Through the Solstice Door

The Portal

The light changed halfway up the hill.

One second it was normal Ohio winter gray—flat, boring, like a cheap flannel sheet pulled over the sky. The next, it went… thinner. Brighter. Not sun bright, just… different. Like someone had turned the contrast up without asking me.

I slowed, boots crunching in the snow, and looked around.

Same trees. Same path. Same patchy snow and dead leaves. But ahead, between two big old pines, the air itself looked… wrong. It shimmered. Just a little. Like heat off asphalt, except it was thirty degrees and my nose hairs were freezing.

“Okay,” I told the woods. “That’s new.”

The two pines were close together, their trunks thick and rough, branches heavy with a dusting of snow. I could’ve sworn they’d just been… trees, thirty seconds ago. Normal, minding-their-own-business trees.

Now, between them, there was … something.

Door wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t solid. It was like a vertical seam in the air, a long, narrow line of pale blue light that hummed so low I felt it in my teeth more than I heard it. The smell hit next: cold metal and pine sap, sharp and clean, like biting down on a peppermint coin and a penny at the same time.

“Yep,” I muttered. “This is how people die in movies.”

I took a step closer anyway, because I have the survival instincts of a drunk raccoon.

The seam widened as I approached. Not a lot. Just enough that what had looked like a line became something with a surface. A… panel? A curtain? It was translucent at first, showing the trees behind it in a warped way, like I was looking through water.

Then it shifted. The whole thing flickered, and suddenly I wasn’t seeing the woods behind it anymore.

I was seeing… marble.

“What the actual—”

I stopped dead.

It looked like a mirror, but it wasn’t reflecting me or the pines or the trail. It was reflecting somewhere else. Somewhere with a polished white floor, crystal chandeliers dripping from a ceiling way too high to be real, and a long candlelit hall stretching out into the distance.

It wasn’t even night in there. The light was warm and gold, the way firelight makes everything soft. Where I stood, the woods were gray and cold. On the other side, it could have been the inside of some royal palace.

I blinked. Once. Twice.

The image stayed.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Either I’m having an aneurysm, or I walked into a very committed LARP and forgot to sign the waiver.”

The sensible thing to do would have been to turn around and go home. Call my sister. Say, “Hey, so the trauma finally won, I’m seeing fantasy castles in the woods, send help.”

Instead, I stepped closer.

The surface—if that’s what it was—filled the space between the trunks, about seven feet tall and three feet wide. The edges blurred into the air, no frame, no visible support. It hummed just loud enough that the hairs on my arms stood up under my coat.

I glanced behind me. Trail. Empty parking lot far away through the trees. No hidden cameras. No prank show host popping out to yell “Gotcha!”

I turned back. The castle hall waited. Big doors at the far end, heavy beams, banners I couldn’t quite make out. It was beautiful in the kind of way that made my chest ache, like all the book covers I’d ever drooled over had come to life.

“This is fine,” I told myself. “This is normal. Totally fine. You binge-read a thousand portal fantasies and now your brain is doing interactive fanfic. Great.”

I should’ve walked away. I knew that. I even took a half-step back.

Then I remembered my mother’s voice on my voicemail. My sister’s texts. The weather alert about ice. The empty spot in my bed. Ten Christmases spent pretending I was okay.

If this was a hallucination, it was honestly better than most of my reality.

I huffed out a shaky laugh. “If I’m dying, at least it’s on theme.”

I bent, grabbed a small rock from the edge of the trail, and weighed it in my hand. It was cold and rough and solid. Real. I tossed it lightly toward the seam.

It didn’t bounce. It didn’t clatter against bark or hit the snow. It hit the shimmering surface and vanished like a drop of water into a pond, sending a faint ripple across the image of the marble floor.

I stared at the spot where it had been.

“Okay,” I whispered. “That’s… less fine.”

My heart was beating faster now, loud in my ears. The hum seemed louder too, vibrating up through my boots. My breath fogged in front of me, hanging in the air for a second before fading.

“You’re hallucinating,” I told myself briskly. “Stress. Like I said, too many fae kings, not enough therapy. Go home, Timber.”

My feet didn’t move.

The hall on the other side wasn’t empty. I realized that now. Tiny figures moved at the far end—people, maybe, slipping in and out of doorways. A woman in a long dress crossing the floor. Someone carrying a tray. Their shapes were blurred by distance, but definitely there.

It was like watching a live feed. Right in front of me. Between two trees in Ohio.

I swallowed. My mouth tasted like metal.

I took one more step, close enough now that if I reached out, I could touch it. The surface looked… smooth. Glass-like. But it wasn’t reflecting me. I held my hand up anyway, about six inches away, like I was going to high-five the void.

“Don’t,” I said under my breath. “This is exactly how the stupid heroine dies in chapter two.”

I dropped my hand. The hum dipped, almost disappointed.

I thought about going back to the car. To my desk. To the box of ornaments and the carefully half-made bed. To the endless loop of “are you okay?” and “he wouldn’t want you to be alone.”

What if this was my brain breaking? What if this was some weird stroke and I collapsed here and they found me frozen on the trail with my face locked in confusion?

What if it wasn’t?

Something tugged in my chest then, sharp and low, like a fishhook under my sternum. Not painful. Just insistent. The same pull I’d felt the night I’d first opened a romance novel after the funeral and realized I could still feel anything at all.

“Fine,” I muttered. “We’ll test it. Rule stuff out. That’s all.”

I peeled off one glove, shoving it into my pocket, and reached out very slowly until my fingertips hovered over the shimmering surface.

“Just to prove you’re fake,” I told the… door, mirror, whatever. “Then I go home and call an actual therapist.”

My fingers made contact.

It didn’t feel like glass. It didn’t feel like air either. It felt like sticking my hand into very cold water. Not wet, exactly—no dampness—but that same shocking chill, all the way through the skin to the bones. The humming jumped, climbing higher, almost a soft, distant ringing now.

I yelped and tried to jerk back.

Too late.

The surface flexed around my hand, tightening. Not grabbing, exactly, but refusing to let go. Cold shot up my arm, then my shoulder, then down my spine. It was like every nerve in my body lit up at once.

“Okay, nope, we’re done—” I snapped, planting my feet, trying to pull away.

The problem was, my feet didn’t seem to be on solid ground anymore.

For a second, I could feel the packed snow under my boots. Then it went soft. Not melting—just… not there. My stomach swooped, that horrible weightless feeling you get at the top of a roller coaster.

I clutched at the nearest pine tree with my free hand. My fingers scraped bark, but my grip didn’t catch. The world around me—the trees, the ravine, the gray sky—blurred at the edges, like someone had smeared the picture.

The hall on the other side snapped into focus.

The image grew, rushing toward me, or maybe I was rushing toward it. The chandeliers swung overhead, throwing shards of light. The marble floor gleamed. I could smell wax now, and something sweet and spicy—cinnamon, cloves, evergreen. The chill of the portal wrapped around my whole body, sinking into my lungs.

Panic surged. “Stop,” I gasped, because I am apparently the kind of person who argues with physics. “I changed my mind—”

The hum turned into a roar, not loud in my ears but inside my bones. The cold intensified, then flipped all at once into warmth, like stepping out of a freezer into a crowded room.

The last thing I saw of the woods was a flash of gray sky between dark branches. Then the light from the chandeliers swallowed everything.

There was no sense of moving, not really. No up, no down. Just a dizzy, weightless drop that seemed to go on exactly long enough for my brain to say, oh, we’re really doing this, before—

Impact.

I hit solid ground hard enough that my teeth clicked.

But it wasn’t packed snow under me.

It was marble.