Chương 1: Solas

The foundations of the Willow House were built on deep roots, Miriam's father used to say. His own father had split the logs from nearby beech and oak, using snaggle-toothed band saws and time-chipped hand axes to fell tree after tree from what later became the back garden. When he attempted to dig the foundation he found his shovels useless against the cluttered earth, denied by a vast working of tangled roots and stone which seemed to originate from an ancient willow dominating the meadow.

Miriam's grandfather was born of and lived among toughened woodsmen, so he did not shy from this challenge. A man's homestead was an investment in the future and no man of Rory Callihan's caliber would let his family's tomorrows be waylaid by stubborn trees who weren't wise enough to bend a knee to their betters. For months he waged war on that tree, those roots and that stone. Finally, two months after the war began, an armistice was declared - and none could call the woodsman the victor.

The willow stood still and stately, its trunk scratched but unbroken. The roots persisted, new ones replacing any he managed to tear out. The stone heavier than any quartz had the right to be. Callihan's tools bent, shattered - now toothless and blunt. But he wasn't one to give up even when one battle was lost. Instead he constructed his manor on top of the roots, leaning gently beside the willow.

It was for this reason that Willow House was one of the few in the area with no basement - a nail-biting risk in tornado season, but in the hundred and twenty years since no twister had dared touch it. In those following decades the willow had absorbed the house. Its branches reached between beech and oak, its roots blackened and fossilized in the fireplaces, its leaves veiling the broad bay windows. Miriam's family and the tree had found peace in cohabitation.

On this day, nearly one hundred and twenty years since Rory Callihan attempted to break ground, a clean century since the birth of Miriam's father (the youngest of nine but the only one to see twenty-five), and eighty years since her own birth, the tree seemed restless. The wind breezed lazily, but her branches shook hard. The sun shone brightly, but the tree remained dull and angry. Fire struggled to survive in the stone fireplaces, no matter how Miriam stoked it. No matter to her.

"Everyone's entitled to a bad day now and then," she said softly, stroking the dangling branches as she shuffled into the garden. The gods knew she'd had more than her fair share. The second thing Rory Callihan had done after finishing the last tile on the Willow House roof was to dig Miriam's favorite part of the estate - the stone well in the back garden. The first thing he had done was to send off a post telling his family to begin the journey west - their home was now complete.

The well was something you'd picture in a story book - almost perfectly round and lined with limestone bricks. There had been a roof when Miriam was younger but it almost never stayed upright - perhaps one of the few things Rory Callihan had not crafted to perfection. The well never ran dry, even in times of drought, which had made their family well-admired in that they were not too miserly to share with their neighbors. Miriam had always loved the well.

As a girl she used to make little boats out of leaves and sail them across the water. She'd look into the well and see her dreams among the reflection of the clouds - and sometimes other things, too, things she'd never tell anyone else about. Strange eyes peering out, wispy lights and sourceless currents. As she grew into her twenties she began to see only herself - though oddly not at all doing what she did, the way normal reflections should.

Once she even watched as the Miriam in the water shouted up at her, soundless and desperate. That had scared her badly and she had avoided the water for a long time after - though she had her own hands full anyway, delivering and raising her second and third children. But now, as Miriam neared eighty she had rediscovered the joy of a quiet reflection by the well. She liked to sit near it and gossip, as if the water could hear.

As if it would care about the dramas of her large family, of which she had become the matriarch, or the tribulations of the neighbors in the sizable town that had grown up around Rory Callihan's masterpiece.

"Time will be soon no one will sit here with you," Miriam said to the well as she lowered herself onto her rocking chair.

"My young ones have all headed west themselves. Or died," she added quietly.

"I've already lived longer than anyone I've ever known. I've had time; time enough to tell my troubles to an old hole in the ground. No one's got that kind of time anymore." Miriam. You have all the time in the world. The words slid on the wind, a whisper hidden in the scrape of leaf-on-leaf, such a part of the soundscape of the forest which ringed in her back garden that Miriam thought no more of it than she would a bird's chirp, or the call of a fox to its mate.

"Maybe eighty years is nothing to a forest," she said, unalarmed.

"But to a woman it's a whole life, and then some." Come to the water. Miriam huffed and hoisted herself up from her chair. For some reason she didn't question the voice. Everything that happened seemed perfectly normal, though some locked-away part of her was shouting from the back of her mind. Shouting like her reflection once had, long ago. The water was still, as it usually was. Miriam leaned over the low brick lip, her spine protesting.

"I'm here. Now what do you want?" I want to show you a new world, Miriam. Do you want to come?

"Too old for that," she grumbled.

"Left the House once, years ago. Had my adventures, came back to a family who needed me. This place is the only adventure I got the spirit for anymore." Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. I think we both know that's not true. Eighty years is nothing. You're just beginning.

"How… how would…" Just touch the water. See the lights inside? They're dancing for you. And she could see them, just as she had when she was a girl, swirling in hypnotic patterns. They flirted with the surface of the water, but skittered back below as if each were daring the others to get closer.

"So pretty," Miriam said, breathless. Feel the water on your fingertips. So cool. Pure. Welcoming. Miriam reached as far as she could, several joints in her legs popping in warning. She had never been tall, but age had withered her further still and she could not quite reach. Commit, Miriam. To the new world. You'll be a queen to the Aos sí. Live forever among the Sidhe, young and undying. Dance the years away to the Ceol sí, rule from on high. Life, vitality, power! It is all yours. It always has been.

Just waiting for you to come take it.

"Who are you?" Miriam whispered, her fingertips inches away from the water. Call me Solas. I'll call you my love. She slid noiselessly into the water without even a splash. The back garden shuddered and the willow dropped more dead leaves. The wind whistled a little lonelier than it had. ✧✧✧ You have to agree, my love. I can't take you there unless you do. Miriam was floating in molasses, a syrupy gel that pulled at her skin and bound her eyes shut.

She couldn't open her mouth or it would choke her, and she hadn't taken that good of a breath at the top of the well anyway. You don't need to speak to answer. I will understand you. The words no longer seemed natural as they had before she slid into the well. They seemed slippery, like a fox wending its way through the heather on hunt for yardbirds. The calm that had held her so tightly before slid away and she became more aware of her circumstances. That's it, Miriam dear, she thought to herself.

That's the end of you. Drowned in a well following honeyed words and twinkling lights like a child on Samhain. It doesn't have to be. Just accept my offer. Whatever the new world holds, it's better than being dead, no? Miriam wasn't sure. Eight decades and death had lost its fright - she thought of it as a dear friend who would take her home at the end of a long journey. But the human body, no matter how old, wanted one thing over all else.

As the last breath of air left her lungs she said it with all the power of the primordial men and women who had first scratched out their lives in the dirt among the dust and devils of this world: Survive! For Miriam, it came out as "Yes!" Let's see the new world then, shall we? The gel sucked harder at her now. Her simple blue dress was ripped apart and the water wrapped her up naked as the day she was born. She screamed as the water kept pulling, tearing skin, pulling hair, invading her lungs.

The water was in her veins now, barreling around like a bull, and sharp icicles traced their way to her heart. The water pulled away her remaining teeth, popped her eyeballs, stretched out her bones and ground them between relentless currents. Her whole being fell into a slurry and she could feel her very self diluting in the water. In her last moments she had an odd instinct to reach out to the old willow tree for which her House had been named.

As if it could protect her as it had Rory Callihan's family for more than a century. To her amazement, it seemed like she could feel the willow respond, not words like Solas's had been, but feelings, images, breezes and groans. Endure, it projected. Endure and I will find you. Finally, an indeterminable time since the water had broken her apart, she could feel stone beneath her feet. Her hands - she had hands again! Her hands ran over the smooth rock as it began to climb up.

She scrambled for a handhold and found none, but she didn't seem to need it. Her feet felt sure and steady - the way they had years before, when she had first left the House to see the world. It almost didn't even make sense that she was able to walk at this angle, but her feet continued, each step surer than the last. Her head broke the surface of the water and she gasped in new air - though shouldn't she have been feeling the burning of her lungs before?

She was crouching at the edge of a pool inside what seemed to be a cave. Light bubbled up from somewhere beneath her, but the rest of the tunnel was in shadow. She felt dizzy, as if she had climbed to a new, uncomfortable height. As she rose out of the water shakily, knees trembling but strong, there was that familiar moment when the body takes on its own weight from the easy buoyancy of water, but she barely registered it.

"Hmm, none the worse for wear, are we, my love?" The voice slinked out of the shadows. It clearly belonged to Solas, but any refined edge she had remembered was gone. How had she thought this voice soothing? She'd even considered it musical. Instead it was a harsh rasp with the hint of a lisp. The voice of someone who didn't speak often, creaky with disuse. Miriam looked down at a body not her own.

She'd prided herself that the years had not ravaged her quite as roughly as some of her neighbors - she'd been active and fit most her life, only descending to brittleness and frailty in the last decade. But as she looked down she saw the lean, long arms of a completely different woman. The skin was a dark reddish brown, the same color she'd been after losing her way in the Harada desert in her younger days.

The fingers were thin, nails longer and sharper than a practical person like herself was used to keeping them. The arms… never in her life had she enjoyed muscles like these. Once she'd taken her youngest to the circus and there had been a married strongman act. The wife was nearly as bulky as her husband. She'd pulled off incredible feats of strength, but seemed inflexible so as to make washing herself an exercise in contortion.

These muscles were not like those - she closed her fist and felt the tendons move, taut and powerful as steel cables under the skin. Efficient, was the word she thought of. But still… elegant. On her chest sat the breasts of a woman sixty years younger. Set high, softness fading gently to firm muscle, smaller than hers had ever been - though perhaps it was because never had her body as a whole been this lean.

Her confusion mounted as she completed the survey - abdominals a lumberjack would kill for, steel thighs, flat stomach. Also, she was still stark naked, but she found that fact unimportant. After all this wasn't her body. Why should she be ashamed of it? Not that anyone would be. Miriam looked out into the dark.

"What has happened to me?"

"You have been reborn. See? Just as Solas promised." Out of the dark she could now see a figure limping its way towards her. It was a creature half her height, gnomish, hunched abruptly at the lower back. Teeth caught the light early and it was easy to see where the lisp had come from - rows of sharp, jagged teeth continually seemed to catch a serpent tongue that lolled out of his mouth at frequent intervals. Its eyes were like a sheep, vertical, but not vacant.

Shrewd intent shone brightly from the deep black orbs. He wore a rusted helmet over a green head, the nose guard sticking out inches from its face - as far as Miriam could tell it had no nose. His skin was green, like a chameleon's, and just as rough.

"Send me home," Miriam demanded.

"How did you trick me into coming here? Or… am I dead?" Horrific realization dawned over her.

"Is this one of the hells?"

"Not dead!" Solas cackled.

"Not yet. Here, I can answer you better with this. Put it on." His voice echoed strangely now, differently than it had only a moment before. He handed her a pretty loop of wire, along which were affixed different symbols she didn't recognize.

"I can explain everything once you're wearing this." She took the bracelet numbly and threaded the strange hand through it - she couldn't even consider not putting it on, though never in her life had accepting jewelry from unknown men ever led to anything good.

"Now what?" Solas made a gesture and a thin, sparkling line extruded from the chain into his hand.

"That was the last step, my love. Now you're mine forever. Or at least until I've burned all the fórsa from your every last drop of blood. Isn't that lovely?"