Fitful sleep made Alyssa toss and turn. Her world burned around her, but not the world of her birth, and even in her dream, she realized this. Something happened, and she rose from the ground and into the air as if flying.
She coughed as the breeze spiraled smoke around her, and when her lungs cleared and her eyes stopped watering, she stared at the strange world below with a feeling of sorrow more profound than she experienced when Melbourne’s hand let go of hers on the day she left.
She needed no one to tell her that this was the land of faerie. The remaining bits and pieces of the luminescent forests were beyond the ability of her words to describe, but the rest lay blackened and destroyed. Even from so high above the forest floor below, she spotted the dead littered among the ruins o
