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...
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The air grew colder as Cassandra walked further away from the city centre, her steps slower now, weighed down by both exhaustion and the surrealness of the night. The breeze picked up, nipping at her skin and sending a chill through her bones, making her wrap her jacket tighter around her body. She hadn't noticed it earlier, but now that the adrenaline of the encounter had faded, the night felt unwelcoming, the cool wind biting through the warmth she had felt in the tavern.
The streets gradually emptied of people, the noise of the tavern fading into the background until it was nothing more than a distant hum, swallowed by the vastness of the city. The towering stone structures that had once intrigued her now loomed overhead like ancient giants, their darkened windows watching her like eyes in the night. She could hear the wind whistling between the narrow alleyways, carrying with it the distant sound of rushing water from the chasms below. It was eerie, almost lonely, but it matched the emptiness growing in her chest.
Ahead, the silhouette of the ancient ruins—her current home in this world—rose up before her. The building was a crumbling masterpiece, its arches and columns worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. Moss clung to the stone like a second skin, crawling up the walls and weaving through the cracks. She hadn't appreciated its beauty before, too caught up in the confusion and strangeness of her arrival to notice. But now, as she stood at the threshold, her breath visible in the cold night air, she realized just how old this place was, how it had been standing here long before her time.
The ruins weren't just a building—they were a relic of a world that had existed long before she'd stumbled into it. The arches, though crumbling, were intricately carved with symbols she didn't understand, and the pillars, half-broken, rose like silent sentinels into the night sky. The windows, many of them shattered or missing, gave the place a hollowed-out, abandoned feel, as if the building itself were waiting for someone to breathe life back into it.
She stepped forward, her boots scuffing against the weathered stone, the sound echoing softly in the quiet. It was strange—this place should have terrified her. The isolation, the emptiness, the coldness of the stones under her fingers. But instead, it felt familiar now. Like she was somehow connected to it, as though the ruins had been waiting for her all along.
Still, the chill in the air was getting harder to ignore, the cold seeping into her skin. She could feel the exhaustion creeping up on her, and all she wanted was to wake up. To snap out of this bizarre dream and find herself back in her apartment, under the warmth of her blankets, her world intact.
But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't shake the feeling that waking up wasn't going to happen—not this time. This world was too real, too vivid to be a figment of her imagination. The cold bite of the wind, the rough texture of the stone beneath her fingers, the deep roar of the river cutting through the city below—it was all too present, too solid to simply fade away with the morning light.
Cassandra sighed, her breath clouding in the air as she leaned against one of the crumbling columns. She missed her friends—God, how she missed Isla and Selene. They would have been the perfect people to share this strange dream with, and at least then she wouldn't feel so alone, so out of her depth.
