“Please, please don’t be gone…HECTOR!” Penny cried, rushing through the living room and out the front door. The tears were coming fast and with stinging pain now. She could see nothing outside but the blurry, meager glow of twilight on her driveway. There was no sign of anyone. Pure anguish hit as Penny fell to her knees, covering her face with her hands and sobbing. She had made the worst mistake of her life, and realized it moments too late.
Hector’s not coming back…I’ll never see Annette, or Simon, or anyone ever again. I’ll go back to my empty life and be forced to continue on as if nothing ever happened, thought Penny through her tears, feeling that no amount of willpower could make her return to her dead-end college or resign herself to a mundane future. She was close to a complete collapse when a strained voice called out from behind her, coming from the front door of her house.
“Penny?” the voice cried, accompanied by hurried footsteps on gravel. At first she was sure it was her mother and was confused as to how her voice had altered so much in the months that she had been gone, but when she looked up through her watering eyes to see Hector racing toward her, Penny almost passed out with relief.
“Hector! I thought you left! I thought you’d gone,” she sobbed, getting up and wiping the tears away from her eyes as surging happiness swept through her. “Hang on, why didn’t you leave? What were you doing in there?”
Shyness crossed Hector’s face. “Well, it’s a bit embarrassing, but those muffins―I wanted to take a few back with me, I…I didn’t think you’d mind,” he stammered, his face turning pink. Penny laughed out loud and wiped the last of her tears away.
“Leave it to you to be thinking of sweets at a time like this,” she laughed in relief and Hector became more flustered.
“N-never mind that! What’s wrong, why were you screaming?”
Penny looked at her feet and sighed. It was not going to be easy to make him understand. “Let’s go back inside. I’ll make some tea for you and you can have a muffin or two while I explain.”
SHE COULDN’T HELP but feel redeemed as she put the kettle on the blue flame of the stove and sat down in front of Hector with her hands folded. “I think I may have made a mistake. I…I want to go back with you and stay in Elydria.”
Hector’s jaw dropped. “What?! All you’ve wanted since we ended up there was to get home, and now that you’re here you want to go back to Elydria? Are you feeling quite well?” He stretched out a hand to test her forehead’s temperature, and she batted him away with a frown.
“Look, it’s hard to explain but…well, in Elydria I kept having a dream that I would come back to my room and it would be filled with all this weird stuff…things like dead leaves and bugs, bones and dirt, you know?” Penny told him, and Hector nodded, looking as if he could not understand how the two were connected. Penny cleared her throat and went over to the counter as the teapot began to hiss.
“Well, I couldn’t understand what it meant before, but I do now. When I said I wanted to come home all those times before, I was confused. I didn’t just want to be home…I wanted to go back to the time before. I wanted the simplicity of not having to live with danger around every turn or the responsibility of carrying out Adrielle’s orders. I wanted to go back to being the person that I was before this happened, not to this place,” Penny elaborated, shutting off the stove just as the teapot began to whistle and pouring the steaming water into two cups.
“But I can’t do that no matter how much I want to. My old life has been erased. This place, this home―I don’t fit into it anymore. Not when I’ve been to Iverton and flown on the back of a giant moth or had conversations with dragons. This life, no matter how nice it was then, doesn’t have a place for me in it anymore. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so,” Hector said as she handed him a mug of steaming tea. Penny sipped her drink and looked around at the green kitchen and its collection of houseplants that no longer belonged to her.
“The person that I was―she’s as good as dead now. I must’ve left her sitting on that curb that morning. I’ve still got more to do in Elydria. So, that’s why I have to go back. I want to help you look for the missing parts of Seival, and I want to learn all the answers to the questions that will be sure to drive me crazy in the meantime,” Penny explained with a small smile, her heart fluttering.
Hector smiled back with genuine emotion. “I’m…well, I’m glad, though I’m still not quite sure about your reasoning.” He lifted his eyebrows again, taking a bite of the muffin and savoring the taste.
Penny blinked. “Y-you’re glad?”
“Of course I am! I was certainly not looking forward to telling Annette that you weren’t going to be back,” Hector confessed, taking a long drink of tea and watching Penny with calculating eyes, as if to gauge her reaction. She shook her head and got up to locate a pen and a piece of paper, then sat down at the table and began to write, taking a break every few seconds to take a sip of tea or a bite of muffin.
“What are you doing?” Hector asked, trying to make out what she was writing.
“Writing a note to my mom; I don’t want her to think I’m dead or something like that,” she explained, nibbling on the end of the pen as she thought of what to put down next. Hector looked astounded for perhaps the hundredth time that night.
“You’re not going to wait for her to return?”
Penny frowned. “She’ll never let me go, and don’t think I want to see her crying and begging me not to leave, even if I do miss her more than anything else in this world. I―” Penny found it hard to go on as terrible sadness welled up within her. She cleared her throat. “I’d love to see her, but I know it’s for the best that I don’t―not right now. I can’t let anything change my mind. I know we’ll see each other again, and when we do it’ll be at the exact right time. You can meet her then, too,” she added with a grin, and resumed writing.
Hector shook his head and sighed. “I simply will never understand you.”
When Penny’s note was done, she crept upstairs to her mother’s room and opened the door. It was dark inside and seemed foreign in a way it never had before. On her mother’s pillow she laid the note, which explained that Penny was doing fine, that she would be back one day and for her not to worry. Penny could not help but shed a tear when she thought of her mother reading the letter. It fell short of what Paulina deserved, and she knew it. Penny removed the rune pendant from around her neck and laid it on top of the note, knowing that her mother would understand its meaning and realize that it was indeed her daughter who had come by that night. She stood by her mother’s bed for a long moment, running her fingers across the covers and smelling Paulina’s familiar lavender fragrance. With a final glance around, Penny stepped into the hall and closed the door.
Hector was waiting for her in the center of the living room with his arms crossed. She sighed and looked around her old home, so much tinier than she remembered. Hector waited with the utmost patience as Penny gave her final, unspoken goodbyes to the house that was once hers. When she looked up at him with confidence, they both knew it was time.
Penny closed her eyes as Hector wrapped his lean arms around her and prepared to make the jump to Elydria again. The thought of what was waiting for her on the other side of the darkness made a bubble of hope expand in Penny’s chest. A world of infinite wonder that beckoned and called with its siren song; a world that had broken Penny apart and rebuilt her to be stronger than she ever could have imagined. She breathed in Hector’s familiar scent and dwelled on the faces of her friends and the unbreakable bonds that had transformed her forever. She felt Hector reach out and pull the two of them into the gap between realities, and Penny let the vestige of her old self slip away like a gossamer shawl falling from her shoulders.
As the silence and speed overtook her body, Penny could not stop herself from smiling as she dreamed of all the wondrous things to come.
OTHER BOOKS BY A.R. MEYERING
UNREAL CITY
MULTI-AUTHOR COLLECTIONS
IN CREEPS THE NIGHT
FEATURING THE STORY THE DANDELION CHILD
A.R. Meyering is a graduate in English from the University of California Santa Barbara with a specialization in Victorian/Neo-Victorian Literature. She is the author of the steampunk-fantasy series The Dawn Mirror Chronicles. She is also the author of the dark fantasy Unreal City, which won quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest and garnered a positive review from Publisher’s Weekly.
Her heart pounds for the horrifying, the sublime, the delicate, the elegant, and the fascinating. She is a life-long fan of fairy-tales, gothic horror-shows, clever mysteries, children’s stories that aren’t quite for children, steam-powered wonders, and sweeping fantasies. She is a dedicated geek and gamer, an educator, and pug enthusiast.
Visit the author at:
Website:
www.armeyering.com
www.bhcauthors.com
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/AlexandraMeyering
Twitter:
@ARMeyering
Goodreads:
www.goodreads.com/author/show/7753852.A_R_Meyering
Cover, interior book design,
and eBook design
by Blue Harvest Creative
www.blueharvestcreative.com
Editing provided by
BHC Staff Editor Bailey Karfelt
Table of Contents
Book Description
Title Page
Copyright Information
Other Books By A.R. Meyering
Dedication
Chapter 1: The Last Morning
Chapter 2: Simon Shaw
Chapter 3: Gales And Gloom
Chapter 4: Butterflies In The Sitting Room
Chapter 5: The Golden Thread
Chapter 6: Under Elydrian Skies
Chapter 7: Deimos Of Dewthorne
Chapter 8: Specters In The Thicket
Chapter 9: The High Priestess
Chapter 10: Warwick’s Grotto
Chapter 11: Gilded Cherry Pine
Chapter 12: Moonlit Monoliths
Chapter 13: The Wandering Wind
Chapter 14: Iverton
Chapter 15: The Archillion
Chapter 16: Finding Freedom
Chapter 17: An Evening Out
Chapter 18: Silk And Spools
Chapter 19: Among The Lilies
Chapter 20: An Agreement
Chapter 21: Trusting Hector
Chapter 22: The Jubilee Waltz
Chapter 23: The Shattered Chandelier
Chapter 24: A Promise Kept
Chapter 25: Annette’s Confession
Chapter 26: On The Sands Of Hulver
Chapter 27: The Puppet Master
Chapter 28: At The Atelier
Chapter 29: The Bishop And The King
Chapter 30: Along Came A Spider
Chapter 31: Mulgrith
Chapter 32: A Light In The Dark
Chapter 33: The World Between Worlds
Chapter 34: The Goblin Carnival
Chapter 35: The Caged Songbird
Chapter 36: Memories Of Madness
Chapter 37: Midnight
Chapter 38: The Weaver Rising
Chapter 39: A Moment Of Quiet
Chapter 40: Penny’s Choice
Purchasing Links
Coming Soon: Eden Undone
About The Author
Visit The Author
Meet The Creative Team
The Angel of Elydria (The Dawn Mirror Chronicles Book 1) Page 42