The raven's word hung in the air like smoke.
War.
Granny Weaversong stood motionless at her crooked windowsill, one hand still extended where the bird had perched. Its weight lingered on her fingers—a phantom pressure, like the memory of a kiss. Outside, the Eastern Woods whispered their endless conspiracies, leaves rustling secrets to roots, roots murmuring to stones, stones dreaming their slow mineral dreams.
She had lived long enough to know when the world was about to break.
"Thank you, Hemlock," she said softly to the empty air. The raven was already gone, winging north toward the Thornwood with her reply clutched in its claws. Three words, scratched in her own hand on bark-paper:
I am coming.
But first—she needed to see.
The meditation room lay at the heart of her cottage, through a door that hadn't existed a moment ago and wouldn't exist a moment hence. The house was like that—agreeable, her mother had called it. It showed you what you needed when you needed it, and hid what you didn't.
The room was small and round, walled with living wood that breathed when she breathed. No windows. A single brazier in the center, cold and waiting. Shelves lined with jars of dried things—herbs, petals, bones, memories. The air smelled of cedar and old magic.
Granny Weaversong closed the door behind her and stood in the darkness.
She was not what the name suggested.
Granny implied frailty, diminishment, a woman worn down by years into something soft and harmless. And yes, she had lived long—two centuries and some, though she'd stopped counting after the first hundred. Time moved differently for those who had drunk from certain springs, who had made certain bargains, who had loved certain things that should not be loved.
But frail? Never.
She stood five feet and nine inches, straight-backed as a birch tree. Her hair—once copper, now silver-white—fell to her waist in waves that caught light even in darkness. Her face was lined, yes, but the lines were interesting: laugh lines at the corners of eyes the colour of autumn honey, furrows of thought across a brow that had pondered mysteries most mortals couldn't pronounce. Her cheekbones could still cut glass. Her jaw still held the stubbornness that had made three kings propose and one dark lord weep.
She had been beautiful at twenty. At two hundred, she was devastating—the kind of beauty that came from knowing exactly who you were and refusing to apologise for any of it.
The young men in the villages she visited often found themselves tongue-tied and flushed. Their wives pretended not to notice. Granny Weaversong noticed everything, and was gracious enough to pretend she didn't.
A cougar, the modern folk called women like her.
She preferred apex predator.
She knelt before the brazier and struck a match—an old one, wooden, the head dipped in sulphur and salamander ash. The flame caught green before settling to orange, and she touched it to the incense cone waiting in its dish.
The smoke rose in a thin grey ribbon: moonpetal, graveroot, the dried tears of a widow who had learned to laugh again. It was a blend for seeing—not the future as it would be, but the future as it threatened to be. The paths that were forming. The choices that were crystallizing.
She breathed deep, letting the smoke fill her lungs, her blood, her second sight.
Then she reached into the satchel at her hip.
The mystic sky rock fit perfectly in her palm, as it always had. It was warm—always warm—and heavier than its size suggested. Black as a moonless night, but threaded through with veins of silver that pulsed like a slow heartbeat. It had fallen from the heavens three hundred years before her birth, had been passed down through her line from mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaughter.
It remembered the void between stars. It remembered the moment before time began.
And when she asked it to—it showed her.
"Old friend," she murmured, feeling the rock's awareness stir against her palm. "I need to see."
She stood. Closed her eyes. Drew her intent up from the soles of her feet, through her spine, into her heart, down her arm, into her fingers, into the rock—
And threw it down.
The stone struck the wooden floor with a sound like thunder.
Crack.
The air split. The walls groaned. The smoke from the incense spiralled wildly as something shifted in the fabric of the room.
Hiss.
Granny Weaversong opened her eyes and watched as the palm-sized rock began to grow. It swelled like bread rising, like a flower blooming, like a truth too long suppressed finally speaking itself. Steam rose from its surface. Silver veins blazed bright as lightning.
Pop. Pop. POP.
She began to undress.
This was not modesty, nor its opposite—it was simply necessity. The sky rock remembered the void, and the void did not recognise cloth or pretension. To sit upon it was to be bare—in body, in mind, in soul. Anything less was an insult to its ancient memory.
Her cloak fell first. Then her dress—simple grey wool, practical and warm. Then her undergarments, folded neatly and set aside. The air was cold against her skin, but she did not shiver. She had been cold before. She had been colder.
The rock had stopped growing. It now dominated the room—a boulder the size of a merchant's cart, black and silver and humming with power. Its surface had smoothed into something almost like a seat, a meditation throne carved by no human hand.
Granny Weaversong climbed atop it, her bare feet finding purchase on the warm stone, and settled herself cross-legged at its apex.
She placed her hands on her knees.
She closed her eyes.
She fell.
The visions came like drowning.
A wolf, crowned in iron, tearing at its own flesh—
Spores drifting on the wind, red as old blood, settling on fur and feather and leaf—
A castle of white stone, gleaming in the dawn, and within it a small man with enormous ambition—
Children weeping in cages—
A war that was not a war, a plague that was not a plague, a lie wearing the face of order—
And beneath it all, beneath the soil and stone and root, something STIRRING—
Something that had been sleeping—
Something that was beginning to WAKE—
She saw Fenric Bloodmaw, the Wolf King, his eyes no longer his own. She saw the red dust on his tongue, in his lungs, threading through his brain like invasive roots. She saw him standing over bodies—friends, advisors, pack—and not recognising what he had done.
She saw the Spore Lord in his fungal throne, deep in the Heartland's rotting heart, and she saw the threads of red spreading outward like a web.
She saw Lord Farquat in his high tower, holding a vial of crimson death, smiling his small smile.
"We are simply hastening the revelation," his voice echoed across the void. "Helping the world see what was always true."
And then—
A flash of red. A hood. A blade.
Blue eyes in a young face, ancient and cold.
A wolf's pelt worn as a trophy.
The smell of silver and gunpowder and righteous violence.
The vision shattered.
Granny Weaversong gasped and opened her eyes.
The incense had burned to ash. Hours had passed—the brazier was cold, the air still. Her body ached with the peculiar exhaustion of having been elsewhere for too long.
But she had seen. She had seen.
This was no natural madness. This was no inevitable war between fairy-kind. This was manufactured—a genocide dressed in the clothing of chaos, designed by human hands to destroy everything she loved.
And it could be stopped.
But not by her alone.
She descended from the sky rock, her joints protesting, her mind already racing. The stone had begun to shrink behind her—it would be palm-sized again within the hour, ready to return to her satchel. She dressed quickly, efficiently, fingers remembering buttons and laces without conscious thought.
The little one, her vision had shown her. The red hood. The ancient eyes in the young face.
She knew who she needed.
The cottage door opened onto the Eastern Woods, and Granny Weaversong stepped out into the grey light of late afternoon. The trees leaned toward her, curious, concerned.
"Not now," she told them. "I have a visit to make."
She walked with purpose, her stride long, her cloak billowing behind her. The forest parted for her—it always had—and the path she needed appeared beneath her feet like a loyal hound anticipating its master's direction.
Three days' walk to the village of Millhaven. Two if she took the old roads, the ones that didn't appear on maps.
She took the old roads.