The Crossing

It seemed to be a fact of life that any bout of good luck was sure to be followed by bad. At least, that was what Rhiannon had determined over many, many years. Graduating college had been followed by a massive recession, so no one was hiring full-time. Finally finding a full-time job was rewarded with her car giving up the ghost before any sort of savings could be built up. And so, when she got the notification a lottery ticket she’d purchased (alongside a singular bottle of wine and a bag of chips) at a gas station had won...well, she just started bracing herself.

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There were too many zeroes.

Rhiannon heard the person waiting their turn at the ATM shuffle behind her, but she had to take another moment to look at the amount in her bank account. What else was she supposed to do but stare? The numbers seemed unreal, but she’d cashed the check herself and waited for it to clear. Even so, it surprised her. Balance: $20,352.38. She’d been cutting it close with utilities.

In the few weeks it had taken to get the winnings, Rhiannon had spent a lot of her free time thinking about how to use the money. The options were endless, which was part of the problem. She needed a new car now, maybe one that was only two decades old instead of three. Credit card and student loan debt exceeded the amount, but paying $20,000 into it would be an incredible help. She could get an entirely new wardrobe, or redo her dated bathroom, or take the vacation of a decade. She could redo part of her apartment into an art studio with all the best supplies money could buy. Hell, she could probably manage a couple of those things. The temptation to just blow it all was monumental, even though she could hear her mom’s voice telling her to invest and save.

At the sound of a very pointed cough, Rhiannon clicked the button to get $200 cash and finished up the transaction with an apologetic nod to the person who’d been waiting. The walk to the bus station was short, and a few whistled songs later she found herself squinting up at the tree canopy. Maybe it was just the bright sunlight, but parts of the trees seemed wrong. Not like they were dying or anything like that, but like they were too alive. Looking at them set her mind buzzing and her fingers itching to try and capture the sight.

Rhiannon dug through her purse for her sketchbook. It was a worn old thing, black cover faded with use, pages a little crinkled from the water bottle that had leaked onto it last year. She flipped to a clear page — very few remained, she’d have to get a new one soon — and began to lightly sketch the sight with a pencil. Even without color, the difference in the trees that were wrong was apparent. They were larger, leaves wildly varying in size and shape, and she could just barely capture how they seemed to pulse with energy.

The buzzing in her mind was louder now; she was forgetting something. A memory tickled at the edges of her thoughts, something about these locations of natural vibrancy being dangerous. A flash of light flickered in the canopy, not sunlight, there and gone so fast she wasn’t sure she’d even seen it. Fairy light, her mind warned, and Rhiannon realized her heart was pounding. Her instincts were on edge, somehow set off by the placid scene in front of her.

She should keep moving. She should turn around and go to the bus stop and get on the bus and go home. Forget about this place.

Rhiannon snapped her sketchbook shut and threw it into her bag. She turned around.

It was too late.

Her stomach lurched and settled somewhere in her throat as the world pitched around her. The violence of the shift sent her to her knees, and she dug her fingers into the soft earth as if that would keep her from falling — not down, but sideways somehow — into a world that was so like her own, and so unlike it too.

It was so easy to forget about the land of the fey when it was simply a fact of life, but not omnipresent. The denizens of that place were hardly ever seen, and people who disappeared were considered simply careless. Just as Rhiannon had been. She should have known the emerald green of those leaves was too unnatural. Should have known it was a place where their worlds overlapped enough to allow travel.

But when the world stopped spinning and she raised her eyes to the canopy, no hint remained of the duller, mortal trees. The trees were larger and taller than they should have been able to grow. Blades of grass and weeds nearly stood to her waist. The earth clenched in her hands was deep brown and loamy, perfect, and she could almost feel it waking to her presence, wondering — she broke the connection with a shudder, struggling to keep her lunch. The staccato beat of her heart pounded in her head as she stood up, brushing dirt from her hands onto her jeans.

Rhiannon let out a sharp curse, and when that didn’t feel like enough she shouted curses for a solid minute until her throat ached. Each word felt like the evaporation of the things she had been focused on just minutes earlier — the lack of a car, the debts, the struggle to pay for housing and food, the job, the money. Her furious swearing, as rapidly as it had come on, turned into laughter. First a few slow chuckles, and then into something bordering maniacal until she was tearing up and clutching her sides. Of course, she told herself as her laughter echoed through the woods, of course the moment I get a little bit of money I wind up somewhere I can’t use it. The cash she’d so happily stuffed in her purse felt comic, about as useful as board game money.

When her ability to laugh at the situation finally gave way, Rhiannon found herself turning in a circle and staring. The trees looked more or less the same in each direction, and there was no way to pick out any further landmarks with the sheer size of the trunks. As if landmarks would really help, given she was in a completely unfamiliar place. It was loud; wind rustled through tree canopy and underbrush, birds chittered to each other, small creatures danced through foliage and ground cover. And the damned trees — they reached up into shadow. The sun didn’t seem to be penetrating as it should, but where it did it conjured rainbows and halos of light all around her. More than once, she thought she saw something move in the distance between trees tall as skyscrapers — impossibly large somethings, as if the fauna had kept pace with the flora here.

Which would be just her luck.

“Well, let’s pick a direction and go.” Rhiannon muttered to herself, and started moving. An indeterminable amount of time later, as she wove through shrubs that now dwarfed her by several feet, she heard humming. A whisper on the wind at first, but recognizable as deliberate sound. She followed it over roots that took precious minutes to climb, around tree trunks bigger than a city block, and every time she thought she was getting close, it would shift locations. To her left now, no, back to the right, straight ahead, no somehow it’s further away even though she was walking towards it. She bore the frustration for a while, perhaps half an hour, before she stopped in her tracks, hands on her hips. She was tired, and if she was going to be killed or eaten or whatever by the fey, she wasn’t going to let them toy with her first.

“Alright, that’s enough bullshit!” She called out.

The humming stopped.

So did every other sound.

Some ancient sense had her spinning around, her eyes landing on...nothing. At first. And then features seemed to coalesce out of the shadow of a tree. A body that was human-ish yet taller and elongated and swathed in fabric seemingly made of shimmering stars. Sharp, angular features played on the line between masculine and feminine. The ears were elongated and pointed as the stories back home described. The creature leaned against a tree in an attitude of curious relaxation, but the face spoke of something else. The eyes — a black that glimmered like moonlight on water, without pupil or iris to speak of — were locked on her with what felt like malicious amusement. The way a cat looked at its prey.

Rhiannon was frozen in place, errantly hoping she was just having a nightmare. The sheer silence of the world around her roared in her ears.

“It appears someone wandered too close to a Crossing.” The fey-creature said, lips curling into a parody of a smile. Their voice was low and smooth, and should have been relaxing had her mind not recognized them as a threat. “Can I have your name, little lost human?”

Rhiannon had an answer halfway to her lips before she paused, blinking. They couldn’t seriously be asking that. Nearly every tale of the fey had a warning against this, the oldest trick in the book. And she had absolutely zero interest in giving away her name. She frowned, summoning bravery where there was none, and answered the way a fey would — with a question.

“Has that ever worked for you?”

To her surprise, the fey’s face cracked into something resembling mirth, and a flash of delight lit their eyes. They paused for a long moment. “...No.” And then they were smiling broadly, as if letting her in on a secret. “But I have to try, do I not?”

“Do you?”

They waved a hand. “I have appearances to maintain. From what I saw, you were attempting to capture the pure beauty of my trees upon paper and lingered too long on the threshold between your world and mine. Is it your wish to return home?”

Rhiannon blinked a few times, pressing a hand against the sketchbook in her bag to reassure herself it was there. How long had they been watching? Despite her concern, if they could truly offer her a way home, if they could offer her safe return to her life and her bills and boring job...could it really be so easy to get back? She'd been lucky enough to win twenty grand, and she wanted to spend it.

“Yes.”

She expected any number of things to come out of the fey’s mouth then, most revolving around extracting some sort of payment for the favor. Like her firstborn, or a favor to be repaid to them at a time of their choosing (always the worst agreement to make). But they just smiled that feline smile and took a few steps closer, sweeping an arm out and bowing. “The next Crossing is a days’ journey, by your measure, duskward. I will lead you there. You may call me Anhaern.”

She rolled the words around her head, and found no trap within them. “Rhiannon.”

“Well met, Rhiannon.” Anhaern said, the stars in their eyes dancing. “Perhaps you’ll find more sights worthy of capture on the way.”

They were right, she knew. She’d have to choose carefully what to draw, if that urge did strike her with a fey standing next to her and while she was completely lost in a land that ate humans alive. After all, her sketchbook only had a few pages left.