Humanities Building, University of Cumbria
The lecture hall was overheated in that peculiarly academic way, where the radiator hissed judgmentally and someone in the back smelled faintly of cheese crackers.
Grey sat in her usual seat by the window, third row from the back, where the glass was warped enough to distort the outside world just a little. She liked it here. It made reality feel appropriately untrustworthy.
Professor Durei was in the middle of what she called a "liminal spaces ramble"—gesturing broadly with a dry-erase marker at architectural slides of ancient thresholds, fog-covered bridges, and one blurry public toilet that apparently inspired an entire category of post-structuralist ghost theory.
Grey had taken precisely one note:
liminality – that weird bit of existence that smells like wet leaves.
She underlined it twice and added a doodle of a toad in a crown.
"Now," The Professor said, pacing, "what happens when a mortal crosses a Fae threshold without understanding the cost?"
Theo—the smug one with the ironic moustache—leaned forward like he had something clever to say. Grey beat him to it.
"Usually? Regret. Occasionally terrible poetry that makes its way into folkore."
A few chuckles. Professor Durei shot her a look that was half amusement, half suspicion. Grey just raised one eyebrow in mild defiance and returned to her notebook, pretending not to notice the spiral that had begun to unfurl in the margin. It wasn't one of hers. She'd drawn it before she knew what it was. Again.
Her mind drifted.
Swinside Orphanage had smelled like boiled cabbage and damp Bible pages.
She didn't remember arriving. No first day. No suitcase. No crying. Just—being there, age three. A pale girl with eyes too large for her face and hands that always felt cold.
The other children avoided her with the unspoken certainty of prey that knew the scent of something not-quite-natural.
"She glows," one whispered once, under a wool blanket. "I saw it. Moonlight hit her skin and it stayed."
"She talks to things that aren't there."
"She doesn't blink when it's dark."
Grey remembered all of this the way one remembers half-solved riddles—only the parts that didn't help. The nuns, in their pressed grey habits, treated her gently. Not with affection. With caution. Like she was a lit candle that might flare if you breathed too close.
Sister Margery once handed her a cup of tea and said, "You've got the look of a borrowed soul, child."
Grey had blinked innocently. "What if no one asks for it back?"
She was ten when she broke the priest.
It was confession. She'd drawn a graveyard in blood-red crayon—again—and Sister Anne had dragged her to the chapel with a look of exasperation that said she needed saving fast, or else.
The booth smelled of incense and guilt. She'd knelt quietly, folded her hands like a doll, and waited for the voice behind the screen.
"What troubles your heart, child?" the priest had asked.
She'd said, very calmly:
"The lady under the hill says the veil is thinning. She says the worms can smell it."
Silence. Long and deep.
Then came the long white corridors. The institution. The padded room where the lights never turned fully off and a nurse with ink-black eyes once whispered, "They really shouldn't have let you come back."
"Grey?"
Professor Durei's voice snapped her back to the present. The marker in her hand had started to squeak against the whiteboard again. "An example of a Mortal-Fae bargain involving a crossing?"
Grey blinked, the memory fading like mist. Her spiral was now a blooming tangle of thread, drawn in deep ink-black. She capped her pen.
"Most of them, really," she said. "Especially the ones where a child walks out different."
Laughter. Professor Durei stared a moment too long.
Grey smiled. Not the warm kind.
Outside, the air was cold and honest. The clouds were arguing above the quad. She made for the moss-ringed well behind the Arts building, where the ground felt just a little thinner and the shadows whispered a bit louder.
Wickham was already there waiting to take her home, perched dramatically under a skeletal birch tree with a scarf the size of a duvet and a newspaper he probably stole.
"Darling," he said, not looking up, "your aura is bruised and your shoelace is untied. Which demon got you this time?"
"I was cursed with memory," Grey replied dryly. "And a lecture about urinals as portals."
"Sounds dreadfully acedemic."
They sat together in the wind, letting silence thicken like soup. Eventually, he glanced at her notebook, which she'd forgotten to shut.
"That's not one of your sigils."
"I know."
He tilted his head. "Do you ever draw something that isn't a key to some dead god's drawer of regrets?"
"I tried a duck once."
"What happened?"
"It bled."
Maerlowe appeared, quiet as fog and without explanation. He glanced at the sigil, offered no judgment, just handed her a string-wrapped charm woven from ash and silver thread. She didn't ask what it was meant to ward off.
Wickham stayed behind, cracking jokes to an invisible squirrel. Maerlowe disappeared between seconds. Grey made her way home.
That night, she dreamed again.
But not like the other dreams. Not the honey-glazed illusions laid by the Seelie King, all sweetness and wrongness and golden hooks buried in memory.
This felt older. Truer.
A cradle. A mother weeping. A voice like velvet and bone: "Give us your joy, your brightest thread." Something woven into her soul—like silk through meat.
A beautiful warrior, with a dark cloak edged with raven feathers. Just a glimpse. His face hidden in shadow, but its lines drawn tight with fury.
"I told them not to use a child!"
Then came the sound of something snapping.
She woke with the taste of salt on her lips and the shape of someone else's lullaby in her throat.
Field Journal – Private Entry (Unsubmitted)
Author: Grey Wyrde
May 3rd – Evening, Post-Lecture
I don't remember being born. I don't remember arriving. I just remember beginning. There's a difference. It's an important one.
Today, I drew something I don't remember learning. Again. It felt like... something unfolding. Or something returning. Maybe I'm not remembering. Maybe I'm leaking.
I think I was a bargain. I don't know what for. I don't know who paid. But I feel the thread tug sometimes. Like something is waiting to see if I'll follow it.
I'm not afraid. Just tired. And a little annoyed.
If I turn out to be a cursed vessel of Fae destruction, I hope at least I get cool boots and a better sleep schedule.