Elara blinked. She was falling.

  Not in the whoops, gravity wins again sense, but in the nothing exists but motion sense, tumbling headfirst through shifting spaces that bent and twisted around her. There was no up, no down, only the dizzying rush of movement through an ever-changing reality. The colors—no, concepts—of different realms blurred past in an impossible swirl: a world made of crystalline trees that hummed forgotten songs, a void of endless books flipping their own pages in a silent storm, a place where everything was sideways, the sky a massive eye that blinked so slowly it made time feel sluggish.

  She flipped end over end through a river of liquid stars, her body stretching too long, then too small, then folding into impossible fractals before snapping back together. The sensation of being flickered—one moment, she was herself, solid and whole, and the next, she was a thought drifting through the mind of something immense. Something waiting. Her breath hitched as awareness brushed against her, vast and impossible. For a fraction of a second, she wasn’t falling at all—she was held in the gravity of something ancient and endless, wrapped in the heavy pressure of a gaze too large to be seen.

  Then—Elara blinked. A mirror. White tile. A sink. A bathroom. On Earth.

  She stared, body frozen mid-motion as if the laws of physics hadn’t quite caught up with her yet. A fluorescent light buzzed overhead. The air smelled sterile, the sharp bite of soap and something vaguely lemon-scented. Water dripped from the faucet with an infuriatingly normal plink, plink, plink. Her fingers twitched. Her chest rose and fell in steady, human breaths. And strangest of all—she felt fine.

  Pain had been her closest companion for hundreds of years—no, really, she and suffering had been in an on-again, off-again relationship longer than Henry had been alive. But now? Nothing. No burning ache, no lightning-strike agony, not even the comforting tingle of a near-death experience waiting to pounce on her. Just… an eerie, alien absence. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  Her body felt—heavy. Solid. It took a moment to realize why. Instinctively, she flapped her wings. Or—she tried. Nothing. Her back was empty. The breath in her lungs froze. A cold, creeping horror slithered through her ribs as she reached behind her, fingers grasping at air. No familiar shimmer of gossamer-thin wings. No telltale flicker of magic humming beneath her skin. No comforting weightlessness keeping her aloft. Gone. Her wings—her beautiful, sparkling, mischievous little wings, the very things that let her slip between worlds like an unhinged, magical mosquito—were gone.

  Elara’s heart pounded, slamming against her ribs like it, too, wanted to escape this awful, awful reality. She reached for her magic, her trusty, temperamental reservoir of chaos, ready to set something on fire or rip a hole in the fabric of reality for funsies—only to find nothing. No spark. No pulse of energy. No flickering chaos at her fingertips. Just emptiness, vast and unyielding, like a door that had been locked from the other side.

  The tiles beneath her feet felt too real. The weight of her body pressed down, unforgiving and unnatural. She lifted one foot, then set it down again, as if testing whether gravity had actually claimed her. It had. Her hands curled into claws, and a sound built in her throat, a thin, strangled thing, half a whimper, half a snarl. She felt like a bird stuffed into a glass cage—wings clipped, sky stolen, left to rot under fluorescent lights and lemon-scented soap.

  Her magic had never not been there. Never. Even in the worst of times, even when the pain had been unbearable, it had still existed. The loss of it was more than a wound. It was a fundamental breaking of everything she was. The realization settled in her chest like a weight, pressing and pressing until it became unbearable.

  Elara inhaled sharply through her teeth, then threw back her head and screamed. “WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?!”

  Her voice rattled the mirror. The faucet wobbled. Somewhere in the building, a dog started barking. Good. Let them all know. Something very bad had just happened, and the universe had precisely five seconds to explain itself before she started tearing holes in reality with her bare hands—if she could figure out how, that is.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  She searched the room, her frantic gaze darting across the sterile walls, her breath coming in sharp, uneven bursts. A hospital. The same one from Henry’s dream prison, the place she had mocked so freely when it had been his problem. But something was off. Or maybe—not off, exactly. Just wrong in a way she couldn’t immediately define.

  There was no mist magic humming in the background, no invisible strings tugging her home, no sense of the unseen pressing against her skin like an overbearing stagehand nudging her back into the performance. The very air felt unnatural, too clean, too still, too… mundane. She took a step forward—and nearly tripped.

  Oh. Right. Legs.

  She scowled, begrudgingly using them like a plebeian. Walking—walking, for gods’ sake!—felt clunky, unnatural, an insult to her usual floating, darting existence. Her steps were awkward and unbalanced, like a baby deer experiencing gravity for the first time, each movement a painful reminder that something was wrong. She made her way toward the bathroom, hoping for some sliver of familiarity.

  When she reached the mirror, she snapped her gaze to the reflection. And immediately regretted it.

  The face staring back at her was not hers.

  Elara’s breath hitched. She tilted her head. The reflection mimicked her. She swallowed, lifting a hand to touch her cheek—only it wasn’t her cheek. The skin was softer, the bones structured differently, the shape of the lips wrong in a way she couldn’t ignore. The moment stretched too long, her heart hammering as she cataloged every unfamiliar detail. Then, finally, it clicked.

  Henry’s mother.

  Her mouth opened. The reflection’s mouth opened with her. She blinked. So did it. She gritted her teeth and hissed out the first, most rational thought that came to mind.

  “What. The actual. Fuck.”

  The words barely left her lips before she stumbled back, her heel catching awkwardly on the tile. She fell, landing with a hard, undignified smash that sent a jolt of pain rocketing through her very delicate, very unprepared backside. "OW!" she yelped, clutching her side as another sharp, unfamiliar sensation jabbed into her ribs. What was that?! Was this what people with flesh and bones had to deal with all the time? No floaty grace, no effortless hovering, just—gravity?? Rude.

  The pain lingered, throbbing in a way that wasn’t just physical. A buried memory, distant but persistent, scratched at the edges of her mind. The last time she had felt something so human, so grounded, was the day her mother had saved her from the witch’s cult. She had been younger then, fragile, mortal, too weak to fight back. Her mother had given everything to change that.

  Tears spilled down her face, unbidden and inconvenient. She missed her wings, missed the way they used to flutter in excitement, the way they let her hover over Henry’s shoulder, making him insane with her constant presence. She missed her magic, the raw, crackling energy that had always been an extension of herself, wild and chaotic, untamed and infinite. Without them, she felt… less. Diminished. Trapped in something too small, too fragile, too human.

  And more than anything—she missed Edward.

  Her breath shuddered out of her chest. He should have been here. He always found her. Always. But now? There was nothing. No whisper of his presence, no reassuring thread of magic between them. Just empty, endless silence.

  "Edward!" she sobbed, flailing in despair on the cold, unfeeling hospital floor. "MY BEAUTIFUL, LOYAL, INCREDIBLY SHARP PRINCE OF DAMCYAN! WHERE ARE YOU?!" Her voice echoed pitifully against the sterile walls. The silence did not answer.

  Sniffling, she gave one last hiccup for dramatic effect before instinctively grabbing at her side, expecting to find nothing but disappointment and despair. Instead, her fingers brushed against something familiar—cool metal, smooth and reliable. Her trusty spoon. Her weapon. Her partner. Edward.

  "Edward!" she gasped, clutching him to her chest like a long-lost lover. The soul bind was still intact. Somehow, through the absolute lunacy of being bodysnatched into Henry’s mother, through the horrifying betrayal of gravity, through the soul-crushing loss of her wings and magic, Edward had remained. She exhaled, her breath shaky but steadying.

  Okay. Okay. As terrifying and nightmare-inducing as this entire situation was, she still had the most important tool in her arsenal. She wasn’t completely defenseless. And that meant one thing—she wasn’t out of the game yet.

  Wiping the tears from her stolen face, she forced herself to breathe, to slow the erratic pounding in her stolen chest. She wasn’t going home anytime soon—assuming she even could. That didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that she was here. And if she was here, then so was he.

  The plan had failed. The barrier between worlds was gone. And when Henry arrived, she needed to be ready.

  The end.