“It’s time to make your wish,” he says, and my stomach fills with butterflies. “Are you ready to be born again?” I don’t know what he means by that; I just want the lovely shoes. I nod anyway, and Pitch smiles at me. “Then close your eyes.”
When I do this, I hold my breath, too excited to breathe.
My heart feels like it’s going to burst out from my chest. I feel dizzy and sick and excited.
“Do you remember what we talked about?” Pitch asks quietly. “What you do once you make your wish? It’s very important that you don’t forget that part.”
“I won’t forget,” I tell him firmly, peeking through my eyelashes. “Can I say it now? Can I make my wish?”
He giggles and lets go of my hand. “Go on, Corvina. Make your wish and make it count.”
I let out an excited squeal, then I scrunch up my little face and think really hard because I don’t want to mess this up.
—Hello faeries! Please can I have the same shoes as my dolly? You know, the sparkly blue shoes with the pretty bows on the silver buckles? I would like them very much. Thank you.—
With my wish uttered, I open my eyes. Pitch is gone just like he said he would be and I’m alone on the well. I look down into the tunnel of darkness stretching before me. A loose pebble falls away from the edge and drops into the well. It takes forever to splash through the water at the bottom, and I gulp, my palms turning sweaty against my dress.
For my wish to come true, I need to go down there.
Pitch said he’ll be waiting for me and that the faeries will even give me wings so that I don’t hurt myself. I’ll be just like the other children who followed the faeries into the woods and lived happily ever after. Maybe I’ll even be able to see my friends, Bella, and Michael and Agnes.
We’ll all be faeries together, like we used to talk about.
I turn around and spread my arms out like wings, smiling at the thought of seeing my friends from school again. Taking a deep breath and holding it in my chest, I close my eyes and fall down into the well, praying that Mama and Papa were wrong about the faeries, and about Pitch, the monster hiding under my bed…
Before I plunge to my death, I wake up with a gasp for air, crutching my thin bedsheets in my hands. Pitch wasn’t waiting for me. There was nothing but pain and misery at the bottom of that stupid well and my innocent ass didn’t know any better back then.
I fell into magical darkness, and as everyone here tells me, that’s when I became a shadowborn.
But that’s not the part that haunts me every night in my dreams. Oh, no. It’s what happened after the pain and misery—after I drowned in all the magical water, my eight-year-old body absorbing it like it was sugar and I was a starving kid. When my heart started beating again and I opened my eyes, I lay floating on my back as the moon drew closer and closer to me. I remember crying and thinking I had been turned into a bug instead of a faery, but it was just the water healing my shattered bones and floating me up to the surface.
The second my feet touched the earth again, my power exploded and I destroyed everything in a five-mile radius, including all the people in the houses.
Including my parents.
And the only living thing was me, covered in ash, lying on the forest floor as the sun rose into a blood-red sky.
Talk about a birthday to remember.
After that, I was picked up by the Shadow Wardens, protectors of the magical world, and thrown in a shadowborn foster home with all the other children that are like me. Only they didn’t kill hundreds of people and not one of them in here see their powers like the curse it really is.
“You having those dreams again?” Sage asks, sitting up on her bed next to me and staring at me, the moonlight highlighting her beige skin, curly pink hair that isn’t at all messy even though she just woke up. Sage Millhouse is the only bit of this foster home that I've ever cared about and I'm certain it's the same way for her. We came here on the same day, two scared kids who wanted nothing more than to escape this hellhole and the new powers we have. Sage got her power the way most of the kids here did, by being bitten by a shadowborn in their animal state. One bite is enough to infuse any soul with shadow magic, and all it took for Sage was a bite from a fox in her garden.
The fox was never seen again, and Sage nearly died, only to survive and be taken from her parents to come and live here.
The foster home is full of those stories, and it's the main reason I don't talk about my past.
"Always."
It’s all I need to say for Sage to get off her bed and head out of the room. I follow her, the old wooden floorboards creaking under my barefeet with each step. Sage holds the timber door open and we head outside into the garden. The cool air is refreshing for only a second before it's nothing but cold nipping at my skin.
"Ready?" I ask her as I stare up, the darkness and shadows comforting me like they always do.
Sage doesn't reply, though I’m unsurprised as she isn't one for words. That’s why I like her. I watch her bright purple eyes as she disappears in a cloud of black smoke. The darkness. It’s become a blanket of sorts to people like us. As the blackness fades away, there is nothing more than a hawk sitting on the ground, its lavender eyes staring up
