Cassandra never believed in magic-until she woke up with wings.
One moment, she's living her ordinary life in London. The next, she's stranded in a mysterious, ancient realm brimming with danger and beauty beyond imagination. As she grapples with he...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
As Cassandra drifted off, the familiar sense of weightlessness came over her. The transition into sleep felt more like a fall—slow, soft, but inevitable. She barely noticed it anymore. What she did notice, though, was the unmistakable pull that came next, a deep tug at the base of her chest. It was always the same, like an invisible thread tied around her heart, pulling her deeper into the dream. She had no choice but to follow.
The world around her shifted, and before she knew it, the dream swallowed her whole.
The ruins stretched out in front of Cassandra, vast and crumbling, the remains of an ancient world that somehow still breathed with life. Every time she stepped into this dreamscape, it felt as though she was walking through a forgotten civilization—a place where time had fractured and blurred, but the heart of the city still beat beneath the decay. The air around her felt thick and heavy, almost oppressive. The first thing that hit her was the smell—earthy and damp, like moss-covered stone after rain, mixed with something sharp and metallic, almost like copper or blood. It clung to the back of her throat, her chest tightened slightly with each breath. There was something else in the air too, something sweet and cloying, like overripe fruit that had been left out too long, fermenting in the damp heat. It was an odd contrast to the sharpness of the stone and copper, adding an unsettling edge to the atmosphere.
The ruins weren't just ruins. Despite their crumbled walls and shattered windows, they were alive, bustling with strange inhabitants. People lived here, nestled in the hollowed-out shells of ancient homes. What once might have been grand palaces or temples now stood as skeletal remains, their grandeur long since eroded by time and nature. Yet life persisted. She could see lanterns flickering from within broken stone archways, their soft, warm glow spilling out onto the cracked streets, casting long shadows across the uneven cobblestones.
The people who lived here weren't like her, though. Some had wings—large, dark, leathery wings that folded behind their backs as they moved through the streets. Others had horns, twisted and curling from their foreheads like something out of an ancient myth. And still others had features that defied explanation, their forms half-shimmering, as though they were caught between two worlds, their edges blurred and shifting like smoke in the wind. They moved with a kind of grace, oblivious to her presence, going about their lives as if she didn't exist.
She walked the streets, her steps silent as the dream pulled her deeper. The cobblestones beneath her feet were worn smooth, slick from the damp air, and cracked in places where the roots of enormous, gnarled trees had pushed through, splitting the stone like old bones breaking through new skin. The streets were narrow, winding in unpredictable patterns, some of them dead-ending into walls of rubble, others spiralling downward into darker alleys, where flickering lamps barely illuminated the shadows.
Above her, balconies jutted out from the higher levels of the ruins, some precariously perched on the edges of crumbling towers. Ivy and other creeping plants had claimed much of the stone, their tendrils winding through cracks and gaps, holding the remains of the city together like stitches in a wound. People leaned on the balconies, their faces cast in shadow, watching the streets below with a quiet intensity. Their eyes glinted in the dim light, sharp and unsettling, as though they could see through her, or perhaps into her.
