AllFreeNovel
Share Us
PROLOGUE
On stormy nights, I dream of the Gray Man.
He holds my hand and walks with me through an ocean of swaying marsh grasses beneath a mass of rolling thunderclouds. The wind whips my hair around my face, and I can see the white caps on the roiling ocean in the distance.
I call him the Gray Man because that is all I can see of him. In the gathered darkness, his features are blurred and dark, his figure solid and yet somehow not, a companion seemingly composed of shadow or smoke. I have to look up at him, and he down at me. My bare feet in the sand have the pudgy dimpled toes of early childhood.
As we walk, he whispers to me.
What he whispers, I can never remember when I wake up; when I try to recall the words, I hear only the susurration of the sea breeze through the dunes and the gentle rolling of distant thunder. But in the dream, I nod my head along to his murmurs as though he is speaking the very truths that nestle in my little heart.
We stop at the edge of the dunes, where the long grasses give way to a stretch of sand bleached white in the storm-drenched darkness. I look out to the crashing waves beyond. I can hear them calling to me, an ancient song. The Gray Man bends low and whispers in my ear, and though I hear only the moan of the wind and the crackle of lightning, I understand him. I know what will happen next.
The Gray Man and I, hand in hand, will walk into the sea.
I feel no fear, no trepidation. I only know that disappearing into the raging waters with the Gray Man by my side will be the most natural thing in the world. My childish heart does not pound, but thrums peacefully, like the purring of a contented cat.
I am ready. I have always been ready.
The sand compresses beneath my feet. I leave a trail of sunken crescent moons behind me. He leaves no footprints at all. I look up at his face, the question in my eyes. The answer he murmurs to me satisfies my youthful curiosity and fades immediately from my memory.
At last the water licks at our toes, sending a delightful shiver up my spine. We pause only a moment before we walk forward, churning water swirling and bubbling up over my ankles, my calves, weighing down the hem of my white summer dress.
The wind howls my name, and the Gray Man’s hand tightens around mine. I look up at him.
At the absence of him.
He is gone, and I am already forgetting what he looks like when I hear my name again. I’m suddenly cold and afraid. A frantic hand grips my shoulder. I turn.
And I wake up.
1
Ihad only a handful of memories of my grandmother, like glittering stones tucked away in a childhood pocket. Whenever I would take one out and turn it over in my palm to examine it like a secret treasure, I was always struck by how each one felt more like a dream than an actual memory, hazy around the edges and full of tiny details that I decided afterward certainly couldn’t have been true.
But they were true. This I knew as well as I knew my own name.
My grandmother, Asteria Vesper, swept into my life once a year on my birthday, from my earliest memories until the day I turned ten years old. She arrived in a whirl of color and sparkle and barely tamed energy like a gift I couldn’t wait to unwrap. And my mother opened the door to her every year with an expression of stony resignation, like she was doing it against her better judgment.
Because she was.
“Wren! Where’s my little guiding star?” came that musical voice, and I would stumble forward into her arms, where I would be enveloped in a heady perfume of herbs and oils and florals that made me deliciously dizzy.
“I missed you, Asteria!” I would cry, for Asteria would have none of those matronly titles associated with grandmothers.
“I have a name and prefer to be called by it,” she would say. “My name is my power and my song. Why would I want another?”
My mother rolled her eyes at this, but I would remember it for years afterward. Sometimes, I would whisper my own name into the silence as I lay in bed, listening for that music and power that Asteria claimed a name could contain. All I ever heard was my own uncertain voice curling up into a question mark in the darkness.
Asteria always brought a gift for me, but she never wrapped it. Instead, she made me hunt for it through the dozens of pockets and pouches of her flowing skirts and dresses, or else guess which of the bangles or rings or necklaces was for me among the jingling collection she always wore that made her sound like a human windchime. I would finger each bauble reverently, as though the right one would speak to me if I only knew its language. When I finally closed my shaking fingers around one, looking up at Asteria with the unspoken question in my eyes, the answer was always the same.
“You found it! However did you know?” Asteria cried, and plucked the item from her person at once to present to me. When I was very small, this would fill me with a kind of wonder at my own cleverness. By the time I was ten, logic had begun to creep in to spoil the magic of the little birthday ritual, and I began to suspect that my grandmother was simply allowing me to select my own gift, and that there never could be a wrong answer, whatever I chose.
It was this yearly ritual of choosing a gift that always seemed to wind my mother up into a tense coil. She would stand silently by, watching with her arms crossed tightly over her chest and her lips pressed together. When I held up my new treasure for her to see, her response was always the same.
“It’s very nice, Wren. Say thank you to Asteria,” she said, the words ground out through clenched teeth.
Although my mother would not admit it, I knew that my tenth birthday gift was the reason Asteria never came back again. The morning of my birthday that year had arrived wrapped in a warm, foggy drizzle. From the moment I woke up, I waited breathlessly for Asteria to appear out of that fog like a dream out of slumber. When she finally swept into our apartment that evening, there were tiny beads of moisture glittering in her hair and on her skin so that she looked half made up of starlight.
