Even as the snake-like construct carried her through the forest at speeds that most cars would envy, Mila kept his hand low, brushing against the tips of grass blades in a series of small bursts of green energy. She knew that so much as lowering her hand two inches, or whatever distance it was from the ground, at the speeds they were moving would, at least, flay her palm.

  And yet, she kept her hand at the same height, risks be damned.

  Her captor, that strange wooden woman who brimmed with Primeval magic of a magnitude unlike Mila had ever felt, kept driving them deeper and deeper into the forest, racing around trees and rocks and rough terrain with the seamless ease and confidence of a model strutting down a catwalk.

  And through it all she never said a single word. That, Mila found, was more terrifying than any of her previous banter could have hoped to be.

  They finally reached a clearing, an almost perfectly circular patch of terrain without any trees or rocks or anything that could stand out against the deep green grass that filled its surface, and their ride stopped suddenly.

  "Here we are," Finally said her captor, casually willing the tangle of roots to free Mila. "This is a spot I made for myself. Here, we can talk unimpeded."

  She waved her hand lazily, and before Mila could ask her anything, the trees delimiting the clearing began shaking and glowing a deep green. A breath later, their branches had extended and entangled with one another, forming a fence that separated the clearing from the rest of the forest.

  "Excuse me for the… safety measures." said the tree-woman, sounding sincerely apologetic. "But I cannot risk any interruptions. Not for this."

  Mila propped herself up, quickly sitting on her heels, making sure to put herself between the tree-woman and the last patch of grass she had touched. "Who… who are you?" She asked.

  The tree-woman also sat up, in the same manner as Mila. "My name is Ruth Watlin. Pleasured to meet you." She offered Mila one of her enormous hands, with her index half stretched. Mila grassped the finger and awkwardly shook it. "I'm terribly sorry, dear, but I don't think I got your name."

  "Mila." She answered. "My name is Mila."

  "Oh?" Hummed the woman, tilting her head to the side and bringing a finger to where her lower lip would have been, had she had a face. "Just Mila? With no surname?"

  Mila looked down at her knees, her mood soured even more than it already was. "It's the only name I remember. I can't recall anything else from before…"

  "You were resurrected?" Offered the woman. Mila's gaze shot upwards, towards the woman's featureless wooden face, completely nonplused. "Oh! I'm terribly sorry dear! That was so rude of me. Could you please excuse that faux pas?"

  "How do you know about that?" Demanded Mila, ignoring the tree-woman's request completely. "How could you possibly know about that?!"

  Once again, the tree woman brought a finger to her non-existent lower lip, and hummed in thought. "Well, I kinda told you already, didn't I? Before I 'snatched you'?"

  "Please, just… please don't be so cryptic." Demanded the girl, rubbing her her temples. She was so stressed that her brain felt like a giant blood clot. "Why do you know about that?"

  "Oh dear, are you feeling alright? You look kinda…" Mila shoot her a surprisingly harsh glare, uncaring of how much stronger her captor was than her, demanding her straight answer. Luckily for her, the tree-woman complied. " Ugh, ok… remember the first thing I told you? That thing about us being the same?" Mila didn't answer verbally, but the increasing widening of her eyes seemed like enough of an answer to the woman. "Ah! I see you are beginning to piece this together, aren't you?"

  "You… are you a fae?" Asked the girl, before her face slackened in recognition. "No, not a fae. You are a wyldfae."

  "A wild what?" Questioned Ruth. "I'm sorry dear, but I'm not quite getting what you mean. Could you please elaborate?"

  Mila took a deep breath, steeling herself before talking. "I… have to ask you something first."

  "Oh, why, of course! What is it dear?"

  "What's your first memory?"

  The wyldfae's entire body stiffened, and Mila felt the flow of Primeval magic around her form grow unstable, inflamated by the older fae's mounting anger.

  "I… would rather not talk about it, dear" She finally said. Her tone was disturbingly neutral. "A lady has to have her secrets after all. I'm sure you understand."

  Her tone had gone back to that pseudo-maternal friendliness she had been using before, but the implication behind her words was still clear: Do not press that issue.

  "O-Okay, yes. Sorry" Quickly said Mila, looking away from the wyldfae. "Either way, I asked because of how fae are… reborn. We only get some memories of who we were before, when we were regular humans. I was so young when I… when I died as a human that I barely remember a thing. Just the moment of my death and the name of Mila. I am not even sure if that was my name or somebody else's."

  "Oh. That… must have been quite a terrible experience for you to go through. How old were you when…?"

  "Five years." Cut Mila. "I was five years old. And about it being a terrible experience… yes, it was. It was a horrible, tragic death. That was the point."

  The wyldfae leaned closer, casting a shadow over Mila's body. "The point? What do you mean by that?"

  Mila groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose. "I mean that, had my death not been horrible or tragic or something, I wouldn't have been reborn as a fae. Fae are created when a human meets a particularly horrible end in a place where nature has a great presence, like a forest. This tragedy can sometimes rouse sympathy from the very forces of nature, which will then pluck the fae-to-be's soul from the cycle of life and death and forge them a new body, identical to the last one, out of their power. This not only gives the newborn fae a new chance of living, but also grants them, well…" She rose her hand, which was brimming with with green energy. "Certain gifts."

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "And what about wyldfae?" Asked Ruth. "You said I was one, so what are they?"

  "They are… fae that have lost their humanity." As soon as those words had left her lips, she felt the nature energy around them beginning to thrash around, much more violently than when she asked her about her past. She felt bile rise to her throat. Nonetheless, she kept talking. "If a fae loses whatever is tethering to their humanity, then their connection with nature takes over their souls. This mutates them and dramatically boosts their abilities and… Well, you know already."

  The thrashing of energy kept growing in an increasingly painful crescendo. For a moment, the image of the wyldfae bringing one of her gigantic hands down and squashing Mila like an insect flashed across her mind.

  Luckily for her, it seemed her host had better self-control than that. The wooden woman reclined back, letting the moonlight reach Mila's frame once more.

  "I did start out looking like I did in life." Confided the woman, sounding tired. "I just… assumed that it was like a butterfly, y'know? That this-" She raised one of her arms, and made vines sprout from the limb. "- was just like reaching maturity and a deeper connection with nature. Looking back, it does check that it's just a consequence of me going, well, all misanthropic, but I really wanted to believe it was some sort of blessing."

  The woman sounded resignated, as if she saw her current predicament and state of being as tragedies or curses, but had been carrying them so long that she was long past anguishing about them. That tone was, despite the context of their conversation, more than enough to draw Mila's sympathy.

  Dying horribly, only to be brought back years after the fact without any clue as to why. Finding herself alone in the middle of the eastern european forest her old self had perished in, with no memories but the name of Mila, of an old lady whose face or relation to her she couldn't remember carrying her through that same forest, running away from something she couldn't remember either, and… the sound of a gun being fired, and the pain of a bullet all but obliterating her windpipe after going through the old lady's chest… the feeling of chocking on her blood as everything goes black.

  There were times where Mila wondered why she hadn't gone through that metamorphosis, why she hadn't taken the same route that the woman in front of her had and relinquished her own humanity in favor of becoming one with nature.

  She probably had been close to reaching that state in multiple ocassions, long before she had known about that posibility. The first time had probably been all the way back when she had reborn only God knows how many years after her 'human death'. The gestation process to become a fae took a long time, it seemed, almost like an actual pregnancy. The thing was that, unlike actual pregnancies, how much each individual incubation could take varied wildly between cases for reasons that no one knew. This had made Mila feel even more disociated from her previous, human self than she already was. Had she been a bosnian during the breakup of Yugoslavia? Or perhaps she had lived sixty years before that, a belarusian child whose village had received the vist of an Einsatzgruppen?

  She couldn't even remenber what specific country she was from, Eastern Europe being the most she knew. She might have been able to figure it out, eventually. After all, she had been reborn in the exact same place, and therefore country, that she died in.

  But she hadn't stayed in that country long after her rebirth. The warlocks that found her had made sure of that.

  Fae were rare for obvious reason which, when combined with their unique powers and connection with the forces of nature, made them extremely valuable. Another of the great questions Mila had about this period was just how had those warlocks found her so fast after her rebirth. Did they have the means to detect the pulse of Primeval magic that came with her birth? Or perhaps they had just been in the right place at the right time. Whatever the case might have been, the end result had been the same: They captured her, put her in a cage, and shipped her very, very far away.

  She never did learn where she was supposed to be her final destination though, because when the boat she was at the time made a stop in the Port of Seattle, the first good thing in her new life happened. The boat they were transporting her in was also packed with all kinds of magical contraband, enough to alert a series of big and small orders of it. And also enough for those orders to crack down on it with the force and impasiveness of a meteor.

  The Order of Myra had been among these orders, and they were the ones to find her.

  She still remembered the fear she had felt when all those scary people, carrying weapons and sticks and whatnot, had burst into the chamber they kept her in. And the relief she had felt when she realized that they were not with the people that had put her there in the first place.

  "Well, it is a blessing." She finally said. Ruth tilted her head at her words. "Becoming a fae is… painful, and disorienting, and it very much doesn't just erase the pain that fate brought down on our human selves. Heck, it seems that the only memory the process reliably leaves us with is that of our frigging' deaths! But… it's still very much a blessing."

  "Is that so?" Asked Ruth, her tone sour. "And why is it so much of a blessing?"

  "Because it gives us something very few people that have gone through what we have get: A second chance, an opportunity to seek happines once again." She took a deep breath, and blinked away the increasing wetness in her eyes. She really didn't like the memories this was bringing back. "The first few… months of my life as a fae weren't easy, not at all. Even when I was found by good people and taken to a place with other children like me, it wasn't easy. Being reborn as a fae at such a young age took a lot of memories from me, including language. I most likely didn't speak english before, so it probably wouldn't have changed much if I had retained that, but it would have been nice to have some form of communicating, even if it was useless for the place I found myself in."

  "What happened?" Asked the woman, leaning closer once again. "Once you were brought to that place, I mean."

  "It… wasn't terrible." Mila answered, scratching the back of her head. "But I can't say it was amazing either. Kids, they… can be rather thoughtless. So when a strange girl, with strange hair, and that couldn't talk at all came along? Well, they weren't welcoming. Not cruel, but not welcoming. Nobody talked with me, or played with me, or… well, you get the idea. I was lonely, and there was a period where I thought I would always be lonely. Looking back, I was probably close at becoming a wyldfae back then."

  "And why didn't you? What changed?"

  Mila's lips curled in a loving smile. "I met Kurt."

  "Kurt?"

  "My companion." Clarified Mila. "The boy that was with me when… you snatched me."

  "Oh, him." Spat the woman derisively. "What's so special about him, that he has you making that face?"

  "He was my first friend, and he is still my best friend. We met about five or so months after I arrived the order's settlement, when we were both seven. Well, he was seven. In my case, between not knowing my birthday, plus some… other stuff , I could only approximate how old I truly was. Either way, we met and… we clicked."

  "You clicked." Repeated Ruth, unimpressed.

  "Yes, we clicked." She emphasized. The older woman's derision towards Kurt was really beginning to piss her off. "We were both lonely. In his case it was because he was… kinda scary. He was the kid that was always grumpy and took sparring way too seriously and always ended up beating the snot out of someone when sparring."

  "He sounds dreamy." Dryly snarked Ruth.

  "Yeah, he was… troubled." Agreed Mila. "That's actually why I approached him in the first place. Not because he was scary, but because he was just as lonely as me. Easier to approach a single scary kid than a group of regular ones. At least, that's what I thought at the moment. I was desperate to… talk to someone, anyone, and he seemed the easiest option, or at least that's what my 7 years old self thought." Without her intending it to, her smile began widening little by little. "Best decision I've ever taken."

  "Oh, god." Groaned Ruth, palming her blank face. "You are in love with him."

  Her words came, not as a question, but as the statement of a fact. The sky is blue, ice is cold, and Mila was in love with Kurt.

  "Yup, I am." Answered the girl simply, one of her hands reaching out behind her. "Been for a while too."

  Another spike of magic hit her senses as Ruth slammed both hands against the ground with enough force to crater it. The wyldfae, it seemed, wasn't one for romance.

  "Do you know how stupid you sound right now?!" She roared. "Pinning for a guy that's going to just… discard you when it hits his fancy?!"

  Mila raised her head to meet the wyldfae's gaze with one of her own, not with one of conptempt or rage, but one of pity. "You said something similar to Kurt before, about him finding 'another girl to fuck'. Was that what happened to you? Is that what caused you to relinquish your human self?"

  Silence. For a moment, the clearing they were occupying became engulfed by an absolute, ear crushing silence. Ruth had paralized at her last comment, and even the flow of Primeval magic around them lost most of its previous vigor.

  This was not an improvement. This silence wasn't born out of a feeling of agreement on the older woman's part. It wasn't shock or even sorrow, either. No, it was something simpler and more terrible than any of those options, a feeling so distinctively opposed to the very essence of Nature itself that Mila could taste it in the air.

  In that moment, in that place, Ruth hated her.

  "You are never leaving this forest." Snarled the woman, her wooden frame bulging with the power of nature. "You are never seeing that fuck-off again, either. No, you… you are staying here, with me, until you see things my way."

  Her words were a display of dark determination such that, when combined with the rapid crescendo of Primeval magic both around and within her treant-like body, were almost enough to convince Mila that she was never leaving that forest.

  Almost.

  "I'm sorry, Ruth. But I am leaving." She stood up casually, unthreatened by the older fae's display of power. Then, with the same energy and gravitas that most people could only muster when handling a gun, she brought her hand high. In that same hand, held between her index and thumb, was a single white daisy.

  It seemed like an inocuous gesture, holding a flower up high, but that gesture held a signifiance that wasn't lost on Ruth, even in her nigh-rabid state. And this transcendent meaning hinged on one simple fact.

  There hadn't been any daisies growing in that clearing.

  The wyldfae looked at the patch of grass right behind the girl's feet, which had been previously covered by her torso.

  White daisies were growing on that spot, in numbers enough that the white overshadowed the green. But it wasn't a singular, isolated patch. No, it was a trail of daisies, growing in varying densities.

  A trail that stretched all the way to the fence around the clearing, and beyond it.

  "You!" Snarled the wyldfae, her face darting back to her younger kin. "What have you-?!"

  She never got to finish her question, because at that moment, and with a green glow too pale to be the Primeval magic she commanded, three Wind Blades cut right through her barrier with the sound of a howling storm, revealing the forest beyond that threshold. And the figure responsible for that reveal.

  "Mila!" Came Kurt's voice, booming and corageous and marvelous as she knew it. "Are you there?!"

  Slowly, uncaring for the wyldfae in front of her, Mila turned to look at him, letting him see the tears of relief that fell down her face, and the huge smile that was parting it.

  "What the heck took you so long?!"

  Book 2.