The Hollow Mirror of Infinite Endings

Once Upon Another Time

Long ago, when the Magnificent North was just the north, and fae still lived in the heart of the woods, it was believed that the wind was the spirit of a fairy queen who refused to leave the mortal plane after her death.

Some say that this fairy queen stayed for love, unable to say goodbye to her living consort.

Others claim it was a curse that kept the queen trapped in the North.

But the ones who were there, the ones who still remember the Age of Fae, say that the queen had always been far more enamored with humans than the other fairies had, and it made a strange, uncanny sort of sense that instead of moving on, she would simply shift into a different form. That she would turn into the wind.

Before, the wind blew in only one direction, from east to west, moving like the sun. And for the most part it still does. But beware if you feel a shift in the wind: Change is on its way.

Long ago, every family knew the signs and sayings:

If the wind moves north to south, the change will most likely be favorable. A northern wind brings many good things.

But woe if it moves west to east. A reverse wind brings mean tidings, wrongness, backward shifts, an upheaval of what should be.

And if you feel it whirl and twirl, stirring up leaves and flowers and dust and making a great fuss, then anything might happen. A twisting wind brings what it will … magic, madness, or the unmaking of what has been.

These superstitions were carved around windows or sewn into drapes. But over time, all stories of fairies faded, the way that stories always do, and the truth of the wind turned from myth to superstition and finally to beliefs forgotten by time.

But just because things are forgotten does not mean they are untrue.