All That Is Right, a sweet fairy tale brought to life in the modern world, is now available from MojoCastle Press.
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Can a newfound love, a young girl’s belief in magic, and modern psychotherapy come together to fulfill the dying wish of a fairy queen?
That’s the last thing on Butch Thomas’s list of possibilities as he struggles to understand the dreams that have been tormenting him. It’s also the last thing on Julia Austen’s list as she tries to steer herself and her twelve-year-old daughter, Daisy, through an ugly divorce from a violent man.
When the lives of these three people converge in a therapist’s waiting room, the wonders of a distant time and place seem more and more to hold the key to their salvation.
First, though, they must believe.
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He fought to ignore the lightning scorching his belly and the thundering of pain through his limbs. I am dying; surely I am dying ran like a song through his mind. Oddly, the refrain helped numb him.
Firelight licked the damp, lumpish walls that arched all around. Murmurings filled the air, melodic whispers and sighs, as if the fire’s fingers had coaxed voices from the throat of the earth. He took a labored breath and forced his mind into clarity.
The throat of the earth . . . Slowly, he turned his head to the left, to the right. He was lying on straw. It rustled beneath his skull and poked into his hair. He squinted into the gilded, dancing darkness. The ceiling seemed festooned with flowering vines. But he was not within an arbor. The blackness seemed studded with winking stars. But he was not beneath the sky.
Then he knew.
It was roots that hung from the ceiling, roots both thick and fine, entwined with flowers. He tried reaching out to touch them but his arm felt as heavy as a bloated boar. Suddenly, the scent of the flowers wafted over him like prayer--foxglove, cowslip, primrose--and he could smell the wedding of their delicate fragrance with the rich, heavy breath of the soil. He knew, too, that the surrounding glimmer came from stones, smooth and shiny and veined with crystalline colors, purposefully embedded in the earth to adorn this space.
The Folk had brought him here. This was one of their sanctuaries. They were everywhere around him, melding with the shadows. They were keeping vigil.
A cool, thin hand, light as the call of a nightingale, covered his forehead. Someone spoke in a strange language he strangely understood.
"Myklwyn, do not struggle so. Surrender to the embrace. Much love and promise lie within it. But first . . ."
~ from All That Is Right, copyright (c) K. Z. Snow
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