“Oh!” she says, and even her voice is fucking musical. “From whence have you come?”

I want to assure her that none of this is real. That she and her tower are hallucinations produced by the last desperate misfires of my synapses. That her usage of whence was grammatically suspect at best, anachronistic at worst.

I manage a single wheezy, “Holy shit,” before my vision goes black.

I WAKE UP in bed. Not mine; mine is a twin mattress with faded Disney sheets that I grew out of years ago but don’t see the point in replacing. This bed is an absurd, canopied affair of white silk and soft down. It’s the sort of bed that only exists in period romances and fairy tales, because actual medieval beds were a lot smellier and lumpier; the sort of bed where a princess might sleep comfortably for a hundred years.

I part the canopy with one finger and find a room that matches the bed: dark stone and rich rugs, tapestries and carved-oak chests. I blink into the cheery morning light for several seconds, half expecting a songbird to alight on the windowsill and break into an upbeat chorus, before sinking calmly back against the pillows.

This is the point in your standard fantasy adventure where the heroine would give herself a good hard pinch to determine whether or not she’s dreaming. But I can hear the labored thump of my heart in my ears, feel the slightly hungover scratchiness of my eyeballs: I’m not sleeping. I’m not hallucinating. Unless the afterlife is even more profoundly wacky than most major religions have so far posited, I’m not dead. Which means—

I can’t seem to finish the thought. It sends a giddy, hysterical thrill up my spine and a nameless rush of something behind my ribcage.

My phone hums in my jean pocket. I fish it out to find roughly eight hundred texts from Charm. Most of them are variations of wtf wtf WTF where are you interspersed with threats upon my person (if this is some kind of sick joke I swear to jesus I will kill you before the grm does) and pleas for a response (hey your parents are calling me now and idk what to say so if you’re alive NOW’S THE TIME BITCH).

I start to type back an apology then pause, wondering about data rates between Ohio and wherever the hell I am and how exactly I have cell signal, before that wild hysteria bubbles over. I write sorry babe. got spider-verse-ed into a fairy tale.

As I hit send, I feel that unfamiliar rushing in my chest again, and it turns out it has a name, after all. Oh, hell. You’d think twenty-one years under a life sentence would be enough to squash all the hope out of me, but here I am, lying in a bed that doesn’t belong to me, filled with the desperate, foolish hope that maybe my story is about to change.