling and turning black all over. The Pixie Dust Well at its base and at the base of the root evaporated, glittering gold turning to dry brown dust.
Cries broke out behind her, and Periwinkle twisted in the root’s grasp. She choked on her own sob when she saw fairies falling from the sky.
And then, suddenly, her view stretched farther, and somehow she could see all the way across the Never Sea, all the way to the Mainland.
Her friends were there. Gliss, Spike, Sled, Slush. The land was covered in winter, its animals trapped in sleep, its ground covered in frost and snow. And for the first time, Periwinkle realized the complete, horrible truth.
The Pixie Dust Tree had died, and life in Pixie Hollow was never going to be the same.
But the Mainland would be changed, too.
Without pixie dust, the Mainland would be trapped in winter forever. The warm season fairies would never be able to bring spring and wake it up. And the winter fairies would never be able to fly home.
A dead Pixie Dust Tree meant Periwinkle would never see her friends again.
Her wings stopped fighting, with that realization. And the rest of her did, too.
But as Periwinkle sank, wings unresisting, she felt—something. A spark of something that caught at her, hooking her through the heart.
A golden thread appeared in her hand.
She looked up, and there he was, racing toward her faster than the wind, faster than her own thoughts.
Weaver, connected to her, just at the end of the thread.
“Periwinkle!”
Weaver streaked across the sky toward the root and the tree. The world around him was a horror. But all he could see was Periwinkle.
Her wide, terrified eyes. Her shaky breathing, her face pale where it wasn’t red from crying. But Weaver could hardly blame her.
He recognized this dream, of course. But this—this was not how his dreams had felt.
Weaver knelt in front of her, hands cupping her face; a falling branch had scratched her cheek and temple. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right. I’m here.”
“But the tree—” Periwinkle stifled a sob. The Pixie Dust Tree’s trunk was withered, split wide open and leaking spoiled sap. A few limbs clung to it limply; others lay broken among its fallen leaves and exposed roots.
Weaver shook his head, pressed his forehead to hers. “It’s just a dream.” A lavender haze filled the air as he held her. “It’s just a dream.”
Periwinkle rubbed hard at her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
Her broken whisper cut him to the heart. But he’d known; of course he’d known. She didn’t understand that all this was only happening in her head.
Periwinkle was a dreamer, but she wasn’t a dream-talent.
The night he’d seen her dreams floating in the sky, he’d hardly been able to believe the Winter Woods held any other dreamers at all. The lights had called to him, like a hearth to a lost human child.
He’d been more like that lost boy than he wanted to admit. But seeing the dreams had brought relief like the soft fall of snow.
And then, of course, he’d found out it was Periwinkle dreaming. Periwinkle the frost-talent, who saw nothing outside her elite little circle—who could barely see past the end of her own perfect little nose.
Perfect Periwinkle. Pretty Periwinkle. Popular, perpetually adored Periwinkle.
Everyone in Pixie Hollow knew who she was. Admired her. Wanted her party invitations, or her outfit advice, or her attention. Everyone wanted something from her. And Weaver was no exception, however much he wished he could deny it.
He’d been so certain he had her pegged when they’d met. So certain that he wanted as little as possible to do with her and from her.
And yet: he’d been just like everyone else. She’d drawn him in before he’d even known it was happening.
It had been a mistake, getting this close to her, letting her fill his head and cloud his vision with her rose-colored view of the world. He knew it was a mistake. Periwinkle was untouchable for someone like him—entirely out of reach.
He had made all kinds of mistakes lately.
Watching her fall apart there in front of him, he knew he was going to make at least one more.
Weaver slid a hand into Periwinkle’s hair. When he drew it away, the mass of dream fiber he’d imagined producing from her thoughts was in his fingers—not an actual dream, of course, but as long as they were there in her dream, he could conjure up anything he wanted to.
Taking the spindle from her hand, he twisted a short leader from the mass of dream fiber and tied it to the spindle’s hook, then gave the spindle an efficient flick. It twisted in the air, a tiny hurricane at the end of the string, almost a mirror image to the storm clouds gathering overhead.
A moment later, he caught the spindle and began to feed more of the dream fiber into it, letting the leader’s twist roll into the rest of the dream, his fingers coursing over the newly spun thread with rough familiarity.
Bit by bit, he added more dream fiber, spinning it and wrapping it around the bobbin as it lengthened.
Periwinkle chewed her lip as she watched him, and the curiosity and hope in her expression turned him inside out.
A moment later, he’d made lengths and lengths of dream-thread, blue and green and pink and glowing. “Help me,” he said. Handing her the spindle, he crouched beside the root.
“This is it?” Periwinkle asked. “This is all we have to do?”
Pain rolled through him again, like a thorn to the heart or a wing.
Of course she didn’t believe it would be so easy. Her mind might not remember what had happened in the Sapphire Mine, but her body hadn’t forgotten. Of course she was afraid.
Her hopes had been smashed beneath a heap of rocks and dust. And it could’ve been so much worse, if he’d been any slower.
Just another thing that would’ve been all his fault.
“Yes.” He touched her cheek, forcing himself to smile. “This is all we have to do.”
So there, in Periwinkle’s dream, he showed her what it would be to save the Pixie Dust Root.
Leaving the spindle in her hand, he began unfurling the dream-thread and ran a length of it over the main shoot first, the iridescent colors glowing brightly against the bloated, sickly wood.
Once he’d conjured the dream-magic scissors, he cut segments of the thread to tie torn-off rootlets back together while Periwinkle tossed loops of it around forks that were still intact.
Together they wrapped the dream-thread around the root like dancers around a maypole, the peridot-aquamarine-rose thread like a bandage around the unhealthy-looking bark.
Weaver could feel Periwinkle’s trepidation, there inside her dream. But he could also feel Periwinkle’s love for her friends, for winter, for the Pixie Dust Tree.
To her, dreaming was a gift, not a curse. He’d never seen things that way until he’d met her.
Periwinkle had changed everything—almost.
When they were done binding up the root, Weaver took her hand, and together they watched the Pixie Dust Tree grow strong again, knitting itself back together beneath a shimmer of violet. And the look on Periwinkle’s face—it took Weaver’s breath away.
She was always doing that. Knocking him off course with just the tiniest thing. The reverence in her face every time she looked at the dreams, her proximity at Floss’s, her curiosity and complete disregard for his personal space. Her voice when she’d defended him, though he’d barely deserved it.
He would never forget the feel of her shoulders under his hands and her lips under his own.
He’d been completely beneath her notice for so long. It would’ve been better if he’d stayed that way.
But Weaver still couldn’t help watching her as she fluttered delicately into the air, to the Pixie Dust Tree that was so much closer in this dream than it was in reality. When he saw the tree, though, he frowned.
He recognized all the pieces of this dream. The rot, the storm, the root, the tree.
Everything but the golden web wrapped around the Pixie Dust Tree’s trunk, sparkling in the clear light of day.
Periwinkle’s dreams were darker than his had ever been. But this web—it was brighter than anything his dreams had ever shown him.
He thought then of the dream that always came back to him, the one where he chased the moon. Where even as he flew and fought and stretched, he knew it was for something he would never capture, could never save.
This dream was no different, really.
Weaver could never catch the moon. And watching Periwinkle delicately touch the golden web wrapped around the tree trunk, he knew—he knew—she could never be his.
He was chasing a storybook ending. And he was no storybook hero.