The year passed like a phantom wind—brushed fingers, echoes in doorways, silence after laughter.
Elara Morin lived.
She lived as no one expected her to.
The illness that once drained her every breath vanished without a trace. Her cheeks bloomed with color. Her limbs, once stiff and sore, carried her through long walks and late evenings. She laughed again. She sang under her breath. She even danced once, when she thought no one was watching.
People noticed.
The townsfolk whispered of miracles. Her healer, old Marrit Krel, insisted she had been misdiagnosed. "Your body simply healed," he muttered with a look of confusion. "Some rare remission. Yes. It happens."
But Elara knew better.
She knew the price.
She kept Gregor Vane's journal hidden beneath a floorboard in her room. Some nights she would reread his final entries by candlelight, hand trembling. He had lived four years past his wish. No more. He had lost everything—bit by bit—until only the shape of a man remained.
Elara did not intend to end that way.
She marked the calendar with an X every night. Counted the days. Practiced what she would give. It had to be something real, the fairy had said. Something she couldn't fake.
When the year turned and the frost returned, the wind brought her a whisper:
"It is time."
Elara walked to the Virelle mansion in silence.
The forest had grown even darker in the last year. The trees bent toward her like curious creatures. The thorns along the path were red-tipped now, wet with something she dared not name.
The mansion itself stood exactly as she remembered it—sinking into its own shadow, roof rotted to bone, windows blank. The gate groaned when she pushed it open. No rain this time. No wind.
Only expectation.
She passed the broken angels and the blind lions. The statues seemed older now. Cracked wider. Grinning, some of them.
Elara stepped through the front doors, into the deep.
The library waited.
Still red. Still silent.
The books hadn't moved. The great circular window at the back glowed with that same unnatural hue—less light, more presence. As though someone had carved open the wall of the world and let raw sunset bleed through.
And upon her pedestal, wings curled like fire around her body, the Crimson Fairy sat.
Her eyes opened the moment Elara entered. Crimson again. This time, with flecks of gold.
"You return," the fairy said softly.
"I said I would."
"You live."
"I do."
The fairy tilted her head. "Then let us see what you've brought."
Elara took a breath. Her heart thundered, but she didn't let her voice shake.
"I brought you… my mother's song."
The fairy blinked once.
"I don't understand," Elara admitted, voice rising. "I don't have gold, or jewels, or talents. But I remember one thing from before she died. She used to hum a lullaby. I don't know the words. I only remember the tune. I've sung it every night since I was a child."
She looked up, desperate. "I want you to take it."
The fairy rose, silent and impossibly graceful.
"Sing it," she said.
Elara closed her eyes.
The tune came easily. She'd hummed it through sickness, through grief, through dreams. It wrapped around her like warmth. The library seemed to lean in, listening.
When she finished, the fairy touched her brow.
"Given. And taken."
The tune vanished.
Not faded. Not dulled. Gone.
She tried to recall it. But her mind hit a wall, smooth and blank. Panic rose.
"Wait—I—no, just a second, I just had it—"
"It is no longer yours," said the fairy. "You have paid."
Elara backed away, breath ragged. A hollow place opened in her chest—not pain, exactly. Absence. Like something had died.
The fairy watched, calm as ever. "Next year. Another offering."
Elara nodded, too shaken to speak. She turned and fled.
That night, she wept. Quietly. Then louder.
The tune was gone. A thread pulled loose from the tapestry of her self. But she was still alive.
And the price… could have been worse.
Couldn't it?
The second year passed faster.
And this time, people noticed more than just her health.
Elara grew sharper. Her memory improved beyond belief. She could recall conversations word for word, remember entire books after one reading. Her co-workers at the archive called her a prodigy. The mayor asked her to help catalogue the town's historical records. She found strange patterns in the land surveys, and even uncovered a lost burial map beneath a church's foundation.
She smiled more, but only at the surface. Inside, the silence where her mother's song had lived echoed louder every night.
She dreamed of the fairy's face.
She did not dream of her mother.
On the second anniversary, Elara brought her next offering.
It was harder this time.
She stood in the red-lit library, and the fairy approached her more closely than before. Her skin radiated heat and a faint perfume of smoke and rosewater.
"Well?" said the fairy.
"My childhood," Elara whispered.
The fairy raised a brow. "Define it."
"The years before I turned ten. Take them."
The fairy placed a hand to Elara's temple.
Warmth, then numbness.
Memories fell away—ice cracking on a pond. Her first day at school. Her favorite game with chalk and marbles. The voice of her father. Gone.
She staggered backward, tears leaking from her eyes, though she did not understand why she cried.
"What did I just lose?" she whispered.
The fairy offered no answer.
Another year passed.
Elara stopped visiting her childhood haunts. They meant nothing to her now. People from her early years greeted her, but their names tasted like ash.
She began to write things down obsessively—afraid of forgetting again. She catalogued her own life, trying to anchor herself. But the more she offered, the more she realized how deeply the pact had dug into her soul.
She began to understand how Gregor Vane had unraveled.
But still—she was alive.
And still, the fairy waited.