The charcoal always left a permanent, dark stain beneath my fingernails, a sharp contrast to the stark white paper of my sketchbooks.
It was a cold, misty Tuesday afternoon in October when the hum began. Nobody else in the modern city could hear it. To my mother, it was just another one of my anxiety attacks—the heavy, suffocating pressure in my chest that forced me to look for places where the concrete streets didn't look so grey. But to me, the hum felt like a physical wire pulled tight at the base of my skull, vibrating with a frequency that didn't belong to our world.
I sat on a mossy stone at the edge of Blackwood Park, my fingers moving with a frantic, automatic rhythm that I couldn't control. My blunt charcoal stick scratched aggressively against the paper.
Line by line, a massive, hyper-realistic wing emerged from the white void. It wasn't the wing of a bird or a bat; it was covered in heavy, interlocking obsidian scales, sharp as daggers, reflecting a storm-filled sky that I had never seen in reality. In the center of the drawing, coiled beneath old stone arches, was the shadow of a colossal black dragon, its eyes burning with a deep, ancient sorrow.
"Morizelle," I whispered my own name into the autumn fog, my voice shaking. "Why do you keep drawing things that don't exist?"
I blinked, and suddenly, the air around me changed.
The scent of dry city exhaust and wet asphalt vanished instantly. It was replaced by a thick, heavy scent that flooded my lungs—the ancient, suffocating smell of damp earth, crushing ozone, and centuries of pine and wild copper. The low hum in my head erupted into a deafening roar, like a thousand brass bells ringing deep underground.
The paper in my lap tore cleanly down the center. The ground beneath my boots simply ceased to be.
I fell. It wasn't a sudden, violent drop, but a slow, swirling descent through a thick, silver fog that felt as dense as cold water. The modern world—the grey park, the distant sounds of traffic, the familiar comfort of my ordinary clothes—melted away into nothingness.
When my feet finally hit solid ground a heartbeat later, the impact sent a soft, whispering shockwave through the soil.
I didn't open my eyes immediately. I could feel wool brushing against my bare ankles, but it wasn't the fabric of my old denim jeans. I reached down, my hands trembling as my fingers brushed against the heavy, elegant folds of a long, midnight-black gown made of silk so thick it felt like armor.
I opened my eyes, and my breath caught in my throat.
