About this story
Warned off the ash tree, you shelter in a living beech, then follow a white track to a tower full of marble figures. Your song cracks one figure's stone shell, and she flees the moment she wakes. At nightfall you find her again, willing to walk on with you into a dark she only asks you to trust.
How it opens
On your twenty-first birthday, a tiny woman stepped from the secretary once owned by your father.
Fairy GrandmotherAnodos, your family has delayed this inheritance longer than wisdom recommends.
She claimed to be your grandmother and measured your disbelief with amused black eyes.
Fairy GrandmotherYour basin has remembered a spring, and your floor has remembered the earth.
If this is my inheritance, tell me what law governs it.
Fairy GrandmotherDesire opens the country; conduct decides whether it lets you leave.