Home Before Morning

You say yes.

The Queen is true to her word: gifts, a swift escort, a rift opened with royal courtesy — and your own bed, before morning, exactly as promised. Aunt Bee holds you so long and so hard that breakfast is nearly lunch.

It takes three days for the quiet to start feeling wrong. The pumpkins shrink back to normal. The weathervane remembers the wind. Whatever magic leaked into the farm drains slowly away like bathwater, and with it goes something you can't name until you're lying awake on the fourth night: the feeling of being needed by something impossible.

Far away — you will never know how the Sky Trials would have ended. You will never know what boon you might have asked. Somewhere beyond a closed rift, a pink unicorn faces the Court's justice, and the Thorn Queen's wolves, without you. She'd be the first to say you earned your safe bed, Madison. You were, after all, only a visitor.

You were never only a visitor.