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were leashed inside her, demands and arguments she’d swallowed for a dozen years.
    Even though she and Dad never talked about it, she knew why her mother had left when she was four. She still dimly recalled her yelling tantrum, the last straw that had driven her mother away.
    Sure, Dad had taken her to expensive therapy, but the shame still bound her, the secret knowledge that she had been so terrible her own mother had fled. So she didn’t argue, didn’t talk back, just went up to her bedroom and watched stupid vids until she was too tired to think.
    By Monday, her dad felt well enough to go back to work. Jennet waved goodbye a little too enthusiastically, then ran up to the computer room. A few minutes later she was in-game. This time, golden light enveloped her, sending dizzy spirals through her stomach.
    It reminded her of the first time she’d played.
    She’d mastered six levels since then—each one with interesting challenges. There had been puzzles to unlock, and ferocious fights, and plenty of the usual hack-and-grind questing she was used to from other games. Sometimes Feyland threw odd twists at her, but after that first, creepy start, things had normalized.
    No question that the game had patchy coding, which was to be expected of a pre-beta prototype. It was obvious the techs had concentrated their efforts at the beginning. After those first couple quests in-game, the experience had flattened out; the sensations not as vivid or immersive. Though it was still an amazing game.
    Jennet’s avatar materialized, as usual, in a faerie ring—but this time she was in the center of a circle of moon-pale mushrooms. Tall oaks encircled the clearing, and the sky was an indigo curtain, dusted silver with stars. A sweet night wind ruffled her hair, pulled at the skirt of her gown—and she felt it. There was an extra-reality to the sensations enfolding her. The taste of dew tingled on her tongue, the soft mosses gave like plush velvet beneath her feet.
    Clearly the programmers had concentrated on the endgame, too—which meant she was getting close to the final boss.
     

     
    “S he comes!” The wood-colored spriggan bowed before the queen, spindly limbs trembling to be this close to her darkness.
    “At last.” The queen’s smile was a blade, her eyes black chasms.
    The spriggan shook like bare branches in the winter wind. He was the least of his clan, and fully expected to be seized in those pale, deadly hands, broken into kindling, and thrown on the violet bonfire flickering behind him, his screams mixing with the flames as his essence was consumed.
    But the queen dismissed him with a gesture, beckoning instead to one of her gossamer-clad handmaidens.
    “Greenbriar,” she said.
    The faerie maiden bowed her head, hair like moonlight dipping over her face, and moved with willowy grace to stand before the queen. Rising, the Dark Queen took Greenbriar’s hand and pulled her close. The blackthorn dagger pulsed in the queen’s pale grasp, an absence of light, of hope.
    With one swift move, the queen plunged the thorn into her handmaiden’s chest, stabbing her to the heart. Greenbriar let out a keening cry that rose up until the stars themselves shuddered. Shaped by the queen’s need, powered with fresh-spilled faerie blood, the Realm opened an inexorable path beneath the mortal girl’s feet.
    Hollow and lifeless, Greenbriar’s body fell to the mute grasses, her pale hair spread out around her like snow. Goblins hastened to bear her away. The musicians struck up a dirge, and the queen tucked her deadly thorn back into her gown.
    “Now,” she said in a voice hard as diamond, “we await our guest.”
     

     
    Jennet drew in a breath of the night-deep air, chill with the faint memory of shuttered flowers. Above, the sky was pricked with stars, and the thin sliver of a crescent moon tangled in the dark branches of the oaks. She’d never been here before, and her heart sped with the lure of the new. The path