A Realm of Myst and Dreams (The Fae of Caeldonia #1)

Prologue

Fairy tales were just that. Tales. Fantasies or folklore. Myth or legend. They were all the same: stories told to children to help them to sleep. To help them to dream. Stories woven with warnings and littered with love. Make-believe.

Or so I thought.

I had grown up with my fair share of myths and folklore.

In the small town I hailed from in the northwest of England, such tales were commonplace.

Believed, even. Fables of witches and warlocks, ghosts and ghouls, fairies and fauns, and every other fantastical creature you could imagine.

All told as if truth. But, as fascinating as they were, I rarely paid them any attention.

And why would I? I was a man of science.

A medical doctor. I did hold a firm belief in an afterlife, having witnessed enough through my work to convince me of the existence of something beyond our earthly realm.

But dreams of happily ever after… Of true love…

Of mystical creatures… Those ideals washed away with the bud of my youth.

They were replaced with reality. With hard work. With responsibility.

All right, I admit, there was love. And I knew it to be true.

My story began twenty-eight years ago, but my happily ever after started the day I met her.

My Helen. My wife. And just like those fairy tales, the ones I was so eager to dismiss, our love grew and grew and grew until just six months ago, it blossomed with the arrival of our son. Our Rowan. My boy.

My dreams – my fairy tale – had finally come true. And I honestly could wish for no more.

But… destiny was a sodding tease. She liked to tempt and torment, and just when you thought your fate had been written – your dreams had been answered – she would weave her magic threads and take it all away.

And that is exactly what she did.

Rowan’s story begins in the Highlands of Scotland. A land well known for bagpipes and whisky. For rippling silver lochs, muddy green moors, and purple-hued vistas. But what many do not realise is that it is also known for its mysteries. Its superstitions. Its ancient traditions. Its fairy tales.

Helen and I, along with her younger sister Sarah, were holidaying in Lochinver, a small town in the Highlands.

A mini-break I had promised my wife before Rowan had been born.

It hadn’t eventuated for one reason or another and he was now nearly six months old.

So, we’d decided the time was right to take that belated trip and had invited Sarah along, as she had just concluded her final year of schooling.

Until recently, Rowan had been a happy, healthy baby boy.

But of late he had developed a nasty case of croup, and despite my care and expertise, he was struggling to move past it.

So, it was no surprise that while chatting with some townsfolk at the local hotel bar, the subject of sick babies had arisen, and before I knew it, I was engrossed in a superstitious story about changeling children told by a grizzled old fisherman.

“If ye left yer ailing bairn in the woods o’ Culag,” he said, “the fairies would come and exchange it for a bonnie, hale one.”

Knowing Helen struggled with the heavy accents of the locals, I paraphrased him back. “If we leave our sick child in the Culag Woods, the fairies will exchange him for a healthy one? Surely that cannot be accurate. We’d have infants disappearing left, right, and centre.”

We had all laughed heartily at that, even the bartender, who was listening with half an ear.

The old man had muttered something about destiny…

or pledges… before we had moved on to more home-grown stories.

But something about that tale lingered in the back of my mind, casting a dark shadow over our jovial conversation.

So, how I came to find myself sitting on lawn chairs with Helen and Sarah hours later, watching my son’s bassinet neatly wedged between the boughs of a hazel tree, was beyond me.

Looking out across the lawn towards the wooded boundary, I had a clear view of that tree and its precious cargo.

It wasn’t a particularly cold afternoon, despite it being late October.

However, clouds had been slowly drifting across the sky, bringing with them the threat of rain.

Rowan had just started to fuss, his small murmurs telling us he was awake, and I knew it would not be long before Helen rose to fetch him.

But for now, we were enjoying a drink and laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation we found ourselves in.

“I think the rain may be here sooner than expected,” I said, indicating the mist that had started to creep through the trees, its spectral fingers stretching across the ground.

Rowan’s cough started up again, the barking sound a siren’s song to Helen, who immediately stood and made her way across the lawn.

I watched her walk towards the woods as the mist crept in further, noticing with alarm that it had now reached the tree where the bassinet was lodged.

My shoulders twitched as a prickling sensation ran up my spine, and I was just about to follow her when Rowan’s cough suddenly cut off.

The mist now swirled around the bassinet, the wispy tendrils appearing to reach in.

I lurched forward, my heart stuck in my throat, but just as quickly as it had appeared, the fog dissipated, and the weak afternoon sun broke up the lingering haze.

A warm glow settled over the woods, casting a net of serenity, and I let out a sigh of relief as my alarm faded, my pulse returning to normal. Helen gathered Rowan up in her arms, soothing him with that innate tenderness that all mothers seem to possess.

“That was odd, wasn’t it?” Sarah whispered, standing beside me.

I could tell from her tone that she had felt it too, whatever it was.

Helen, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the strangeness in the air and walked past us towards the house, her arms lovingly filled with our baby boy.

She murmured her intent to bathe him, and my face softened as I watched them.

While Sarah began clearing away the glasses, I pulled the bassinet from its perch, my eyes scanning the woods, searching for any signs of what had just happened.

An uneasy sensation still tugged at me. The same feeling as before, the one I’d had at the bar.

The feeling that something was not quite right.

Suddenly a blood-curdling scream sounded from within the house, and the glass Sarah had been holding slipped from her fingers, crashing to the ground, splintering into a thousand pieces.

Splintering into my soul. Later, I would recall that exact moment and remember with absolute clarity the noise that crystal tumbler made as it shattered upon the earth.

A precursor to the events that followed.

Discarding the bassinet I had managed to untangle from the hazel, I ran into the house, finding Helen backed up against the wall on the other side of the small bathroom.

She was staring, her eyes glazed with shock, at Rowan, who lay on the changing table directly in front of me, a blanket haphazardly strewn across him.

Sarah came crashing to a halt behind me before moving to her sister.

Clinging to each other, they both watched wide-eyed as I approached that table, trepidation marking my every step. With a lump in my throat and rocks in my stomach, I reached out, pinched the edge of that blanket, and pulled.

Pulled, inch by agonising inch, revealing an otherworldly glow emanating from beneath it.

Pulled, inch by agonising inch, showing that light shone from within his eyes.

They glimmered, illuminated as if by the stars themselves. He blinked slowly. Then blinked again, and as I stepped closer, the strange swirling light faded until his normal blue eyes peered back at me.

Were they his normal blue eyes? I had been certain they would turn darker, much like my own, and had noticed the colour changing over the last couple of weeks.

Now, however, they looked bluer than before.

I shook my head, my forehead creasing, convinced I had imagined it, and ran my eyes over the rest of him, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

A facecloth had been placed over his hips, a trick I had learnt from a midwife I worked with.

For some reason, my heart started to race again as I stared at that nondescript cloth.

It was unassuming, plain. Ordinary. Yet I did not want to touch it.

I felt as if I stood on a precipice. Behind me was the life I had dreamt about.

The life I knew and wanted. But before me was the unknown.

Something that would change things, forever.

My throat closed up again and I swallowed, trying to alleviate the sudden dryness. The sound was mirrored across the room, and I glanced back at Helen and Sarah still standing against the wall. They appeared to be holding their breath, as if aware of my inner turmoil.

I looked back at my son. Looked at his eyes, as he stared into mine. My hand trembled as I reached out, drawn by an invisible force, guided by a separate consciousness, and tugged on that cloth. Pulling it down and away.

A startled breath flew from my throat, robbing me of air as I looked at the child on the table.

The child who gurgled and cooed and kicked their little legs.

The child who was not mine.

My mind tried to offer up a rational explanation for what I could plainly see in front of me. But I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand.

“If ye left yer ailing bairn in the woods o’ Culag, the fairies would come and exchange it for a bonnie, hale one.”

My head reeled with what the old fisherman had said.

With what he had foretold.

With what we had laughed off as mere superstition and myth.

And as I stared at that little girl who lay in front of me, one thought came to mind, over and over and over again. It slashed at my preconceived notions. At my ideals. At my reality.

Fairy tales were real.