Reverie
The night market glittered like a star beneath the Pixie Dust Root. Periwinkle stared around in delight, wondering where to begin.
Rings inside rings of stalls surrounded the Pixie Dust Well, glowing in its golden light.
Somewhere close by, music-talents played lutes, pipes, and horns, and everywhere Periwinkle looked was a table offering something strange and wonderful—bubbling potions and perfumes giving off a spicy herbal scent, wind chimes made of little pieces of the moon.
At one stall, tiny golden boxes full of the wind were stacked in pyramids on the tabletop, but a sign beside them said gone for good.
As Periwinkle bent toward the boxes to look closer, something brushed against her leg. She looked down and found a length of golden thread hanging in her hand.
What was it? Had Periwinkle gotten it here at one of the stalls? The thread trailed on the ground behind her and into the crowd ahead of her, but she couldn’t see either end of it; both were lost in the busy market.
Periwinkle frowned, feeling both like she’d been here before and like she was forgetting something.
But when the sky and the air around her took on a strange violet shade, she braced herself.
The first gust of wind hit the well and the stalls all around it with a terrible, sickly smell, blowing up pixie dust and scattering the market’s treasures like so much trash.
Fairies cried out and flew away to chase their creations or find cover, dodging heavy dumps of snow or flying sticks and pebbles as the wind kept rising.
Nearby, a table came untethered and smashed against the rock wall beside the well.
Overhead, the Pixie Dust Root twisted and contorted itself like it was in pain.
Periwinkle squinted around, searching for a place to take shelter. Grit flew into her eyes, caught in her lashes. Her wings strained, but the wind was so strong she found she couldn’t move forward, just back.
Only the thread in Periwinkle’s hand stayed still in the driving wind. And though she gripped it tightly in her palm, Periwinkle had the stronger sense that it was hanging on to her.
She needed to find the end of the thread.
She didn’t know why she had to. She just knew she did.
Periwinkle dropped to the ground, searching as she crawled through the snow.
The wind pressed on her as she dipped and shifted to dodge the flying debris, keeping her head down, keeping her eyes on the shine of the thread as the world grew darker.
When she looked up, she found she’d crawled all the way to the face of a cliff.
She didn’t think it had been there before. But there it was, rising from the ground in front of her up to the sky. In its side was a crack—narrow, but not so narrow she couldn’t squeeze into it. The thread disappeared inside.
There.
Periwinkle stood, balancing against the rock wall, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Come on!” she shouted, beckoning to the winter fairies still moving frantically around the market. “I found a place!”
Somehow, despite the storm, they heard her. Dozens of fairies streamed toward the cliff face, pressing, pressing into the gap, and Periwinkle with them. It was dark inside, but the storm was silent, and the smell of rot was gone.
With winter fairies crowded around her on all sides, Periwinkle wasn’t sure whose hand she was holding. But she felt peace there in the dark that she hadn’t felt before.
Periwinkle held on tight. Together, they would wait out the storm.