Charlie Morrison's Arc

Chapter 1 of 14

Charlie Morrison stood on the porch of her grandmother's cabin and watched the tree line refuse to greet her. She was thirty years old, tall in a teal sundress, and twenty years too late. When she was a child, the moment her sandals touched the moss, small lights had lifted from the ferns like startled fish. Now the woods held still. A deed sat folded in her pocket. The lawyer had called the place hers on Tuesday. The fae, apparently, had not been informed. She stepped down onto the path. A branch snapped somewhere she could not see. Something small and fast moved between two trunks, then stopped. She felt watched the way a trespasser feels watched. Her grandmother's voice came back to her in pieces on the porch swing, warning that the woods judged strangers quickly and forgave them slowly. Charlie backed up the steps and pushed through the teal door. Inside, the log walls were studded with the same blue and green crystals that crowned the roof. She had come looking for tea. She stayed looking for proof. Her grandmother had told her, more than once, that a token made the difference between friend and foe out there. A gift the fae themselves had given, so they would know their own mark when they saw it. She searched the bedroom first. Quilts, dried lavender, a hymnal. Nothing. In the sitting room she knelt at the hearth and pulled up a loose floorboard she remembered prying at as a girl. Beneath it sat a silver jewelry box, tarnished at the hinges, its lid worked with rainbow butterflies that still caught the light. Her hands remembered the weight before her mind did. She opened it. Inside, on a bed of faded velvet, lay a thin silver chain and a butterfly pendant the size of a thumbnail. The wings held the same shifting colors as the box. A folded scrap of paper sat under the chain in her grandmother's handwriting: Wear it out. They will know you. Charlie fastened the clasp at the back of her neck. The pendant settled cold against her collarbone, then warmed. She carried the box outside and set it on the top step, lid open, so whatever watched could see it too. She walked to the edge of the moss and stopped. For a long moment nothing happened. Then a single blue light rose from the ferns at her knee. Another lifted behind it. A third drifted down from a low branch and hovered a hand's width from her face. It was small enough to sit in a teaspoon and bright enough to throw her shadow onto the trunk behind her. It studied the pendant. It studied her. Then it turned and flew deeper into the trees, slowing once to look back. Charlie followed.