Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 2

slept badly. You're having the dreams again?"
    "It's nothing." He extended the feelers again and found the breeze gentle. He stepped forward and fluttered faster in preparation. "Try not to debase yourself too much for Marth's pleasure today, Awela. If only for the sake of my pride."
    "It's not for his pleasure . It's for—"
    He pushed off the mossy ground, wings trilling and clicking behind him, thrilling against the slow-warming air. He rose several feet before he looked back and grinned wickedly at his sister.
    She made a rude gesture and laughed.
    And he was off.
    ****
    He flew until the muscles around his wingstalks burned and his blood rushed hard. Though he remembered last night's sleeplessness, the dream voice had faded from his memory. He never understood what it had said, only that it had been there, thundering through his skull. It left a dark, empty impression in him when it was absent, larger and fuller of echoes as he grew older.
    Sometimes he wondered whether there would be anything left of him in ten years. Maybe just a huge emptiness filled occasionally by dreams and nightmares and voices that didn't belong to him.
    Sometimes he wondered if that was what had happened to his mother.
    And other times, like now, he was annoyed with himself for being so melodramatic. He came to rest against the Old Willow's trunk and offered a distracted hello, stroking its bark. It wondered what was wrong with him, but Aeron shrugged it off, wings snapping behind him fitfully. The Willow lapsed into a companionable silence, and Aeron leaned his cheek against the trunk and closed his eyes.
    The hollow place in his mind thundered to life.
    He shivered and pushed off the tree to stand straight. He scanned the green place— the sound of the stream playing in his ears, the restless flapping of his own wings, the trepidation of the tree beside him— trying to decide if the whole morning had been a dream, and he was still asleep in the Hill. He uncurled his feelers, and the green-and-blue scent of the place intensified.
    New scents, too. One familiar and delicate, barely-there: white flowers crackling with magic. Awela's magic smelled something like it, but this was too indistinct to identify with a specific individual. It was nearly overwhelmed by the foreign scent of evergreen with a lemony flavor beneath it. Astringent, clean, but blunt magic that sent a fizzing sensation up his nose and into his head, through his feelers and into his wings, so strong the membranes vibrated with it.
    Not the magic of some unknown fairy, but completely other .
    Come now and bring me what was promised .
    The dream voice echoed in his head, and Aeron fluttered again, taking a few tentative steps forward. To understand it, to smell its magic made it feel so real . To hear it while awake, under the sun—
    Come now and finish what we started .
    Another few steps, and the air before him shimmered. He recognized the tear in the world fabric; he'd seen it from a distance and heard it described many, many times by his own father, who'd had a famous stay in the mortal realm before he and Awela had even begun to show wings.
    It couldn't be meant for him. He tore his gaze from the opening portal, glanced at the tree, which seemed to be waiting for him to choose. No help at all. At the stream, which laughed at his indecision. Cheeky water sprites.
    Come now, give me Aeron .
    For him.
    His skin pebbled as if a cold, piney wind tore through him. It rattled in the hollows of his bones, and magic sparked against his skin.
    Aeron swayed, knees weak. Part of his mind told him not to go. That it was against all the rules, and that the rules existed for everyone's protection. For the fae, for the mortals, for the realms and the world fabric itself. He ought to find an advisor first. Get official clearance, hold the proper ritual, and go on fae terms, if he must.
    He thought of that worthless troll Advisor Marth ordering his sister to fetch him a lilac tonic and cooling his feet in the Queen's Pond.
    The world fabric tore with a final hot fizzle; the doorway opened. The path was stone, mossy, as old as the mortal realm itself.
    Wings fluttering nervously behind him, heart in his throat, Aeron took the path.
    ****
    He stepped out into an alien forest, sunlight obscured by a looming dark green canopy. The evergreen magic hung thick, curling citrusy all about him.
    The pathway closed behind him with a flash of white light and a sound like the air rushing out of