The castle oozed secrets. Fae could feel it, as sure as her own heartbeat. A thrum that rattled her bones with each cautious step towards the monolithic edifice. Its shadow loomed towards her, casting darkness across the sodden land, stopping just at the toes of her scuffed brown boots. She hesitated, breath tight. There was something about the castle’s shadow, something… off.


    Fae turned her pale, damp face skywards, noticing the castle’s turrets jutting at odd angles. They all but pierced the sky hidden beneath a dense fog that bit her skin with cold. But it was the rain that chilled Fae’s bones; not the pounding of storms that came and went, but the relentless fine drizzle that seeped between cloth and bone, making joints and heart ache. 
Her brow knotted.


    Too much cloud-cover for the castle to cast such a foreboding shadow. And the castle almost seemed to laugh at its disregard to nature’s laws.


    “Come, Offspring,” Fae’s father called as he trotted past, carrying her meager belongings in a sack cloth. He did not stop to check if she followed, but danced towards his castle, dwarfed by its enormity. She watched him, and could not help thinking he looked wrong in the gloom and the mist and the strange half-light that lingered across the violent countryside. He seemed too bright—too clean—in a harsh marshland that seemed to sing of sadness and regret. 


    Old secrets live here, Fae thought, ice-blue eyes scanning the savage countryside filled with ragged mountains and undulating pastures cloaked in a perpetual swirl of mist.

    A scream sliced through her ears. Fae gasped, clutching hand to heart. She spun; a defensive spell pulsed at her fingertips and… She released a sigh. An embarrassed smile tugged at her lips but her face was too chilled for blush to reach the surface of her cold cheeks. Behind her, the gilded carriage that carried her to her estranged father’s dwelling crept away, the wheels screeching into life as a young groomsman led the white, driving horses to the warmth of their stables.


    Not a scream, she thought. Not her scream.

    
Fae’s heart settled, but upon the canvas of her mind’s eye flickered Emrysa in the last moments before the old witch had disappeared. The blackness. The flurry of ravens’ wings. The scream from the evil crone’s mouth. And beneath it, a whisper Fae heard but could not decipher no matter how hard she tried. It somehow reminded Fae of her sister Morganne’s own whisper as she and Amara departed for Camelot, leaving Fae to accompany their father to this strange land alone.


Be strong, quiet one, Morganne had whispered. 


    “Come along!” called Father, voice muted by distance and fog. “Chippy chop. We have a witch to find and alchemy waits for no man—” She heard him chortle to himself, and he made an exaggerated gesture with his arm over her shoulder for her to follow, “—or woman, or… girl or whatever it is you call yourself these days.”


    He continued, disappearing through enormous double doors, almost as though the castle devoured him in one gulp.


    Fae looked up once again to the sunless sky, then over her shoulder to the unease that followed her from her peaceful village, and with her usual quiet determination, walked into the castle’s foreboding shadow.