Back at the cottage, Snow went to bed sopping wet under the pretense of a cold. There she huddled under the covers, feeling the wonder at having visited Elis' shop spoiling inside her, until the next morning. Body heavy with troubled sleep, she rolled over and felt the bulge of Fantastic Folklore trapped beneath her mattress, the reality of it a swift prick to her psyche. It hadn't all been a dream. The old fears she had known her first moons in this house came creeping back like a persistent mold, and for that, she hated the tinker.

Snow climbed out of bed and wiggled the book out from under the mattress with the intent to chuck it but settled back onto the bed before she knew what she was doing, arrested by the velvety cover and silver lettering. What was more escapist than a good story?

No sooner had she cracked the book open and Mat knocked. Snow thought about hiding the book away but decided against it.

"You should burn that thing," he said sternly on sight while she marveled at a pastel portrait of mustard-colored pygmy unicorns with tiny ears and languid eyes. The bed sagged as he sat down beside her. "There anything about you in there?"

"No, but there's an empty page in the back; I'm thinking of inking me in."

It infuriated her how he had a habit of lingering, letting niceties pile on what he came to say.

She slammed the book shut, determined to do what he could not--slice open the wound: "Myst wasn't the first town I ever saw. Eliwood took me to one once to meet a captain of a ship in the sky," she said, accentuating her brother's words with mock wonder. "I never saw it, but I heard it without ever learning what it was, until I saw it fly over the cottage."

"He took you to see her," he said derisively.

She nodded. "But he changed his mind." No matter Eli's initial intentions, he had ultimately changed his mind.

Mat looked away, his knuckles white as he gripped his knees. "But he got on—"

"Yes," she said, standing up.

"He met her—"

"Yes," she said, tossing the book onto the bed.

"And told her about you."

"He paid for that," she said, wheeling around, her expression sharper than a broken eggshell.

"Did you know who she was, what she was doing--why your brother signed on?"

"No."

"He boasted about the things he did to you."

Her eyebrow cocked.

"That he made you into what you are."

"What am I?" she asked, genuinely curious to hear the answer.

He sat a little straighter and looked away, visibly uncomfortable, then said, as if it were a curse: "A chimera."

The word was familiar but didn't bring her eyebrow any lower.

"Part human, part.... That he manipulated your genetic makeup!" he said, gesturing in a wide arc toward her impatiently. "He bragged that he had already achieved what Elsie never could—" his mouth kept moving, but the words died as he struggled to reduce her to a simple explanation and came up short.

This time the edge of her mouth perked up.

"You think my brother did this to me? No one did this to me. I was born a freak."

"You're not—"

"That's the word you're looking for, the word for things without names, that aren't normal."

He was shaking his head before she had even finished. "You're putting words into my mouth—"

"You're talking about me like I'm Frankenstein's monster! I don't see any seams, do you?" she asked, coming within inches of his face, kneading her hairline. "What about where they can hide?" she said and started to tear off her oversized shirt.

"Stop!" he yelled, throwing a hand up over his face.

Snow nearly dislocated her shoulder yanking her shirt back down when the door swung open.

"You both stop before the rats on the far side of Myst can hear you!" she said, waving a spatula about, sending a wiggly nugget of scrabbled egg soaring to land on Mat's big toe.

They stewed in the fiery silence of Gran's fury, staring at that drip of egg, anything to avoid the old woman's wiggling jowls.

"Now get to the table before I make you two hug it out!"

Any moment not spent at the counter, jarring all sorts of vegetables and fruits in preparation for the winter (that it was all too evident to Snow she wouldn't see at the cottage), she spent in her bedroom, flipping through Fantastic Folklore where she read about reptilian soldiers laying siege to earthen castles, serpentine temptresses with sunlight for faces and heads of tentacles with tiny mouths that fancied blood oranges, huntresses with three faces but abnormally small hearts, wolves that could shed their hides to become mortals, faeries with bone faces, and halflings that were all depicted as hunchbacked gremlins with lizard eyes, but never about a plant in girl's skin the color of moon dust. The Holóspiritus made frequent appearances, but it was unrecognizable to her in all its verdant glory.

Despite the tall tales, she couldn't keep her mind off the one who had gifted her the book. Fate had always seemed like a dream for children--now, it felt a very real beast breathing on the back of her neck.

Mat walked in. Right then, she knew what she had to do--

"I can't stay."

He briefly hovered over the chair before he sat down. "I understand you're scared--"

"Aren't you?"

"Not anymore than I've ever been before," he lied, she could see it in the way his eyes wobbled as he spoke, like he had to fight to not look away. "Elis suspected you were here for orbits and nothing happened."

"Suspecting isn't the same as knowing."

"He wouldn't—"

"Everything you know about him, you learned yesterday. All the times before, he was pretending. All you know about him now is that he hated the world enough to put that airship back in the sky and that his love for his daughter was greater than his disdain for her atrocities."

He chewed on that with storm clouds behind his eyes as he tried to formulate an excuse, maybe for Elis, maybe for himself. "We all have our own secrets, past transgressions."

"It's not the same and you know it." That he made the comparison at all, even if only because he felt cornered, pickled her guts.

The chair creaked as he shifted. "That news about your brother didn't surprise you."

More pickling. "No, it didn't surprise me."

Her heart raced as she found herself back on the landing outside her brother's room, peering through the crack in the door he had been too eager to shut, watching his hunched frame over a small girl, a new friend she had introduced to him not an hour before. The girl had wandered into their yard without reservation, following a puppy she called Pebble, and strode right up on chunky legs to Snow.

"Why does your skin look like that?" she asked promptly in the rude way children do.

A shrug.

"Do you want to pet my dog? Your eyes kinda look like his."

They didn't, but she nodded anyway. Pebble cowered when the girl reached out her hand but with soothing encouragement from his friend, wagged his tail and gave her fingers a quick lick. They were all fast friends after that, but Eliwood quickly ruined their games.

"Where are your parents?" he asked on bended knee.

She shrugged sheepishly. "Pebble ran off into the woods and I chased him."

Eli smiled but Snow remembered that there had been something odd about his face. It was artificial, Snow thought. Like the one Elis wore when he said goodbye. Eli scratched the dog behind the ear.

"It's a hot day. Why don't you wait inside? I can give you and Pebble some water."

The girl complied.

"She's my friend. You can't play with her, you're too old!"

He scoffed, which only incensed her.

"You remember what mother said about visitors?"

No one can see her.

"Mother's dead."

"Yes. She is," he said, as if she were a stranger he wished would go away. "Wait outside."

She did. At first.

Pure terror kept her rooted to the spot on the landing outside Eli's room as she watched him pour what looked like red soot from a jar out onto the floor to complete one of those alchemical circles she recognized from his dog-eared grimoires that she had thought up until right then had been crammed with fantasy. The girl and her dog laid unmoving at the center, their eyes wide open. When Pebble spotted her at the door, he whined a pitiful mewl. Eli ignored it. He said nothing as he handpicked what looked like a spoon from a line of instruments beside him on the floor. His back to the door, he placed a hand on her head and wielded the utensil like he was scooping frozen cream. It was the sucking sound of her eye socket letting go that propelled the girl through the door.

"NOOOOO."

A flurry of flying fists, she lunged at him. He made quick work of restraining her but not before she got a good look at the girl's eye, a little too big, lifted by the spoon and protruding from the socket. Her other eye followed her as Eliwood forcibly removed her from the room. Without a word, he dropped her on the landing, pulled the latchstring inside and shut the door.

Her fists pounded on the door until they turned bloody and her lungs burned as she screamed until it melted into sobs. Only when she sunk to her knees on the landing, completely spent could she hear tiny, unidentifiable noises. The wondering drove her mad and with a burst of clumsy energy, she took off, taking the stairs so quick that she fell down the last flight, leapt back up and tore out the door, leaving it bouncing on its hinges, and bolted across the yard before she plunged into the woods.

With nowhere to run to at the age of eight, an animalistic drive for preservation and sheer inertia propelled her through the Burnt Forest. Even then, a childlike notion bloomed in her like a smoke stack: maybe if she hid in the only place she and her brother had ever felt safe, he would find her there, not that monster that she had left behind in his study. Blood thrummed in her ears, the ashen air coated her throat and her eyes burned with betrayal as she leapt over roots, ran into trees and bloodied her knees with every misstep, until a more adult notion pricked her brain--today seemed as good a day as any to see if one could run straight through the Burnt Forest--and she promptly tripped on a root and tumbled, head over end into a pit, landing chestfirst on a protruding root that sucked all the air from her lungs. Brain pounding from the impact, she inclined her head and looked up through soot-caked lashes to a clearing. Certain that she was seeing fuzzy lights because of her hard landing, she beat her eyelashes and pulled herself up into a sitting position, but no matter how much soot she blinked away, the floating, white specs remained. If she held real still and focused, the night above her head shivered like a thin curtain the werelights passed through, disappearing and reappearing. The sight quieted her thoughts, making way for simpler ones rooted in wonder and she laid back down, the soot cool and soothing on her skin.

"Snow."

She blinked, phantom tears in her eyes still burning.

I got angry earlier because what you accused him of, he did, just not to me. But she didn't say that.

"He was obsessed with the old magic," she said. "Like Elsie, he wanted to create but could only undo.

"After a fight we had, I ran away into the Burnt Forest and came across that tear painted on Elis' wall, the one that gobbles up and spits out light" she said, brow furrowing as she recalled how her heart had leapt into her throat when Eliwood stepped into the clearing. "When Eli found me, he couldn't see it even though I still could."

"What about the flowers?"

She stopped mid-shake, realizing she had seen them, dreamed them anyway. "There was a crater but no flowers."

Mat ran a hand over his face. "Elis said that we only see what the Burnt Forest wants us to."

Eli thought I had a concussion.

"What do you think?"

"I hadn't thought about it in a long time. I went looking for it again once or twice but never found it. I guess after awhile, I assumed I'd imagined it."

"You said your brother.... He didn't—"

"I was born this way." Mother had relayed that story, ripe with disgust, enough times for Snow to believe it.

"But he didn't know about your...abilities?"

Her first impulse was to answer no, but her powers had appeared subtly; it was the flicker of a candle she thought had gone out, the opening of a door she wasn't sure she had latched, a lamb tripping over its own feet when she had wanted so desperately to touch its wool. "How could he? I didn't even know.

"Maybe it was enough that I looked peculiar," she said around a lump that had amassed in her throat. "Enough for Elsie, I mean."

Sat in her lap, the book felt like it was burning a hole through her trousers.

"You think you've got some faery blood in you?"

"Isn't that how the stories go? 'Wizards and witches are made when faeries stay to play'."

Mat had told her Elis' father had likely been a faery, if men, even magiced ones, living beyond their mortal means was to be believed. Maybe Mother had been unfaithful, too, but even as she entertained the thought, she doubted it from her scalp to her toes.

"But Elis doesn't look like you," Mat said.

"No, not on the outside. I'd've liked a blood sample, though," she said with a small smile.

He smiled, too, but it quickly slipped away. "I haven't been entirely honest with you. I told you my mother was unfit. It's because she was--is like your brother." Everything he said after that skipped up her spine with all the finesse of an icepick. "A regular Dr. Frankenstein, except she didn't quit after her first botched attempt. Our basement was a makeshift lab of sorts. She--" his throat visibly constricted, like the words were getting stuck. "She captured animals and abducted people with a gross regularity," he said, sounding increasingly sick. He wiped his palms on his pants, then said in a rush: "I'd help." His eyes flicked up and glanced off hers at the omission. "No one ever suspected a little kid.

"Later, after Gran took me away, I reasoned for awhile that I hadn't really known what I was doing, you know? Except I did. I did know, and sure, I'd throw in the occasional no or you're hurting them but in the end I always caved. It was just me and her, and she was--" he gripped his knees, trying to find the words. "She was the sun to me," he said desperately.

"I know," she said and she meant it.

He really looked at her, then.

Snow knew what it was like to love someone who was your whole world even if they didn't deserve it, and she knew what it was like to be ashamed once they were gone because for the first time, you see them as the world did, even if only a little.

"She left me, like Eli left you," he said, his voice much more even, "and I never found out where she went." He stared at a space above her head and Snow knew he was back home with his mother. "She came back worse, more desperate than ever to prove that she was on the brink of a breakthrough in her research, but it was more of the same. She never even really looked at me again, not until Gran showed up. I'd written her a letter after being holed in that dunghole alone for weeks--I hadn't known what else to do. I could barely read or write--how she was able to even suss it all out...." An ugly grin split his face and he snarled: "When Gran showed up to haul me away, all Mom cared about were her patients. She stood, her body a barrier to the stairs leading to the basement until we were gone.

"And I never went back, not even when I was old enough to know better, to try and stop her." His eyes bore into Snow, as if searching for a reprieve. He chuckled humorlessly. "Even the wicked love their wicked children. Guess the same can be said for brothers and mothers."