The water held her like a memory.
Emma couldn't remember falling in—couldn't remember anything before the sensation of cool liquid parting around her limbs as she rose toward a circle of impossible light. Her lungs didn't burn. Her clothes didn't weigh her down. She simply moved upward through the green-dark depths as naturally as a thought surfaces in the mind.
When she broke through, the first thing she noticed was the silence.
Not true silence—there were birds calling from distant trees, wind moving through leaves, the gentle lap of water against an unseen shore. But it was the silence of a world holding its breath, waiting for her to arrive.
Emma treaded water, turning in a slow circle. The lake stretched around her in every direction, its surface smooth as dark glass except where her movements disturbed it. Mountains rose in the distance, their peaks touching a sky so blue it hurt to look at. Everything had a quality of sharpness, of hyperreality, as if the world had been drawn with a more careful hand than the one she remembered.
She remembered something. A voice. Deep and warm, reading words that had once meant safety and sleep.
"And from the depths of the Moonmere Lake, when the world had greatest need, would come the Lake Fairy, neither living nor dead, but something born of story and starlight..."
The memory struck her with physical force. She gasped, and water that shouldn't have been in her lungs spilled from her lips—not choking her, just leaving her, as if it had been waiting for permission.
Her father's voice. Her father's book.
Emma's hands flew to her face, her arms, patting herself down with growing panic. She was solid. Real. The water soaking her clothes was cold enough to make her shiver. But the clothes themselves—
She looked down at what she wore. A dress of pale green that seemed woven from something finer than silk, something that caught the light like water itself. It moved around her legs as if it were still liquid, still part of the lake. She'd never owned anything like it. She'd never owned anything remotely like it.
"This isn't real," she whispered. "This can't be real."
But the voice that answered her was real enough.
"The Lake Fairy! She's come! She's really come!"
Emma's head snapped up. A small boat had appeared—or had it been there all along, and she simply hadn't seen it? A boy stood at its prow, no more than twelve or thirteen, his face alight with wonder. He had russet hair that stuck up in all directions and freckles scattered across his nose like thrown seeds.
"Please," Emma called out, her voice shaking. "Please, I need help. I don't know where I am, I don't know how I got here—"
But the boy wasn't listening. He'd already turned, cupping his hands around his mouth. "Father! Grandfather! Come quick! The Lake Fairy has awakened!"
"No, wait, I'm not—" Emma started to swim toward the boat, but the moment she moved, something strange happened. The water seemed to propel her forward, carrying her across the surface faster than any human could swim. Within seconds, she'd reached the small vessel, her hands grasping its weathered wooden side.
The boy stumbled backward, his eyes wide. "By the old tales," he breathed. "You walked on the water."
"I didn't walk, I swam, I—" But Emma looked down and realized he was right. She was standing. On the water. Her feet pressed against the lake's surface as if it were solid ground, and though she could feel the gentle give beneath her soles, feel the water responding to her presence, she didn't sink.
Her breath came in short, sharp gasps. "This isn't happening. This is a dream. I'm dreaming."
"You're not dreaming, Lady Fairy." An older man had emerged from the boat's small cabin—the boy's father, presumably, with the same russet hair threaded through with gray. He dropped to one knee, his head bowed. "We've waited for you. The whole kingdom has waited."
"I'm not—" Emma's voice cracked. "My name is Emma. Emma Thorne. I'm from Seattle. I'm seventeen years old, and I fell asleep reading in my room, and this is just—this has to be—"
But even as she spoke, more memories surfaced. Not her memories. Story memories.
The Lake Fairy would come when the kingdom faced its darkest hour, when the Shadow King rose from his mountain fortress and sent his creatures to devour the light from the world. She would be born knowing the old magic, speaking the language of water and wind, able to heal what was broken and mend what was torn.
"Oh god," Emma whispered. "Oh god, this is The Water's Daughter."
The man's head came up. "You remember the prophecy?"
"It's not a prophecy," Emma said, her voice rising toward hysteria. "It's a children's book. My father used to read it to me when I was little. It's not real. It's not—"
A sound cut through her words. Deep and resonant, it rolled across the lake like thunder, though the sky remained cloudless and blue. The mountains in the distance seemed to shudder, and from their highest peaks, something dark began to unfold.
Wings. Massive wings, black as coal smoke, blotting out the sun.
The boy made a small, frightened sound. His father's face had gone pale as old bone.
"The Shadow King's servants," the man whispered. "They're coming. Lady Fairy, please—you must remember who you are. You must remember what you were born to do."
Emma stared at the approaching darkness, at the impossible creatures taking shape against the sky. Her mind screamed that this couldn't be real, that she needed to wake up, that any moment her alarm would sound and she'd be back in her narrow bed in their apartment above the bookstore, her father's footsteps already moving in the kitchen below.
But the water beneath her feet pulsed with life. The dress she wore moved like a living thing. And somewhere deep in her chest, in a place that hadn't existed before this moment, she felt something stir.
Magic. Old magic, the kind written in fairy tales and myths.
The kind her father had read about in a gentle voice, night after night, in the years before the cancer took him.
Emma looked at the man and boy watching her with desperate hope. She looked at the darkness spreading across the sky. She thought about her father, about the way he'd loved this story, about how he'd always paused on the page where the Lake Fairy first emerged from the water, about the way he'd looked at Emma in those moments, as if he were trying to tell her something important.
"I don't know how to be a fairy," she said quietly.
The boy managed a trembling smile. "Maybe you just need to try?"
The dark wings were closer now. Emma could see the creatures more clearly—things with too many limbs and eyes like dying stars, their forms shifting and changing as if they couldn't quite hold a shape in the light.
She took a deep breath. She thought about her father's voice. She thought about the countless nights she'd fallen asleep to this story, letting it weave through her dreams.
And she stepped forward onto the water, spreading her arms wide.
"Then I suppose," Emma said, "we'd better see what happens next."