Crash Landing in Maple Hollow
Storm-scars, it turns out, do not have landings. They have arrivals.
You come through in a tumble of cloud-fluff and legs and one yelling prince, and land in — apples. Windfall apples, dewy grass, a sky just going morning-pink, and up the hill the split tree, and beyond it, white and dear and impossible: Aunt Bee's farmhouse. The scar dropped you in the orchard. Home.
“So this is your world,” says Nimbus, upside down in the grass, deeply impressed. “It smells like breakfast.”
But Sera has gone still, ears flat, and then you see it too. Down the slope, the meadow — grey. Not one patch, like the night you left. A tide of grey, lapping at the fence line, silent and patient, and in it the fence posts stand like things that used to matter. However long you've been gone, the grey has not been idle here.
Growler, exhausted, shrinks to the size of a pillow and refuses to fly another foot. Whatever you do next, you do it here, in your own world, where the same enemy is winning quietly.