The house Catie remembers is a dainty, Victorian structure with powder-blue siding that sits at the edge of a wood white with birches. There, she and her little cousins had plunged through crispy, fallen leaves in autumn, and blankets of wildflowers on dreaming, summer days when they’d been young. Her memory bears little resemblance to the house now, its windows pitch-black and the birches crowding to either side, ghostly pale beneath the moon. The taxi’s vanishing headlight

The magic wakes him, gentle as the fall of golden leaves from the white-limbed trees that whisper softly above, in the glade of the ancient hero. Eyelids flicker, lift. A sky of pallid blue greets him, gilded with boughs. The glade is quiet, murmuring with the echoes of ages long-gone. He sighs, and pushes upright with a wince. Caked in rusted armor, the ancient hero screeches to a sitting position, exhales a plume of dust. Moths lift from beneath his pallid braids and scutte