Otherworld

Prologue

Life, Wren mused, is a peculiar thing. Some things, some places, some people seem to have too much of it. Before she had been old enough to know better, Wren had thought that it was obvious there was more than was immediately visible. It was obvious because you could see Life and some things had more than their fair share. But Wren’s father had set that little misconception straight. She’d made the mistake of talking to her father about the Life that surrounded them. She had only made it once. Her mother on the other hand, Wren’s mother had been able to see, she had been alive in a way that her father wasn’t. And while she never exactly taught Wren anything directly, Wren learnt everything she knew from her mother.

That, Wren knew, was why her parents could never have worked. They were an exceptionally mismatched couple; her father worked as something in the city, always carried a briefcase and was constantly barking into a mobile phone whereas her mother was.... different. Other people might have called her a hippy, though she was aging, but Wren knew her mother simply was. She was real in a way that her father wasn’t.

Wren had not been surprised when her mother left.

What had surprised her was that everyone who’d ever known her mother seemed to instantly forget her. The moment Wren’s mother had disappeared, the entire world forgot she had ever existed, save for a method of delivering Wren into her father’s care. Even he had forgotten the woman he had married in a moment of madness (because they were just too different for it to have been anything else) and claimed ignorance when Wren questioned him. So Wren was left behind to figure out the ways of the world, to puzzle over Life and Seeing and Understanding.

Wren didn’t belong in the world that her father lived in. He inhabited the unreal world of mundane, ritualised lives that were barely lived, of routine and order and normality. She was nothing if not her mother’s daughter. She had the family skill and that was all she needed to know. Wren, like her mother, her grandmother and countless other female relatives for centuries, had a skill specific to their shared blood. She could speak and be understood, listen and understand. She had a Voice that could not be ignored, though she used it sparingly in the world of her father. Anything that had Life could communicate with Wren, and she could talk to it. And so, when her mother had left, Wren had been left with no choice but to follow.

It was surprisingly easy to follow the woman that the world forgot. Wren’s mother was the sort of person who left a trail wherever she went. Oh, it wasn’t anything visible, per se, rather a sense, a feeling or an echo of her passage. For Wren, her mother was as easy to follow as the string through the labyrinth in her favourite story of Theseus and the Minotaur (although she had always cried when the Minotaur was killed, much preferring him to the soppy hero).

Wren was still a child when she turned her back on the world of her birth, which soon forgot her anyhow, in favour of her Home. She felt no unease, had no second thoughts, when she crossed from the unreal world into a place where everything had Life, a place in which she belonged.

But the Otherworld is not known for its welcome. By the time she had found her, Wren’s mother was already dead.