Rowan Song-Williams had always felt out of step with the world. But nothing had prepared her for this day. She had just returned from the funerals—funerals, really—her parents taken together in a car crash that had left her life hollow, raw, and unanchored. Their absence pressed on her chest like iron; the quiet apartment, once filled with her mother's laughter and her father's careful, grounding presence, now felt suffocatingly empty.
She tried to remember to breathe. Tried to ground herself in the ordinary: the smell of coffee, the sound of rain tapping against the window. But grief made the world fragile, and everything seemed thinner, sharper, unreal.
That's when Ellion appeared.
He was impossible: impossibly tall, impossibly graceful, impossibly beautiful in a way that made the air itself hum. Silver hair that shimmered like starlight, eyes older than time itself, and a presence that both frightened and comforted her all at once.
"You are the one I have been searching for," he said, voice low and resonant. "Your bloodline… your dual fae inheritance… it must awaken."
Rowan's throat went dry. "I… I can't… I just—" Her voice cracked. Words were useless. He seemed to see through her, through the grief, through the numbness she didn't even realize she was carrying.
"You will," Ellion said, and the air shimmered. The apartment melted away. The rain, the walls, even the light itself bent around them. Colors bled together like wet paint, the room twisting and stretching, and Rowan felt herself unmoored from the world she had known.
She screamed—or thought she did. Sound dissolved into sensation. And then—power.
Warmth, fire, lightning—filling her veins, climbing her spine, setting her chest aflame. Her Seelie and Unseelie lines had awakened. She felt it in every nerve, every heartbeat. She was… alive in a way she had never been before.
"This is your Remaking," Ellion said softly. "Your blood, your magic, both awakened. You are the mate the world has been waiting for. The only one who can touch him."
Him. The word landed in her chest like a stone. She didn't know who he was, yet the pull in her blood screamed with recognition, with a bond older than time itself.
Ellion gestured. "I will send you now. You will find yourself in a world you knew… but nothing like what you were told."
Before Rowan could ask a question, the air shimmered again, and the world dissolved beneath her feet. She tumbled through color, through light and shadow, through sensation and memory, until she landed softly on moss beneath towering trees.
Everything was still. The air smelled of pine and earth. The forest stretched endlessly in every direction, silent but for the whisper of wind. Rowan pushed herself up, eyes wide, heart hammering—not with fear, but with the thrill of discovery.
She wandered, unsure of direction, until she came to a clearing. A wooden sign stood crookedly in the fog, half-hidden by vines: Forks.
Her heart stuttered. 'Forks…' She had read about this place countless times in books, in stories, in fiction she had thought was imaginary. And now here she was—standing in it. Real, breathing, and utterly alone.
Ellion's words returned to her mind: 'A world you knew… but nothing like what you were told.'
Rowan realized then the truth of her new existence: the familiar was unfamiliar. The stories she had loved as a child were… incomplete. Twisted. Alive. Dangerous. And she, for reasons she did not yet understand, was central to it all.
A pull in her chest drew her forward, a thread of magic resonating deep in her blood—alive, insistent, impossible.
The weight of her grief, the sorrow of her parents, the fear and power inside her—they all intertwined. She was afraid. She was terrified. And she knew, with bone-deep certainty, that there was no going back.