A Pocketful of Stars

Welcome to the World: Chapter 1

There weren't many things Ciara trusted.

Her memory wasn't one of them.

Her first memory, that one that was set in stone, that she trusted...that was waking up in a little stone cottage, an older woman at her side that was replacing the ice on her forehead.

She hadn't understood what was happening them.

Sometimes, she still didn't.

But Esmeray, as she had later learned was her name...she was the first thing in her new life that Ciara trusted.

Esmeray and later Garvan, who she had learned was the one who had pulled her from the snow near the mountains.

How she had come to be there...who had broken her ribs and bruised her to hell and back...she hadn't known that for months. And even then, the memories had come to her in dreams, until she was no longer sure what was real and what wasn't...until Esmeray had sat her down and made her talk through them all, until they had tried to write it down and make up a timeline and figure out what had happened to her.

The result of that...she hadn't really wanted to know more until some of the pieces had clicked in place...until she just knew, deep in her bones that...that had happened.

By then she had already known that there was a child slumbering in her womb.

And she knew that whatever she did...she needed to have a safe place to raise her baby.

That was all that had mattered.

So she had stayed in Rosehall. And she started to trust that as well. Rosehall, nestled between the Illyrian mountains and the crashing ocean...between cliffs and forests. Rosehall, with its tight-knit community of Illyrians who maybe didn't all get along but would still lay their life down for each other because they had a common goal: Survival.

And she did her best to find her place there, to make herself useful. To thank Esmeray for everything she had done for her, repay her for the kind she had shown Ciara that she hadn't needed to but still had.

And so, as the babe within her grew and started kicking, as the days grew longer into summer and then shorter as autumn came and winter knocked...Ciara had started to...trust Rosehall.

Trust in the rhythm of Esmeray's cottage, in her work in the seamstress shop...had realised that whatever she had been before...she had been that with the callouses on her fingers.

Ciara couldn't even remember her name but she remembered the rhythms of needle and thread.

And still...even with Esmeray opening her house and her work for Ciara...giving her name when she hadn't even remembered her own...even with all of that...Ciara had trusted on being alone.

Trusted on there being her and her baby and that would be it.

And then she opened the door to the cottage for lunch and there hadn't just been Esmeray...but also the most beautiful male she had ever laid eyes on.

And between one blink and the next...everything in her body had yearned for him.

She hadn't expected that.

A part of Ciara had trusted that there never would be any...that there wouldn't be any male in her life. Not like that. Not as a mate, or a husband or anything of that kind.

She already had been burned once...even if she still couldn't remember everything. What she had remembered...it scared her out of her mind.

And suddenly he was standing and she realised how tale he was, how broad his wings were and she had stumbled back in terror, unable to keep her eyes from him. She had expected him to...do something.