“Something you have to face in order to be free. You have to go alone …” His voice faded. I wanted to turn and look for him, but I didn’t. I stepped into the roiling eye of the hurricane …

… where it was a calm and clear summer night. I stood on a grassy lawn beneath a twilight blue sky, surrounded by the flickering light of fireflies. The place tugged at my memory. The smell of smoke and night blooming flowers riding the warm summer air, the thick blue dark pinpricked by pulsing fireflies, the damp grass beneath my bare feet … my bare feet? I looked down and saw my pale feet half buried in grass, only … they looked smaller than my feet. I wriggled my toes. Definitely my feet … then a noise caught my attention. A humming that blended with the cicadas and tree frogs, but wasn’t cicadas and tree frogs. I looked up … and up as though I had shrunk and the world had grown taller around me. A cloaked figure towered above me, arms raised to the crescent moon. As I stared in amazement, the figure took hold of the moon and drew it down toward her. I gasped and the figure spun around, robes billowing in the warm air, wafting the smell of smoke and something else toward me, something bitter … then there was a flash of silver as a sickle knife arced down toward me …

I screamed and turned … and felt the coil wound inside me snap. Instantly, I was spun out into the void with the force of an exploding star. I’d broken the spiral by turning and now I was hurtling through space. Far away I heard a distant hum, an echo of that summer night insect hum … or the circle trying to sing me home. But I was out of their reach. Out of anyone’s reach. Brock was lost and I was lost, all because I hadn’t had the courage to face my past. I had been that little girl standing in the grass watching the tall woman pull down the moon and slash the air with it. But that knowledge did me no good now. Without the spiral I had no path home …

But then I remembered Liam’s voice telling me that Aelvesgold linked true lovers together, no matter how far apart. I imagined Liam’s face and saw him, his face above me as we made love, a halo of gold light blazing around him, his eyes looking deep into mine, reaching into my core. I felt a warmth uncoil in my chest, wrapping around me and unspooling like a loose ball of yarn.

See, he said as the thread came to the end of its reach, his voice as clear as a bell in the emptiness of space, like I said. True lovers.